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Marijuana was barely on the ballot in Colorado this year, and the little action it did see wasn’t great for industry expansion.
Just two small towns, both in rural Colorado, had marijuana-related ordinances on their ballots for the November 4 election, according to the Secretary of State’s Office and local county clerks. The people of Springfield, a town of about 1,300 people in Baca County, voted down measures that would have allowed dispensaries, growing facilities and other medical and recreational marijuana businesses to operate within the town. Colorado’s Springfield (one of anywhere from 34 to 67 municipalities and communities with the name in this country) is just the latest municipality in Colorado’s southeastern corner to reject the alluring smell of legal weed — despite the fact that it could bring in valuable customers from neighboring Texas and Oklahoma.
Voters in Craig, the self-proclaimed Elk Hunting Capital of the World, approved the lone marijuana question on their ballot, but dispensary shoppers probably weren’t thrilled. The question, 2A, proposed giving Craig City Council the power to increase the local marijuana sales tax by up to 4 percent. Craig’s current local tax on recreational dispensary sales is around 7 percent, which doesn’t include the 15 percent state sales tax on recreational marijuana sales.
The ordinance narrowly passed, 984 to 977, according to the Moffat County Clerk and Recorder, allowing councilmembers to increase or decrease the tax without local approval as early as January 1, 2026.
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According to the Craig Press, the council is expected to use its authority to raise Craig’s marijuana sales tax, with revenue used to fund the Craig branch of the Moffat County Library and the Museum of Northwest Colorado. There are six dispensaries located in Craig, according to the state Marijuana Enforcement Division. That’s a lot of pot shops for about 9,000 people, suggesting that Craig could be counting on tourists and travelers from Utah, Wyoming and Idaho to help spur revenue, but dispensary sales in Moffat County have consistently fallen over the last couple of years, MED figures show.
With the majority of Colorado’s major cities and several popular resort towns having already opted into legal marijuana sales, there aren’t many new areas for commercial cannabis to penetrate. Of the state’s ten largest cities by population, only three (Arvada, Greeley and Westminster) don’t allow dispensary sales. Colorado’s six largest cities all allow recreational pot sales, including Colorado Springs…after a dramatic and unsurprisingly drawn-out process that ran from 2024 into this year.
Suburban communities outside of Arvada and Westminster — which actually did approve marijuana sales in 2021, only to block them in the same election by not approving the accompanying sales tax — have mostly opted into commercial cannabis, while rural towns have been less welcoming to legal weed. And as the marijuana industry’s earning power continues to fade in Colorado after the pandemic, fewer small towns have considered allowing these businesses within their jurisdictions.
Maybe Colorado Springs really was the final frontier.
