UPDATE 10/24: Since this story was originally published on Monday, the Committee for Colorado’s Shared Heritage has sent another mailer that falsely claims The Gazette still endorses Amendment 74. That mailer began showing up in mailboxes on Wednesday.

The oil-and-gas-sponsored Committee for Colorado’s Shared Heritage has a new mailer out on Amendment 74 on the fall ballot, and opponents claim it deceives voters by falsely stating The Gazette of Colorado Springs still endorses the measure.

“Pass Amendment 74 and save the economy,” the mailer quotes the newspaper’s editorial board as saying.

On Oct. 2, the Gazette’s editorial board came out in favor of the amendment, which would entitle a property owner to compensation when a government law or regulation lowers the value of the owner’s property.

But the mailer doesn’t point out that The Gazette editorial board’s stance on Amendment 74 changed eight days later.

“Amendment 74 sounds like a good idea and originally had us fooled,” the board wrote in its second opinion piece on Oct. 10. “Don’t fall for it. This proposal inadvertently threatens property rights, while paving the way for expensive, frivolous and opportunistic litigation that will waste hard-earned taxpayer dollars.”

That’s the Gazette editorial board’s current view.

(Colorado Politics is affiliated with The Gazette and shares news staff and resources with the newspaper. Both are published by Denver-based Clarity Media Group. Gazette editorials are not written by news staff.)

> RELATED: CU poll shows Polis, school tax, takings measure leading

Despite the change in the board’s stance, the Committee for Colorado’s Shared Heritage in the past week sent out a mailer citing the Oct. 2 endorsement. Sources told Colorado Politics the mailer showed up in mailboxes last Friday, Oct. 19.

Asked for comment, Kelly Maher, a spokeswoman for Committee for Colorado’s Shared Heritage, said there was “a lag between the time a design [for a mailer] is approved and printed and the time mail actually appears in a mailbox. The retraction happened after the mail was already in the stream and there was no possible way for us to go back and remove them out of mailboxes once they’re out.

“The Committee for Colorado’s Shared Heritage would never intentionally deceive anyone,” Maher said.

But Aaron Bly, who heads the anti-74 campaign, said there was more than enough time for the committee to pull the mailer before it started showing up in mailboxes at the end of last week.

“It’s a complete fallacy that they wouldn’t be able to pull that mailer,” Bly said. “I’ve been sending out mailers for campaigns for eight years and we can correct errors and change mailers in as little as two to three days [before it goes out]. To claim that they didn’t have time is completely outrageous and just shows that they intended to deceive voters in Colorado.”

Pac/West Communications, an Oregon firm that produces political mailers, has been paid $1.7 million to handle all of the pro-74 committee’s mailers.

Colorado Politics reported Oct. 6 that Pac/West produced a mailer that Democrats saw as falsely implying that Gov. John Hickenlooper supported a Republican state senator – Sen. Tim Neville of Littleton – for re-election, when in fact he had endorsed Neville’s Democratic challenger, Tammy Story.

A second mailer also implied Hickenlooper supported Republican Sen. Beth Martinez Humenik, who is in a tight race for re-election against Democratic Rep. Faith Winter in Senate District 24, in Adams County. Hickenlooper endorsed Winter.

Amendment 74 is seen as a counterpoint to another ballot measure, Proposition 112, which would greatly expand the buffer zone between new oil and gas development in the state and occupied buildings.

If both measures were to pass, oil and gas companies presumably could sue under Amendment 74 if they were unable to develop their mineral holdings because of Proposition 112’s restrictions.

Results of an online poll from the University of Colorado Boulder’s American Political Research Lab, released Monday, showed 63 percent of the Colorado registered voters surveyed support the amendment, with 37 percent in opposition. As a constitutional amendment, the measure would need a 55 percent “yes” vote to pass.

Colorado already has a “takings” compensation law on the books. It allows a property owner to sue when a regulation reduces property value by 90 percent or more. But under Amendment 74, the property owner could sue for any reduction in value, and even when the regulation was passed years earlier.

The pro-74 Committee for Colorado’s Shared Heritage is publicly backed by Colorado Farm Bureau, as it states on the mailer. But behind the scenes, its backers are elements of the the oil and gas industry, through Protecting Colorado’s Environment, Economy and Energ y Independence, aka Protect Colorado.

So far, the Shared Heritage committee has taken in $10.1 million. Of that, $10,000 came from the Farm Bureau. All of the rest came from Protect Colorado, which has raised $38.7 million during this election cycle, most of it going to fight Proposition 112.

Anadarko has given $6.6 million; Noble Energy, which is running its own ads against Prop 112, gave $7.1 million; PDC Energy contributed $5 million, and Extraction Oil and Gas gave $3.3 million.

The mailer claims out-of-state “environmental extremists” have put $1 million into opposing Amendment 74. Protect Colorado has taken in more than $3 million from out-of-state oil and gas companies, primarily in Texas.

Exactly when the mailer was paid for by the committee is not yet known; the most recent reports through the Secretary of State’s TRACER campaign finance reporting system shows two mailers done by Pac/West on behalf of the committee, but at least four mailers have already been produced for the committee by Pac/West.