January 15, 2025 02:37 PM UTC

Colorado Springs City Council Determined To Ignore Their Own Voters

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Sun’s Olivia Prentzel reports–after the voters of Colorado Springs passed a ballot measure in November to allow recreational marijuana sales within city limits by the same shops who currently sell weed to the city’s medical marijuana patients, and at the same time rejected a measure referred by the City Council that would have made it impossible for those medical marijuana shops to do so, conservatives on the City Council are considering the bizarre and unprecedented step of asking voters to weigh in a third time by posing the question again in the upcoming April municipal election:

Weeks after residents voted in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana sales in Colorado Springs, elected leaders are considering putting the issue back on the ballot in April, saying people who voted “yes” could have been mistaken.

The city council is expected to vote at its next meeting Jan. 28 whether to re-refer the issue to the April 1 ballot, when voter turnout is historically lower than general elections, claiming that “confusing” language had muddied the issue…

The language of Colorado Springs’ Ballot Question 300 comes out to just under 200 words, and very clearly says what it does–allowing medical marijuana shops to apply for retail licenses, with the number of licenses limited to the number of medical shops on Election Day. But failed 2022 GOP House candidate and Councilman Dave Donelson is nonetheless very concerned that voters were misled some nefarious way into…well, voting against Dave Donelson’s wishes:

Among those pushing for a new ballot measure on pot was Councilman Dave Donelson, who suggested during a work session Monday that Question 300 was poorly worded and may have misled voters. He proposed that residents have the chance for a new vote to “know once and for all if these citizens want recreational marijuana in Colorado Springs or not.”

“The previous vote, I think, was confused,” Donelson said. “And I think it really could have had the impact that something passed that the majority of citizens don’t really support.”

This is ironic since the only action to “confuse” voters over the question of recreational pot in Colorado Springs was the one taken by City Council to introduce a second measure that if passed would have had the effect of invalidating the first. Voters rejected that measure while approving Question 300, sending a clear message against the City Council’s longstanding desire to keep recreational marijuana out of the city.

The plan following this full-scale defeat from the City Council appears to be to ignore the voters entirely, and hold out for a smaller, redder electorate in the municipal election to nullify last November’s results. If they proceed with this plan it will be one of the most cynical manipulations of the democratic process you’ll ever see at any level, and the only reason the idea isn’t national news (yet) is it’s a conservative municipal government of a conservative town disregarding the will of their own voters.

In that one sad respect, it’s a case of voters getting the government they deserve.