Both Fort Collins Ballot Issue 2B and Colorado Proposition BB passed Tuesday night.

Ballot Issue 2B gives the City of Fort Collins the right to provide its own high-speed Internet services, and the approval of Proposition BB means excess tax revenue from marijuana sales will continue to go to school construction and education funding and not back into the wallets of taxpayers.

On one issue, it looked as if Larimer County was at odds with the rest of Colorado — locally, a majority voted in favor of Proposition BB, but as a state, the issue appeared to had been voted down. There was a glitch in the state website that switched the “yes” and “no” votes, however, and in reality, Proposition BB was passed.

At around 8 p.m., the Associated Press reported that the proposition had passed, and at around 10 p.m., 66 percent of about 972,000 counted votes had voted “yes.”


This means that revenue made off of the sale of marijuana will not go back to taxpayers who would have received between $6 and $16 each, and instead, the $66.1 million will continue to be allocated to state-funded projects.

The areas that will most benefit from the funding are school construction, which will receive $40 million, and marijuana education and prevention campaigns, which will receive $2.5 million. Bullying prevention school grants, drop-out prevention school grants and youth mentoring services will each receive $2 million, and a variety of other projects will receive smaller sums.

BULLETIN (AP) — Proposition BB Retain Revenue, approved, Colorado. — CPR News (@NewsCPR) November 4, 2015

According to results released at 10:07 p.m., 83 percent of Fort Collins voters were in favor of the City of Fort Collins providing it own high-speed Internet services, while 17 percent were against the ballot issue. At that time, 27,670 votes had been counted.

“I’m pleased it passed, because it gives Fort Collins the options that it needs,” said Patrick Burns, the Colorado State University vice president for Information Technology and dean of libraries. Burns is a member of the Broadband Steering Committee for the City of Fort Collins.

“I’m not surprised it passed — it gave the city the right to do what it should have done all along.”

Moving forward, the next steps for Fort Collins will include extensive research.

“The city is going to study this very, very exhaustively,” Burns said. “There’s a quote that I love from Winston Churchill, he says, ‘Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else,’ and I think Fort Collins will probably do the same thing.”

The ballot question gives the city permission to offer Internet services similar to how water and electricity are provided. The city will move forward carefully, likely taking years to study this issue, Burns said.

Cathy Kipp was re-elected as director of the Poudre School District Board of Education. She had received about 78 percent of 29,193 votes at 10:07 p.m. In her previous term, her board developed a set of goals called District Ends, which according to her website, are “new cutting-edge student-centered goals for the district.” She hopes to oversee the implementation of the goals during her next term.

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Collegian Reporter Tatiana Talesnick-Parafiniuk can be reached online at news@collegian.com or on Twitter @tatianasophiapt.