Secession talk: This time it's serious!

Several Colorado counties say they want to form a new state called North (or Northern) Colorado. Officials in the eight counties say they strongly oppose increased regulations in the oil and gas industry as well as some agricultural laws recently passed.

Residents of the 11 counties in Nebraska's panhandle are watching closely. Those folks in the Mountain Time Zone understand secession. In the 1890s, panhandle residents threatened to become part of Wyoming because the neighboring state to the west had water laws, which encouraged irrigation. Nebraska officials finally enacted the desired laws.

In September 1973, secession talk began again in the Nebraska panhandle, which, like Wyoming, is mostly range country. A (Scottsbluff) Star-Herald poll showed that 85.2 percent of the respondents favored the 11 counties leaving Nebraska and becoming part of Wyoming. Nebraska historian Frederick C. Luebke said at the time that he didn't blame panhandle residents for wanting the state's boundaries redrawn because they never made any sense in the first place.

"The boundaries in the West were not really done for the logic of the situation--who was there and that sort of thing," Luebke said. "They were pretty arbitrary." He said officials who through the years carved up the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 "simply drew the lines and let the line fall where it may. And in a lot of instances, they didn't have any idea what the topography was like."

The panhandle is in a different time zone. In order to do business with state offices in Lincoln, folks need to realize that those offices actually close at 4 p.m. Mountain Time. And those pesky bureaucrats are in their offices at 7 a.m. Mountain Time the next day.

Folks living in Scottsbluff are actually closer to three other state capitols. It is 400 miles to Lincoln, but only 101 miles to Cheyenne, Wyoming, 202 miles to Denver, Colorado, and 327 miles to Pierre, South Dakota.

But, back to the current Colorado situation. Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway told a TV station recently that he and his fellow secessionist's concerns are ignored, and they truly feel disenfranchised. He cautioned that the movement is not a stunt but the catalyst for very serious deliberative discussion. He said there is a real feeling that a lot of folks who come from the urban areas don't appreciate the contribution that many rural Coloradans make.

The matter could wind up on a Colorado ballot this fall. If voters in the counties decide they want to move forward, then the county commissioners would ask state lawmakers to approve the plan, and then petition Congress for statehood.

The Founding Fathers and even Abraham Lincoln, before he became President, spoke in support of secession. It's one of several unnamed rights the Tenth Amendment was designed to protect. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Some are writing the whole thing off as a crackpot idea by a bunch of crackpot commissioners, former University of Northern Colorado political science professor, Steve Mazurana, told the Denver Post. "Some will just call it Crackpottopia."

What about those naming rights? Especially if the Nebraska panhandle gets involved. Coloraska? Neborado? Colohandle? Panorado?

What if the new state sold its naming rights to corporate America to raise sufficient funding for a new budget? Coorsoradoaska? UPoradoaska? WellsFargoradoaska?

The last state to secede was Virginia when West Virginia was established in 1863. We'll see if the new idea sticks in Colorado and if the panhandlers can stir the 40-year-old embers of secession talk to at least liven up a summer of speculation.