Cripple Creek voters have decided the mountain town will chart its own course as a home-rule city rather than stay under the state's standard statutory rules. Ballot Issue 2A passed with nearly 60% of the vote, marking a turnaround for a proposal that failed at the ballot box once before, according to The Gazette.
According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, Cripple Creek voters approved the home-rule charter instead of remaining a statutory city, with the vote finalized this past week. The shift gives the city more autonomy over local issues, including housing policy and whether certain state tax exemptions for special interests apply within city limits.
This is not Cripple Creek's first attempt at home rule. A previous home-rule proposal was defeated in 2016, and the Gazette's earlier coverage attributed that loss to a lack of public education about what the concept actually meant for residents. This time around, city officials say they took a different approach.
A Deliberate Campaign to Explain the Stakes
Annie Durham attributed the charter's win to proactive public education about the proposal, telling the paper, “we were proactive last year.” Durham also said the vote margin matched the margin by which the city's home-rule commission itself had been supported, and she credited commission chair Kirk Pennock with advocating for the charter throughout the process, as reported by The Gazette.
Durham said she intentionally stayed out of the charter debate herself, noting it was a citizens' commission driving the effort rather than city hall. That commission's work traces back to March, when Cripple Creek began formally discussing home rule versus remaining a statutory government, before the proposal moved to a city council vote in May and then on to the ballot this fall, as noted by The Gazette.
Town Hall Answered Voter Questions Before the Vote
Pennock scheduled a public forum on Oct. 15 at the Aspen Mine Center, bringing in city attorney Geoff Wilson to explain Ballot Issue 2A and field questions from residents. At that town hall, Wilson walked through how the proposed charter would work, including the fact that the document codifies all current council procedures, terms and meeting structures exactly as they already exist, The Gazette reported, according to its coverage of the Oct. 15 forum: The Gazette.
Wilson also told attendees that a charter ensures state-level tax exemptions do not automatically apply locally unless the town itself chooses to adopt them, per the same account. That distinction, between what the state assumes for statutory cities and what a home-rule charter lets a city decide for itself, was central to how officials pitched the measure to voters.
Cripple Creek Joins Colorado's Home-Rule Majority
Cripple Creek's move puts it in company with the vast majority of Colorado's municipalities. Wilson said at the October forum that about 95% of Colorado's municipal population already lives in home-rule municipalities, leaving only about a dozen statutory governments left in the state, per a report from The Gazette. A Colorado General Assembly issue brief separately references the broader count of home-rule governments statewide, though the available excerpt of that document is incomplete.
What is clear is that a decade after an earlier attempt stalled out, voters this time delivered a clear answer, one that Durham and the commission she credited spent months preparing residents to understand.
