Out of Dillon’s seven ballot questions on the April 7 ballot, six passed and one failed Tuesday night, according to unofficial results.

Ballot questions A, B, C, D, E and G passed with “Yes” vote percentages of 59%, 66%, 59%, 55%, 53% and 79%, respectively. Ballot Question F failed with a “Yes” vote percentage of 47%. The town clerk reported 323 ballots were submitted out of 708 registered voters.

Official results will become available April 17, after special ballots like those for overseas military members that were postmarked by April 7 have been received and counted.

Four of the questions, C through F, asked voters about amending the charter to allow the council to complete different actions via resolution rather than ordinance. Ballot Question G had to do with updating town charter language to align with state statute. Ballot questions A and B deal with Town Council meeting scheduling and where official notices are posted.

Ballot Question A will “remove the requirement that Town Council must meet at least twice each month” from the town charter, according to the question’s language. The change will leave the charter stating that, “The Council shall meet each month.”

A memo from town attorney Kathryn Winn explained that the Town Council has had a hard time meeting twice a month when holidays interfere with the schedule or the council lacks action items to discuss, and the change will provide flexibility in those cases.

Ballot Question B asked voters if the charter should be amended to “designate the town’s website as the official location for all postings and publications.” The charter currently has a requirement that things like meeting notices be published in a “newspaper of general circulation.”

Winn said in a February Town Council meeting that the town could still publish notices in the Summit Daily, which is the area’s newspaper of general circulation, but the charter change will mean the town will not be required to do so. She also said “most people” get information about public notices from the town website anyway. The Colorado Press Association has come out against ballot issues that remove legal notices from newspapers since there are transparency concerns regarding governments overseeing the legal requirements of posting these notices.

“At the heart of public notice law is a simple principle: Governments must inform the public through independent platforms they do not control,” according to the Colorado Press Association. “Allowing a government entity to declare its own website legally sufficient turns that safeguard upside down. It puts the fox in charge of the henhouse.”

Questions C, E and F were designed to allow appropriations, the fixing of rates charged by municipal utility systems, and acts that place direct burdens upon or direct limitations on the use of private property, respectively, to be done by resolution rather than ordinance. When approving something by ordinance, the Town Council has to have two readings of the proposal before voting, while a resolution only requires one.

Winn’s memo stated the current charter’s requirements of approving those actions by ordinance are more restrictive than state law and removing them would allow for a “more efficient and streamlined process.”

Question D will allow the approval by resolution of leases of town property that are for more than a year. Winn’s memo stated the intent of the change is to provide more flexibility. 

Town manager Nathan Johnson said at the February meeting that the change will apply to the town leasing out property for event or commercial space, and council member Barbara Richard said the issue came up in past years when Ice Castles wanted to have a five-year lease in the Dillon Town Park.

Ballot Question G combined three changes to the town charter into one question because they all have to do with aligning the charter’s language with state statute. 

The first change will move the deadline for the town to complete its audit from April 30 to June 30, which is the state law’s requirement. Winn wrote in her memo that the April 30 deadline “can be challenging for auditors to meet.”

The second and third parts have to do with the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR. The second part removes language in the charter that allowed Dillon to delay TABOR’s implementation. The language is now irrelevant because TABOR was implemented over 30 years ago.

The last part of the ballot question removes charter language that allows the Town Council to levy certain taxes without an election — something specifically prohibited by TABOR, meaning the charter language is irrelevant.