[[{“value”:”
It has been nearly two months since Colorado Springs residents voted to make recreational marijuana legal to sell in the city. A group of the ballot measure’s backers sent a letter to the city asking them to enact the approved measure in good faith in 2025.
The letter to Mayor Yemi Mobolade on Tuesday criticizes the Colorado Springs City Council for attempting to undermine the recreational marijuana ballot measure in the lead-up to the November election. The ballot question received 54.7% of the votes in the election.
The 17 groups and people that signed the letter include the owners of medical marijuana stores in Colorado Springs, El Paso County Democrats chair Mischa Smith, a doctor and two leaders of El Paso County Progressive Veterans.
“Even if you disagree with the voters’ decision, you must respect it and implement the law. We urge you not to play politics with this issue, a policy that a significant majority of your constituents embraced,” the letter states.
Ballot Question 300 allows the current businesses that sell medical marijuana in Colorado Springs to opt into selling recreational marijuana as well. The total number of retail licenses the city can grant would be capped at the current number of medical marijuana locations.
The concerns in the letter relate to the location restrictions for where the new recreational businesses can operate. The City Council passed an ordinance in September that bans recreational businesses from operating within a mile of a school, residential child care center, drug or alcohol treatment facility or another marijuana business. The mile radius would prevent all of the current medical marijuana businesses from adding retail sales.
The ballot measure that passed a few months later included much less stringent zoning rules. In the version approved by voters, recreational stores have to be more than 1,000 feet by foot from schools and day cares.
Marijuana business owner Tom Scudder has been part of campaigns for years to get Colorado Springs to allow recreational weed. After the election, Scudder said he heard rumblings that some council members and staff were looking to keep the mile radius in place. He helped organize the joint letter to organize a message to the city.
“They are designing the ordinance to put in place right now, and we wanted to put our thoughts in front of them before anything got written,” Scudder said.
The letter argued that because the ballot question was approved after the city resolution, the public vote takes precedent. The letter also said it would be legally tricky for the city to make any changes to the ballot question after the fact.
“That the City would circumvent the citizen initiative process, substituting its will for the clear will of its voters, is contrary to the City’s pre-existing rules voters specifically adopted in passing Question 300 as well as decades of case law,” the letter stated.
The City Council had placed a question on the November ballot to add a ban on recreational marijuana stores to the city charter. The charter ban failed to pass, with 50.6% of voters ruling against it.
The Colorado Springs Safe Neighborhood Coalition campaigned in favor of the charter ban on marijuana sales. Coalition spokesman Joel Sorenson said in response to the letter Tuesday that the pro-recreational sales side was the group that had misled voters in how the question on the ballot described the limited number of licenses that would be issued.
“Thousands of people who voted for (question) 2D, which asked voters in plain-as-day language to ban recreational marijuana sales, also voted for (question) 300. The reason? They thought 300 was limiting sales rather than authorizing them for the first time,” Sorenson said in a statement Tuesday.
Leading into the election, city staff said they were not sure how to square the different zoning of the council’s ordinance and the ballot measure if the current scenario came to pass. The city has not released any details for two months, citing the need for an extensive legal review.
Scudder said he felt the time to put the rules in place was appropriate to give the city time to adapt to the new businesses. The timeline included in the ballot question would allow retail marijuana businesses to begin seeking licenses early in the year and begin making sales in April.
City spokesperson Vanessa Zink said the final rules should be available around Jan. 8. The final details of the ordinance will have to be voted on by the city council early in the year before being put in place.
You can read the entire letter here:
”}]] “Even if you disagree with the voters’ decision, you must respect it and implement the law,” the letter asks the Colorado Springs City Council and city staff to do with recreational marijuana. A ballot measure to allow retail sales in the city passed with 54.7% of the November vote. Read More
