Aurora voters set to decide pit bull ban's fate after judge rejected City Council's repeal

A decade after Aurora voters last determined the fate of pit bulls in Colorado’s third-largest city — by opting to keep the city’s ban in place — they’ll revisit the question.

In November, voters will decide whether three types of pit bulls — the American pit bull terrier, the American Staffordshire terrier and the Staffordshire bull terrier — can legally be kept in the city. The Aurora City Council on Monday referred a measure asking that question to this fall’s ballot.

The latest twist in the saga of pit bulls in Aurora was prompted by a ruling in late March in which Arapahoe County District Judge Elizabeth Beebe Volz struck down the council’s 2021 decision to repeal the city’s long-standing pit bull ban.

Voters seven years earlier had chosen to keep the city’s breed-specific ban — first enacted in 2005 — in place. The judge’s conclusion: Because it was the voters who decided against jettisoning Aurora’s pit bull ban in 2014, only they could make the decision to reverse that position.



https://www.denverpost.com/2024/07/09/aurora-pit-bull-ban-repeal-city-council-ballot-voters/