Ten counties, including Weld and Morgan, started talking about seceding last month. Now some people Lincoln and Cheyenne counties say they want to join a new state they’d call “North Colorado.”
Organizers of the secession effort say their interests are not being represented at the state Capitol. Representatives from the 10 counties held a meeting on Monday in the town of Akron in Weld County to begin mapping the boundaries for the new state they say will represent the interests of rural Colorado.
“I say 80 percent of the oil and gas revenue in the state of Colorado is coming out of northeastern Colorado – Weld, Yuma County, and some of other counties,” Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway said. “Seventy percent of the K-12 funding is coming off the state lands in Weld County alone. I’m telling you we are economic drivers.”
"A water right is the livelihood of many, many people in northeast Colorado ... and if you put the security of that right at risk at all -- as starting a brand new state might do -- that could be enough to convince people they don't want to go forward with this (new state)," said James Witwer, a water attorney in Denver, who represents various municipalities and agricultural water users in northeast Colorado. "It would be problematic and risky."Eight major U.S. rivers flow from Colorado's mountains and into surrounding states and, because of that, Colorado has agreements in place with its neighbors -- compacts that require certain amounts of water to flow across state lines.
Such an agreement would have to be made between Colorado and North Colorado.
This process has been successfully used in the past to create five new states — Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maine and West Virginia, according to the National Constitution Center.
But the road to statehood is mostly littered with failures. There have been more than seventy-five unsuccessful attempts at statehood, including the fantasy states of Forgottonia, Texlahoma, Nickajack, Absaroka, and Long Island.