Denver should Raise the Bar Chuck Plunkett is The Denver Post’s editorial page editor.

It wasn’t that long ago in our fair city that voters were asked to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission meant to raise awareness of encounters with beings from space.

While the 2010 ballot measure was a lot of fun to talk about, and meant to be funded by donations, it still would have committed the city to the embarrassing distraction of tracking UFO sightings over Denver.

The ballot measure’s supporters put it before voters by presenting at least 3,400 verified signatures from registered Denver voters — in a city at that time of more than 428,000 registered voters, presumably all them Earthlings.

This past election cycle, a small group of activists managed to put before voters a measure requiring buildings of certain size to install gardens on their rooftops. This wasn’t an effort to welcome space visitors, but to save the planet from heat islands. (And because we’re a reliably progressive city, voters passed it despite reasonable economic concerns from the business community and our liberal, green-minded city government.)

The activists were able to do so by gathering little more than 4,700 petitions in a city that now has more than 477,000 registered voters.

Next election cycle, Denver voters will get a chance to greatly curtail campaign donations to elected officials, and again, the measure, which will sound great to many, but comes with all kinds of unintended consequences that many likely won’t think through, will appear courtesy

the signatures of 4,700 registered voters.

As one expert in the increasingly expensive and difficult business of collecting valid signatures in Colorado said to me: “I could get (that many) signatures with volunteers.”

This column will come across as awfully rich to those who supported the successful statewide Raise the Bar campaign in 2016 that makes it far more difficult for citizens to amend the state’s constitution. The Denver Post editorial board staunchly opposed that measure. (And, of course, for really good reasons.)

But my take on Denver’s system to change the city’s rules is that it’s much easier to create real mischief that it had been at the state level. And there are real differences in signature collection at the city level.

That said, my suggested reforms seek to honor the spirit of our opposition to the statewide change.

To get a sense of how easy it is to get on Denver’s ballot, consider that in most cities across the country, residents can’t even directly initiate such measure.

Rules vary in Colorado, but our neighbors in Aurora, for example, set the petition requirement at 15 percent of the total vote cast in the last regular municipal election.

In the Mile High City, petition-gathers need to collect verifiable signatures from but 5 percent of the total vote cast in the last mayoral election. And, unlike in Aurora, Denver’s mayoral races aren’t held on what we think of as Election Day, or the first Tuesday after Nov. 1. Instead, they are in odd years and held in the spring. Far fewer vote than during peak election cycles. The 2015 mayoral race, for example, drew about 94,500 voters. Almost 342,000 votes were cast for Election Day 2016.

Another limiting factor, for years Denver’s incumbent mayors haven’t drawn serious challengers, so the race tends to attract less attention, lowering the petition requirement for the next four years.

Had the Green Roof Initiative supporters launched their effort in the years following Michael Hancock’s take-down of Chris Romer to fill the seat left by John Hickenlooper, they would have had to find almost 30 percent more sympathetic voters.

Finally, advances in technology have made the petition-gathering process much easier. Denver’s elections office rents tablets equipped with software that can check voter identification and even allow interested parties to register right then and there.

It ought to be a little more difficult to impose the stiff arm of the government on building owners or campaigns or space visitors than it is.

I wouldn’t want to make it unreasonably difficult, of course. I like the idea of this power for the people.

But following Aurora’s lead, or at least setting our 5 percent figure against the total votes gathered in the last presidential election cycle, would be a lot better than what we’ve got.

Surely even intelligent life from outer space wouldn’t object.