Final arguments made in utility ballot fray

BOULDER – Attorneys for New Era Colorado and the group Voter Approval of Debt Limits made their closing statements Friday morning in a hearing before Boulder city clerk Alisa Lewis regarding whether certain Voter Approval of Debt Limits petition circulators acted fraudulently in gathering signatures.

The petition in question would place on the November ballot a measure asking voters whether voter approval should be required for any debt issued by a municipal electric utility if the city were to break ties with Xcel Energy Inc. The measure would also limit the cost of repayment of such debt and require that customers of the new utility who live outside city limits be allowed to vote on such debt.

Lewis certified that the petition contained more than enough signatures last month, and an ordinance to place the measure on the ballot is scheduled for third reading and final approval at the Aug. 20 city council meeting.

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But New Era filed a complaint with Lewis, alleging that two petition circulators in particular lied to potential signers about what the petition was about, and possibly forged signatures. In hours of testimony on Thursday, New Era presented video and audio clips of petition circulators – one named Mae Cornish in particular – stating that the measure would be to decide whether the city would municipalize and that the vote in 2011 in which Boulder voters authorized the city council to move forward with creating a utility had been “too close for comfort and they’re going to vote on it again.”

“This is a process that was full of fraud,´ said Aaron Goldhamer, New Era’s attorney.

After hearing all of the arguments, Lewis said Friday that she will rule on the matter by the end of next week.

Most of the signatures in question are those gathered by Cornish and circulator William Sperry, neither of whom appeared at the hearing either day.

Those two circulators accounted for about 2,600 signatures of the roughly 8,200 turned in. In July, Lewis went through about 7,000 signatures before verifying about 5,100 as valid. That eclipsed the mark of 4,549, or 5 percent of registered voters in the city, that was required to land the measure on the ballot.

Even if all of the signatures gathered by Cornish and Sperry are thrown out, there potentially still would be enough for the measure to reach the ballot in November. Lewis said Friday that she would have her office next week begin looking at the approximately 1,200 signatures that were not scrutinized in case they would need to come into play.

Mark Grueskin, attorney for Voter Approval of Debt Limits, said after the hearing Friday that he hadn’t spoken with his client about next steps if the clerk rules in New Era’s favor. However, he said Voter Approval of Debt Limits could appeal the matter to district court. Goldhamer said he would wait for a decision from Lewis before deciding on the next steps if the ruling went in favor of Voter Approval of Debt Limits.

In his closing remarks Friday, Grueskin made clear that he doesn’t think anywhere near all of Cornish’s or Sperry’s signatures should be thrown out. He likened the video instances and testimony that Goldhamer presented to a speeding ticket he’d received in downtown Denver. “Does that mean every time I’m on 20th Street I violated the law? The question is what kind of proof is there,” Grueskin said.

Tthere is no way of knowing if the instances on the video and audio recordings led to actual signatures on the petitions, he said, nor that such instances could be extrapolated to all of the other signatures gathered by Cornish and Sperry.

“If they could point to you specific signatures, we would actually be adjudicating something,” Grueskin said. “But right now we’re having a political conversation.”

The Voter Approval of Debt Limits ballot measure hasn’t gone over well with municipalization supporters, who contend that it would make running a municipal utility virtually impossible. The city staff has proposed a competing debt limit measure that asks voters to limit the amount of debt issued for acquisition of Xcel’s distribution system to $214 million but places no strict limitations on the amount of future debt issued.

Xcel has formed an issue committee that helped back the Voter Approval of Debt Limits measure, a point that New Era director Steve Fenberg has often brought up. Fenberg said after the hearing Friday that it was important “to show the deception that occurred to get such a measure on the ballot.”

Goldhamer, while jokingly offering condolences to Grueskin for his speeding ticket, contended that his counterpart’s analogy was misguided. Goldhamer argued that given all of the instances of misinformation conveyed to voters by Cornish and Sperry, it was safe to believe that they did so with other voters whose signatures they gathered.

“The analogy that really we should be talking about is that someone who’s been caught speeding over and over and over again by multiple different people and multiple different locations,” Goldhamer said.

Grueskin argued that there’s little evidence tying fraud to specific signatures that were verified by the city clerk’s office, and called New Era’s complaint a “political show” amidst a municipalization topic that has been quite divisive in the city at times.

“This measure, whether you like it or you don’t like it, belongs on the November 2013 ballot,” Grueskin said.