AKRON, Colo.—Rural counties in Colorado are considering alternatives to secession as part of their efforts to have a bigger role in political decisions after opposition mounted to plans to form a 51st state.
One alternative discussed during a Monday meeting of officials from 10 counties would require state representatives or senators to be elected by county, rather than by population. That would dilute the influence of some of the bigger cities on the Front Range and Western Slope.
Of about 70 people who attended the meeting in Akron, many said they were unhappy with laws passed during the legislative session earlier this year, including stricter gun regulations, civil unions for gay couples and new renewable energy standards.
Rural residents also are angry because they are seeing less tax money return to their communities for road and highway improvement projects, even though they collectively generate some of the state’s highest revenue, according to Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway, who offered the original plan to secede.
“I think the city people kind of feel like country people are just hicks,” Washington County farmer John Lueth said. “They tend to generally use us. We just don’t have that much of a voice.”
When Conway polled the participants, asking them to raise their hands if they thought lawmakers had ignored rural citizens’ needs, nearly every hand flew up. Conway said that is proof that the fight should continue.
Counties represented at the meeting included Cheyenne, Kit Carson, Lincoln, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, Weld and Yuma.
Yuma County Commissioner Dean Wingfield said creating a North Colorado state could simply create a small-scale version of the rural-urban tensions that existed in the first place. He said about 75 percent of the population in the proposed new state lives in Weld County, which would give them more power.
