Montezuma County heaved a collective sigh of relief Tuesday night over the failure of amendments 21 (tax cuts) and 24 (growth control), but lamented the passage of Amendment 22 (closing the gun-show loophole).

Amendment 21, which was crafted by longtime tax foe Douglas Bruce, was failing at presstime on a 66-34 margin statewide. In Montezuma County, it lost 76 to 24 percent, or 6,990 votes to 2,220. It would have slashed property taxes paid to special districts by $25 per landowner per district in the first year, $50 in the second, and so on until the tax was eliminated.

Bruce had maintained the state would be "forced" to step in to provide the missing funds, but the electorate wasn’t buying it. Envisioning the elimination of fire-protection districts, cemetery districts and a host of other small locally controlled entities, voters overwhelmingly rejected the proposal.

Locally, city and county officials had voiced grave concerns about the effects on special districts if the amendment passed, and Cortez Sanitation District officials had feared that it would mean the end of a recently approved $10 million expansion project for the city’s waste-disposal system.

Amendment 24, which was put forth by a group headed by nature photographer John Fielder, would have required counties with populations over 25,000 to create maps showing where growth would occur. The maps would have had to be approved by voters.

That amendment was failing statewide by a margin of 71 to 29 percent. It did even worse in Montezuma County, failing 83 to 17 percent (7,615 votes to 1,544).

But on the chance that it would pass, local voters approved a ballot question to "opt out" of Amendment 24, 57 to 43 percent.

Although it initially had high voter approval in the polls, as did Amendment 21, Amendment 24’s popularity plummeted as the campaign went on.

Coloradans for Responsible Reform, a group organized to defeat the measure, set a state fund-raising record with a total of more than $5.1 million, the most ever spent on a Colorado initiative. Real-estate agents, construction companies and developers lobbied against the measure, while the proponents — who raised a paltry $635,000 or so — sought in vain to convince Coloradans that the measure was not "too extreme," as anti-24 ads argued.

But while local residents were in agreement with the majority of the state’s voters on those two major amendments, they were almost diametrically opposed to the majority on Amendment 22.

The gun-control measure was shot down locally by a margin of 61 to 39 percent, but carried easily statewide, 70 to 30 percent.

Put forth by SAFE Colorado, the measure will require unlicensed gun-show vendors to conduct background checks on gun-buyers and get approval from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation before the sale is completed.

Proponents said it was a common-sense measure that would simply make gun-show dealers subject to the same rules as owners of pawnshops and firearms stores.

Opponents charged that the definition of "gun show" could apply to casual get-togethers between hunters or other gun aficionados.

The measure defines a gun show as "the entire premises provided for an event or function, including but not limited to parking areas for the event or function, that is sponsored to facilitate, in whole or in part, the purchase, sale, offer for sale, or collection of firearms at which: (a) twenty-five or more firearms are offered or exhibited for sale, transfer, or exchange; or (b) not less than three gun-show vendors exhibit, sell, offer for sale, transfer, or exchange firearms."

Proponents said that was intended to keep persons at gun shows from slipping outside and making deals off the premises.