Oops, We Outlawed Ourselves: The Colorado Towns That Accidentally Made Their Own Governments Illegal

Here's a sentence that should not be possible: a town government passed a law that made the town government illegal.

And yet, in Colorado in 2009, that is more or less what happened — not once, but in multiple municipalities across the state. Nobody had done it on purpose. Nobody had even noticed. The laws had just been sitting there, quietly contradicting themselves, for years.

Welcome to one of the strangest administrative pile-ups in recent American civic history.

How Laws Go Wrong Without Anyone Trying

To understand how this happened, you have to understand something about how small-town governance actually works in the United States. Most municipalities — especially smaller ones — operate on a patchwork of ordinances accumulated over decades, sometimes over a century. Laws get passed, administrations change, newer rules get layered on top of older ones, and nobody always goes back to check whether the new stuff conflicts with what was already on the books.

In Colorado, a wave of municipal code reviews around 2009 turned up something embarrassing: a number of towns had ordinances on the books that, read literally, prohibited activities that were completely standard parts of running a local government. We're talking about things like holding certain types of public meetings, collecting specific fees, or conducting routine administrative procedures.

The town of Westland became one of the more widely cited examples — a municipality that discovered its own accumulated legal code had effectively created a series of quiet contradictions that made normal civic operations technically illegal under local law.

The Gap Between What Laws Say and What They Mean

Legal experts who examined the situation pointed to a phenomenon that's more common than most people realize: legislative drift. A town passes an ordinance in, say, 1953, written in the specific language and context of that moment. Thirty years later, a new council passes something related but slightly different, using updated language. Nobody explicitly repeals the old one. Now you have two ordinances that don't quite agree with each other, and depending on how a court reads them, one might functionally override — or even criminalize — what the other one permits.

In some Colorado cases, the contradictions were almost comedic. An ordinance designed to limit government overreach in one area had been written broadly enough that it could be interpreted as restricting the government's ability to function in an entirely different area. The people who wrote it almost certainly never intended that. But intent and literal legal language are two different things, and courts — at least theoretically — work from the text.

Nobody Noticed for Years. That's the Part.

What makes this story genuinely weird isn't just that the contradictions existed. It's that they existed quietly, undisturbed, while real governments conducted real business around them.

Town councils met. Fees were collected. Permits were issued. Administrative decisions were made. All of it potentially in technical violation of the town's own laws — and not a single person flagged it, because not a single person was reading the full legal code in its entirety and cross-referencing it against current operations.

This is actually how most municipal law works in America. The idea that every small town has a team of lawyers continuously auditing its full ordinance history for internal contradictions is, to put it gently, optimistic. Most towns rely on the assumption that if something has been done a certain way for a long time without anyone complaining, it's probably fine.

Spoiler: it is not always fine.

The Fix Was Almost as Awkward as the Problem

Once the contradictions were identified, municipalities had to go through the process of formally repealing or amending the problematic ordinances — which meant officially acknowledging, in public meetings and legal filings, that yes, they had technically been operating outside their own rules.

For most towns, this was handled quietly and quickly. A few agenda items, some updated language, a vote. Problem solved. But the process required towns to essentially admit that years of government activity had been conducted in a legal gray zone created entirely by their own paperwork.

Colorado responded to the broader issue by encouraging municipalities to conduct more systematic code reviews — essentially, audits of accumulated local law designed to catch exactly this kind of quiet contradiction before it became a problem.

The Bigger Picture

Legal scholars will tell you that this kind of thing isn't unique to Colorado, and it isn't unique to 2009. Across the United States, there are almost certainly hundreds of municipalities carrying old, contradictory, or technically unenforceable ordinances that nobody has ever bothered to examine. Some of them are merely absurd — famously, many states still technically have laws on the books banning things like ice cream on Sundays or tying your horse to certain objects. Others are more substantive.

The Colorado situation stands out because it wasn't just an odd relic from the 1800s. These were functional modern governments that had quietly legislated themselves into a corner without realizing it.

It's a reminder that the machinery of democratic governance, for all its procedural formality, is ultimately built and maintained by human beings — and human beings, it turns out, are very good at creating paperwork and somewhat less reliable at reading all of it afterward.

The laws were real. The governments were real. The contradiction was real.

And for years, nobody looked down.