After a head-spinning week of court filings, appeals and emergency stays, Colorado Springs voters will not have to decide in April on the validity of their decision last fall to legalize recreational marijuana sales in the conservative city.
The Colorado Supreme Court declined to weigh in on a ruling against the city on Thursday, and city spokesman Max D’Onofrio confirmed that a new prohibition measure recently referred to the April 1 ballot by the City Council is dead.
El Paso County District Judge Hilary Gurney had ruled Monday that Colorado Springs leaders violated the state constitution by attempting to pose their ballot question during an odd-year election. That is not permitted by Amendment 64, the 2012 ballot measure that legalized recreational sales statewide, which allows ballot measures to prohibit recreational sales only in even-year general elections.
She quickly put her ruling on hold while the city appealed its case to the state’s high court. When it declined to take up the case on Thursday, Gurney lifted her emergency stay and ordered the city to “take all actions necessary to ensure that the Referred Ballot Question does not appear on ballots to avoid disenfranchising and confusing the electorate.” Overseas and military ballots will be mailed starting on Tuesday.
The battle over what would appear on the city’s municipal election ballot April 1 began last month when a majority on the council adopted a ballot measure challenging voters’ decision in November to green-light recreational pot sales, with nearly 55% support.
Several members claimed voters may have been confused by the language in Question 300, and by a competing unsuccessful ballot measure that would have banned those sales.
Question 300 allows Colorado Springs’ nearly 90 medical marijuana shops to convert to recreational sales. The first sales in Colorado’s second-largest city are expected in April.
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