Call it the Oil and Gas Scholarship Fund: millions of dollars of new revenue for college scholarships for low- and middle-income families.

Gov. Bill Ritter, environmental groups and others hope the scholarship fund will appeal to enough Coloradans that they will vote for a proposed ballot measure this fall. The proposal would eliminate the property tax credit in the state’s severance tax and thereby raise the amount of severance taxes energy companies pay.

Eliminating the credits isn’t a bad concept. We have long argued it makes more sense to do that now than to raise the severance tax rate in Colorado.

However, other parts of the ballot measure announced late last week may make it more difficult to win support.

One provision has Western Slope leaders concerned. Although 50 percent of existing severance tax funds are available to communities most affected by mineral development, the percentage of new severance tax money going to impacted communities would be less than half that under the ballot plan.

The proposed ballot initiative would also set aside 10 percent of new money to promote renewable energy and conservation. While those may be laudable goals, the need for them is hardly an impact created by oil and gas drilling.

We can’t argue with the proposal’s plan to set aside 15 percent of new severance tax money to protect wildlife habitat. There’s little question that concentrated drilling in an area affects wildlife habitat. Using money from the drilling industry to help mitigate those impacts makes sense.

There’s also no question that higher education suffered severely during the budget crisis of the early part of this decade, and still lags far behind the amount of state money it once received.

By devoting 60 percent of the new severance tax money to college scholarships, and only 10 percent to operational funding at colleges and universities, this ballot plan doesn’t do a great deal to alleviate the funding problems of higher education.

Many people think it’s high time the oil and gas industry in Colorado pays severance taxes more in line with rates charged by neighboring states such as Wyoming. But the industry has already vowed to spend millions to fight any increase in the severance tax.

This will be a tough fight. Backers of the proposal will need all of the support they can muster to win voter approval. The funding distribution system in this ballot proposal may not be the best way to obtain that broad support.