DENVER – Colorado’s attorney general and two legislators want to change a state law that prohibits the sale of gasoline and other motor fuels below what the fuel costs to buy, The Daily Sentinel reports.

In November, a federal judge ordered City Market and King Soopers to stop their “buy groceries/get gas program,” because it violated the state law. Running intermittently from January 2005 to November 2006, the program rewarded shoppers who bought more than $100 in groceries over a 30-day period with a 7-cents-per-gallon gasoline discount.

After a price war in January 2005 brought retail gasoline prices in Montrose, Colo., below wholesale cost, Parish Oil Co. Inc. and Ray Moore Tires and Petroleum Service Inc. filed a lawsuit asking the court to put an end to City Market’s program, the newspaper reports.

The Montrose companies pointed to the Colorado Unfair Practices Act in their case, a 1937 law created to combat fears that chain stores might engage in predatory pricing, said Colorado Attorney General John Suthers. Amended in 1992 to specifically relate to sales of motor fuels, the act now makes it illegal to merely injure competition by selling fuel below the wholesale price.

Supporters of changing the law say that it makes it against the law for gasoline retailers to run limited promotions on pump prices. Roy Turner, executive vice president of the Colorado Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association, told the newspaper that consumers paid for the grocery-store gas discounts through the products they bought inside the stores.

The attorney general’s office is working with legislators, the petroleum marketers association and other groups to draft a bill that is expected to go to the House first. The bill will try to strike a balance between the “low standards” created by the fuel provisions of the act and the general predatory pricing provision.