AURORA — It’s a sprint to the finish for the groups collecting signatures to try to get a measure on the November ballot that would ask Colorado voters to amend the state constitution to impose a graduated income tax plan and raise billions of new dollars for the legislature to spend.
Supporters of Initiative 195 have until Monday to turn in about 125,000 voter signatures needed to make the ballot, including from at least 2% of the voters in each of Colorado’s 35 state Senate districts.
“We’re feeling pretty bullish at the moment,” former state Rep. Chris deGruy Kennedy, a Democrat, said Thursday. He now leads the Bell Policy Center, the liberal think tank leading the effort to get Initiative 195 on the ballot. “We’re feeling like we’re pretty close.”
In other words: It’s not a done deal.
It’s fairly unusual for supporters of a ballot measure to be collecting signatures up until their submission deadline. But Initiative 195’s backers have relied a lot on volunteer signature gatherers, instead of almost entirely on paid circulators like other campaigns, to make the ballot.
Initiative 195 will ask voters to raise Colorado’s flat 4.4% income tax rate on income earned by people and corporations that exceeds $500,000 while cutting the income tax rate on earnings less than that. On the high end, annual income earned by people and businesses over $1 million would be taxed at 8.4%, while on the low end, earnings up to $25,000 would be taxed at 3.7%.
For a household earning the median Colorado income of about $95,000, they would see their effective tax rate drop to 4.07% from 4.4%, resulting in a savings of a few hundred dollars. A family earning $1.2 million would have an effective tax rate of 6.39% and pay nearly $24,000 more in income taxes.
Graduated income tax calculator
See what you’d owe under Initiative 195’s proposed six-bracket structure versus Colorado’s current 4.4% flat rate. Enter your federal taxable income.
The proposed graduated rates apply to federal taxable income as determined by Section 63 of the Internal Revenue Code, for tax years beginning on or after Jan. 1, 2027. Brackets: 3.71% up to $25,000; 4.21% to $100,000; 4.41% to $500,000; 7.41% to $750,000; 7.91% to $1M; 8.41% above $1M. “Current” reflects Colorado’s 4.40% flat rate. Estimate only; individual filings vary.
Claude was used to assist in writing the calculating code for this tool. Information submitted through this form does not leave the browser window and is not stored or transmitted in any way. No part of this story was written using AI. See the source code here.
Those changes are estimated to raise about $2 billion annually, which would go toward increasing funding for K-12 schools, healthcare and early childhood programs.
On Monday, The Colorado Sun was there while a group of volunteers at Del Mar Park in Aurora as they gathered petitions and collected new signatures too.
“The main struggle has been the disbelief that you could actually launch a statewide, people-powered campaign like this,” said state Rep. Lorena Garcia, an Adams County Democrat who was leading the Del Mar Park operation. “The money wasn’t coming in to help us do this. You can have the people, you can have the energy, but you still need some funds to print petitions, to help people get places, to cover snacks at events.”
The Protect Colorado’s Future Coalition, the issue committee supporting Initiative 195, raised less than $100,000 through June 24.
Some money eventually arrived, but not until late in the signature gathering campaign.
As a result, Initiative 195’s supporters didn’t report gathering 75% of the signatures they needed until July 20 — five months after they started.
“This is probably the hardest part to win this campaign — just getting it on the ballot,” Garcia said. “When people hear about it, people want it.”
As of Thursday, the campaign had collected enough signatures in 23 of Colorado’s 35 state Senate districts to make the ballot, deGruy Kennedy said. Supporters were on track to finish gathering signatures in another four districts by Saturday and had just a few thousand more signatures to collect in the remaining districts.
“We’ve got staff in those districts every day until we close them out,” he said.
DeGruy Kennedy said about 70% of the signatures gathered for Initiative 95 have been collected by volunteers and staff of organizations, like his, that are pushing for the ballot measure.
The good news for him is that they are seeing a roughly 90% validity rate in those signatures, compared with a 75% validity rate for the signatures gathered by paid petitioners.
That means Initiative 195’s backers feel like they don’t need a large surplus of signatures to ensure they make the ballot like campaigns made up of mostly paid circulators.
Still, deGruy Kennedy acknowledges that the Initiative 195 campaign couldn’t rely on volunteers alone. About a half-dozen petition companies are gathering signatures for the measure — some of which are also gathering signatures for measures on the other end of the ideological spectrum.
For instance, Ground War Marketing is gathering signatures for Initiative 195. It’s also being paid by conservative and business groups to gather signatures for initiatives that would require the legislature to spend more money on roads, create a “right to natural gas” usage in Colorado and make it harder for Democrats to redraw Colorado’s congressional districts in the middle of a decade.
Citizens Voice, another signature-gathering firm, is circulating petitions for Initiative 195 and Initiative 232, a competing, conservative measure that would change state law to prohibit the income tax rate from rising above 4.4%. (Paid signature gatherers can and do sometimes present people with competing ballot petitions to sign.)
Advance Colorado, the conservative political nonprofit behind Initiative 232, has already turned in signatures for the measure and is awaiting final sign off from state elections officials before the initiative is placed on the November ballot.
If both Initiatives 195 and 232 are on the November ballot and pass, the courts may have to weigh in on whether and how they would interact.