“That’s insane!” an audience member shouted at the Sept. 10 City Council meeting as Council President pro tem Lynette Crow-Iverson said the council was “not a democracy.”
Crow-Iverson made the statement during the first reading of an ordinance that would increase by a factor of five the setback between shops that sell recreational pot and schools, daycares and rehabilitation facilities. The broader setback would effectively ban sales of recreational weed in Colorado Springs.
The Council voted 7-2 to pass the ordinance on first reading, despite Colorado Springs’ Planning Commission recommending that the setback remain at 1,000 feet instead of being changed to one mile.
“The Planning Commission heard a lot of testimony about the fear of marijuana use, especially among the youth in our community, but they did not see the logic between a one-mile versus a half-mile versus whatever other distance,” Walker said in response to a question from Councilmember Dave Donelson (D1) at the Sept. 10 meeting.
But Crow-Iversen thought otherwise. The main reason the council asked the planning commission to weigh in on extending the setback around recreational marijuana shops was to protect the young people of Colorado Springs, she said.
The Planning Commission had stepped “…out of line a little bit into asking why Council was doing this, and are you usurping the will of the people,” she said.
“I think they need to go back and do a little bit of a civic class because we are not a democracy,” she said. “We are elected to write policy and to govern on behalf of the people.”
‘A REPUBLIC IS A FORM OF DEMOCRACY’
Crow-Iverson had trotted out an often-used, but erroneous right-wing assertion, said political science professor Lonna Atkeson, the LeRoy Collins Eminent Scholar in Civic Education & Political Science and director of the LeRoy Collins Institute at Florida State University.
“There’s this distinction that conservatives make a lot between a democracy and a republic — but a republic is a form of democracy,” she said. “If you read James Madison, it’s very clear that the point of representation is representation, and if people are not represented in the way they like, … their obligation is to hold those legislators, those politicians accountable.”
“Representation is representation, and if people are not represented in the way they like, … their obligation is to hold those legislators, those politicians accountable.
Some Colorado Springs residents have said on social media that they plan to start the process to recall Crow-Iverson. They say she feels she is “outside of the purview of democracy” and “it’s time we show her that she works for us.”
Two weeks after the first vote, Council again ignored the Planning Commission, as well as pleas from members of the public, and passed the ordinance on second reading. The same councilmembers voted for extending the setback, and the same against. The exclusion zone was extended to one mile, effectively barring sales of recreational cannabis in Colorado Springs.
“This was engineered,” said Councilmember Yolanda Avila (D4), who, with Councilmember Nancy Henjum (D5), voted against the ordinance.
“It’s to make sure there’s no recreational cannabis in Colorado Springs, a way to get around what the people really want,” Avila said.
Before the vote, Donelson suggested that the ordinance be withdrawn until after the Nov. 5 election, when voters will have their say on two opposing ballot questions about recreational marijuana.
One, question 2D, would totally ban sales of recreational weed in Colorado Springs. The other, question 300, grew out of a citizens’ initiative that gathered thousands of signatures to get on the ballot. It calls for recreational marijuana to be sold out of existing medical cannabis dispensaries that are at least 1,000 feet away from facilities frequented by kids or other sensitive populations.
“It may turn out that (the ordinance allowing) recreational marijuana sales in the city doesn’t pass and that [2D] does pass,” Donelson said. “The council doesn’t have to pass an ordinance before the election even occurs, and I think it would be a wiser thing for council to do. I think it’s better to just wait and see how the vote goes.”
But Crow-Iverson refused to pull the ordinance, and the vote went ahead.
Luther Bonow, who had helped gather signatures that got question 300 on the ballot, was angered and frustrated by the lack of democratic process surrounding the vote.
“Why petition for change if the council can just go against the petition?” he said. “Petitioning takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of time, and what’s the point? How can change ever come to Colorado Springs if you have councilmembers that don’t want to implement change?”
PURE DEMOCRACY
If an issue is important to voters and they are letting that be known by starting a citizens’ initiative, “then to not be responsive to that is misunderstanding what it means to be a representative in a republic,” Atkeson said.
“We’re not a pure democracy, but the initiative process is pure democracy,” she said. “The purest democracy would be where the people would vote on every legislative matter. An initiative is the people voting on a legislative question.”
Henjum said when she voted against the ordinance the first time, she failed to see why the change was needed. Avila questioned how democratic it was.
“It’s a sure way to stop there being recreational marijuana,” without even paying lip service to the citizens’ initiative, she said. “And that, I thought, was taking away a citizen’s right.”
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