Petitioning is one of our fundamental rights. It is enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and has been used to change the legal landscape in Colorado. When a government denies that right, it should raise more than eyebrows. Yet this is exactly what the City of Arvada recently did.
Rest assured, too, that this decision was indeed made with city council's complicity. At the May 12 meeting, council entered a sudden executive session, meaning it was closed to the public, for the purpose of discussing an intent to petition that I had filed. Clearly, city attorney
Chris Daly stated his intended plan to deny our group the right to petition on a dubious claim of "contractual obligations." Council could have directed him not to pursue that avenue. Yet they did not.
The petition stemmed from an ordinance entering the city into a contract with Jefferson County and Broomfield to form a new government entity, the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority (JPPHA), created for building of a flawed private tollway. The prior contract noted by Daly involved an agreement in which Arvada holds a right of way for a future tollway developer. In no way would the city be in breach of that contract by not joining the JPPHA. If they would be, then the public hearing on the JPPHA contract was a sham because Arvada would have been forced to enter it before council had made a decision. Otherwise, according to Daly's logic, the city would have been in breach of contract.
When creating a new government entity, citizens should definitely have the right to petition to stop it if they believe it is a bad idea. This is especially true when the new entity is not only un-funded, as Arvada Councilor
Don Allard noted, but when it has such powers as eminent domain. Do we really want to extend these powers without first having a full vetting?
Yet that was not the case in the creation of the JPPHA. The ordinance creating the JPPHA was first introduced on April 21 - at a meeting that had been previously canceled. A scant two weeks later the ordinance was up for final reading. Most ordinances have well over a month between first and final reading. The purpose, of course, is to give residents a chance to review and possibly object to them. Why then was this shoved through so quickly?
Most likely the answer is not only that Arvada wanted to ensure that certain developers got money quickly, but also because the city was afraid that citizens might actually review the contract. If given time, citizens would notice such insidious clauses as "members [contract signatories] shall not be required by this Contract to compensate a property owner for the Jefferson Parkway right-of-way." Regardless of any intent of that clause, the mere fact that it is in the contract should make citizens wary.
Such wary citizens, including members of our group, Arvadans for Responsible Transportation (ART), should rightly want to stop it. That was the reason for the daunting task of a petition drive. We wanted to make sure citizens could vote against this awful contract.
Ultimately the city did not want a vote. They know that Arvadans do not want the JPPHA or the boondoggle that the tollway would be.
Being fearful of a citizens' rejection of a bad idea though, is no reason to tyrannically stop a referendum. Assuming that we could have gathered enough signatures, the city still would have been able to mount a campaign when the issue was up for election. That method would have at least been an admirable fight rather than the method they chose of trampling upon our fundamental right to petition.