Opinion: A job for the next council: improve our democracy

Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others,” or words to that effect. But there is a wide range of forms of democracy — from what are, in effect, elected dictatorships, to those where direct democracy works in parallel with elected democracy.

The Scandinavian countries’ democracies are rated best, along with Switzerland, and almost all have accessible processes for national and/or local initiatives. In Switzerland, citizen initiatives only require 100,000 signatures in a country of almost 9 million — slightly over 1% — and the signature gathering process is relatively simple. Also, Switzerland allows initiative votes up to four times per year.

In Boulder, non-charter legislative initiatives require the signatures of 10% of the average number of voters in the last two municipal candidate elections. In 2023, over 33,000 people voted. This will likely increase substantially in 2026 to well over 40,000 because council, county, statewide and national elections will occur together. So, the signature requirement will move up to 4,000 or more, around 4% of our 107,000 population.

Relative to this, consider this year’s city ballot issues: The first extends “in perpetuity” the current 0.3% sales tax, and the second allows the council to issue $350 million in bonds to fund whatever capital improvements they dream up — with almost no limitations whatsoever. (I note that Lafayette has both limits and specifics on their ballot measure.) Is the Boulder council planning a gold ballroom at Broadway and Alpine? I’m joking, but the lack of any limits is not funny.

My point is that with initiatives getting harder and harder to do, we are losing the only tools we have to directly influence council members once they are elected. So, step number one is, of course, to elect more responsible and responsive council members.

A next step could be to make online petitioning much simpler and easier to use, so the citizens can more easily require a vote. The current online system is simply not workable, because petition endorsers must first have a phone number on file in the state voter registration system to be used for verification to confirm their identity. The problem is that this data is public. 

Voters don’t want to add their numbers, knowing full well that they will get an infinite number of robocalls, etc. And even entering and then erasing them doesn’t work because that data is sent to a city’s petition system in batches every few days, so the user may have to wait up to four days to sign. So, people just give up.

People who registered to vote in Boulder County before the registration system went online in 2010, were allowed to give “unlisted” phone numbers. So there’s apparently no good reason why the state won’t simply keep that data private.

We could use the system proposed by Maplight some years ago, when online petitioning was being adopted. But that council ended up adopting an expensive, inefficient system. Thus, this is a solvable problem, but only if our elected officials want to give citizens an accessible way to bring about a vote on important issues as an alternative to letting their elected officials decide everything.

There are plenty of issues that citizens ought to be able to vote on. For example:

At the local level, we have the three-lane concept for Iris, the critical need to do a comparative analysis of flood protection alternatives for South Boulder Creek (huge downstream dam and floodwall vs. smaller and cheaper upstream dam vs. floodproofing buildings), and how big Boulder wants to be. As I’ve pointed out before, long-term housing demand is insatiable, even though, in the short-term, prices have dropped.

On the regional level, we may need a vote on the future of the Chimney Hollow Reservoir. Northern Water’s plan is to now allow the radioactive site to fill to 2% of capacity so Northern can “collect more data.” Exactly how Northern plans to “mitigate” this problem, that occurred solely because they didn’t do their homework, has not been revealed. This again relates to the densification issue; we wouldn’t need the water if we didn’t keep increasing demand.

And one more item related to densification: Per the 10/21 Denver Post, RTD’s ridership is still declining. Its short-term drop was 5% from mid-2024 to mid-2025, and is at least 3.9% below six years ago. Now RTD’s CEO is considering shifting focus from commuter services to “high volume events, activity centers, concerts and festivals.” That makes building more “transit-oriented development” even crazier. 

We need a vote!