Colorado voters will decide this November whether to boost funding for conservation and wildfire mitigation projects by exempting tax revenue from sporting goods sales from constitutional limits set by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Proposed Initiative 308, backed by The Nature Conservancy and a handful of other environmental groups, qualified for the ballot after submission of a sufficient number of petition signatures to state elections officials, the Colorado secretary of state’s office said Friday. Backers submitted more than 205,000 signatures, well above the 124,238 signature requirement for statutory measures.

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The initiative, which will be assigned a new proposition number when it appears on the ballot, would raise up to $175 million in new revenue by exempting sporting goods sales tax collections from TABOR limits. It would not raise taxes, but could reduce the size of TABOR refunds in years when state revenue exceeds the annual growth cap.

Nearly all of the new funding would be split evenly between Great Outdoors Colorado, a state entity that invests in conservation and outdoor recreation projects, and a constellation of state programs that fund wildfire mitigation efforts. Two additional small slices of the funding would be directed to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Outdoor Equity Grant Program and economic development projects under the state’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office.

“We want to protect many of the most critical and beautiful places in this state — for recreation, for protection of our water resources that (are) filtered through those lands, and for wildlife,” Aaron Citron, Colorado policy director at the Nature Conservancy and one of Initiative 308’s sponsors, said last week during a presentation on Initiative 308 at the summer conference of the Colorado Water Congress.

Vast scale of wildfire threats to Colorado watersheds far exceeds funding

More than 13 million acres of mountain watersheds across western and central Colorado are now covered by a Wildfire Ready Action Plan, or WRAP, developed as part of a watershed protection program administered by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the state’s lead water agency.

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The Colorado State Forest Service estimated in 2020 that 10% of Colorado’s roughly 24 million acres of forest “need urgent attention to address forest health, wildfire risk and threats to water supplies.” Depending on factors like equipment and terrain, the cost of wildfire mitigation treatments typically runs to thousands of dollars per acre — making even the state’s highest-priority to-do list a multibillion-dollar proposition.

“There is far more work than there is funding, so this initiative, should it come before voters and be approved, would be a key source of dollars to reduce wildfire risk,” Madelene McDonald, manager of watershed planning for Denver water, which voted earlier this month to endorse the measure, said in a statement. “Every project we can complete helps ensure a clean water supply and reduces property damage — saving enormous amounts of money and resources down the line.”

An issue committee registered in support of the measure has reported over $3 million in contributions, about half of which came from The Nature Conservancy. Other major donors include Western Resource Advocates, the Trust for Public Land, and Tom and Olivia Walton, of the ultra-wealthy Walton family.

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Some grassroots environmental groups remain skeptical of wildfire mitigation efforts that they fear could open up Colorado forests to large-scale logging. But Citron told Newsline last week that the measure’s proponents don’t expect any “funded opposition.”

A 2022 report examined how wildfire mitigation treatments improve the odds of saving Colorado homes, providing context on the types of thinning and fuels-reduction work this initiative would fund.

“What we’re talking about is thinning, pile burning, prescribed fire, fuels mitigation — around communities, around reservoirs,” he said. “It’s projects that are identified by HOAs, local governments, fire districts.”

As a statutory measure, the initiative can’t tie the hands of future legislatures that may seek to divert the funding elsewhere, Citron said at the Water Congress. But sponsors hope its passage would send a clear message to lawmakers that wildfire mitigation should rank high on the state’s priority list, even in tight budget years.

“We’re bullish about the fact that this is so critical, it has to be in line for funding when it’s available,” said Citron. “The wildfire mitigation grant programs have received pretty consistent funding from our general fund, (but) it’s been small … We need to substantially increase that.”