Friday, June 07, 2013

Rural county commissioners discuss seceding from Colorado - video

A group of county commissioners say they are pursuing a plan to secede from Colorado and create a new state because they feel the Democrat-controlled state legislature is not representing their way of life. Sean Conway, a commissioner in Weld County, is leading a charge to ask voters in November whether to form a new state. “I know you think, wow, this is crazy when you first hear about it, but then you realize that five of our states — Vermont, Maine, Tennessee, Wyoming and Kentucky — came about in this fashion, and the circumstances were very similar to what we’re going through now,” Conway told FOX31 Denver Thursday afternoon. Conway, a Republican, said informal discussions have been underway between county commissioners about what kind of action to take. They say the state government has been ignoring values of rural counties when passing recent legislation including gun control measures, expanding oil and gas production and creating new renewable energy standards for rural areas. Gov. John Hickenlooper, after a long deliberation, signed the increased renewable energy standard for rural electric co-ops into law on Wednesday. Opponents of that bill labeled it as part of a “war on rural Colorado.” Now, it’s become Fort Sumter. Commissioners from Morgan, Logan, Sedgwick, Phillips, Washington, Yuma and Kit Carson counties all expressed interest in the idea.  Many met earlier this week at a Colorado Counties Inc. conference in Keystone to discuss the feasibility of forming a new state.  Any move to secede would require votes in each county. Then the plan would require the approval of the state legislature and the governor in order to petition Congress to create a new state, the newspaper reported...more

Here's the Fox31Denver video report:


No comments: