COLORADO SPRINGS — Voters here chose to legalize recreational marijuana sales for the first time in the city’s history last fall, casting 22,372 more votes in favor than against Question 300 on the Nov. 5 ballot.
But for some members of the Colorado Springs City Council, the more-than-9-percentage-point electoral margin backing the establishment of a retail cannabis industry in Colorado’s second-largest city wasn’t definitive enough. Elected leaders in the politically conservative community are gearing up to place a new measure on the April 1 municipal ballot that would overturn November’s vote.
“We’re just going to give the citizens one chance to make sure this was their intent,” Councilman Dave Donelson told The Denver Post in an interview.
Referral of a recreational marijuana prohibition measure to the spring ballot is expected to pass at the council’s next meeting Jan. 28.
Donelson points to last fall’s Question 300, which included language about license limitations and setbacks from schools and day care operations, as overly dense and confusing. That there was a competing measure on the same ballot all-out banning recreational marijuana sales — put there by the council — muddled things more, he said.
“Regular people are busy — they have kids crying, they have jobs. They don’t read this like lawyers,” the first-term councilman said.
But while he says the goal is “simply verifying that this is what the voters truly intended,” those behind November’s ballot question say the people have already spoken, loudly and clearly. They approved Question 300 and rejected Question 2D, the marijuana prohibition measure.
Question 300 supporters accuse the anti-marijuana majority on the council of using baldly underhanded tactics to thwart the will of the voters in this city of nearly half a million people.
“Older and more conservative voters tend to vote more in off-cycle elections,” said Karlie Van Arnam, the general manager of the medical cannabis dispensary Pure, of the potential new ballot measure. “It’s the crowd they want — the will of the few to override the will of the many.”
Pure is one of nearly 90 medical marijuana dispensaries in Colorado Springs. Medical sales have been legal in the city for more than a decade, while the recreational side of the industry has failed to take hold in the 11 years since the first retail weed shop opened in Colorado.
Just two years ago, Colorado Springs voters rejected a measure to legalize recreational sales, though they passed a separate measure to tax those sales at 5%, should they become legal.
Then, last fall, nearly 55% of Colorado Springs voters said yes to recreational sales.
At a meeting last week that packed City Hall with dozens of agitated residents, Councilwoman Yolanda Avila, a voice of dissent on the nine-member body, accused her colleagues of trying to engineer a favorable electoral outcome this spring.
“We are going to have the least voter turnout on April 1 because we don’t even have a mayor running,” Avila said. “It’s the lowest, lowest turnout.”
Kent Jarnig, a Vietnam War combat vet who helped found the El Paso County Colorado Progressive Veterans, told the council it should be easier for veterans to access marijuana to help them treat post-traumatic stress disorder and other traumas incurred from their service.
“I just get the feeling the City Council is going to keep putting this on the ballot until it is voted down,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting, eliciting loud applause from the audience.
Longtime anti-cannabis ethos
Colorado Springs, by not allowing recreational cannabis sales, is an outlier among Colorado’s five biggest cities.
For eight years ending in 2023, the city was led by Mayor John Suthers, who previously served as Colorado’s attorney general and U.S. attorney. He was known as an ardent opponent of cannabis legalization.
While Colorado Springs has a wealth of medical marijuana dispensaries, there are enough hurdles in place — the need to get a doctor’s note and purchase a green card from the state — that Tom Scudder says that side of the industry simply can’t compete with the recreational side. In a retail storefront, the only requirement is that the customer has 21 years under her belt.
“We’ve been going out of business for three years,” said Scudder, who owns a pair of medical stores and a grow operation in the city. He serves as president of the Colorado Springs Cannabis Association.
While the entire industry in Colorado has taken a hit following the COVID-19 pandemic cannabis surge that sent sales to a record $2.2 billion statewide in 2021, the medical market has been on an even steeper decline in recent years.
Scudder said that what is now a $72 million annual business in the city could blossom to $130 million in the first year of recreational cannabis sales — and $171 million a year by 2030. The city could see anywhere from $7 million to $10 million in annual sales tax revenue by that later date, he said.
“They literally could solve homelessness overnight if they allowed these sales to go through and used it for that,” Scudder said. “It’s just insane we’re not doing that. They are fanatics in this respect.”
The tax on recreational marijuana sales that voters passed in 2022 would allocate the money to three buckets: support for military veterans, enhanced public safety and funding for mental health.
But that’s only if voters in April don’t overturn what voters in November decided.
The whole situation has Aaron Bluse beyond frustrated. The 38-year-old entrepreneur, who has been in the cannabis industry for more than a decade, has three medical shops in Colorado Springs. He also has a dual-license storefront in Dillon in Summit County, which he says often pulls in as much business in one day as all three of his Altitude Organic Medicine shops do.
A big part of the problem, Bluse said, is that Colorado Springs’ dozens of medical pot shops are largely chasing after just over 22,000 medical marijuana card holders in El Paso County. That reality prompted him and other marijuana advocates to spearhead a signature-gathering effort last spring to get Question 300 on the November ballot.
They structured the measure to assure voters that the industry wouldn’t be able to operate in too freewheeling of a manner, Bluse said. It stated that only existing medical shops could apply for a recreational license, creating a de facto cap on the number of retail stores allowed in Colorado Springs. It also stipulated that any dispensaries selling recreational weed would have to be at least 1,000 feet from schools or day care centers.
Right away, Bluse said, the City Council began to fight the measure.
In September, it passed a preemptive ordinance to increase the 1,000-foot setback to a mile, effectively precluding just about any location in the city from qualifying for a retail license.
Then the council placed Question 2D, the recreational marijuana prohibition measure — an amendment to the city charter that could have trumped 300 — on the same ballot. Just this month, Colorado Springs’ elected leaders advanced a new ordinance to again increase setbacks to a mile.
While that ordinance was voted down last week, the new ballot measure wiping out the old one potentially looms in April. Councilwoman Nancy Henjum has been outspoken on the aggressive tactics her council colleagues have taken to throw a monkey wrench into a situation the voters approved.
“I find it a blatant disregard of the will of the voters and am gobsmacked that in the city that is known to be the birthplace of libertarianism, that this City Council would conclude that it knows what is better for people than the will of its own constituents and voters by majority,” she said.
“Every day, like clockwork”
If the aim of city leaders is to reduce residents’ overall access to marijuana, Bluse says it’s not working.
“Eleven minutes from City Hall, you can get recreational pot in Manitou Springs,” he said.
Or in Pueblo, 30 minutes down the road. Or in Palmer Lake, 23 minutes to the north.
Bluse has to turn away at least 10 people a day who seek recreational pot at his medical stores.
“It’s every day, like clockwork,” he said.
Often, he sends them to Dead Flowers in Palmer Lake, an eclectic retail pot shop decorated in evocative murals of classic rockers like Jim Morrison, Slash, Freddie Mercury and — owner Dino Salvatori’s favorite — the Rolling Stones.
“I’ve been in medical for a long time, and there is no money in it,” said Salvatori, who has run a medical marijuana shop in Palmer Lake for more than a decade. He now owns a dual-license shop after voters in the northern El Paso County town legalized recreational sales in 2022.
Salvatori, 64, went from greeting 12 to 15 people a day in the year leading up to Palmer Lake’s marijuana election to around 350 people daily now — even up to 450 on Fridays.
“Had that not passed, I would have gotten out,” he said.
Now business is going gangbusters with referrals from Colorado Springs. But nearly half his clientele comes from the opposite direction in Douglas County, which permits no cannabis sales of any kind.
He recognizes that as long as there are no recreational cannabis sales in Colorado Springs, it will be good for his pocketbook. But Salvatori also feels badly for the voters to his south, who he feels are being disenfranchised by their own elected leaders.
“The people voted for it — and last time I checked, that’s what elections are about,” he said. “I’m leaning more towards letting them have it.”
Worries about youth use
Arguments against recreational marijuana in Colorado Springs have run the gamut from concern over youth use to worries about whether, as a military town, the city could see its role as host of U.S. Space Command jeopardized by the commercialization of a drug that is still illegal at the federal level.
At last week’s council meeting, Councilman David Leinweber made it clear that he is a supporter of medical marijuana — even calling the industry “awesome.” But he said he had “deep concerns” about the drug getting into the hands of young people, which he feels is more likely if the industry expands in the city.
“Research has increasingly linked early and frequent marijuana (use) to elevated risks of psychosis, anxiety and mental health challenges, particularly in youth whose brains are still developing,” Leinweber said.
A 2024 study published by the National Institutes of Health stated, “There are concerns that the use of products with increased potency will increase risk for cannabis use and comorbid mental health disorders, particularly cannabis-induced psychosis and suicidal behavior …”
It concluded that because young brains develop over a long time, “youth are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of cannabis.”
“We have to find a balance between the benefits and the negative aspects of this,” Leinweber said.
The Post’s attempts to reach several other council members who look dimly on cannabis use were unsuccessful.
Van Arnam, with Pure, said youth use of marijuana is actually on the decline.
“We have seen youth use drop in regulated markets,” she said.
According to the most recent Healthy Kids Colorado survey, the share of high school students in Colorado reporting use of marijuana at least once in the previous month dropped to 12.8% in 2023 from 13.3% two years earlier. Both of those figures were well below the more than 20% who answered the question affirmatively in 2019.
And compliance with state rules on youth restrictions has been strong in the industry, Van Arnam said. State data show that undercover underage operatives who attempted to purchase marijuana in Colorado were denied 99% of the time in each of the last three years.
If Colorado Springs’ council votes to put its prohibition measure on the April ballot at the end of this month, industry advocate Scudder said, there’s no saying what might happen. The city is scheduled to begin accepting applications for recreational licenses in February, with the first licenses expected to be issued in April.
Scudder said voters in Colorado Springs have rejected recreational marijuana before. With the much smaller — and more conservative — pool of voters likely to turn out for a spring municipal election, the anti-cannabis forces would hold the advantage, he thinks.
He and his allies will have to make as much noise as they can and appeal to voters’ sense of fairness, Scudder said.
“It’s going to be a hell of a challenge,” he said, “and I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do it.”
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