DENVER – Two ballot measures that would restrict oil and gas extraction in Colorado have failed to turn in enough valid signatures to put the questions on the November ballot, Secretary of State Wayne Williams announced Monday.

Williams said his office determined both measures were 18,000 to 20,000 signatures short of the required 98,492 required to put a question on the ballot. The office didn’t check all of the signatures turned in by Coloradans Resisting Extreme Energy Development, but rather checked a random sample of 5 percent of the submitted signatures.

Williams said both ballot petitions had an about average number of signatures deemed invalid, but neither petition had a large buffer over the required signatures. Seven measures will be on the November ballot, but only the oil and gas proposals – which would have been measures 75 and 78 on the ballot – failed the petition process.

“If you look at every count that got turned in, all the ones that made it turned in way more signatures than they did, by 20-, 30-, 40,000. Some of them turned in as many as 180,000 signatures,” Williams said.

Petitioners submitted 107,232 signatures for measure 75 and 106,626 for measure 78. Williams said the petition for 78 included “several potentially forged” signatures.

CREED has 30 days to appeal the ruling in Denver District Court. Three Republicans running for U.S. Senate this year sued the Secretary of State and won to get their names on the June primary ballot after a number of signatures were deemed invalid.

Williams said a successful challenge is much more difficult when several thousand signatures need to be made up.

Representatives from CREED didn’t immediately return phone calls on the ruling Monday.

Pete Maysmith, Executive Director of Conservation Colorado, hinted at the possibility of a legal challenge.

“This is not the end of this fight,” he said in a statement. “The underlying problems with oil and gas development that have led to these citizen-led efforts must be addressed. People who live in the oil and gas patches are worried and scared for their futures, and their struggles are not going to go away just because the oil and gas industry was able to crush a local, homegrown effort to fix them. The unprecedented spending of millions of dollars by out-of-state oil and gas companies to stifle our democratic process and to keep these initiatives off the ballot shows the extraordinary lengths that they are willing to go to in order to keep the people of Colorado from being able to vote on issues affecting their own state.”

Initiative 75, had the measure made the ballot and passed, would have created an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would have allowed local municipalities that have banned hydraulic fracturing in their communities. Such municipalities that prohibited fracking have been sued by the state and the industry, arguing that is an unconstitutional taking of their mineral rights.

Initiative 78 would have mandated all oil and gas operations be at least 2,500 feet from “the nearest occupied structure.” That question is in response to encroaching oil and gas development along the front range, especially in Weld County, where fracking has been done schools and office buildings.

Opponents of both measures say the industry is working with communities to minimize the impact of short-term fracking operations. After about a year of intensive fracking – where sand, water and other chemicals are pumped into the ground to fracture rock and release the natural gas and oil that are trapped there – most locations are left with visible but silent well heads that can collect the resources for decades.

The conflict is over more than just the disturbance, and proponents of the measures say there are dangers of being that close to activities that could release methane gas and other contaminants into the air and groundwater.

Executive Director of the Colorado Petroleum Council, Tracee Bentley, was glad the initiatives failed to make the ballot.

“Oil and natural gas companies have a long history of working collaboratively with local government and communities and we will continue to do so,” she said. “Companies in Colorado operate under some of the most stringent rules in the country and we have proven it is not an either-or situation. We can produce clean, safe, affordable energy while being good environmental stewards. Moving forward, it’s important that we put in place policies that further Colorado’s leadership on these critical issues and benefit consumers, both in our state and nationally.”

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Contact Megan Schrader: 286-0644

Twitter @CapitolSchrader

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