Vote Required on SECONDS COUNT! Initiative

SECONDS COUNT!

NEWS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts:

Warren Hultquist (303) 541-0151

David Wagner (303) 440-9446

VOTE REQUIRED ON SECONDS COUNT! INITIATIVE

Boulder, CO-October 29, 1999--The SECONDS COUNT! committee of petitioners filed papers with the Boulder city clerk this week requiring an election on its initiative to improve emergency response by prohibiting traffic devices, including speed bumps and small traffic circles, that slow emergency vehicles on public streets. The committee also formally notified the city attorney of the ballot language for the measure after completing a review with his staff and agreeing on wording that meets legal requirements. These actions complete a process spelled out in Boulder's charter. They were necessary because City Council declined, on October 19, 1999, to adopt the ordinance requested by the SECONDS COUNT! initiative petition, despite the thousands of valid signatures collected. According to the charter, the Council must now place the ordinance on the November 2000 ballot for a decision by the voters. If the ballot measure is successful, the action cannot be superseded by City Council action, but only by another vote of the electorate.

The SECONDS COUNT! petition drive began in April 1999, after City Council rejected a joint recommendation from the professional transportation and public safety staffs to keep critical emergency routes clear of delay-inducing traffic mitigation devices, while allowing them in neighborhoods with speeding problems if specific criteria were met. The staff recommendation enjoyed considerable support from the community, with many followers of the traffic mitigation debate acknowledging it as the best obtainable compromise between citizens supporting effective emergency response on one hand and neighborhood activists demanding engineered traffic control on the other. Instead, Council opted to permit the devices on any street, without identifying objective qualifying conditions.

This Council action came after the professional staff had worked for more than two years at Council's direction to develop engineered speed control measures that didn't slow emergency vehicles, ultimately concluding that satisfactory solutions were not possible on critical routes. Public outreach and opinion surveys by the city during this period revealed only minority support for delay-inducing devices. By healthy margins, citizens preferred traditional police enforcement of speed limits over engineered treatments.  Nevertheless, neighborhood activists continued to press for installation of speed bumps and traffic circles on their streets.

While the staff's recommended approach would likely have put this contentious issue to rest, City Council bypassed the opportunity for resolution, choosing instead a course of action that virtually guarantees rancorous debate on projects throughout the city well into the future.  Inevitably, since there are now no predefined criteria for project approval, every traffic mitigation request will have to be brought before the Transportation Advisory Board and Council for decision. The SECONDS COUNT! committee was formed to pursue a permanent solution endorsed by a majority of the voters. The resulting petition drive attracted support from a politically, economically, and socially diverse cross section of the community.

The ordinance proposed by the committee offers uniform protection to all citizens by prohibiting two categories of delay-inducing traffic devices: vertical obstacles such as speed humps and raised crosswalks, and traffic circles with rotary islands smaller than 50 feet. (Traffic circles are defined by Boulder's municipal code to be only at the intersection of streets, not including alleys, so many of the features commonly thought of as traffic circles would not be affected. Also, several traffic circles in the city meet the 50 foot size requirement. By the committee's count, only five circles would be affected.) The ban would apply only on public streets, not to private parking lots or driveways.

Ironically, now that the initiative process has guaranteed a vote on the measure, some Councilmembers seem eager to soften their positions. During the October 19 debate, several expressed the belief that a compromise could surely be reached before the November 2000 election. However, Boulder's charter provides no mechanism for removing an initiative measure from the ballot.  And the committee openly and publicly informed Council from the beginning of its drive that the time for negotiation and compromise would have passed when the petition was certified as sufficient by the city clerk.  Had Council accepted the compromise staff recommendation last March, the petition drive would never have been launched.

SECONDS COUNT! chair Warren Hultquist said, "We worked for a solution to the risks of traffic mitigation for five years. But the Transportation Advisory Board and Council-both by one vote margins-showed us they weren't interested in compromise or in what a majority of the public had to say. Finally, the people will have a democratic opportunity to decide the issue."

The SECONDS COUNT! initiative was one subject of a recent telephone poll of 403 likely voters conducted for Boulder Tomorrow, a civic group promoting effective governance and community sustainability. Over 57 percent of respondents reported they would support the measure at on the ballot, versus only 33 percent who would oppose it. These figures almost exactly match the city's outreach results, in which a weighted average of 32 percent supported using speed bumps to control speeding and 30 percent backed traffic circles. (These numbers reflect written and testimonial comments to the Transportation Advisory Board, public opinion surveys in the Moorhead Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue neighborhoods prior to abandoned speed bump experiments, and a city-wide neighborhood traffic mitigation survey.)  Commenting on the survey results, David Wagner, one of the initiative organizers, said, "We've seen opposition to devices that slow emergency vehicles in all the various surveys. And, the numbers don't change over time. That tells us people are knowledgeable about the issue and have firm opinions. What's more, we're able to determine from some of the surveys that the more experience people have with the devices, the more they oppose them. Starting out with a 24-point margin, we're confident this measure is going to pass."

With the transition from petition drive to ballot measure campaign, the SECONDS COUNT! group will become an "issue committee" under Boulder's election laws. Campaign contributions and expenditures will be disclosed as required by law during the November 2000 election cycle.

SECONDS COUNT! is the successful grassroots effort of Boulder, Colorado citizens to place an initiative on the ballot banning traffic mitigation devices that delay emergency response.

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