Colorado Vote on a Proposal to Close Rocky Flats

 An extensive fire in 1969 at the Rocky Flats Plant attracted significant attention and led to information that a previous fire in 1957 and an outside storage area called the “903 pad” had released plutonium contamination. I discuss in the book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” (available on this web site, Amazon, and Createspace) that the reputation of the site never recovered from the negative publicity. However, it is apparently not well remembered that the voters of Colorado had an opportunity to express their opinion about whether the plant should remain in operation. As I wrote at the end of Chapter 11 of the book, there was a ballot issue in 1982 to end operations at the plant. The exact wording was, “Shall the constitution of the State of Colorado be amended in order to bring about cessation of nuclear weapons component production in Colorado…” The vote was defeated 584,356 to 326,550. The source of this information is an article published in the Rocky Mountain News November 4, 1982.

At least one person who followed the history of Rocky Flats closely mentioned they weren’t familiar with the vote on the amendment, and I decided I needed to look for additional verification. I was able to locate a reference on ballotpedia.org, which listed all the ballots issues for 1982. Proposition 6 was the measure that would have made it illegal to produce components for nuclear weapons at Rocky Flats. It did not specify which components were included, so production of stainless and other non-nuclear components would have been just as illegal as those made from plutonium.

The Rocky Mountain News article opens with mention that Denver and Pitkin country voters approved a “freeze on nuclear weapons,” but that was rejected in Mesa County. That vote did not have had any impact on Rocky Flats. Components for nuclear weapons manufactured there were shipped to other locations for assembly of the weapons. The proposal to end manufacturing at Rocky Flats was rejected in a statewide vote. A supporter of the initiative said it was believed confusion between the two proposals was part of the reason for the defeat. The coordinator of the Denver Freeze Campaign speculated that “…jobs, particularly with unemployment at its highest point since the Great Depression, might have influenced the verdict about Rocky Flats, which employees 4,700 in its production of triggers for the United States arsenal.” Another proponent suggested that the proposal might have lost votes because it “…may have suggested to voters a unilateral decision by the United States to cease nuclear production.”

Regardless of why the proposal was defeated, I suggested in my book that the proposal might have had a different fate if the vote had been held in the late 1980s. Negative stories about Rocky Flats in 1988 won the site the dubious honor of being the top news story for that year. Of course the raid in 1989 might also have swung a few (or many) votes.

3 thoughts on “Colorado Vote on a Proposal to Close Rocky Flats

Comments are closed.