Inside a warehouse just off the highway in Denver, sewers feed large sheets of green and beige fabric through industrial machines.
Will Marquardt, owner of Davis Tent, walks from station to station, explaining how the company turns canvas into premium wall tents for backcountry hunting and glamping.
“If you're wondering whether they're really warm or not, we like to say that you can play poker in your underwear in our tents if you want to,” he said.
It’s a busy time for this small business. Hunting season is underway, and so is election season.
Marquardt said he’s no politico. But he is a bow-hunter — a birder, too — and his warehouse recently hosted one of the final campaign stops for Amendment 83, handing out yard signs and urging Coloradans to vote "yes."
The measure would create a constitutional “right to hunt and fish,” including by the use of “traditional methods.” If passed, it would make hunting and fishing the state’s preferred ways of managing wildlife and would allow the state to regulate hunting “if the law is necessary for sound scientific wildlife conservation and management, public safety,” or to preserve the future of hunting and fishing.
Among the supporters is the advocacy arm of The International Order of T. Roosevelt, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit which has contributed more than $1.5 million to the campaign and worked to pass a similar ballot measure in Florida in 2024.
Twenty-four states have "right-to-hunt" language in their state constitutions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, including Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. Arizona voters rejected a similar measure in 2010. Legislative efforts to adopt similar protections have failed in Nevada and New Mexico.
Supporters say the amendment in Colorado would be a way to proactively prevent attempts to limit hunting, while opponents worry the measure could complicate wildlife management.
Marquardt said the amendment recognizes the importance of hunting and fishing to businesses like his and the state economy; the industry in Colorado generates roughly $6 billion a year, according to the Common Sense Institute. One-third of revenue for the state wildlife agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, comes from hunting licenses, according to a state analysis.
Despite this, Marquardt said he’s noticed a shift in the perception and understanding of hunters as Colorado has urbanized.
“We feel like rural Colorado, in a lot of ways, is under attack,” he said.
In 2020, Colorado’s urban voters were key to approving the reintroduction of gray wolves. Four years later, voters faced another question at the polls: whether to ban the hunting of mountain lions and other big cats. That measure was defeated, but hunting groups saw it as a broader threat.
“That was definitely an attack on hunting,” said Dan Gates, the executive director for the Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management, and a leading spokesperson for the campaign supporting Amendment 83. “It was a definite attack on the ability for the managing agency to utilize hunting as a management tool.”
Gates thinks elevating hunting and fishing to a constitutional right will mean an added backstop against so-called “ballot box biology,” as well as efforts to restrict hunting by the legislature and Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s governor-appointed commission. He said it will ensure wildlife decision-making rests with biologists at the state agency.
“These are experts, and the experts should be able to turn around and make the decisions, whether I agree with them, whether you agree with them, they should be the ones making the decisions — as long as it's science-based,” Gates said.
However, opponents to the ballot measure argue such a threshold could hamstring state officials to manage wildlife in ways they see fit and elevates one way of managing over others.
“Hunters have felt they have to share with new people and new voices, and new ideas, different viewpoints,” said Jay Tutchton, the chair of the CPW commission and a former wildlife attorney, who was speaking in his individual capacity. “This is a backlash against that broadening of who counts in wildlife policy.”
Tutchton’s concern centers on the phrase “traditional methods,” in the ballot language, which is not defined. He thinks it could be used to challenge methods or hunts that voters in Colorado have banned, like certain types of trapping, hunting bears with bait or dogs, and hunting bears in the spring.
Gates emphasized that the amendment itself wouldn’t overturn any regulations. He also said its goal is forward-looking.
“I don't see any scenario where somebody is going to legitimately try to bring back what was already previously restricted or prohibited because of this constitutional amendment,” he said. “This is a stopgap to stop any further detriment to the ability for the agency to manage their wildlife.”
A state fiscal analysis of the ballot measure said workload and litigation costs could increase as a result of its passage. Tutchton said the vague language will lead to lawsuits.
“We will have years of uncertainty until we actually know what's going to happen, and that uncertainty will get resolved one lawsuit at a time,” he said. “It'll be a lawyer bonanza, basically, which is a very ineffective way to manage wildlife.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
