The party had pushed to retake the state Senate with the help of a new group, Advance Colorado, that assisted with candidate training and donated to Republican efforts. But on election night, the GOP found itself even further adrift, outnumbered by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio in the Senate and losing everywhere else, too.

The then-GOP chair, Kristi Burton Brown, said that night that the party had run a strong slate of candidates, but it hadn’t mattered. Colorado had “fundamentally shifted” away from a Republican Party that once jockeyed for power.

A year later, with a new leader at its helm, Advance ran the campaign to crush , a Gov. Jared Polis-backed proposal to curb property tax increases that also would’ve allowed the state to keep more of its revenue. The measure’s failure forced a special legislative session.

But more importantly for a battered conservative movement, it suggested that conservatives could still win in the state — maybe not as candidates, but a little farther down the ballot.

“After 2023 happened, it was like, ‘Why don’t we try to go on the offensive on this, if (Democrats) aren’t?’ ” said Michael Fields, the group’s president.

As the institutional conservative movement has withered in Colorado, the infrastructure and financial support that once powered the Republican Party and its candidates have found a new home — and new influence — in Advance Colorado, according to interviews with more than a dozen consultants, politicians and activists from across the political spectrum. And while money still backs Republican candidates and committees, Advance has proven itself as the most successful wing of the conservative movement in the state.

Led by Fields, 39, Advance’s small group of consultants and officials has mastered the ballot process with the help of a network of conservative — and largely secret — donors and like-minded groups. The Denver Post’s reporting shows that former Gov. Bill Owens and billionaire Philip Anschutz have played supporting roles as it has successfully advanced conservative policies in a state that has not elected a Republican to statewide office since the Obama administration.

Advance’s victories continued in 2024, when it backed two winning ballot measures, including one that required the cash-strapped legislature to spend $350 million on police funding. It also threatened to run two property tax measures that, had they passed, would have cut taxes and blown gaping holes in government budgets.

That move forced yet another special session. As frustrated Democratic lawmakers returned to the Capitol that August, they gave a promotion to Advance’s leader.

He was, they complained, Gov. Fields.

Despite the GOP’s rapid disintegration in the state, Advance now finds itself at the center of a fourth election cycle, the most expansive and significant ballot contest for the organization and in Colorado’s recent history. Much of that fight will be dominated by the tripartite tax war: Advance is running a measure that would cap the state’s income tax, while opposing two other ballot proposals that would increase taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations and would allow the state to keep more money for schools.

The result of those contests alone will help determine the state’s fiscal situation for the near future. But Advance is backing six ballot measures in all, with major potential implications for energy, criminal justice and immigration policy.

For conservatives, it’s a remarkably prominent position for a movement that has scrambled to find relevancy. Advance has offered not only influence and a counterpunch to Democratic electoral dominance but a ray of hope that, while the GOP brand is in tatters in a state that’s roundly rejected President Donald Trump, the core ideas that animate it — and the money that can put those ideas in front of voters — still have purchase in Colorado.

If they didn’t, voters wouldn’t back Advance’s policies, and it wouldn’t wield the influence it now does.

“What Advance has succeeded in doing — conservatives have long said that our ideas win, even if our candidates don’t win,” said Tyler Sandberg, a Republican consultant. “They put that to the actual test by putting them on the ballot and passing them pretty overwhelmingly.”

For liberals and Democrats, Advance stands as something between a worthy adversary and, in the view of some, a Trojan horse for wealthy people who want to cut taxes and shrink government.

Ian Silverii, a veteran liberal consultant who’s working to oppose Advance’s proposals, blasted the group for packaging complex policy as simple yes-or-no questions to an electorate that may not grasp the full impact of the bargain. Other critics said that Advance could run whatever it wanted at the ballot without the burden of having to figure out how it would work, should voters pass it.

“It truly is remarkable what you can do when you have donors and corporations who are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars in secret money to influence our politics,” said Shad Murib, the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party.

Whatever the depth of their antipathy, Advance’s opponents have been forced to reckon with it as a legitimate political force.

The group has won at the ballot, forced special sessions and now has a serious chance of passing sweeping reforms across a number of policy areas in November. While its prior campaigns faced little opposition, a coalition of liberal groups is banding together this year to fight Advance’s measures and promote its side’s larger tax-reform proposals. Some of the groups have also hinted at pursuing ballot reforms next year.

Advance is “defining the criminal justice conversation; they’re defining the energy conversation and the pollution conversation,” said Chris deGruy Kennedy, a former state representative involved in the property tax negotiations two years ago. He now leads the progressive Bell Policy Center, which will face off against Advance over the income tax measures. “And by virtue of this contest with us, yeah — whichever way this goes will define the state budget conversation.”

Group rises as state party flounders

After the Republican failures of four years ago, Fields was recruited from another conservative group — which had unsuccessfully backed — to come to Advance and shape its policy agenda.

The candidate losses in 2022 were steeper than conservatives had expected. Soon after, the Colorado Republican Party elected far-right firebrand Dave Williams as chairman, kicking off a series of internal disputes and lawsuits that continued for three years. The party is now a shadow of itself: As of July 31, the state GOP owed more than $271,000 in debts and had fewer than $60,000 in its federal bank account, according to campaign records.

Craig Steiner, the current chair of the state GOP, did not return a message seeking comment.

Anschutz, a conservative megadonor, had regularly contributed to the party. But he hasn’t cut a check to the state GOP — at least one that’s publicly reportable — since 2022. He also did not return a message seeking comment.

But as the institutional GOP floundered, Advance was notching headline-grabbing wins at the ballot. Simultaneously, its annual revenue grew from $1 million to $5.7 million between 2021 and 2024, according to federal tax records.

Ralph Nagel, a prominent businessman and an Advance donor, said Owens, the last Republican to serve as the state’s chief executive — from 1999 to 2007 — invited him to join the group’s supporters as conservative donors sought to coordinate support and organization. He said Advance was pulled together by Owens and Anschutz, and supporters include an invite-only group of four or five dozen donors who gather for dinner twice a year.

“It’s a curious thing — if there was a book written on this era of this group, it wouldn’t be that long,” Nagel said. “But it would be so credible. Is it really that simple to do important things? And it turns out: Yes, you can.”

“It’s a terrific success,” he continued, praising the group’s backers as committed businessmen who wanted to steer the state in the right direction. “You have to be proud of it.”

Advance is not the first group to bring significant cash into Colorado politics. The business-friendly group One Main Street has spent millions in largely untraceable dollars to support moderate Democrats in recent years. Outside groups still spend money to elect Republican and Democratic candidates as Democrats reach for supermajority control of both chambers in the Capitol.

Most famously, the mythologized “Gang of Four” — a group of wealthy liberals that included Polis, then a State Board of Education member — brought their fortunes to bear to send Democratic candidates to the Capitol more than two decades ago.

But while the Gang of Four’s spending coincided with the beginning of the state’s leftward tilt, Advance has found success as the name-brand conservative movement has collapsed. That shift also helped shape the group’s focus.

“I think there was a recognition by the supporters of Advance (that) maybe this isn’t the best bang for our buck,” said George Brauchler, the district attorney for the 23rd Judicial District who was the first president of Advance Colorado. Instead, they thought: “Maybe the issue here is the R and D next to the names that����ap driving this outcome. Why don’t we instead focus on conservative issues and see if we can get conservative issues on the ballot — because Colorado isn’t nearly as blue or left as elected representatives suggest.”

Advance has largely focused on fiscal policy and public safety issues, which, in cases like the police funding measure, can double as fiscal restraints. Fields said the group typically comes up with its own ideas, polls possible ballot language to gauge public support and files different versions of that language with the state title board, the administrative gatekeeper for ballot access.

“Once it’s actually going to move, there are other groups and other people, and we’re constantly just saying, ‘Hey, we have an idea. Do people want to help us put this on?’ ” Fields said.

Nagel said Fields and his team give presentations to the donor group, and that while donors may have their own ideas, Fields has been broadly respected and trusted to steer Advance.

Like Fields, he said the group’s campaigns were often planned two to three years out.

“We fund a base amount, and then everyone makes more contributions on a project basis — (for) ballot initiatives or whatever’s going on — and then most of us still continue significant support of candidates and old-fashioned politics involvement,” he said.

Fields said his group focuses on the issues facing the state, and it has balanced its priorities between playing offense and defense. The property tax wars forced Democratic concessions, for instance. But when Democrats moved this year to redraw the state’s congressional districts as part of a multistate redistricting war, Advance fought the ballot proposals and put forth its own measure that would block any changes.

“We are doing stuff that I believe can pass because voters understand it,” Fields said, adding that the group’s leaders have shelved ideas that don’t have popular support. “And we are that voice, I believe, of the center of unaffiliated voters right now.”

‘A clearinghouse for dark money’

To Advance’s critics, though, it’s little more than a black box that takes in mostly dark money and churns out ballot measures that serve conservative donors’ economic interests.

Steve Fenberg, a Democrat and former president of the state senate, said Advance is a “clearinghouse for dark money,” referring to donors whose identities are largely undisclosed. He said the group was proficient at boiling complex issues down to overly simplified ballot questions. Policy, he argued, is supposed to be nuanced and complicated.

“They’re a shell of an entity, in my opinion, with a good and charismatic leader,” he said. “But at the end of the day, they’re there to hide major donors who want to have an influence on Colorado’s future.”

Fields declined to identify his financial supporters, other than to say that more than 12,000 people have donated to Advance. (He didn’t know what the average donation was.)

Some of those donors are disclosed in federal tax filings. In 2024, as Advance readied to run five ballot measures, Nagel’s foundation gave the group $475,000. foundation gave $400,000. The Norwood Foundation, run by the leaders of a , gave $250,000. A group run by erstwhile U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea contributed $627,000 that year, while the Wisconsin-based Bradley Impact Fund gave $500,000.

Advance is also connected to a larger, multimillion-dollar conservative donor and spending network that includes spending committees and think tanks like the Greenwood Village-based Common Sense Institute, which has received support from Anschutz’s son and other donors, like the Coors family foundation.

The group and its broader network have included many of Colorado’s most prominent conservative voices. have included Burton Brown, the former state GOP chair who lamented the state’s shift back in 2022, and top Republican lawmakers like state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer and then-House Minority Leader Rose Pugliese.

West Group, a law firm that’s worked with Advance, is staffed by former officials from the Owens administration. Owens himself is also involved in Advance’s work, and the law firm for which he works was paid by Advance in 2023 and 2024, tax filings show.

Dick Wadhams, a former state GOP chair, referred to Owens as the informal chairman of Advance, playing an important role with donors.

“He’s not running it day to day, but he’s certainly played a big role in Advance, and he’s not stayed on the sidelines as a former governor,” Wadhams said. “I think you’ve got to have somebody of Bill Owens’ stature and with a record of achievement … for donors but also just to show that this is a serious organization.”

Fields says he discusses Advance’s ideas with Owens, whom he describes as an “informal advisor” who has “a special relationship with donors.” Nagel, who said he was invited to the group by Owens, said the former governor was the “face” of the group.

In response to an interview request, Owens told The Post in a statement that he was “proud of the work Advance Colorado is doing to promote common sense policies and protect Colorado’s future. It has now become a critical part of the infrastructure pushing back against the Left’s stupid policies.”

Pursuing simple-sounding measures

Fields, Wadhams and others can, and do, point to Advance’s past success as evidence that voters support its criminal justice agenda, as well as its drive to keep the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights intact. That 1992 voter-passed amendment requires voter approval for tax increases and restricts growth in government revenues, and it’s come under repeated attempts by Democratic-aligned groups to pare it back.

Advance’s record is not perfect: A school choice proposal in 2024 failed, for instance. Still, its influence exists because voters have either backed its proposals or Advance can credibly argue that voters will pass them, which prompted the 2024 special session.

“Pound for pound, we’ve out-fought them, right?” Nagel said of Democratic interests in the state. “If you deal with the revenue model with the state and keep it proportional to good policy — their thing was always raise more taxes, make government bigger and more complicated, and less focused.”

But like Fenberg, Democratic and liberal critics argue that Advance essentially distills its proposals into simple, even deceptive, language that masks the true impact.

For instance: Did voters in 2024 know that requiring the state to provide $350 million to police would mean taking that money from the rest of an increasingly beleaguered state budget?

More to the point: Are ballot questions the right way to address complex issues such as — to cite two Advance measures on this year’s ballot — fentanyl-related sentencing or whether Coloradans have ?

“I think one of the major problems is that the opposition can just either burn the house down (through ballot-passed tax cuts) or just be like, you have a right to natural gas,” said Scott Wasserman, who previously ran the Bell Policy Center. “And it����ap the governing coalition” — meaning Democrats — “that has to figure it out. If we’re just going to govern by brinksmanship, this is not going to work.”

But he said Democratic leaders and liberal groups had been slow to respond to coalesce and respond to Advance. There was little organized opposition to its three ballot measures in 2024.

This year, though, a coalition of liberal groups has joined together in an effort to head off Advance’s half-dozen proposals.

“Advance has gone deeper and broader in what they’re doing,” said Carolyn Siegel, a spokeswoman for the coalition, which is broadly organized under the name Vote Common Sense. “And people recognized they can’t be fighting off these bad policies one by one, but they need to kind of work together to expose whose money is really behind Advance — and what are the real impacts of some of these measures that aren’t about the sound-good things they try to make them about?”

The breadth of that coalition speaks to the extent of the reach of Advance’s proposals this year: It includes the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which is concerned about a measure that would require law enforcement to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in certain circumstances; Conservation Colorado, which opposes the natural gas measure; Cobalt, the abortion advocacy group; and the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, which is involved in opposition to the fentanyl measure.

The measures have broader implications outside their specific policy areas, argued Kyle Giddings of the criminal justice group. If the fentanyl measure passes and sends hundreds more people to prison, the state , on top of existing pressures. (Earlier this year, Polis asked lawmakers to devote $200 million to a new prison.)

That would mean less money for the rest of the budget, with far-reaching impacts.

The anti-Advance coalition has raised roughly $1 million across its spending committees already. Advance’s measures will mostly be supported by a group called Brighter Colorado, which had raised $275,000 as of last week. Another group, focused on supporting Advance’s income tax cap and opposing Bell’s progressive income tax, has not reported any money raised yet.

Beyond the results of this election, Giddings and others hinted — without providing specifics — that they may push for ballot reforms in the future.

The rise of opposition groups — and their threat to pursue ballot reforms — is a sign of both Advance’s growing prominence and the seriousness with which liberal groups are now taking it. In the near term, the results of the November contest are likely to be significant in determining funding for schools, the tax burden on corporations and wealthier individuals, how the state regulates natural gas and how law enforcement interacts with ICE.

For his part, Fields chafes at the suggestion that his group simply does the bidding of wealthy donors. He is adamant that Advance proposes measures that will benefit Colorado, and that the group only has as much influence as voters give it.

“Voters decide, right?” he said. “Eventually, you get an answer on it, one way or the other.”

but the intent of this measure isn’t so plain. Colorado law already requires ballot measures be written in understandable language accessible to the “widest possible audience.” Could this ballot initiative be about power rather than accessibility?

This isn’t the first time since the state adopted its initiative process in 1910 that voters have been asked to revise how initiatives and referenda appear on the ballot or in the state voter guide known as the Blue Book. For example, in 1992, Coloradans voted to require the state to mail voters information about each ballot measure including arguments for and against the proposal. This provision was part of Amendment 1, the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), which is better known for its impact on taxes and revenue.

Two years later, voters mandated ballot measures cover only a single subject. The Title Board, appointed by the Colorado secretary of state, attorney general, and the Office of Legislative Legal Services, determines whether the text of a ballot proposal meets the single subject rule and other draft requirements. Opponents, more often proponents, appeal the Title Board’s decisions as a means to keep proposed initiatives off the ballot.

Legislators have also mandated changes to the ballot language. In 2021, the General Assembly passed a law requiring initiatives that reduce taxation to include information about the impact on funding of state government programs. Measures that would increase taxation, however, had to state their purpose was to “increase or improve levels of public services.” The following year, lawmakers referred Proposition GG to the ballot to require fiscal impact summaries showing how tax initiatives will affect income taxes for taxpayers at various levels of income.

If empowering voters with information about public policy tradeoffs was the goal, lawmakers would have made all ballot proposals disclose counterargument data within their text. Rather, this was self-serving. Democrats, who have tried unsuccessfully for years to rid themselves of TABOR limits, thought that by manipulating the language of ballot measures they could lobby Coloradans to vote for higher taxes and ditch their TABOR refunds.

This year, Advance Colorado is striking back by putting Initiative 234 on the ballot. If the constitutional amendment passes, it will be more difficult to render fiscal and taxation impact information into middle school reading material. That����ap not all.

Because there are multiple tests to determine the grade level of text, notes Ari Armstrong from Complete Colorado, “by failing to define what constitutes an eighth-grade reading level, the measure invites inane and costly legal battles.” Of the four states that have adopted an eighth-grade reading level mandate, two have faced law suits. Looks like Initiative 234 may be less about equipping voters and more about equipping lawyers to gum up the process before a measure can reach the ballot.

That����ap just as well. We pay state lawmakers $50,000 a year to hear arguments and counterarguments, consider tradeoffs, make compromises, and work together to legislate on our behalf. Thanks to Open Meetings Laws, Colorado Open Records Act, lobbyist registration rules, and investigative work by the press, the public can see into this deliberative process and hold lawmakers accountable.

It����ap not perfect by a long shot but it beats lawyers funded by anonymous donors quibbling before the Title Board over whether a verb tense or semicolon renders the text too complex for the average eighth grader.

Krista Kafer is a Sunday Denver Post columnist.

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Latino voters in the state have consistently said they feel the country is going in the wrong direction, and they reiterated that dissatisfaction in a poll released Tuesday by the Colorado Latino Policy Agenda. Sixty-six percent of respondents said they felt the country was on the wrong track as their frustrations about the cost of living — which ranked higher than any other issue, including immigration — had gone unaddressed and, for many, had worsened.

Against that national critique, the annual poll has repeatedly found that Latino voters still hold a positive view of their own state. But that grace appears to have been exhausted: Forty-six percent of respondents this year said the state was moving in the wrong direction, against 40% who said the opposite.

That’s a stunning 26-percentage-point swing from the same poll last year. It’s also the first time in the poll’s six-year history that it has found an overall disapproval for Colorado’s direction among Latino voters.

“The main thing is the economy,” said Gabriel Sanchez, the pollster for BSP Research who conducted the survey. “Poll after poll, Latinos are telling us loudly: ‘Address the economy. We can’t afford housing. We can’t afford groceries. We can’t afford gas.’

“We’ve seen consistently in the poll that anger and frustration was largely at the federal government. Now, what we’re seeing is that frustration pointing toward government, period. And that’s because people are saying, ‘Look, every year things are getting worse. Somebody fix it.’ ”

The poll was conducted between July 1 and Aug. 11 in partnership with the advocacy groups Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights, or COLOR, and Voces Unidas. It included 1,606 registered Latino voters and has a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points.

The respondents were also critical of who influences their government, saying that wealthy donors, corporate business groups, political consultants and outside PACs, and oil and gas companies wielded too much influence in the state. Eighty-one percent said they were concerned that campaign contributions from wealthy outside groups limited policies that could address the affordability crisis.

Asked to rank what federal and state policymakers should focus on, the top responses included the cost of living and healthcare, increasing wages, and building more affordable and attainable housing. Forty-three percent of respondents said their financial situation had worsened in the past year, compared to 22% who said their situation had improved.

More than half of voters who said their situation has worsened blamed Trump. (Ten percent also blamed billionaires and corporations, the second-highest response.)

Latino voters’ dissatisfaction with Colorado’s direction did not extend to the Democratic officials leading its government. U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, Gov. Jared Polis, Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Attorney General Phil Weiser all had double-digit net approval ratings, with positive appraisals exceeding negative ones significantly.

Respondents also approved of Republican U.S. Reps. Lauren Boebert and Jeff Hurd and their Democratic colleagues, U.S. Reps. Diana DeGette, Brittany Pettersen, Jason Crow and Joe Neguse.

Freshman Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, whose 8th Congressional District seat is among the most hotly contested in the country this fall, was less appreciated. Only 34% of voting Latinos in his district regarded him favorably, while 42% viewed him unfavorably. Respondents in CD8 disapproved of congressional Republicans by 22 percentage points, compared to views of congressional Democrats that were net-favorable by 6 points.

That’s notable given that Latinos make up more than 38% of the CD8 electorate, .

What’s more, 61% of voters in the district disapproved of Trump. Of those who said the country was going in the wrong direction or their financial situation had worsened, a majority of Latino CD8 voters blamed Trump more than anyone else for those problems.

But Latino voters in the district also had the lowest overall opinion of the direction of the state. With an unpopular president in a blue state, Evans has focused his campaign on opposing Democrats at home. But while they’re unhappy with the state, CD8 Latino voters simultaneously have strongly favorable views of Polis and Colorado state lawmakers.

While those concerns may spell trouble for Evans, the poll’s top-line takeaway about affordability is a call to action for government officials across the political spectrum, said Alex Sánchez, the president and CEO of Voces Unidas.

“The problem is the lack of action by those in power who can do something about it,” he said. “For the first time since we began this project, more Latinos believe Colorado is moving in the wrong direction than the right direction. That is concerning. State leaders should take that seriously.”

Sánchez said the affordability concerns were “being made worse by what’s happening in our streets, in our communities.” The survey found that 40% of respondents statewide knew someone who had been deported as Trump has pushed to increase immigration arrests and deportations.

To that end, significant majorities of the poll’s respondents opposed letting immigration agents arrest people directly from jails. They backed efforts to allow Coloradans to sue federal officials and opposed allowing the governor to “voluntarily” share immigrants’ information with the federal government, a nod to Polis’ repeated attempts to cooperate with ICE subpoenas.

But the respondents were not entirely progressive. Majorities also supported conservative-backed ballot measures related to penalties for fentanyl possession; trans athletes competing in high school and college sports; and gender-affirming surgeries for minors.

Initiative 195 would create a graduated income tax for the state under which higher earners pay a greater percentage of their income than lower earners, generating significantly more tax revenue. Colorado currently uses a flat tax system, where all taxpayers, regardless of income, pay 4.4% of their income in state taxes. For the ballot, the measure will be assigned an amendment number.

The measure was the last of more than a dozen proposed questions to be certified by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office after it determined the proponents had collected enough petition signatures. Voters will decide on 14 statewide questions total, in addition to the slew of state, federal and local elections that will make up the Nov. 3 ballot.

The graduated income tax proposal is likely to be one of the marquee ballot box battles heading into the fall.

If passed, the measure would keep the current tax rate for Coloradans making between $100,000 and $500,000 per year. It would raise the marginal income tax rate to 7.4% on income over $500,000 and less than $750,000; to 7.9% on income between $750,000 and $1 million; and to 8.4% on income over $1 million.

The tax rate for Coloradans making $25,000 per year or less would drop slightly to 3.7%, and the rate for Coloradans making between $25,000 and $100,000 per year would decrease to 4.2%.

expect the proposal would bring in nearly $2 billion more in revenue every year to the state, which this year has a general fund budget of more than $17 billion. That money would be earmarked for education, healthcare, and early childcare and preschool.

Medicaid, which would be included, has been a massive driver of the state’s recent fiscal crunches.

“Every Colorado student deserves a great public school and real pathways to opportunity, with great teachers who are paid and supported the way they deserve,” Lisa Weil, the executive director of Great Education Colorado, one of the key backers of the initiative, said in a statement. “Initiative 195 qualifying for the ballot means Coloradans will have the chance to vote their values and build a tax system where everyone pays their fair share and our neighborhood schools finally get what they need to do right by our kids.”

One of the other measures proposed for the ballot, Proposition 136, explicitly seeks to undercut the graduated income tax measure by setting a cap on the state income tax rate. Earlier it was designated as Initiative 232 during the petitioning phase.

If voters pass both, it could set up a potential legal battle over which takes precedence and becomes state law. Both measures would require more than 50% support to become law. The graduated income tax proposal, while a constitutional amendment, would only remove language from the constitution, and thus does not need to clear the 55% threshold for amendments.

“We’ve been prepared for this fight for months,” Michael Fields, the president of the conservative advocacy group Advance Colorado, said in a statement. “That’s why we qualified Initiative 232 — the Income Tax Cap — for the ballot. An overwhelming number of Coloradans agree that the progressive tax hike is too high, too extreme, and will take good paying jobs away from working families and out of our state.

“The Tax Cap is the better answer for anyone who believes Colorado should be more affordable for everyone,” he added.

The other questions that made the statewide ballot would:

• for the possession or sale of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
• mandate time in prison for .
• ban not aligned with their biological sex.
• ban for people younger than 18.
• require that law enforcement when an immigrant without proper legal status is charged with a violent crime.
• establish a right for cooking and heating.
• require that sales taxes on sporting goods be earmarked for conservation efforts.
• require additional verification when voters submit mail-in ballots, such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number.
• ban congressional redistricting outside the typical once-a-decade census cycle.
• create a constitutional right to hunt and fish.
• require that ballot questions be written at an 8th-grade reading level.
• allow the state to keep more tax money, typically returned under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights revenue cap, to put toward education. That measure was referred by the legislature.

Another measure, which would have made it a constitutional requirement to better fund the state’s roads, was pulled days before the deadline to do so after Attorney General Phil Weiser, lawmakers and the backers of the measure reached a deal to secure more money for roads in future years. Weiser is the Democratic nominee for governor.

All of the items are being renumbered as amendments or propositions now that they’ve been approved for the ballot, with the ballot titles still to come. The secretary of state must certify the ballot by Friday. That is also the deadline for groups backing ballot initiatives to withdraw their measures.

County clerks can start mailing out general election ballots on Oct. 2, about a month before the election.

But this year, districts face two challenges in winning approval: They must vie for voters’ attention on crowded ballots and make their case for tax hikes during a cost-of-living crisis.

“The economy being flat, inflation still being a problem — it’s going to be tough to get the message out there,” political consultant Steve Welchert said.

Statewide, about 15 school boards have voted to place mill levy overrides on November’s ballot, and the number is expected to climb in the coming months, according to the .

The state’s three largest districts are among the school systems asking voters for money. DPS will have a $44 million mill levy override on the ballot, while the has a similar $54 million measure.

is asking voters to approve $133 million in marking the first time in eight years that Colorado’s second-largest district has asked for a tax increase to raise money.

If their measures are approved, all three districts plan to use the money they raise to increase teacher salaries, expand career and technical programming and other services.

“We understand this year is a hard ask,” said Erin Kenworthy, vice president of Jeffco Public Schools’ Board of Education. But, she said, “Jeffco students deserve some increased investment.”

Mill levy overrides allow districts to collect more money than the state-determined funding rate already set on property taxes. For example, the Denver measure would increase the average homeowner’s costs by about $5.91 a month, or $71 annually, according to the district.

But districts will be fighting for voters’ attention when it comes to this year’s ballots, which will be filled with multiple state and county tax measures.

The crowding of the ballot, coupled with concerns about rising taxes, could make it harder to convince voters to approve the districts’ mill levy overrides, Welchert said.

“It’s still a challenge to get all the way through the ballot,” he said.

K-12 districts are also facing rising costs at a time when the state and federal governments are tightening their own budgets and enrollment is declining, leading to less per-pupil funding. As a result, school systems are turning to local taxpayers for money via mill levy overrides.

Nowhere is this more apparent than Jeffco Public Schools, which recently cut $45 million from its budget, including 139 jobs. The district expects to use $13 million from its reserves to balance its nearly $1 billion budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year, despite those cuts.

Jeffco Public Schools will have to implement a second round of budget cuts if voters don’t approve the mill levy override this November, Kenworthy said.

“We’re still in a deficit,” she said. “If we have to do another round, the impacts to students will be felt.”

Overall, revenue from mill levy overrides makes up a larger share of K-12 districts’ funding compared to a decade ago.

Statewide, overrides made up almost 11% of districts’ revenue during the 2023-24 academic year, up from 9.2% in the 2014-15 school year, according to the latest data from the Colorado School Finance Project.

District officials say they need to increase educators’ salaries because costs, including health care and housing, are outpacing wages. They also argue they need to expand career and technical education programs for students.

“We’ve had a lot of needs for students, and traditionally, if you look nationally, Colorado doesn’t fund its K-12 schools entirely to its ability to do so,” said DPS Chief of Finance Chuck Carpenter.

Studies commissioned by state lawmakers have found that Colorado needs to spend fund K-12 schools.

Affordability is the No. 1 issue politicians are talking about this election, but Coloradans historically tend to support increasing tax revenue for schools, pollster Floyd Ciruli said.

“The public tends to be fairly generous with teachers and education — continuing to value it and continuing to increase the property tax load,” he said.

Up to 15 questions, either referred by the state legislature or more commonly initiated by outside groups through statewide petitions, could end up on the ballot — each capable of creating new state priorities, stamping new mandates into law, making binding declarations about Colorado values or remaking fundamental parts of state governance.

That number would be a modern record for questions put before voters. It’s the latest ballot measure crush of such a scale in the last two decades, according to the secretary of state’s office, with a few past even-year elections — when federal and state races tend to draw more participation — featuring as many as 14 state ballot questions. But the average number in that time has been 10.

Many measures heading for this fall’s ballot will stir fierce fights between opponents and proponents. All will fight for oxygen in an electoral season headlined by the contest over the governor’s office and flooded with money in a battle over congressional seats that could determine the balance of power in Washington, D.C.

And each will be a test for an electorate tasked with Colorado-style direct democracy, in which voters have a chance to overrule, affirm or sidestep the state’s elected representatives altogether.

“It’s a legitimate part of the political discourse of Colorado, and it’s just as legitimate as the legislature is in the ability to create laws,” said , the head of the conservative advocacy organization Advance Colorado and a superuser of the initiative process.

But as legitimate as the process is for making laws — indeed, it����ap necessary for things like raising taxes or changing the state constitution — it����ap also not the same thing as the legislative process, said , a University of Denver political science professor.

Lawmaking via ballot box comes with its own challenges and burdens for voters, especially as they’re weighing measures that could have broader implications than the direct question being asked.

“People think of it as the legislating process,” Chen said. “But it doesn’t really look like the legislating process.”

Citizen initiatives as a ‘backstop’ to the legislature

This year, the state’s voters will likely be asked to weigh in on eight proposed changes to the Colorado Constitution and seven that would change state law. Several of the measures are undergoing signature review by , with the final say still weeks away — including on a major income tax rewrite that has the potential to become the marquee ballot battle.

Citizen initiatives that have qualified for the ballot propose changes to state law that include:

• for the possession or sale of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
• Life in prison for .
• A ban on not aligned with their biological sex.
• A ban on for people younger than 18.

Proposed constitutional changes that have qualified for the ballot include:

• A requirement that law enforcement when an immigrant without proper legal status is charged with a violent crime.
• The establishment of a right for cooking and heating.
• A mandate that all taxes and fees collected for motor vehicles and gas .

Other measures are still awaiting final approval by the secretary of state:

• A proposal that would move Colorado to in which high earners pay a higher tax rate, marking a big change in tax policy.
• A cap on .
• A requirement that sales taxes on sporting goods be .
• A mandate for additional for mail-in ballots.
• A ban on outside the typical once-a-decade census cycle.
• The creation of a constitutional .
• A requirement that ballot questions be written at .

A proposal that would raise the amount of tax money the state can keep under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights — known as raising the TABOR cap — was placed on the ballot by legislators last spring. That extra money, which normally would be returned through refunds or another way, would be mandated to go to education.

Other outside initiatives proposed this year didn’t make the ballot, including ones geared toward allowing an extra round of congressional redistricting in 2028 to give Democrats a shot at winning more of the state’s U.S. House seats. Part of a national effort by Democrats to blunt Republicans in a mid-decade redistricting battle, the attempt here was halted in late June by the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled the measures violated a single-subject rule.

Many of the citizen initiatives that did make the ballot came in direct response to things the legislature had either passed or rejected in recent years.

The severity of fentanyl penalties, for example, was a session-defining debate in 2022 as lawmakers grappled with balancing rehabilitation and public health in light of the rising scourge of synthetic opiates.

Protections for trans people and children have also been a perennial push in recent years, as have efforts to push back on federal immigration enforcement in Colorado.

But as Colorado has turned reliably blue over the past decade, with Democrats winning large legislative majorities, the ballot box has proven to be the best place for conservative policies to gain traction.

Fields and Advance Colorado have successfully pushed to earmark money for law enforcement and to pass more stringent sentences for people convicted of violent crimes. Voters also overwhelmingly approved income tax cuts in 2022 and 2020.

This year, the group is playing a mix of offense and defense. It is backing the natural gas measure, which would protect access to that fuel source as Colorado officials push for more renewable energy. It is aiming to block the graduated income tax measure by running the proposed income tax cap. The group is also backing the fentanyl measure and the immigration enforcement measure, among others.

“The assumption from legislators is (the people) voted for us, so they agree with all of our policy positions,” Fields said of Democrats’ mindset. “And we just know that’s not the case. The backstop to that is our citizens’ initiatives. That’s why we’re seeing that used more and more, because there is that disconnect.”

Many of the proposals, from Fields and others, tackle complex policy that can have second- and third-level effects that aren’t necessarily apparent on first blush, said Chen, the University of Denver professor.

In the legislature, the debate around fentanyl, for example, often turned to concerns about sweeping people with addiction into broad categories of drug-dealing and whether harsher penalties would actually result in fewer people with addictions.

To hear it from opponents of the proposed graduated income tax measure, that question is not just about whether wealthier people should pay more; it also expands to whether businesses will relocate to Colorado or stay here — and the resulting economic impact of those decisions.

If any of those proposals were to move through the legislature, they would come with multiple committee hearings — likely with hours and hours of testimony from advocates, opponents, nitpickers and people who would be directly affected by the policy changes. Lawmakers would have chances to offer amendments, ask questions and weigh in at several steps along the way.

Chen said the initiative process, by contrast, in effect loops voters in for the last possible up-or-down vote on what is often a morally charged, but complex, policy.

Regular people, who are busy with their own lives, simply don’t have time or access to the wide variety of expert opinions and analysis that lawmakers do. They can’t offer amendments or signal degrees of support. It����ap not that people aren’t capable of careful considerations, Chen said, but the logistics are simply different from the legislative process.

Colorado does hedge against such challenges some, with its Blue Book offering pro-and-con analysis of the measures in the weeks between ballots being mailed to voters and Election Day. But it’s still not the same thing as person-to-person discussions, he said.

“This is ultimately the issue we run into with initiatives and referenda,” Chen said. “At least in Colorado, many of them are very complex policy positions, and then they are also moral or social issues.”

A statement of values — or tying the hands of experts?

One initiative in particular taps into the dynamic of asserting a statement of values as a policy preference: the constitutional right to hunt and fish.

The initiative was brought by the International Order of T. Roosevelt, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit group named after Theodore Roosevelt, the nation’s 26th president. Its declared aims are to preserve the “North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” or the principle that wildlife is a public trust — including the right to hunt and fish.

To that end, the organization has been on a national push to write those protections into state constitutions. This year, Colorado is on the list with Initiative 302. (That initiative, like all others approved or pending, will be renumbered once the ballot is certified in the next month.)

The proposal would amend the state constitution to say that “hunting and fishing are the preferred means of responsibly managing fish and wildlife populations.” The language also specifies that the amendment would not authorize any trespassing or infringement on property rights, or limit state authority to regulate hunting and fishing or wildlife management, if a new law is “necessary for sound scientific wildlife conservation and management.”

Backers of the proposal say recent attempts at the state Capitol and at the ballot box to limit the hunting of bobcats and mountain lions, along with to move away from using hunting and fishing as the state’s primary tool for wildlife management, show the need for the amendment.

Luke Hilgemann, the CEO of T. Roosevelt Action, which is backing the measure, characterized the proposal as taking an “offensive position” against those efforts — and as a chance to enshrine the heritage of hunting and fishing in the state constitution.

The measure’s backers have made similar successful pushes in dozens of other states.

“Not only is (this amendment codifying) the will of the people as the law of the land, but it prohibits additional attempts at eroding those rights in the future,” Hilgemann said.

He’s adamant that the proposal would still allow science to steer the wildlife management conversation; the amendment would just be a bulwark against rhetoric and politics, he said.

But what Hilgemann sees as Colorado codifying its values, opponents see as tying the hands of decision-makers — and moving the ever-shifting public policy debate on ecology away from experts from different backgrounds and into courtrooms.

“It narrows what the legislature can even do. It narrows what the wildlife commission can do,” said Michelle Lute, the executive director at Wildlife for All, which is opposing the measure. “… These types of constitutional amendments often lead to new legal questions, not fewer.”

‘Our voters are our tax policymakers’

Organizations can spend $1 million just to qualify for the ballot. They need to hire lawyers to draft the language and argue before the Title Board, the administrative body that approves initiatives, and they typically hire firms to gather petition signatures from registered voters.

An initiative proposing a change to state law ; a proposed constitutional amendment also requires that signatures come from at least 2% of voters in each of the state’s 35 Senate districts.

Backers of Initiative 195, a proposed constitutional amendment that would move from a flat to a graduated income tax structure in the state, turned to volunteers for signature gathering — and ultimately delivered their estimated 163,000 entries in the last hours before the deadline to qualify for the ballot. The coalition of progressive and liberal groups supporting the measure, led by the Bell Policy Center, did need to hire petition-gatherers for the final push but estimates that two out of every three petitions were filled with the help of volunteers.

On Monday, supporters marched from the Bell Policy Center in downtown Denver to the secretary of state’s office, chanting and cheering that they’d made the cut-off. As the final banker’s boxes were loaded with petitions ahead of the drop-off, Bell President Chris deGruy Kennedy joked, “Today, I feel great. Yesterday, I was a nervous wreck.”

Now the state is reviewing those signatures to make sure enough are valid.

If approved by voters in November, the initiative would make for perhaps the most sweeping change to Colorado tax policy since voters passed the TABOR Amendment in 1992. Among TABOR’s biggest changes were a requirement that tax increases go on the ballot and limits on how quickly government revenue can grow.

TABOR also locked in the state’s flat tax setup, which means every Coloradan pays the same percentage of their income to the state each year.

Opponents of that system argue wealthier Coloradans benefit disproportionately from it because they have more disposable income, to the detriment of the social safety net and public goods. This proposal would raise the tax rate on filers making $500,000 or more per year from the current flat 4.4% to 8.4%, while lowering the rate for filers making less than $100,000 per year to as low as 3.7% for the bottom bracket.

The net effect would bring an estimated $2.7 billion into state coffers for spending on areas like education, early childcare and healthcare.

The question stands apart from most recent tax ballot measures, which largely pertained to either keeping money collected over the TABOR cap or outright tax cuts. If it qualifies for the ballot, Fields — from Advance Colorado and an opponent of any tax increase — predicts it will be “the biggest battle of the year.”

Since TABOR requires that any tax increase go to voters for approval, the ballot is the end-all, be-all of tax policy that brings in more money.

DeGruy Kennedy and others behind the measure hope the front-end stress of getting enough signatures will pay dividends during the home stretch of the election season. Each of the more than 1,000 people who volunteered is invested — and, supporters hope, will advocate for the need for the change in their own communities.

“It is such a grassroots thing,” said Lisa Weil, the executive director of education advocacy group Great Education Colorado, a backer of the measure. “People find such joy in having something positive and concrete to do — to give the voters an opportunity to vote their values.

“That����ap the thing: Our voters are our tax policymakers (in Colorado), but they can only make policy if it����ap put in front of them. And this was hard as hell to do.”

Initiative 177, brought forward by the conservative nonprofit , qualified for the ballot after proponents submitted the required number of signatures, according to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. The “right to natural gas” initiative will be on the Nov. 3 general election ballot.

Proponents needed to gather enough signatures from each state senate district to equal 2% of the total registered voters in those districts because the ballot initiative would change the Colorado Constitution. It also needed to meet the 124,238-signature threshold, the secretary of state’s office said in a Thursday news release.

In May, Democrats floated a bill that would establish guardrails for Initiative 177, anticipating that it would make the ballot and win approval from voters. But House leaders scuttled the bill at the last minute, saying it would not meaningfully change the impacts of any ballot measure.

Colorado is trying to move away from natural gas as a heating and cooking source in homes as the state tries to reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions. Denver has also considered outlawing natural gas in homes after implementing new restrictions on its use in commercial buildings.

Burning natural gas produces nitrogen oxides, which are a key ingredient in ground-level ozone pollution. Those nitrogen oxides combine with volatile organic compounds on hot summer days, and the pollution contributes to climate change and harms human health.

The nine-county northern Front Range region — Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, Jefferson, Larimer and Weld counties — has been out of compliance with federal ozone standards for 17 years.

Research has also shown that cooking with a gas stove in the kitchen can release as much benzene as second-hand cigarette smoke.

I was busy weighing the benefits of ice cream against the eventual sugar crash and tantrums that would come later. But I have a lot of respect for anyone passionate enough to stand around with a clipboard in the ninety-degree heat.

I assumed this guy was a dedicated volunteer.

Plus, it seemed like a good time to teach my older kid about ballot initiatives, a hallmark of direct democracy.

In Colorado (and 23 other states), citizens can propose new legislation; if they hammer out the language with the title board, and manage to gather enough signatures, it gets added to the ballot for voters to decide.

This grassroots process has given us things like recreational cannabis and Universal Pre-K. But it����ap also easily manipulated by billionaires, who can spend millions to push their own preferred measures.

But I didn’t know that yet. I still thought this guy was a volunteer. “Sure,” I said.

He thrust a clipboard at me. “We’re out here trying to lower taxes,” he said. “With a flat tax.”

“Wait,” I said, wondering if I was just sleep-deprived. “Wouldn’t a flat tax just help billionaires?”

He looked at me like he was reconsidering something. “Oh, then you’ll love this one,” he said, handing me a different clipboard. “It����ap about accessibility, making all ballot initiatives be written at an eighth-grade reading level.”

Accessibility. Okay. My kids were yelling again. I signed it.

But later, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why would one volunteer be circulating two petitions that seemed so ideologically opposed? I started researching.

That����ap when I learned about Advance Colorado, the organization behind both campaigns. The group doesn’t disclose its donors, and they’ve already spent millions to influence our ballots before.

In 2024, they managed to get one of their ballot initiatives passed. It diverts $350 million to police departments — by siphoning the money away from other social services.

Now they’re pushing a slew of other initiatives, and they’ve already gathered enough signatures to add two of them to our ballots this November. One would make the possession of any amount of fentanyl a felony, and increase criminal penalties, despite many studies showing that such policies have zero positive impacts. (This measure is clearly a gift for the private prison industry, which would see its profits increase as more people get incarcerated.) The other measure would force Colorado police departments to report people to ICE.

It����ap unlikely that Coloradans actually want this.

In December, a reporter for the nonprofit Colorado Times Recorder managed to record signature-gatherers outside a Boulder grocery store, where they were telling voters the measure would rein in ICE. One Boulder resident told reporters she’d been asked to sign it to “stop ICE from attacking … nonviolent criminals.”

Misleading voters like this isn’t technically illegal.

Even if it was, it wouldn’t be the first time an Advance Colorado campaign has run afoul of the law. Earlier this year, two paid signature-gatherers were indicted for forging signatures on one of the organization’s 2024 petitions. The organization itself faced zero repercussions. (Colorado is one of 16 states where it����ap legal to pay petition-circulators per signature.)

My interaction with that guy with the clipboard was starting to make a lot more sense.

But why would Advance Colorado want all future ballot initiatives to be written at an eighth-grade reading level?

According to progressive think tank The Bell Policy Center, this one is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” because it sounds reasonable but would also remove any language about how a measure would affect state budgets. (For example, like if diverting money to law enforcement would require cuts to Medicaid or school funding.)

But the real answer might be even simpler. Studies show it����ap harder to get people to vote “yes” on a ballot measure than to vote “no” — but it����ap easier when the measure is written in plain language.

Advance Colorado is trying to pave the way for their future ballot measures.

It����ap a good strategy — if you’re trying to push right-wing legislation in an increasingly progressive state.

We should have rules to prevent dark-money groups from hijacking our ballot initiative process. But until then, we should make sure everyone knows what Advance Colorado is up to.

Cecelia Thorn is a mom and former journalist who’s lived in Colorado for 20 years. She writes a Substack newsletter called “Thoughts Not Bots.”

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It’s complex and multilayered, with a 48-page minerals access agreement at its heart that has stirred questions and suspicion among residents of fast-growing Erie, which straddles Boulder and Weld counties.

The quarrel related to what is known as the Draco oil and gas pad, which has received clearance from the state to move forward, is now likely headed to a special election — a vote that will test the tolerance of Erie residents for the latest fracking project in a town that sits at the edge of the energy-rich Denver-Julesburg Basin.

Opponents are crying foul over a controversial deal Erie’s elected leaders approved in June — on the second try — to sell town-owned underground minerals to SM Energy for up to $35 million over the next two decades. The agreement calls for the company to give the town 160 acres of land as well. SM also would plug and abandon old wells in exchange for access to the subterranean riches.

Many in this town of 42,000 question whether there was enough openness in the way town leaders crafted the minerals agreement with SM Energy — and why a consultant who once worked for a company that recently merged with it was hired to help Erie close the deal.

In a larger sense, the community pushback in Erie is the latest flashpoint in a long history of standoffs between residents, industry representatives and state regulators. Those disputes have centered on the question of how the state’s communities can co-exist with an industry that employs thousands of Coloradans and injects billions of dollars into the economy — including — while also posing threats to human health and the natural environment.

Fights over proposed drilling operations are gearing up, or already underway, in other burgeoning areas of the Front Range, including southeast Aurora, Adams County and Windsor.

The Draco pad would be located just east of the Erie town line in unincorporated Weld County. SM Energy’s lateral wells, drilled 7,000 feet deep, would extend westward .

For Amy Becker, an 11-year Erie resident, people’s health and peace of mind outweigh any financial benefits the town might accrue from doing business with an oil and gas operator.

“To me, it’s not about the money,” she said, “it’s about doing the right thing.”

The right thing, she says, would be to resist SM Energy’s plans and make it as hard as possible for the company to do business at the edge of the bedroom community, where new suburban houses are sprouting from the ground just a mile from the proposed well pad site. The site is at the northwest corner of Weld County roads 6 and 7.

“Do we want to make it easier for them or do we want to make it harder for them?” Becker said. “We have been fracked enough — we want to be done with this.”

Becker has been helping collect signatures for a petition to send a measure to a special election ballot, asking voters if they want to keep the agreement Erie made with SM Energy, a $7 billion oil and gas firm based in Denver — or scuttle it.

Last week, Erie’s clerk determined the petitioners had to go to the voters. Assuming it isn’t successfully challenged over the next month or so, the measure will appear on a ballot in the fall.

An election date has not yet been set, though a town spokeswoman last week said Erie would do all it can to include the measure on the Nov. 3 general election ballot. If the timeline doesn’t allow that, it will likely appear on a special election ballot a few weeks later.

“With a decision like this, where the repercussions last decades, if not longer — and it affects everyone in Erie — you really need the backing of the people,” said Emily Brecht, a recent Erie resident who is spearheading the ballot effort. “Many people did not feel heard when the Town Council made the decision ultimately to make a deal with SM Energy.”

Erie Mayor Andrew Moore, who voted in favor of the minerals deal, said there are “activists against the oil and gas industry in and around Erie, (who were) either trying to stop Draco before or (are) just being against oil and gas in general.”

“And there’s emotional commitment to that,” Moore added.

But killing the deal with SM Energy would be tantamount to Erie shooting itself in the foot, he said. The , the regulatory body that decides on drilling and fracking applications statewide, .

That means the project can move forward regardless. Absent a deal with SM, Erie will forfeit millions of dollars that the town could use to fund infrastructure projects and other town services.

“So when we get to the point of, ‘Hey, the state approved this’ — I can’t change that,” Moore said. “But I think we need to work to get as much as we possibly can for Erie.”

SM Energy spokeswoman Maureen O’Shay declined to comment for this story.

Pursuing minerals deal, despite project concerns

The battle over the Draco pad has been swirling for years. Before the ECMC greenlighted the project in March 2025 — after — Erie residents .

The town itself of the ECMC’s decision hours after it was made.

But with the approval behind it, SM Energy’s next step was to establish access to the oil and gas that lies largely beneath hundreds of Erie homes.

The eventual package negotiated with SM reflected the leverage Erie gained under a recent change in state law. Under , which took effect in January 2025, local government-owned mineral rights cannot be force-pooled. Forced pooling allows oil and gas operators, with state approval, to combine mineral interests within a drilling area even when some owners object.

Late last year, the town hired Matt Owens, the founder and CEO of Alameda Mineral Advisors, to help it hammer out a minerals access deal with the company.

Owens is the former an oil and gas company that joined forces with SM as part of a $12.1 billion merger earlier this year.

That was a red flag for Steve Drew, a five-year Erie resident, who wondered why the town would choose a former executive of a company that would, in short order, become part and parcel of the very same operator seeking to develop Draco.

“That’s why conflict of interest laws exist,” he said.

Owens, who wouldn’t comment for this story, told the Boulder Daily Camera in June that his involvement in crafting a deal with SM Energy posed no conflict. He left Civitas in April 2023, according to .

“There is no basis for anyone to complain about a (conflict) because what I am doing benefits Erie,” he said. “And I do not get compensated unless Erie does, so our interests are in lockstep.”

Owens could earn up to $4.5 million for his services if the deal goes forward.

Under the agreement negotiated by Owens, Erie would receive a $4.5 million upfront payment and 3% royalty interest for the life of the project, which the town projected at the time of the council’s vote could range from $19 million to $31 million. The royalties wouldn’t kick in until SM Energy has recovered 200% of its cost to develop Draco.

The agreement would also transfer roughly 160 acres of SM’s land along County Line Road to the town and allow Erie staff to conduct inspections at the Draco well pad, even though it would be located outside town borders.

Drew said the town never properly bid the contract before awarding it to Owens. In June, he hired an attorney to investigate how Erie ended up with Owens as its representative.

The town has acknowledged it violated its purchasing policy in the way it hired Owens.

Town leaders are “investigating what led to these purchasing policy oversights and acknowledge and take responsibility for the errors,” the town

Erie, Drew said, should rip up the contract and start over, not just because of how Owens was hired but because he believes the town didn’t claim all of its underground minerals in its negotiations with SM Energy. The agreement stipulates that Erie will sell 180 acres of municipal mineral rights to SM — roughly 4.9% of the overall Draco drilling area.

According to Erie spokeswoman Gabi Rae, a couple of parcels in the nearly 4,000-acre drilling area have “unclear titles.”

“The final due diligence report should give more information about ownership and sizing,” she said.

That doesn’t allay Drew’s concerns.

“Why would you give away that potential negotiating position?” he said. “This deal could have been done right.”

Aside from the agreement itself, some in Erie are vexed by what they say was an opaque process behind the negotiations with SM Energy, said Brecht, the special election petition organizer.

“When this sale came into the public discussion earlier this year, the mayor framed it to the people of Erie that the town was just exploring whether it was the right option for Erie to sell, versus not sell, its minerals,” she said. “It has become clear that at that point the lawyers were already negotiating the terms of the sale.”

Much of the early discussion took place in executive session, she said, a part of public meetings that are not open to the public. The lack of detail from town leaders “left a lot of residents frustrated,” Brecht said.

Leverage requires discretion, councilman argues

That’s not the way Erie Councilman Brandon Bell sees it.

He voted in favor of the minerals agreement, and he pushed back on the idea that the town’s process was shrouded in secrecy. Executive sessions are a common tool used by elected bodies in Colorado to protect positions and leverage in sensitive negotiations, he said.

“State law allows for executive sessions for negotiation strategies that are held in private so that those are kept from third parties,” Bell said. “Because you don’t want that information getting back to the people you’re negotiating with, and you want to ensure that the town has the strongest position.”

Erie, he said, has had “dozens of other land deals where we’ve had executive sessions.” Killing the deal with SM Energy, Bell said, would still allow drilling to move forward while leaving the town holding a whole lot of nothing in exchange.

“There still is a thought that … if this petition gets brought to a vote, that it’s going to stop Draco,” Bell said. “The petition really just would stop the sale of the mineral rights.”

Councilwoman Emily Baer voted against the agreement with SM Energy in June. There were too many unanswered questions, she said.

The stipulation in the agreement allowing SM to recover twice its cost to develop Draco before Erie receives any royalty payments runs up against the hard reality that oil and gas well yields start to decline precipitously in the first couple of years of operation, she said.

One industry estimate concluded that wells in the Denver-Julesburg basin .

Then there’s the issue of Erie taking energy money in the first place, Baer said.

“It is hard for health and safety to rise to a level of importance when budgets, projects and services rely on oil and gas money,” she said. “I think it is a risk to entangle our budget with oil and gas revenues.”

Baer wants to hear what residents have to say at the ballot box.

“In my opinion,” she said, “having a committed, engaged electorate that is willing to spend the time and effort to ask their fellow neighbors if they’d like to have the opportunity to vote on a matter is an important part of the civic process.”

Oil and gas fights elsewhere

Potential health harms from proximity to oil and gas drilling have long been a major driver of opposition to the practice in Colorado.

Nearly a decade ago, Colorado voters rejected a ballot measure that would have increased the setback required for new oil and gas wells from homes. But that same 2018 election set the stage for a blue wave that ushered in Democratic state lawmakers determined to turn the tables on oil and gas regulation.

The result: a new state law in 2019 that shifted the focus of the state regulators who consider drilling applications from favoring the industry to ensuring that oil and gas development doesn’t harm human health and the environment.

This year, the ECMC assembled a panel to review several health studies that looked at how exposure to oil and gas fracking — and some of its cancer-causing emissions, like benzene — impacted people living nearby.

It spent eight months reviewing the findings and released in June. However, the report did not reach any conclusions as to whether Colorado’s rule requiring oil and gas sites to be at least 2,000 feet from the nearest home is sufficient to protect people’s health.

Randy Willard, who has spent three years fighting drilling proposals near the Aurora Reservoir, isn’t surprised the state hasn’t been stricter about where energy companies can drill. He’s watched both Arapahoe County and the state approve one well pad after another on a state-owned parcel next to the reservoir and close to his Aurora neighborhood.

“Until the ECMC has a backbone and steps up to bad actors, we won’t see any change,” Willard said.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t stop trying to stop drilling efforts.

Just last week, Willard and his neighbors crowded a meeting of the Arapahoe County commissioners, urging them to reverse their earlier approval of a 24-well pad that will be just over half a mile from homes in Aurora’s Southshore neighborhood.

Willard is looking farther afield to other communities facing similar challenges. To the north of Erie, Verdad Resources submitted an application to Weld County in the spring to drill a 22-well pad near Windsor. To the south, oil giant Chevron is proposing a massive 40-well operation, dubbed Cord Federal, near U.S. 85 and East 136th Avenue, north of Commerce City.

That project is being pursued by a Chevron subsidiary, PDC Energy.

Just over a year ago, there was a well blowout in the Weld County town of Galeton — an incident that spewed pollutants over homes and a school for about five days. Willard said a similar accident near more densely populated communities would be exponentially more disastrous.

Chevron owned the blown well in Galeton, for which it was fined $1.5 million.

“We can help them much more quickly to learn the process,” Willard said of other communities being eyed by the industry. “It’s going to take consistent community engagement and outrage.”

More statehouse action?

While Moore, Erie’s mayor, suspects that a vocal minority is behind the effort to crush Erie’s minerals deal with SM Energy and deprive the town of millions of dollars in revenue, he shares the frustration that many town residents feel about not having the power to change the course of things.

It starts with a lack of jurisdiction, he said: The drilling pad is set to be located in unincorporated Weld County, outside Erie’s borders.

“It’s because state laws are such that oil and gas operators can get permission from the state — and one county — to drill,” he said. “And they can cross county lines. (SM) went outside of Erie to go under Erie. Something just feels wrong about that.”

If state lawmakers want to help empower local communities with meaningful input on drilling decisions, he suggested, they could pass a law prohibiting cross-county access to minerals.

“It would seem to me that we should have more say about what happens in and under our town,” Moore said.

As critical as Brecht has been of Moore and his colleagues on council regarding how they went about crafting the minerals access deal with SM Energy, she agrees that local voices deserve a fuller hearing.

That’s what the effort to get a measure on the ballot is all about, she said.

“In getting a voice, in getting a say in the future of our town, the people of Erie win,” Brecht said. “Whichever way the vote goes.”

Over my almost eight years as governor, we have pursued a consistent vision: every child should be able to start learning earlier, attend a free public school that meets their needs, receive strong academic instruction, continue learning beyond the traditional school day and school year, and graduate into an affordable pathway to college or a good career.

I wish it were as simple as just one thing we did. But these six focus areas have boosted our state’s education system to the top:

1. An early start

One major reason I ran for governor was to make sure every child could attend preschool and kindergarten for free. In my first year, we delivered free full-day kindergarten throughout Colorado, saving parents around $500 per month for a full school day. We then successfully created free universal preschool, preparing our young learners for success while saving families thousands of dollars a year.

Universal preschool moved Colorado from 27th to third among states in the percentage of four-year-olds enrolled in preschool. Nearly 73% of eligible four-year-olds now participate. The data shows that investing early is more effective — and less expensive — than trying to repair learning gaps years later. Put simply, every child deserves a strong start.

2. Increased funding for schools with better direction

For years, Colorado balanced its budget by withholding constitutionally required education funding through the Budget Stabilization Factor.

In 2024, we eliminated that deficit and fully funded Colorado schools at the level required by our state Constitution for the first time since 2009. We also enacted the first major overhaul of Colorado’s school-finance formula in nearly 30 years, directing more resources toward students experiencing poverty, English learners, students with disabilities, and districts with greater needs.

And because it is even more difficult for a hungry kid to learn, I’m grateful that Colorado voters approved Healthy School Meals for All. Now everyone who wants it gets breakfast and lunch free.

Average per-pupil funding increased from $8,480 in the 2019–20 school year to $11,452 in 2024–25. Average teacher salaries increased approximately 42%, from $52,728 in 2017–18 to $74,909 in 2025–26.

3. Expanding public-school choice

Colorado’s tradition of public-school choice predates my administration, and during the last eight years, we have expanded and protected choice while working to make it fairer and more accessible.

There’s something magical about making a deliberate choice about what school to attend; empowering parents with choice leads to families thinking about what path and option works for each child’s learning style. Today, nearly 40% of Colorado public-school students — more than 347,000 children — attend a public school other than the one assigned to them based on their address. That share has increased by more than six percentage points since the 2016–17 school year.

Denver Public Schools, for example, uses enrollment zones that guarantee students a seat at one of several schools rather than at one specific school, empowering each family with a real choice.

Colorado currently has 262 public charter schools serving 136,627 students — nearly 16% of statewide public-school enrollment. The most recent comparable federal data placed Colorado second among states in the share of public-school students attending charter schools.

We have worked to make funding fairer. In 2024, we provided full mill-levy equalization for schools authorized by the Charter School Institute. In 2026, we required districts considering capital-construction ballot measures to be more responsive to charter schools.

4. Focus on fundamentals and measurable outcomes

We have used science and data to guide policy.

In 2019, we strengthened implementation of the READ Act, emphasizing phonetics and evidence-based reading instruction and better preparation for teachers. And in 2023, we enacted a statewide strategy to improve mathematics instruction by creating evidence-informed training for educators, including strategies for students who are below grade level, students with disabilities, and multilingual learners. We also expanded the Ninth Grade Success Program to prevent students from falling behind in the critical high school transition, and created the Colorado Academic Accelerator Program, which supports community learning centers offering free mathematics and STEM instruction outside regular school hours.

Colorado also supports high-impact tutoring, an intensive, data-driven model centered on frequent, sustained interaction between students and tutors. We developed free mathematics-intervention toolkits for teachers, families, tutors, and out-of-school-time programs.

The results extend beyond test score improvements. Colorado’s four-year graduation rate increased from 80.7% for the Class of 2018 to 85.6% in 2024–25, while the dropout rate fell to 1.6%. Graduation rates have also risen substantially among economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, English learners, homeless students, and students attending Title I schools.

5. Learning does not stop at 3 p.m. — or at the end of May

Summer and out-of-school learning are an important, and sometimes underappreciated, part of our education strategy. Tutoring, academic enrichment, science and mathematics experiences, art, recreation, mentoring, and social-emotional support help kids catch up, learn new things, and give working families safe, constructive places for their children to learn and grow.

In 2022, Colorado directed more than $21 million in federal recovery funding to expanded-learning programs operated by school districts, charter schools, community organizations, libraries, and institutions of higher education. That investment supported 23 afterschool programs and 37 summer opportunities, including 19 programs serving rural communities.

We then moved beyond temporary pandemic assistance. In 2024, Colorado created our first state funding stream specifically dedicated to summer and out-of-school-time programs, appropriating $3.5 million annually for 2024–25, 2025–26, and 2026–27.

And this year, when House Bill 1355 would have cut the program’s final-year funding in half, I vetoed it. That preserved $1.75 million and kept the full $3.5 million available for organizations such as Boys & Girls Clubs and other community partners serving children and families. Even in a difficult budget year, this was an investment worth protecting.

6. Affordable paths beyond high school

Education does not end with a high-school diploma. We have worked to make that diploma, and what comes with it, more meaningful, while reducing the cost of college, technical education, and workforce training.

Colorado Promise reimburses eligible students from families earning $90,000 or less for out-of-pocket tuition and fees covering as many as their first 65 college credits at a Colorado public institution.

Career Advance Colorado provided zero-cost training through Colorado’s community and technical colleges in nursing, education, early-childhood education, construction, firefighting, forestry, and law enforcement. The program covered tuition, fees, course materials, and other costs in high-priority fields where Colorado needs more skilled workers.

Care Forward Colorado has similarly provided free training for more than 10,000 health-care professionals, including certified nursing assistants, emergency medical technicians, and medical assistants.

We’re not just saving students money on tuition, we’re saving students money on all of the other costs that go into pursuing higher education. Through the Open Educational Resources grant program, we’ve made high-quality instructional material open access. Students have saved nearly $60 million in textbooks, and now 46 degree programs have zero textbook costs along the way.

New federal tax credits that parents can use for private school tuition complement Colorado’s existing Child Care Contribution Tax Credit, which provides a state tax credit for qualifying donations supporting child care, including preschool. I recently signed legislation extending that credit for another ten years, through 2038.

The work continues

Our number one ranking belongs to Colorado’s educators, students, families, advocates, school leaders, community organizations, community colleges, and universities. Yet our ranking does not mean every school is where it needs to be or every child has the opportunities they deserve. Significant achievement gaps remain. Too many students still struggle with reading, mathematics, attendance, mental health, or the cost of continuing their education. Our school day and school year are still too short. Colorado still ranks towards the bottom when it comes to dedicated funding for K-12 education. Educators are still not paid what they deserve.

But becoming number one in the United States shows what is possible when we combine investment with accountability, early education with academic rigor, strong neighborhood schools with meaningful public-school choice, classroom instruction with summer and out-of-school learning, and traditional college degrees with affordable career-connected credentials.

Being number one in the United States is hardly the finish line in a global economy. On the 2022 international PISA assessment, American students performed above the OECD average in reading and science, but below average in mathematics. Only 66% of American students reached the baseline level of mathematics proficiency, compared with an OECD average of 69%, and the highest-performing countries were far ahead of both.

We need to do more–in Colorado and across the country—to help every child reach their potential. We are proud of how far Colorado has come. But we know that our work has only begun.

Gov. Jared Polis is finishing his final year in office due to term limits. He took office in January 2019 as the 43rd governor of Colorado.

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