The campaign to pass the Danish Plan began in August 1976 with a panicked phone call to me from Councilwoman and future Mayor Ruth Correll. She wanted to know why the Danish Plan (officially called the Slow Growth ordinance) didn’t exempt affordable housing from its growth limits. I told her it was because I had given a draft of the plan to Boulder Housing Authority Director John Hoyer months ago and asked him for his input. He didn’t offer any.
He hadn’t bothered reading it, of course. You have to exempt affordable housing, she said. The petition drive was scheduled to kick off that evening.
We had 200 petitions printed and ready to hand out to dozens of volunteer circulators. Adding language exempting affordable housing would require revising and reprinting the petition and delay the petition drive by about a week. And we were already cutting it close if we were going to make it onto the November 1976 ballot. I went ballistic, of course.
You have to do something about affordable housing, she said adamantly after I stopped venting. Let me think about it, I said. I’ll call you back. She was right, of course. We did have to do something. It was already obvious that in order to pass the ordinance we were going to have to fight it out with the business community. If the affordable housing advocates came out against it as well, it would most likely lose.
But what to do? A blanket exemption for “affordable housing” (whatever that meant) would gut the ordinance. I called her back and told her we would add a single sentence exempting the projects of the Boulder Housing Authority.
She was relieved and mollified. The episode did indeed set us back a week. But the affordable housing advocates stayed neutral.
Even so, the petition drive was a terrific success. We collected something like 5,300 signatures in about 27 days, about 800 more than we needed to appear on the ballot during the highturnout 1976 Presidential election (Carter vs. Ford).
Within a week of getting on the ballot, the first anti-Slow Growth ads appeared.
This is the point where the supporters of ballot initiatives often make a fatal mistake: They assume that because they have succeeded in putting their issue on the ballot their work is done. The truth is it is just beginning. If you think the job is done when you hand in your petitions, on Election Day you will be handed your head.
If you don’t put as much effort and passion into fund-raising, getting out your message, mobilizing your voters and countering attacks as you did collecting signatures, you will have wasted your time in petitioning your proposal onto the ballot in the first place.
While we had been petitioning, the opposition had been organizing. Four separate political action committees sprang up to fight the Slow Growth initiative, led by the Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Realtors. Together they raised and spent more than $15,000 (more than $61,000 in today’s dollars), a breath-taking sum for a local election at the time.
Fortunately, we had a pretty good idea what was coming. As soon as the petition went into the field we started our own fund-raising and kept it up through the campaign. In the end I think we raised about $3,500 (more than $14,000 today). It was enough. Just.
I knew we could never match the opposition dollar for dollar, but I was certain that if we had enough to 1) get our side of the story out to the voters, and 2) to respond to the substance of their ad blitz convincingly in the last days of the campaign — when undecided voters and voters with misgivings were making up their minds — we would have a chance.
The first order of business was to get our story out before the opposition defined us.
What we lacked in money we made up with volunteers. Boulder environmentalists, including members of the Sierra Club, PLAN Boulder and PURE (People United to Reclaim the Environment, another local environmental group) were rallying to the cause. So we printed up an eight-page booklet (on newsprint to save money) explaining what was in the Slow Growth ordinance and providing answers to what we thought would be the most frequently asked questions about it. We printed 30,000 of them and set out to put one on every doorstep in town as soon as possible.
We got decent earned media; reasonably fair and balanced stories and our fair share of letters to the editor, in the Camera and Town & Country Review, the weekly paper that occupied the Boulder Weekly’s niche at the time. (T&C was my employer at the time, which did not stop editor and publisher Jim Johnson from coming out against the ordinance.)
We didn’t dominate in earned media, but our voice was heard. That was enough.
In the last 10 days of the campaign the media blitz against the Slow Growth ordinance got as intense as I thought it would — at least one fullpage ad a day in the Camera and sometimes more. The opposition knew what it was doing; their campaign focused on sowing the seeds of doubt about our proposal — the classic strategy for defeating ballot initiatives.
We didn’t remotely have the money to answer it ad for ad, but we had saved most of what we did raise for the last few days of the campaign. I thought we would have one chance to reach the undecided voter at that point — and that we had a good way to do it. The opposition’s campaign had been so pervasive that it was impossible not to have noticed that big bucks were being spent. It was making people uneasy. So we produced a full page ad of our own.
Across the top of it were pictures of the ads the opposition had been running.
The headline under the pictures read: “Someone is spending a hell of a lot of money to kill Growth Control in Boulder. Guess who.”
The text did not fulminate about money in politics. That’s a losers’ game. Instead it focused on the arguments the opposition had been raising and rebutted them. And it also made the case for passing the ordinance. The ad told our side of the story at the moment when people were prepared to hear it. In retrospect, I think it prevented the opposition from closing the deal with the undecideds.
The one thing we didn’t have to do was mount a get-out-the-vote drive on Election Day. The fact that the ordinance was on the ballot during a presidential election took care of that. Just about everyone in Boulder who hadn’t achieved room temperature voted that year.
In 1976 Boulder was voting with a brand new punch card system that would allow the ballots to be counted by computer. There were glitches. The ballot counting dragged on all night. We thought it was going to be close, and it was. At 6 a.m. the count was tied. There were seven precincts that hadn’t been counted. We had three of them down as leaning “yes”, three down as leaning “no” and one as a toss-up. The final returns came in at about 9:30 a.m. The plan won 18,783 to 18,230, a 553 vote margin.
A reporter asked me if I was concerned by the closeness of the vote. “The closeness of the vote doesn’t bother me,” I said. “It is still a mandate. The margin is every bit as decisive as a 5-4 vote in council.”
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