Why It Matters: The use of ballot initiatives in states that allow them is on the rise, and we are seeing more and more efforts to use the polls to undermine, and potentially ultimately ban, hunting, this time by targeting the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission. The Commission process exists to provide the opportunity for input by professionals, such as fish and wildlife scientists, for revisions, and considerations of broader impacts within Colorado’s overall science-based management plan. Citizen-led ballot initiatives seek to make wildlife management decisions based on emotion rather than scientific principles by tying the hands of professional wildlife managers by restricting adaptive tools and methods necessary to achieve balanced and thriving ecosystems. Defeating these ballot initiatives keeps the authority to manage Colorado’s wildlife in the hands of the wildlife Commission and the state’s professionals where it belongs.
Highlights:
- A new ballot initiative has been submitted in Colorado, called Initiative 82. Named the “Colorado Wildlife and Biodiversity Protection Act,” Initiative 82 seeks to create an independent commission parallel to the current Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, which would exist to create legal protections for unnamed “keystone species” and assess financial penalties to those who violate these arbitrary protections.
- The Colorado Legislative Council released a 19-page response, citing page after page of flaws and errors the submitting parties will have to cure before the proposal can move forward.
- There are constitutional questions regarding Initiative 82 which proponents are likely to have difficulty overcoming during the Colorado Supreme Court review that will no doubt be requested by our in-state partners.
Perhaps “The Broken Record State” should be considered to replace Colorado’s “Centennial State” moniker, as yet again, anti-hunting activists have proposed another tiresome, dubious, and intentionally harmful ballot measure—this one called Initiative 82, the “Wildlife and Biodiversity Protection Act.”
Initiative 82, if it makes it to the 2026 ballot and passes, would create an independent, parallel wildlife commission to the already existing Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission. Why? Because the antis have repeatedly been frustrated by the legislative and wildlife commission processes, which exist to be intentionally deliberative to allow actual wildlife management experts to craft regulations and policy, in order to best protect the use of scientific wildlife management practices and the ability of Colorado’s wildlife professionals to use said practices.
The antis’ repeated losses through these normal legislative processes year after year led to their changing strategies by going for the 2020 ballot initiative that famously forced the reintroduction of wolves in Colorado, which caught the hunting community flat-footed and only passed by a mere 2% margin—a grave mistake that was not repeated last year when our community came together and defeated Proposition 127, the ballot measure to prohibit mountain lion hunting, by a whopping ten points.
So, because the antis cannot get their way through the legislature or Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission, they’re hoping to rekindle their 2020 luck, and this time create a new commission to “protect” certain unnamed “keystone species.”
The Colorado Legislative Council, the non-partisan legislative services agency tasked with, among other things, reviewing all ballot initiative proposals to ensure adherence to the laws regarding them, held the review and comment hearing recently. While many of the details of what this new council would do are vague in the proposal, the hearing did reveal that the new commission would require $2.5 million in taxpayer funding, and that the new commission would have the ability to unilaterally determine if a species has been or is being harmed, and impose fines which will go into their funding pot—a keen financial incentive to abuse Colorado’s hunters as much as possible.
The implications to our hunting heritage and family traditions aside, the Legislative Council responded with a 19-page document that, frankly, tears the proposal apart, citing legal flaw after legal flaw and asking question after question, all of which must be fixed or adequately answered to the Council’s satisfaction before the proposed initiative can move forward. Given the depth of the criticisms, the antis will have to essentially reformulate Initiative 82 practically from scratch before they’ll be allowed to move to the next steps in the process.
The antis will also face another challenge that might well prove to be the magic bullet that puts this nonsense down for good: Unless fundamentally changed, Initiative 82 will be challenged in the Colorado Supreme Court by our in-state partners. There are constitutional questions regarding the initiative, namely that the Colorado Constitution does not allow for the existence of an independent executive branch agency outside of existing department structure. This end run to achieve independence is, of course, the entire purpose of Initiative 82 to begin with, so we’ll see how the antis respond.
The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF) will be neck-deep in this issue, just as we were in the monumental Proposition 127 fight last year, so rest assured we’ll keep you up-to-date.
