“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our dear sister, Lynn Bartels,” her family . “We are heartbroken. We have been overwhelmed by the love that all of you have shared. It will lift us through the coming days and will stay with us forever.”

Bartels became known for her tenaciousness as a political reporter at the Rocky Mountain News, then went to work for The Denver Post after the News closed in 2009. She had undergone surgery to remove a large brain tumor, her family in late April, and her sister Kitty DiMartino said it was diagnosed as glioblastoma. She was 69.

Plans for a memorial service were pending, the family wrote.

“Lynn was a born reporter. Long after she’d left newspapering, she was sniffing out news and passing on tips,” said Lee Ann Colacioppo, The Post’s editor, on Friday. “It was part of her DNA. The Rocky, The Denver Post and Colorado journalism were lucky to have her.”

Bartels spent 22 years working at Denver’s two metro dailies — first at the News for 16 years, then at The Post for a half-dozen more until she took a buyout from the paper’s parent company during a round of staff cuts in 2015.

“She was a delightful human being, and her loss will leave a hole in the universe,” said former Mesa County Commissioner Rick Enstrom, who met Bartels nearly 30 years ago when he served on the Colorado Wildlife Commission under Gov. Bill Owens. “If anyone deserves to lie in state at the Colorado Capitol, it is Lynn Bartels.”

Gov. Jared Polis issued a statement Friday afternoon, saying he had known Bartels for more than a quarter of a century.

“Lynn’s infectious personality and ongoing quest for selfies made her someone that everyone wanted to know, and her sharp wit kept readers coming back for more,” he said. “I know that her passing will impact so many across Colorado, but we’ve all learned something from Lynn that we can carry forward in our lives.”

Bartels regularly spent time with — and wrote about — the luminaries of Colorado politics, including governors, U.S. senators, members of Congress and state lawmakers of all stripes — often holding them to account in blunt and unforgiving ways, but never dismissing their humanity.

“She might grill them on the latest turn of the news wheel, or even openly point out their hypocrisy — citing a month, year and issue when they took the position they were now opposing,” said Todd Hartman, a former colleague of Bartels’ at the Rocky Mountain News. “But in the very same conversation, she would ask about their kids.”

Bartels, he said, “knew their family members, kids, pets and hobbies, and she was sincere in seeing them as just people, flawed and mostly trying their best like all of us.”

Bartels’ influence on political reporting went beyond Colorado. In 2015, she was named a “longtime stalwart” by The Washington Post blog The Fix in its annual list of best state political reporters, according to . MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, then a broadcaster on MSNBC, relied on Bartels as “her political attache for the inside scoop on the Colorado midterm elections” in 2014, the story said.

‘She didn’t play favorites’

Kevin Vaughan, an investigative reporter for 9News who sat just feet from Bartels at both The Post and the Rocky for 15 years, said his colleague was fiercely fair in her coverage.

“She didn’t play favorites. It didn’t matter what party you were in, or what issues were important to you — you were fair game,” Vaughan said. “It might mean she’d write a glowing piece about you. It might also mean she’d write a tough one — one you wouldn’t like.”

But she was always willing to face her subject the next day and hear out what they thought of her story, he said.

“It����ap a big reason why she was universally beloved by people across the political spectrum,” Vaughan said. “Some of those people had been punched in the mouth by her in print, and they came to respect and love her anyway.”

Former U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican, that Bartels covered him when he was a state lawmaker and later a senator in Washington, D.C. Her work, he wrote, “defined Colorado politics, its leadership and the intrigue of power.”

“And Lynn was there every bit of the way — knowing where the ball was bouncing before any of us had even figured out there was a ball at all,” Gardner wrote. “She was the Grand Dame of Colorado politics and political reporting.”

Bartels, a native of Vermillion, South Dakota, grew up with two brothers and six sisters. She attended Cottey College in Missouri in the mid-1970s before moving on to Northern Arizona University to study journalism.

Her first newspaper job was with the Gallup Independent in New Mexico. She then moved two hours east to work for the Albuquerque Tribune, where she met John Temple, the eventual editor and publisher of the Rocky.

The year was 1984.

“I made her a columnist at The Tribune and she was incredibly popular,” Temple said. “People could relate to Lynn, which was one thing that made her such a great reporter and columnist.”

When Temple moved north, he hired Bartels as the night cops reporter at the Rocky, where she was charged with covering the shenanigans and hijinks of metro Denver’s after-hours dwellers.

“Nobody could believe it at the time that someone would give up being a columnist to become a night cops reporter, but Lynn loved covering cops, and I loved working with her,” he said.

Temple remembers the uniquely human touch Bartels employed in uncovering the details of a story.

“People trusted her. They would talk to her,” he said. “She was a people reporter. She wasn’t a documents reporter. Nor did she like to write think pieces. Lynn was a true news reporter.”

While she eventually made her name covering state politics, Bartels wanted nothing to do with it at first, Temple said.

“One funny thing, given how much Lynn became part of Colorado political life, was that when we first asked her to go to the Capitol to cover the legislature, she cried,” he said. “She didn’t want to go.”

Remembrances from across the spectrum

Mary Alice Mandarich, a longtime political operative who served as chief of staff for the Colorado Senate Democrats, had known Bartels for 30 years and had her over to her home for backyard pig roasts and Thanksgiving meals over the years.

She remembers Bartels making the trek to Kansas City to watch Mandarich’s son get married, talking easily with people she had never met.

“While being an iconic newspaper reporter, Lynn had an ability to lay that aside and be just small-town Lynn from Vermillion, South Dakota,” Mandarich said. “And I believe that background gave her the ability to engage effortlessly with people in many different walks of life.”

She remembers the two strengths that Bartels had that made her the reporter she was.

“First, she strongly guarded her sources, never betraying a confidence given on background,” Mandarich said. “Second, she immersed herself in the maelstrom of political and government events. She was not one to report off of press releases and press conferences.”

Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado Republican Party chair who managed U.S. Senate campaigns and Owens’ run for governor, said Bartels “knew something was going to happen even before the candidates and campaigns did.”

He recalled a moment in 2004 when he was considering whether to run the senatorial campaign of John Thune of South Dakota, who is now Senate Majority Leader. He kept putting Bartels off when she asked if he would be heading up the effort, not knowing if Thune was even running.

“When my plane landed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on a frigid January evening where I would start Thune’s campaign, I turned my phone on and sure enough, there was a voicemail from Lynn saying, ‘I know you’re in South Dakota. Call me.’

“Of course she knew,” he said.

He said Bartels always wanted to be in the middle of the action.

“Her idea of a good time was going on a bus tour of rural Colorado with a candidate. And because of that, she knew every county, town and wide spot in the road,” Wadhams said.

In a statement Friday, former Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who served from 2007 to 2011, said: “Lynn was one of the best reporters I’ve ever worked with. I came into public service when she came to Denver. She was hard-working and she had great, top-notch integrity as a journalist. She will be missed terribly.”

Marianne Goodland, the chief legislative reporter with Colorado Politics, regularly crossed paths with Bartels at the state Capitol.

“Lynn was the consummate reporter, and I learned a lot from her — mostly her ability to stand up to the folks in power without hesitation,” Goodland said.

Bartels, she said, would head from the Capitol office to “check the traps.”

“That was code for talking to anyone — lobbyists, partisan and nonpartisan staff, and of course lawmakers — to see what was hot, what was coming,” Goodland said. “I started doing that when I joined Colorado Politics, and it has served me extraordinarily well over the past decade.”

Post-newspaper career

Bartels’ value continued after she left The Post in 2015, Goodland said, when she was a source for Goodland as spokeswoman for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.

She worked several years for Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican, after her newspaper career came to an end. She also worked more recently as an aide to state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican.

“I am heartbroken by the loss of Lynn Bartels. I loved that lady,” Kirkmeyer, who’s now running for governor, wrote in a statement Friday. “Lynn was a dear friend, trusted colleague and a buddy who worked alongside me at the Colorado Capitol after an extraordinary career covering Colorado politics.”

Bartels, she said, “brought intelligence, humor and an unmatched passion for public service to everything she did.”

At the secretary of state’s office, Williams said Bartels “transformed government communications, changing it from reactive to proactive and even publishing a blog about Colorado elections and election officials that became famous and revered.”

“She chronicled everything from conferences to elections to the day-to-day grist of the job,” he said.

DiMartino, Bartels’ younger sister by 13 years, called her big sister the “absolute ringleader of the family.” Bartels never married nor had children but she loved her nieces and nephews, she said.

“Lynn was everyone’s favorite sister,” DiMartino said. “She was there for every single birth of her nieces or nephews.”

DiMartino remembers feeling crushed, at age 5, as her sister headed off to college in Missouri. After Bartels’ freshman year came to an end, DiMartino recalled visiting her at her dorm and “running as hard as I could to jump into her arms because I loved her so much.”

Journalism for her sister, she said, became bigger than just a collection of facts to pass along to others.

“It allowed for her to be forever curious, to get to know people and to really know them,” DiMartino said. “And to use those relationships not for personal purposes but to provide information to people on issues that were important in their lives.”

“We have lost an outrageous sister, friend, colleague and human,” she said of her older sister. “Lynn was outrageously funny, outrageously loyal and outrageously talented.”

The rusted structure was barely hanging on, and its operation was time-consuming for the busy ranchers, who had to lug special tools on all-terrain vehicles and on foot to open or close the mechanism. But it seemed impossible for the tiny district to find the $6.8 million needed to replace the headgate and the rocky diversion dam that pushed water into the canal.

Then legalized sports betting came along, and, with it, millions of dollars for Colorado water projects. The tiny irrigation district, in Moffat County in the far northwest corner of the state, soon became the poster child for how gambling money is benefiting Colorado’s waterways.

The district received a $750,000 grant from the , which doles out money from sports betting tax revenue, said, sustainable food and water program director for , which helped the district land the grant. That led to a matching grant from the program. With those two grants in hand, other organizations jumped on board, and money poured in, she said.

In 2024, the Maybell Irrigation District installed a new headgate that can be opened or closed via cellphone. If a rancher is cutting hay and doesn’t need to irrigate, he can close the gates to match the amount of water he actually needs at that moment, Lane said. And the diversion structure no longer uses boulders to control the water flow. Instead, it’s a modern structure that is the right height for water control.

The project also benefited four fish species, including the threatened humpback chub, and it made river navigation easier for boaters, helping the region’s outdoor recreation economy.

“That $750,000 was really the ball that got it all rolling, that showed people, ‘Oh, this is going somewhere,'” Lane said of that initial state grant.

Since sports betting became legal in May 2020, the state has collected more than $154 million in taxes, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board has funneled $140 million to various projects that preserve and conserve Colorado’s precious water. Supporters say the gambling money is a godsend for ranchers, fishermen, paddlers and others who want to protect the state’s water and those who depend on it for their livelihoods. Critics, however, say legalized sports betting has come at a cost — fueling an addiction crisis that the state was unprepared for and is underfunding.

This is the second story in The Denver Post’s three-part series exploring the impact of legalized sports betting in Colorado, including the billions spent on wagers, rising addiction rates, and the impact on athletes and the games they play.

Erin Karney Spaur, executive vice president of the , said she reminds her family members and friends who bet on sports that every time they place a wager, they are helping ranchers like those in Maybell access precious water.

“It����ap exponentially more than we could ever imagine,” she said of sports betting’s impact on ranches and water. “Coloradans like to gamble on sports, and water is the beneficiary.”

‘That’s our ticket’

In 2015, the Colorado Water Conservation Board — at the behest of then-Gov. John Hickenlooper — released a report on how to best conserve and protect the state’s water.

“It made a lot of plans. It set a bit of policy, and it identified two big funding needs,” said , director of western water for the .

The board determined at the time that Colorado needed $100 million per year for projects to improve river and stream health and restoration, to replace the agricultural industry’s aging irrigation systems and to conserve as much water as possible.

“The 2015 water plan put up that price tag and then continued on its merry way,” he said.

But the money wasn’t there.

A consortium of groups with interests in the state’s waterways — including environmental, agricultural and recreational organizations — began meeting to figure out how to fund the water plan. They considered various tax schemes, such as asking the state to put a levy on bottled water or rental cars. But none of their ideas came with an easy path to voter approval — something necessary to raise statewide taxes in Colorado.

“We sat around a table for over a year and a half trying to figure out how to do this, and there were no good options,” Jackson said.

Then, in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a ruling that offered the answer to funding water projects in Colorado: . That decision overturned the , paving the way for states to legalize sports betting.

“I said, ‘That’s it. That’s our ticket,’ ” Jackson said.

Jackson thought Colorado voters would be sympathetic to the state’s water crisis, caused by decades of drought and climate change. They also wagered that a tax on sports betting would be easier for voters to digest because it would only be paid by those who chose to gamble; if someone didn’t want to pay the tax, then they didn’t have to participate, he said.

The legislature agreed to put it on the 2019 ballot, and voters approved with 51% in favor. The bill established a 10% tax on sports betting companies’ revenue.

“Water certainly pushed it over,” Jackson said.

Sports betting was slated to open in Colorado on May 1, 2020. But the big date was a false start. The COVID-19 pandemic hobbled betting like a quarterback with a bum knee.

“Sports betting was legal, and there were no sports,” Jackson said. “And I thought to myself, ‘What the hell did we just do?’ ”

Gross sports betting revenue in Colorado was $2.6 million, with 25% of wagers placed on table tennis. Tax revenue was just $96,544.

But that freeze on sports did not last, and the gambling money began flowing as rapidly as Clear Creek during the early summer snowmelt.

The revenue stream

Colorado leaders soon realized sports betting was far more lucrative for tax revenues than had been predicted. In the first six years of legalized sports betting, the has reported record-setting figures each year.

“It����ap been hugely successful,” said Drew Peternell, Colorado state director at . “Revenues from sports betting have greatly exceeded any expectations when these mechanisms were put in place.”

By May 2021, when sports betting in Colorado hit its first anniversary, monthly tax revenue hit $635,640 — more than five times what sports wagering had brought in during the same month just a year prior, according to data from the Department of Revenue.

In its most recent report on sports-betting taxes, the department reported it collected $4.4 million in April. The news releases often tout the success of sports betting and the benefits it brings to state waterways. They also include links to , the state’s website for problem gambling resources.

The April tax revenue was 28% more than the amount collected in April 2025, and taxes collected for the current fiscal year through April were at $40.7 million, up 35% over the same period last year.

Thus far, the largest single-month record for tax revenue came in January when the state collected $5 million from $57.8 million in revenue. Coloradans bet $630.2 million, with $119 million wagered on professional football in a month when the Broncos made a run to the conference championship game.

Proposition DD’s 10% tax on net proceeds from sports betting means casinos and companies doing business in Colorado pay the tax after they pay out winning bets and federal taxes.

But the Colorado General Assembly placed a $29 million-a-year cap on sports betting tax revenue when it approved Proposition DD for the statewide ballot. If the state collected more than $29 million each year, the overage was to be refunded to the casinos and licensed gaming companies.

Proposition DD also determined how sports betting proceeds were to be divvied up between programs, with water projects receiving 93% of the tax revenue.

The first projection estimated that sports betting would generate about $16 million annually and that water projects would receive $14.9 million.

Six percent of the tax revenue, or an estimated $960,000, would be set aside in a special fund that would be distributed to Colorado’s three casino cities and other entities that received gaming revenue if they could prove that the new sports betting market caused them to lose money due to decreased bets on traditional gambling and horse racing.

So far, no one has tapped that fund.

Problem gambling would receive just $130,000 annually for establishing a crisis hotline and training for gambling addiction counselors. That amount was increased to $2.5 million annually in 2023.

The Post interviewed seven people whose agencies receive sports betting tax revenue, but only one — Jackson — said they bet on sports themselves. And only one person, who did not want their family’s story to be told publicly, said they sometimes were bothered by the addiction problem because a loved one had died by suicide after gambling away his money.

The tax revenue proved so lucrative that water proponents returned to the legislature to ask for another statewide ballot. This time, which voters approved in 2024, eliminated the $29 million cap, meaning casinos and licensed sports betting companies can no longer receive refunds. And more money will pour into the water conservation fund.

In 2025, water proponents returned to the revenue well again.

This time, they asked the General Assembly to eliminate a clause that had allowed sports betting companies to use their free bet promotions as tax write-offs.

In those promotions, DraftKings, FanDuel and others lure prospective gamblers by offering “free bonus bets” when users apply a promo code advertised on television.

During the NFL’s wild card playoff weekend between Jan. 10 and 12, for example, FanDuel offered a promotion in which bettors would receive $300 when they placed a $5 bet on a game. In the past, FanDuel would have been allowed to write that $300 off as a tax deduction.

But starting in January, that tax deduction was no longer allowed, which means FanDuel and other companies doing business in Colorado pay even more in taxes.

For years, the sports betting companies had argued that losing the tax deduction would force them to pull back on those offers and lead to fewer players, Jackson said. But Colorado watched other states that did not offer similar tax deductions and realized those promotions were still available to gamblers.

“It’s still the primary marketing scheme,” Jackson said. “Colorado was very much an outlier in allowing the deduction.”

Colorado’s water woes

As the planet’s temperature rises, Colorado’s rivers and streams become more threatened by drought.

Last year was for Colorado after the state marked its 10th-warmest year out of 130 years of data, according to the at .  It was the 51st driest year on record, and a swath of northwestern Colorado fell into exceptional drought — the most dire category recorded by the .

And 2026 has brought even hotter and drier weather, with the winter being the warmest on record and snowpack at its lowest levels since records started being kept in 1941.

While drought dries up lakes, rivers and streams, it also impacts almost every person living in Colorado. People live with a shortage of drinking water supplies, irrigation becomes trickier for ranchers, rivers dry up for rafters and fishermen, fish and wildlife struggle, and manufacturers must cope with less water.

Less water also boosts the state’s risk for devastating wildfires and can cause insect infestations or forest diseases to spread.

“Climate change is water change in Colorado, and we need every resource we can to put towards building a more resilient future,” said Lauren Ris, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s director.

The conservation board intends to help Coloradans address all of those issues with the  through the state’s water plan.

“It primarily focuses on water supply, not water quality,” Ris said.

Projects awarded money during the most recent grant cycle in September included:

• to build a new water storage facility at the Jurgens Reservoir in Weld County that will increase the Lower Latham Reservoir Company’s irrigation supply
• to Adams 12 Five Star Schools to evaluate 54 irrigation systems across 475 acres of irrigated landscape and develop a water conservation plan for the district
• for a Colorado River conservation exhibit at the Confluence Center of Colorado in Mesa County

The water board employs a team of regional grant managers who live and work in the areas they serve. They become familiar with their region’s needs and help decide which projects are worth funding, said Jeannine Shaw, the grants section chief at the water board.

The more organizations applying for a grant together, the more competitive the application becomes, she said. And all of the grants awarded require the applicants to find matching funds, doubling the amount of money available.

And, as more money is spent on sports betting, Colorado can expand its outreach to all four corners of this parched state.

“The difference that makes on the ground is pretty incredible,” Ris said.

In the San Luis Valley, ranchers have long spread water over their grasslands when temperatures start to freeze to create a sheet of ice over the vegetation. As the ice slowly melts during the spring thaw, it seeps into the ground, recharging the water table. It also helps revegetate retired farmland and creates a habitat for wintering birds and wildlife, said Fay Hartman, conservation director for the southwest region of .

In September 2025, American Rivers received a $199,761 grant funded by sports betting to study how the winter ice sheet practice actually benefits the environment. The grant will provide the money for a groundwater study so scientists can collect data by placing groundwater wells at the near Saguache. American Rivers secured $145,956 in matching funds.

There just wasn’t good data on the benefits of creating the winter sheet ice, Shaw said. Different groups wanted to quantify what happens so they would be better informed about the practice and find ways to improve it.

The project, named Frozen Assets, demonstrates the water conservation board’s desire to support innovative ideas for Colorado’s water management, Ris said.

“We’re really able to test some of these theories and use this funding where there is not a whole lot of other opportunity out there to really test some concepts and pilot some things that could have pretty big benefits,” Ris said.

So far, Ris and others who are working to solve Colorado’s water woes believe sports betting revenue is the lifebuoy the state needs to start solving the crisis. It’s not enough, they said, but it’s charting the right course as the state responds to increasing drought, floods and wildfires worsened by climate change.

“We’re thrilled,” she said. “What we really needed was a steady funding stream for water projects, and that����ap what this proved to be.”

READ PART 3 NEXT: Sports betting is changing the game for Colorado’s fans and athletes as big money adds new pressures

Set to launch down a ski slope at Breckenridge, where he was celebrating his engagement with his fiancée and their friends, Everett glanced at his phone before pushing off.

A notification informed Everett that he had just won $55,000 on a $15 fantasy-golf wager on the . The money was in his PayPal account by the time he finished the run.

“That was more than my salary at the time,” he said. “You convince yourself that you’re so good.”

The money was gone almost as fast as Everett, high on dopamine from his big score, flew down that mountain. By the end of the ski weekend, he had blown the entire $55,000: drinks and food for his friends, a gold watch and, worst of all, more bets, including an $18,000 loss with one tap on his phone to bet — incorrectly — on the Big 10 football championship. He did not have enough money to buy gas to get home.

For Everett, the next two-and-a-half years would be “incredibly off the rails.”

“After I lost that money, I couldn’t get it out of my head chasing that,” he said. “I was basically trying to win it all back.”

Colorado, much like Everett, plunged headfirst into legalized sports betting after voters approved it in 2019. Since online sportsbooks opened in May 2020, the state’s residents have bet more than $30.6 billion on the outcomes of games and on the performances of the athletes who played them, netting the state more than $154 million in tax revenue.

But the growing popularity comes at a cost.

Mental health and addiction experts are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis that Colorado was not prepared to handle. The state does not sufficiently fund services for people who become addicted to gambling via the sports-betting apps on their phones, mental health experts say, and there are not enough therapists trained to treat gambling addiction. Colorado also provided little funding to promote awareness about gambling addiction and put limited guardrails in place to help people slow their betting habits.

It’s not clear how many Coloradans have gambling problems. There’s never been a study to determine that, but the results of a national survey suggest that more than 100,000 people in the state could suffer from that mental health disorder.

Jamie Glick, executive director of the , calls gambling addiction the “next big public health crisis.”

“Unfortunately, we are hearing a lot of rock-bottom stories,” Glick said. “People aren’t seeking help until they hit rock bottom. We are seeing people whose marriages are destroyed. They’re financially destroyed.”

Six years after legalization, Colorado is trying to catch up. The General Assembly this spring passed a bill that will put some controls on sports-betting apps, including by limiting the number of daily deposits a person can make. The state also increased the share of tax revenue funneled annually to problem-gambling awareness and prevention.

Gambling companies told The Denver Post they are creating new features to help people limit how much they spend, saying it is in their best interest to retain customers who view betting as entertainment, not a problem. Five sportsbooks stopped accepting credit cards in the past year amid growing criticism that people should not gamble with money they don’t have, and Colorado will ban credit card deposits, beginning in August.

“We want our customers to play with us month over month or year over year,” said Cory Fox, senior vice president of public policy and sustainability at . “If they have a problem, they will be off the platform.”

The Post examined the impact of legalized sports betting in the state by interviewing those involved in the industry and those who regulate it, mental health professionals, the groups who benefit from the tax dollars, athletes and coaches, and the gamblers. The Post also analyzed the money spent to show how much people are wagering, which sports are most popular for betting, and how much revenue sportsbooks are earning.

The first installment of this three-part series looks in-depth at gambling addiction and the attempts to get it under control before it becomes a public health crisis. The second part will examine how water conservation advocates bet on sports gambling to obtain funding to rescue communities and industries dependent on the state’s scarce water resources.

And the final story will explore how betting is changing sports itself as professional leagues embrace sportsbooks as business partners, even as gambling scandals make headlines and athletes report increasing hostility from fans who lose money when players fail to perform.

The launch of sports betting

Colorado was among the early adopters of legalized sports betting when voters approved Proposition DD in November 2019.

The state had moved quickly after the the 1992 , a federal law that had prohibited states from allowing sports betting.

In exchange for legalizing sports betting, Colorado voters agreed that sportsbooks should be taxed at a 10% rate to fund water conservation. That bargain pushed Proposition DD toward a narrow win, and the rushed to put rules in place.

By May 2020, sportsbooks in Colorado were open for business, and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, people found a new avenue for entertainment. Although the pandemic paused major sports in the U.S., including the Kentucky Derby, the NCAA basketball tournament and the NBA season, Coloradans still found sports to wager on.

Bettors spent more than $25.6 million that first month, with the largest percentage of bets being placed on table tennis at $6.6 million.

Table tennis remains one of the most popular sports for Colorado gamblers to bet on, with $989 million wagered since legalization. In April, it was the fourth most popular sport for wagering, with $28.5 million bet on it.

Those who want tighter controls on sports betting cite table tennis wagers in their arguments, saying it’s an example of problem gambling because Americans do not care about or understand ping-pong and only bet on it because it’s played in other parts of the world when most people in this country are asleep.

Professional basketball is the state’s favorite sport when it comes to betting, with $7.3 billion wagered on the NBA and overseas leagues, as of April. The NFL is second, followed by baseball, tennis and NCAA basketball, according to the revenue department’s data.

Sports betting continues to grow year after year.

In April, the most recent month of data available, Coloradans bet $521 million on sports — 20 times more than that first month in 2020. The state raked in $4.4 million in taxes.

, director of the state Division of Gaming, said interest in local sports teams is driving the growth, especially with the Broncos, Nuggets and Avalanche fielding championship-caliber teams.

“It’s becoming more and more exciting to watch our teams here in Colorado,” he said. “Every time we have a lot of interest in sporting events featuring our local teams, we see that continued growth. It’s more accessible with attention and advertising.”

Colorado has a healthy sports-betting market with 13 online companies and 10 in-person sportsbooks, Schroeder said. The goal, he said, is to have the best odds available for the gamblers.

The state also offers a with 5,866 approved events and wagers, ranging from which team will win the Super Bowl to whether someone will get knocked out in the U.S. SlapFIGHT championship to who will win the Chinese Basketball Association’s Club Cup.

At the same time, Schroeder said the state is committed to responsible gaming, which is the term the industry uses instead of gambling.

“We want individuals to bet smart,” he said. “Betting should be entertainment. It shouldn’t be something where you’re adding on a second level to the house by gambling.”

Colorado offers a through which gamblers can ban themselves from online apps and in-person sportsbooks at the state’s casinos. There were 1,245 people on that list as of June 15.

The state also promotes March as and operates the . Each year, the state awards millions in grants to nonprofits that are focused on gambling addiction.

Yet even as sports betting grows, public opinion is becoming more critical.

An found 43% of Americans say sports betting is bad for society, up from 34% in a 2022 poll. Still, 22% of respondents said they had bet on sports in the past year, up from 19% in the prior study.

Chasing the high

It’s impossible to know how many people in Colorado bet on sports, let alone to understand how many might suffer from a gambling addiction. Sports betting companies do not release their data and the state does not conduct public health monitoring of gambling addiction.

Sports betting is prolific among young people, said Evette Marquez, a 26-year-old, diehard Broncos fan.

She learned to gamble on a sports app from an ex-boyfriend and routinely places wagers on her favorite sport — pro football. Most of her friends do, too.

“Everyone is betting these days, especially at my age,” she said. “Some people may not be paying rent.

“I think people my age get stuck on the dopamine. You get that green ticket,” she said, referring to an icon on the DraftKings app that signifies a winning bet, “and it����ap the best feeling.”

That dopamine hit certainly contributes to the addictiveness of gambling, said assistant professor of psychiatry at the .

“It’s something pleasurable like hearing your favorite song or eating chocolate,” she said.

People who become addicted to gambling can naturally have lower dopamine levels, making them crave a high, Hemendinger said. And some people are just hardwired to take risks, and that makes them more prone to gambling addiction, she said.

Researchers have also linked gambling disorders to the parts of the brain that respond to rewards and regulate social behaviors and impulse control, Hemendinger said. But the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until a person reaches their mid-to-late 20s, making young people more susceptible to impulsive behavior while gambling.

The profile of a heavy sports bettor is a male younger than 35 who is single, employed and well-educated, according to the . And they think sports betting involves skill, not luck, which makes them “prone to distortions in thinking,” according to a coalition summary of sports wagering and addiction studies.

Matt Ferraccio, 38, started gambling in middle school, continuing into adulthood. He found it an escape from other problems in his life.

Ferraccio said he used legal gambling apps as well as the unregulated, overseas sportsbooks and bookies. He took advantage of special promotions, and when he ran out of credit on one, he opened another account.

“A compulsive gambler just doesn’t stop,” he said.

Ferraccio and Everett each talked about “chasing” their losses. Both men said they were never satisfied with a big win. They placed more bets rather than pocketing their winnings, and when they lost, they tried to win the money back — usually losing even more.

“It’s really hard to replicate that feeling you get when you win a lot of money,” Ferraccio said. “It means higher bets and longer sessions. You’re just chasing.”

Gambling addicts can stay awake for days, betting on obscure sports happening in other countries.

“You can log in at 3 a.m. and find tennis that����ap going on in China, ping-pong in Russia, basketball in China, cricket games. The possibilities are endless if you want to be compulsive and keep going, which I did,” Ferraccio said.  “Obviously, you don’t know anything about them, but you just pick.”

Ferraccio always promised himself he would stop once he dug himself out of a financial hole. It never happened.

Unprepared for a crisis

The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that 9 million Americans have a gambling disorder, which is recognized as a mental health illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Brianne Doura-Schawhol, director of the , said a 2023 study by the estimated about 2.4% of the population struggles with gambling addiction, which would mean about 110,000 adults in Colorado suffer from it.

But Colorado never conducted a study to gauge the prevalence of problem gambling before it legalized sports betting, and public health officials have no plans to do one.

“How can you make policy decisions without the proper data?” Doura-Schawhol said.

Colorado also ranks among the worst in the nation when it comes to funding gambling addiction resources, multiple people told The Post. The state law that legalized sports betting established a 10% tax on net sports betting proceeds, but only allocated $130,000 annually to problem gambling.

In 2023, the legislature boosted the annual amount to $2.5 million. Since 2023, the Colorado Division of Gaming has awarded $11.2 million in grants to organizations that raise awareness about addiction and help those who suffer from it.

The state allocated less than a penny per person for gambling services in 2023, by the National Association of Administrators for Disordered Gambling Services.

The bill passed in May did not include additional money for prevention and treatment. And as lawmakers faced down a $1.5 billion budget deficit, there was little room to set aside extra money. The legislature could shift some funds set aside for water to gambling addiction issues, but that has not been proposed.

Nationally, there is no federal revenue stream to support gambling addiction prevention and treatment, even though experts estimate that the social cost of gambling addictions exceeds $14 billion annually in the U.S.

In March, a group of bipartisan representatives in Congress introduced the Providing Opportunities for Individuals In Need of Treatment and Support, also known as the , which would divert a third of federal taxes collected on gambling to awareness, prevention and treatment of gambling addiction. If approved, it would raise an estimated $100 million per year, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling.

But in Colorado, there is no movement to increase funding for gambling addiction, even as the state rakes in tax revenue from sports betting.

Doura-Schawhol said the National Campaign for Fairer Gambling ranks Colorado at the bottom of the 39 U.S. states that have legalized sports gambling when it comes to funding treatment and prevention for gambling addiction.

Liesl Leary-Perez, co-founder of , said Colorado has long ignored mental health problems, and sports betting addiction is now one more thing on the list that needs to be addressed.

“To answer your question of ‘Were we prepared?’ No! We were not prepared,” Leary-Perez said of Colorado’s swift entry into the online sports-betting world. “And no one seems to care because we aren’t increasing that budget.”

When legalized sports betting came online, those who work in the addiction-treatment field were not prepared for clients struggling with gambling addiction.

The , which establishes the best practices for counseling gambling addicts and issues certifications to professional therapists, lists just 17 people in Colorado who have received certification. Only two are practicing in Denver, the state’s largest city.

The Problem Gambling Coalition of Colorado lists 18 counselors who treat gambling addiction and two behavioral health centers that offer telehealth appointments for gambling addiction on its website. And the coalition has developed a four-hour certification program for counselors on college campuses to help them recognize and treat the problem, Glick said.

Daniel Umfleet, founder and chief executive officer of , a behavioral health company focused on gambling addiction, left the United Kingdom to move to Colorado to start up his company after sports betting was legalized in the U.S.

Treatment for gambling addicts is in its infancy in the United States, Umfleet said.

“The unfortunate reality today is there are not enough health systems that understand this and have adopted it into their service mix,” he said. “The infrastructure wasn’t there.”

Ryan Canaday, founder of the in Denver, said he received a warning in 2020 from a doctor who called sports betting the “new dopamine dump,” and recommended his church and its associated nonprofit, which focuses on addiction recovery, prepare for it.

Then more people started showing up, seeking help, and Canaday had to learn what those addicts needed to recover.

“When I heard someone say, ‘Last night I lost $100,000,’ it was hard for me to fathom. I thought, ‘Well, why’d you place that big of a bet? And why couldn’t you just stop?’ and all the questions a rational mind asks,” Canday said, “but this disease of addiction is not rational, or else none of us would be here, right?”

‘Modern-day get-rich-quick scheme’

Arty Smith, a math teacher, last year launched the , a program that teaches teenagers the pitfalls of wagering.

Smith’s lessons on sports betting involve PowerPoint presentations with bar graphs and pie charts as he breaks down how it’s nearly impossible to beat the house.

He gathered data from every NFL game since 1966 and crunched numbers to show that picking the over/under bets — guessing what the total points scored by both teams in a game will be and whether it will be higher or lower than the points total set by the house — is no different than picking heads or tails on a coin toss.

It is a certainty that people lose money in the long run, Smith said.

“It doesn’t matter how well you know the game of football,” he said. “You could be Peyton Manning for all I care, you still won’t be able to pick football games any better than you could pick the outcome of the coin flip.”

On the over/under bet, the house has a 4.5% edge, Smith said. But when it comes to parlays, the house edge jumps to 40%. In a parlay, gamblers wager on multiple things happening at one time.

For the April 30 playoff game between the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Timberwolves, offered a “Joker Jackpot” parlay that would pay out if all-star center Nikola Jokic scored more than 30 points, recorded more than 10 assists, grabbed more than 10 rebounds, and hit more than three three-point shots. In gambler parlance, that’s a “four-leg parlay.” A winning bet on a $10 wager would return $70.

The parlays are wildly popular with gamblers because they have higher payouts, and they benefit sportsbooks because they have higher odds and bigger profits.

“It����ap a way for the sportsbooks to take gamblers’ money even faster,” Smith said. “It’s the modern-day get-rich-quick scheme. It doesn’t seem that hard to win the bet.”

Smith developed the Gambling Awareness Initiative after a friend consulted him about how to respond to his preteen son’s request to create an online sportsbook account because the boy was too young to open his own.

“He knew what he wanted to tell his boy about drinking and drugs and unprotected sex, but he was unprepared for the question about gambling,” Smith said. “It occurred to me that we need to talk about this.”

Zach Everett’s love of gambling started as a child at a race track when his father allowed him to pick a horse and placed a bet on his son’s behalf.

He gambled through a bookie for a couple of years in college. In 2018, Everett obtained his first credit card while earning $36,000 per year. Sports betting would not be legal for another two years, but daily fantasy sports were legal and growing in popularity in the U.S.

The daily fantasy sports apps run by DraftKings and FanDuel were not considered gambling because participants played against each other rather than the house. But those games gave both companies footholds in the market before sports betting became legalized, and they continue to reign as the biggest sports-betting companies in the country.

Everett, a self-described “big-time sports fan,” used his new credit card to make deposits into a DraftKings account to enter those fantasy sports contests. But he couldn’t handle winning a big prize.

“My brain couldn’t comprehend it was life-changing money,” he said. “You’re not holding the cash and you don’t have a moment to breathe. It����ap just so fast and then you blink and it����ap gone.”

Sportsbooks and responsible gaming

The sportsbook operators say they take measures to promote responsible gambling, arguing it would be short-sighted to drive people away through increasing addiction.

Lori Kalani, chief responsible gaming officer at DraftKings, said it is in her company’s best interest to establish controls that players can use to limit themselves.

“It����ap the right thing to do,” she said. “If people are out of control and they’re spending money on entertainment that they don’t have to spend, they’re not going to be a happy customer and we’re not going to be a happy business. We want long-term customers. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do.”

At DraftKings, Kalani has a staff of 50 who work on the company’s responsible gaming programs. Those include a budget builder that lets players determine how much they want to spend and how long they want to be on the app. They can set alerts that notify them when they’ve hit their limits.

DraftKings also provides customers with a personal stat sheet they can use to review how much they’ve deposited, how much they’ve wagered, how much time they’ve spent on the app, and even which sports they’ve bet on. It’s like getting a monthly spending report from a credit card company, she said.

Meanwhile, Kalani’s staff also manually reviews individual accounts flagged for abnormal betting patterns, such as a customer suddenly making much larger or more frequent deposits. Last year, 92,000 accounts were reviewed, she said.

When Kalani, who is a lawyer, first took the job at DraftKings, she was surprised by how few people used the various tools that help control time and money on the app. People saw responsible gaming tools as something only those who have problems need, she said.

“I thought that was upside down,” she said. “The whole point is you use them so nothing gets out of control. It����ap a lot of work to change how people think about that.”

Fox, Kalani’s counterpart at FanDuel, said his company also makes an effort to boost participation in the app’s responsible gaming features.

FanDuel’s parent company, , wants 75% of its average monthly players to use its responsible gaming tools by 2030. Individual performance bonuses for employees on his team will be tied to that goal, Fox said.

One tool introduced in the past year by FanDuel is an artificial intelligence program that can quickly detect when a person has deposited an amount that is much larger than that player’s previous deposits on the app. The program then asks the player if they are sure about the amount, Fox said.

A staff of 30 people reviews accounts that get flagged for abnormal betting patterns, and after users threaten customer service representatives or even mention they can’t pay their mortgage. Those employees can send emails with responsible gaming information, put players in time-out, set deposit limits and, in some cases, ban them from the app, Fox said.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done in this field. We are not declaring victory,” Fox said. “We are working hard to figure out the best ways to identify and protect that small percentage of our user base who may be struggling to manage their play on our site.”

While the sports betting companies say they limit problem gamblers, others insist that’s not the case.

Josiah Clarke, 40, is a lawyer and a sports betting sharp — meaning he figured out how to win consistently.

Clarke played fantasy football for years and casually bet on offshore sportsbooks. But when sports betting was legalized in Colorado, and the pandemic gave him a lot of spare time, he decided to “take a real go at it.”

Clarke, who lives in Greeley, built a system of analyzing games and created his own model for statistical analysis. He raised the stakes as his model improved.

He won — and the sportsbooks noticed his winning pattern.

DraftKings was the first to limit him after he won $24,000 over two football seasons, Clarke said. FanDuel followed.

“I’d try to bet like $2,000 on an NFL game, and they’d say you can bet up to $47,” he said. “And I was like, it����ap not worth all the effort I’m putting into it for $47.”

Ferraccio and Everett said no sportsbook ever cut them off, even when it was clear they were gambling too much.

“Responsible gambling from these sportsbooks doesn’t even come close to identifying people,” Ferraccio said. “If they see me spending all night doing it, guess who’s getting the free bet? Guess who’s getting the big promotions? It����ap not the people who are winning.”

Bonus bets are not free money. Instead, gamblers must put something into their accounts first. Gamblers are never allowed to withdraw those “bonuses,” and they expire.

FanDuel’s Fox took exception to accusations that sportsbooks do not actually limit gamblers who show signs of addiction.

“First and foremost, we absolutely identify problem gamblers and prevent them from being on our site any longer,” he said. “Any suggestions that we don’t actually do that on that basis are inaccurate and wrong.”

Doing a lot with a little

Colorado has boosted its addiction awareness and prevention efforts in the six years since sports betting went online.

The state’s Gaming Division funds responsible gaming grants, doling out $3.8 million in March. Those grants were awarded to nonprofits, including the Problem Gambling Coalition of Colorado, which will use its $1.5 million to certify therapists treating gambling addiction, to support a project that works with college students, and to promote gambling addiction awareness.

The , a nonprofit advised by Umfleet, received more than $1 million to work with the military to address gambling addiction within the ranks. He said Colorado is doing a lot of work with little funding, and some efforts are gaining national attention.

“You’re doing it half the speed of what you would prefer,” he said.

In its most recent legislative session, the General Assembly passed , setting some first-in-the-nation standards to control addiction through state law. The law will go into effect in August.

The new law bars gambling companies from sending push notifications to their app users, something that emerging research shows triggers people into betting more. It also restricts advertising from targeting people younger than 21.

The new law will limit gamblers to six daily deposits on an app. But it does not limit the amount a person can deposit, and people can have multiple apps, meaning they still could deposit an unlimited amount of money in a 24-hour period.

The bill was watered down after its sponsors, under pressure from the gambling companies and their lobbyists, struck a provision that would have banned all proposition bets. A prop bet allows gamblers to wager on an individual athlete’s performance, and those prop bets can be rolled into the wildly popular parlays. Colorado already bans prop bets on college athletes.

Sen. Matt Ball, a Denver Democrat who was one of the bill’s bipartisan sponsors, said the new law should put some friction between gamblers and their impulse to place bets.

It was needed, he said, because technology has rapidly changed since Colorado legalized sports gambling, making it easier and faster for people to bet. Industry advertising works, Ball said, because he sees its effect on his preteen son.

“It works on his brain,” Ball said. “He asks me about placing bets. He thinks he can make a big hit, win $100. We need to put reasonable guardrails on sports betting to protect our kids.”

‘There is hope’

Ferraccio has no idea how much money he lost over the years. He said he could go on a winning streak and have as much as $200,000 in his accounts, only to lose it all over again.

“It����ap a lot,” he said. “Everything I’ve ever earned basically.”

Ferraccio placed his last bet on July 1, 2024.

“I was hitting a point where I had nothing but debt and darkness, and it just made me sick,” he said. “When you get to that point, it doesn’t feel like you have a way out.”

Ferraccio was afraid that if he did not stop and get help, he would become part of the statistic that haunts gambling addiction — the high suicide rate.

Multiple studies in the U.S. and internationally have found that people with gambling disorders have higher suicide rates than people suffering from other addictions, such as alcohol. One in five people with a gambling addiction has attempted suicide, according to the National Problem Gambling Coalition.

Ferraccio found help in recovery groups. He formed friendships with other recovered gamblers, and they hold each other accountable.

“There is hope,” he said. “You have to look in the right places. You have to admit you lost control. If you can’t admit you have a serious problem, you’re never going to get right.”

For three years after his big fantasy golf prize, Everett said he gambled so much that he alienated almost all of his friends and family.

He maxed out six or seven credit cards. He burned through at least six payday loans. He ran out of friends and relatives willing to loan money. He pawned a $12,000 TAG Heuer watch that his dad had given him as a wedding present. He wrecked his car — also on loan from his dad — while checking a bet on his phone.

Everett, who worked as a sales director and ranked first in sales for his company, was fired after his boss learned he had asked a client for a loan.

“Getting called into the office that day…” Everett said, unable to finish explaining what happened.

He dreaded telling his wife he had lost his job because of his gambling. She quit wearing her wedding ring.

Everett gambled away his severance. Loan sharks came calling. His first inpatient stay had failed, and support groups and regular therapy were not helping. He considered fraud. He considered overdosing.

So he flew home to Minnesota and the one person who still took his calls — his dad, Brad Everett.

Looking back, Brad Everett said he did not realize that gambling addiction strangles people much like alcohol and drug addiction.

“I didn’t understand why he just couldn’t stop,” he said. “It was a complete lack of understanding. And a complete lack of understanding of how easy it is with your phone and the apps.”

Brad Everett had already flown to Denver multiple times to help his son, crafting lists of people from whom his son had borrowed money. “But it was never the end,” he said.

Brad Everett checked his son into another rehab center in Minneapolis with a warning: If Zach Everett did not complete rehab and stop gambling, he would be financially cut off.

“He’s the most generous man in the world, and it was eye-opening to me to see him get to his breaking point,” Zach Everett said.

Everett placed his last bet on April 24, 2024.

Since then, he said he has kept his promise to his father. He repaired his marriage. He is slowly paying off debts and earning his old friends’ trust. He attends regular meetings with other recovering gamblers.

And he is becoming more comfortable telling his story in hopes of helping others struggling with gambling addiction.

“It’s such a hidden problem,” Everett said. “You’re definitely not alone. I know how scary it is. If you do not address it, it����ap only going to get worse. You’re not going to win yourself out of whatever hole you’re in. You can’t bet yourself out of it.”

READ PART 2 NEXT: How sports betting became Colorado’s ticket to funding $140 million in water conservation projects

Updated 10 a.m. June 18, 2026: This story has been updated to clarify Daniel Umfleet’s relationship to the Kindbridge Research Institute.

Lawmakers and advocacy groups have been calling for regular inspections since Melvin Ariel Calero-Mendoza, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan national, died in Aurora, Colorado’s only center, in October 2022. The center, administered by Geo Group, has 1,530 beds.

In March of this year, the Adams County Health Department reprimanded the facility for lack of access to staff and delays during its investigation into accusations of widespread gastrointestinal and respiratory illness in January. Detainees have also criticized the center for serving moldy or spoiled food and poorly functioning air conditioning.

Geo Group, which operates the Aurora detention center under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), filed suit to strike down the law and suspend its implementation immediately. The company contends that unpredictable inspections will increase the cost and administrative burden to the company and the government, and that only the federal government can mandate how the company is run. Moreover, they say, the law is unfair since the state does not require county health inspections of prisons. These reasons have succeeded in deterring several other states where legislators have tried to oversee ICE. 

One such state, , though in the midst of similar court proceedings, was able to conduct a partial investigation of Geo Group-run Delaney Hall and found the facility’s kitchen areas satisfactory. The state Department of Health inspectors, however, were not allowed to examine the medical unit, bathrooms or sleeping quarters. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport filed a against Geo Group for denying that access.

Other detention centers run by other companies have also received complaints about food, sanitary conditions, air conditioning, medical care and abuse. Last week, the Government Accountability Office issued a report finding Camp East Montana in Texas, the nation’s largest facility, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and failed to provide adequate care. The report found some egregious problems; a contract security guard at the center, for example, lost a loaded somewhere in the camp, putting everyone in danger. 

For all these reasons, state lawmakers want greater leverage to investigate facilities to ensure detainees are receiving care. The Colorado General Assembly did the right thing in passing HB 1276. Whether they win or lose in court, the bill’s passage will serve as a wake-up call. All immigration facilities in this country, whether they are managed by ICE or through a contract, must provide basic, safe, clean facilities with clear water and decent food. The General Assembly will have their day in court. In the meantime, they can sleep at night, which may be more than we can say for detainees at some ICE detention centers. 

Krista Kafer is a Sunday Denver Post columnist.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

The two-term Republican state representative from Colorado Springs said he hates going to the Capitol every day, “but I know this is what God called me to do.”

Politics for Bottoms, an evangelical pastor and candidate for governor, is a deeply spiritual endeavor, and he regularly infuses religion into campaign speeches, remarks before the legislature and policy briefs. He has referred to Colorado Democrats as “satan” and frequently pitches political differences as a battle between good and evil.

“I’m sick and tired of hearing pastors say, ‘I don’t get involved politically,’ ” Bottoms said in a at Texas’s Nelson University. “They have a problem. We’re losing our children. We’re losing our states. We’re losing our country.”

Bottoms, one of the most conservative lawmakers at the state Capitol, won top billing for governor on the Republican primary ballot at the party’s statewide convention this spring. He’s one of three candidates — along with state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer and political newcomer Victor Marx — seeking to return his party to the governor’s mansion for the first time in two decades.

Bottoms, though, has an uphill climb in an ever-deepening blue state that Republican standard-bearer President Donald Trump.

He is the lead pastor at the , an evangelical church in Colorado Springs that and believes a person’s gender is established by God in the womb and “is not subject to personal choice or change.” In sermons, he has , saying, “You’ve got to hate the evil that is Islam.”

He has been the prime sponsor of just one bill in his four years at the Capitol — a to create a new license plate that says “In God We Trust.” Even on that bill, he was not initially a sponsor, but instead was added to the legislation by Republican leadership, who wanted him to get a win.

In an interview with The Denver Post’s editorial board last month, Bottoms said his greatest legislative achievements were providing leadership and helping lawmakers effectively communicate their ideas.

“It wasn’t passing bills,” he said wryly.

Rep. Ken DeGraaf, one of Bottoms’ Republican colleagues in the statehouse, said the pastor is “very smart, very principled, with a strong ethical base.”

“If he tells me he’s going to do something, I would take that as being effectively done,” DeGraaf said in an interview. “He’s going to keep his promises.”

Bottoms has campaigned against what he says is reckless spending, rising crime and failing schools in Colorado. He promised a version of the federal , which drastically cut spending across the government.

A quick look at the Colorado governor candidates running in this month’s Democratic, Republican primaries

He maintains that Trump won the 2020 election, despite there being no evidence to support it. He wants to give parents more rights in their children's lives; invest more in oil, gas and coal; repeal state health insurance mandates; and make Colorado a leader in artificial intelligence technology.

"I know I'm gonna be sued constantly as governor," Bottoms told The Post.

The pastor also speaks frequently about pedophilia and protecting children from trafficking. He has repeatedly said state lawmakers are buying children, while offering no evidence to support his shocking assertions.

The candidate claims to be working with the FBI and "private companies" to put offenders in prison, but will not reveal any details. An FBI spokesperson would not confirm whether the agency is working with Bottoms.

Pressed by The Post's editorial board, Bottoms admitted that "we haven't found any victims. We really haven't been looking for them." He was unable or declined to answer questions about how he's rooting out this problem.

In a debate earlier this month, Bottoms that he was mistaken when he claimed more than 45,000 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were present in Colorado. He had conflated the total number of Venezuelan migrants who had come to the state, after applying for asylum, with gang members.

With the Republican primary just weeks away, political watchers in Colorado say Marx has become the frontrunner in the race. A last month showed Marx commanding 59.2% of Republican and unaffiliated primary voters. Kirkmeyer received 15.1%, while Bottoms came in third at 6.3%. There have been no other public polls.

Marx has also dominated the fundraising battle, pulling in $2.7 million through late May, compared with $556,000 for Kirkmeyer and about $200,000 for Bottoms.

Both Bottoms and Kirkmeyer have said they won't support Marx if he's nominated, with ."

Dick Wadhams, a veteran Republican operative in the state, said if the party nominates Marx or Bottoms, they will not only lose, but they will take down other Republicans on the ballot.

Wadhams, who's backing Kirkmeyer, said Bottoms' characterization of himself as "God's candidate" simply won't sell in a state where say they believe in a higher power with absolute certainty.

"He is way out of the mainstream in Colorado," Wadhams said.

Aware — and annoyed — that he’d been nabbed for exceeding the 35 mph speed limit, Anderson didn’t realize the monthslong legal quagmire in which he would soon be embroiled. It’s one that echoes an all-too-familiar battle pitting the .

When the 44-year-old computer repair specialist received his ticket in the mail, it said he had 30 days to pay it or challenge it. Through deft use of the artificial intelligence chatbot Claude, Anderson dug into state law. He found that in 2023, the state legislature had that stipulated that the response time given to motorists caught by speed cameras “not be less than forty-five days after the issuance date on the notice of the violation.”

With that, Anderson hit on a legal discrepancy that he felt obligated Aurora to void his $40 ticket. And not only his ticket.

“I’m not against safety,” he said, “but if you want everyone to follow the laws, you need to follow the laws, too. I’m really hoping they have to refund the fines to those that got a 30-day notice.”

Through a public records request this week, The Denver Post learned that Aurora had issued 26,268 speeding tickets to motorists since the city began enforcement through its automated photo safety program in late December. As of May 31, it had collected $627,000. Around 60% of violators had paid their tickets, the city said.

“If you have a program that’s going to make you millions over the next few years, you should be able to follow proper procedure,” Anderson said.

He noted that the city’s has a link to the very state law he’s holding up in his defense.

Anderson requested a hearing to dispute the ticket within the 30 days allotted. A magistrate commended Anderson for his gumshoe research into the matter — “You did a good job and you’re making the city work,” she told him during the April 30 appeal — but she refused to dismiss the ticket.

The city agreed with the magistrate, telling The Post this week that Aurora is a home-rule municipality, “meaning the city has the constitutionally protected right to make local decisions at the local level.”

“The 30-day timeline between issuance and due date on these fine-only, civil violations is an example of the city exercising said authority,” said Jennifer Soules, an Aurora spokeswoman.

That’s not how two sponsors of the 2023 bill see it.

Former state Rep. Leslie Herod, a Denver Democrat, said the 45-day response period was deliberately inserted in the law to give violators a reasonable amount of time to both receive and respond to the ticket.

“Forty-five days was put in there intentionally, and Aurora should follow the law,” she said.

Outgoing state Rep. Meg Froelich, an Englewood Democrat, said the legislature saw the use of speed camera systems as a matter of “statewide concern” that would give localities little discretion on enforcement.

The first paragraph of the bill says so — adding that the “enforcement of traffic laws through the use of automated vehicle identification systems … is an area in which uniform state standards are necessary.”

“We were trying to balance people’s civil liberties with the push for traffic safety and saving lives,” she said. “We would hope the municipalities would enforce it to the letter of the law.”

Lawmakers, Froelich said, wanted to make sure that people who might work in another location in today’s work-anywhere environment had adequate time to collect their mail and respond.

“Fifteen (extra) days may not seem like much to Aurora, but it may be for this guy,” she said.

The underpinnings of the dispute over Anderson’s speeding ticket have flared often in Colorado, where state lawmakers gave towns and cities the ability to enact . The problem that repeatedly arises is the conflicting interpretations of how the state or the cities wield their respective powers.

“There’s always been tension between state decisions and local sovereignty, and that won’t go away,” said Robert Preuhs, a political science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “If the driver wants to pursue this, it will come down to the courts.”

That’s where two recent prominent home-rule and state preemption cases landed.

Last year, six metro Denver cities sued Gov. Jared Polis over the enforcement of several housing laws that require municipalities to take steps to increase housing density. The plaintiff cities, including Aurora, claimed that the state laws encroached on their local home-rule authority to oversee land-use matters. The case is ongoing.

And in the waning days of 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court handed down a ruling forbidding cities from punishing lawbreakers beyond what state courts would allow for the same offense. The justices ruled that when a municipal ordinance and a state statute prohibit identical conduct, the municipal penalties for such conduct “may not exceed the corresponding state penalties for that conduct.”

Preuhs said it was not totally clear who had the legal advantage in the Aurora speeding ticket case. But if he had to bet, he would give the edge to Aurora.

“Given the civil nature of it and the power of cities to set speed limits and enforce them, it wouldn’t surprise me that they would have the power to set a reasonable time frame for a response to a ticket,” he said.

Questions about the terms and conditions of speeding tickets issued by radar-activated cameras will only increase as the technology proliferates. Local governments in at least 27 cities and towns in Colorado have approved automated speed camera enforcement.

The Colorado Department of Transportation‘s first speed cams on Interstate 25 north of metro Denver caught more than 4,000 drivers speeding between Mead and Berthoud in March. Denver expects to install its first fixed cameras along high-accident stretches of Alameda Avenue and Federal Boulevard later this year, adding to the four photo radar speed vans that police move around the city.

Anderson, who did pay his $40 fine after his appeal failed, doesn’t know what his next steps will be with Aurora.

Municipal leaders in the Weld County town of Kersey voted in January to refund thousands of dollars it overcharged drivers caught by its speed cameras, according to . While the situation in Aurora is different, Anderson could envision a class-action lawsuit arising from all of the drivers who paid their $40 fine but didn’t have enough time to formally lodge an appeal.

He to tell his story.

“I’m not going to stop,” he said. “There’s a lot more road to go down.”

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would also ban push notifications that solicit bets or deposits on gambling apps — another first-in-the-nation measure. And it would ban credit card deposits on gambling apps in an attempt to keep people from placing bets with money they do not have.

Five of the 13 online sportsbooks doing business in Colorado already have credit card bans in place.

Research shows that frequent deposits into online gambling accounts are an indicator of problem gambling, Ball said, and those who repeatedly reload accounts are more likely to be high-risk gamblers who experience bigger losses.

“As a result, deposit limits are widely recognized as an effective harm-reduction tool designed to introduce friction, slow loss-chasing behavior and reduce extreme outcomes, particularly among high-intensity users,” he said.

The bill would limit gamblers to making up to six deposits per day, with no limit on the value of each.

Ball also said repeated push notifications on cell phones serve as cues that trigger gamblers to keep playing, even when they’ve already faced significant losses — and those pushes drive impulsive behavior in bettors.

The legislature faced heavy opposition from the gambling industry, which argued that betting limits and advertising restrictions would be bad for business. The industry fought hard to retain its proposition bets, which allow gamblers to wager on individual athletes’ performances and to combine those performances into bigger packages, known as parlays.

Those bets are popular with gamblers because they produce bigger payouts for winners. The gambling companies like them because the odds are higher and they produce more revenue.

Brianne Doura-Schawohl, the director of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, said the bill created “revolutionary consumer protections,” and she urged Polis to sign it.

Polis’s spokesman, Eric Maruyama, said the governor will review the final version of the bill.

This story will be updated throughout the day.

7:12 p.m. update: Well, so much for Colorado Democrats’ plans to undercut another prospective conservative ballot measure.

Three days after she unveiled the plan to reporters, House Speaker Julie McCluskie said in a statement Monday night that she would not bring forward legislation intended to establish guardrails for Initiative 177, should it make the ballot and win approval from voters. That measure aims to establish a right to use natural gas. (See the 3:43 p.m. update below for more on the effort.)

The bill that she and other lawmakers had hoped to bring — and that various outside groups could agree to — “would not meaningfully change the impacts of Initiative 177 or mitigate the harms of this measure.” She called on Advance Colorado, the conservative group backing the proposal, to withdraw it before it reaches the ballot.

6:15 p.m. update: Lawmakers killed a pair of bills Monday afternoon that were designed to undo some of the state impact of recent federal tax changes as a way to direct money to low-income families.

House Bills and , which were postponed indefinitely in committee votes at their sponsors’ requests, would have limited some of the tax cuts enacted last summer with the federal tax bill. Colorado automatically mimics changes made to the federal tax code. The extra money raised by the bills would have helped fill the gap left by the flagging Family Affordability Tax Credit. That credit, which went into effect for tax year 2024, was credited with helping to cut Colorado’s child poverty rate by more than a third.

Revenue collected over the growth cap set by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights funded the credit. State revenue did not hit that cap this year in part because of the federal tax changes — meaning the family credit won’t be dispersed.

The bills would have limited the tax deductions businesses could claim for things like CEO pay, operating losses and interest deductions. That money would have then been diverted to a new credit designed to mirror the Family Affordability Tax Credit.

“We are giving preferential treatment to CEOs and corporations who are doing fine, and we are giving not-preferential treatment to people who are really struggling, who are working and contributing to our society,” said Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who sponsored HB-1221.

Sponsors of these bills couldn’t wrangle enough support to create a substitute credit to help those families. Sen. Cathy Kipp explicitly blamed a veto threat by Gov. Jared Polis when she killed HB-1222.

“It is clear that this bill will be vetoed unless we agree to reducing the state income tax, something that I believe is irresponsible,” Kipp, a Fort Collins Democrat, said shortly before killing her bill.

Polis said in an interview at the start of the session that he would want broad-based tax changes to support any targeted tax credits.

“The governor has long supported providing tax relief, including income tax relief for Colorado families,” spokesman Eric Maruyama said in a statement after the bills were killed. “Colorado’s Family Affordability Tax Credit helped cut child poverty rates … and the governor supported strengthening this credit to help families while saving every Coloradan money on taxes.”

A third bill that would help fund the new credit, , is still alive after sponsors altered the benefits to include tax credits for restaurants’ utilities.

3:43 p.m. update: Democratic lawmakers have fewer than nine hours left to introduce and advance legislation that, they hope, would curb the impacts of a potential conservative-backed ballot measure.

Democratic lawmakers told reporters late last week that the bill would add “guardrails” to , which would give Coloradans the right to buy and use natural gas and for companies to sell it. It’s in the petition-circulation phase and hasn’t yet made the November ballot.

But the new bill still hadn’t been unveiled as of mid-afternoon. If lawmakers hope to pass it before the end of the session Wednesday, they’ll need to introduce it today, shepherd it through any and all House committees and then move it through a first full vote in the chamber — all before the clock strikes midnight. Otherwise, there won’t be enough time to pass the bill through both chambers before lawmakers call it a year.

Sen. Lisa Cutter, a Jefferson County Democrat sponsoring the bill, said today that discussions were underway with outside stakeholders. She said the bill’s fate had been back and forth in recent days. Last she heard, she said, “we might be alive.” She added: “We’re still trying to figure it out. I hope we do.”

To protest the late introduction of the bill, House Republicans have begun having every bill read aloud in the chamber — a constitutionally approved request that largely functions as a delay tactic.

“This isn’t good governance,” Rep. Ty Winter, the assistant minority leader, said. “Since they didn’t give us the time and what we need to do the due diligence … we’re figuring it out now.”

2:20 p.m. update: Colorado lawmakers passed a $174 million effort to reform the state’s competency and civil commitment systems.  aims to create a clear pathway within criminal cases to institutionalize people accused of serious crimes who are mentally ill or developmentally disabled and to ensure such defendants are not set free without care when their criminal cases end.

The bill, which was finalized today when the Senate approved House amendments, is expected to cost Colorado $174 million by 2030 and then roughly $73.5 million annually in subsequent years, according to a fiscal note. The new approach will include increased bed capacity and outpatient care.

The bill’s proponents say the effort will close loopholes in Colorado’s current competency process. Critics worry it will not solve broader problems within the state’s under-resourced mental healthcare system.

“These systems that have been put in place under the competency bill attempt to reform the way people are shuffled through our courts, and reform some of the ways that people are held during their crises at hospitals or other behavioral healthcare provider institutions, but the underlying problem is they are getting to this level of crisis where they are committing a crime,” said Jack Johnson, a public policy liaison at Disability Law Colorado.

Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, said the effort went through “tense” times as stakeholders and others weighed in on the expansive proposal, but she noted that the bill ultimately saw nearly unanimous support from lawmakers.

“At the end of the day we all had the same basic goal, which is (that) people who are dangerous because they have an illness should not just be put out on the street,” she said. “This is not a good solve. And we have been doing that in Colorado for 50 years.”

2:13 p.m. update: The second of two bills seeking to regulate data centers died this afternoon under the weight of a proposed last-minute rewrite.

was an attempt to mix regulations and incentives to rein in data center development in Colorado. Sen. Cathy Kipp, a Fort Collins Democrat, worked through the final weeks of the legislative session trying to find alignment between data center companies, Xcel Energy, environmental groups, labor unions and other interests.

The bill would have required new data centers to include community and wildlife protections and meet water efficiency standards and limits on backup generators. The proposed rewrite also included new incentives for data centers that follow best practices on environmental protections, renewable energy, and grid and ratepayer protections.

But the rewrite was going to be introduced ahead of the bill’s initial committee vote today. That left the measure with a series of extremely tight deadlines to meet before the legislature adjourns Wednesday. Kipp voluntarily killed the bill after hearing from colleagues that there wasn’t enough time.

“We really thought we were threading the needle,” Kipp said.

She promised to spend another year working on the issue. She also warned: “These (data center) companies need to come to the table, understanding the harms their operations can cause to our communities and to our grid.” The death of this bill follows the death of a competing data center bill last week. would have offered tens of millions of dollars in incentives to comply with regulations.

2:07 p.m. update: The Colorado Senate passed legislation requiring increased inspections of immigration detention centers in Colorado — but only after stripping several provisions from the bill at the behest of Gov. Jared Polis.

Once lawmakers clear a procedural vote in the House, will move to Polis’ desk for signature. As it����ap now written, the measure would require health officials to conduct at least four annual inspections of detention facilities. Those visits would probe whether the facilities sufficiently meet food, water and medical standards, while also examining their temperature control and detainees’ access to medical care and legal counsel.

Colorado has only one immigrant detention center, a privately run facility in Aurora owned by the GEO Group and contracted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The bill would apply to any state, county or privately run facility, but it would not cover future detention centers owned wholly by the federal government.

The bill no longer includes several provisions drafted in direct response to how the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has unfolded in Colorado. Lawmakers stripped provisions requiring more transparency around federal immigration subpoenas received by the state, an issue Gov. Jared Polis has faced scrutiny over.

A section that would’ve prohibited ICE from entering nonpublic areas of jail facilities was removed, as was another provision, which would’ve fined state or local agencies that illegally shared information with ICE. Employees can face those penalties, but lawmakers sought to strengthen them after a Mesa County sheriff’s deputy helped get a college student arrested last year, only to quit and end a subsequent state lawsuit against him.

HB-1276’s sponsors said those changes were made to avoid a veto from Polis.

“It’s disappointing to have not been able to move forward with some of these provisions,” said Sen. Mike Weissman, an Aurora Democrat who sponsored the bill. “I think we still have a worthwhile bill here, particularly from the standpoint of being the senator whose district includes the GEO facility, which is obviously the hub of a lot of these conversations.”

Sen. Iman Jodeh, another Aurora Democrat and sponsor, said Polis’ opposition just meant “that we have to come back, and there’s a lot more work to do.” Polis is term-limited and will leave office early next year.

The governor has told reporters that he supported some provisions of the bill. “The Governor has consistently called out the federal government����ap complete lack of transparency regarding immigration enforcement and detention in Colorado,” Polis spokeswoman Ally Sullivan said in a statement this afternoon. “We appreciate conversations with the sponsors on this bill, and the Governor will review the final version.”

12:58 p.m. update: A bill that would regulate AI-powered chatbots has cleared the Senate, while the legislation faces renewed calls for a veto from a mother whose daughter died by suicide following sexual grooming by one of the chatbots.

would require chatbots to announce to users regularly that they operate on artificial intelligence. Their developers also must implement measures to prevent emotional dependence and to refer users to a crisis services provider if the user exhibits any suicidal ideation. The bill passed the Senate 24-11 with bipartisan support and opposition.

The original version required companies to try to prevent artificial intelligence bots from producing sexually explicit content. Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat, sought to toughen that language by requiring chatbots to shut down any conversation that veered in that direction; that also would apply if the bot����ap programming led it to produce that content without being directly spurred by the user. That amendment passed.

Mullica invoked the death of Juliana Peralta, a 13-year-old girl whose mother still live in his district. Cynthia Montoya, Peralta’s mother, said her daughter was sexually groomed by a chatbot and the AI agent did nothing when Peralta shared suicidal thoughts with it.

Peralta died in November 2023. Montoya has fought the bill on the grounds it does not go far enough.

In a statement sent late Sunday, Montoya said she still opposed the bill. The measure would set the standard of “technically feasible” for implementing new protections — which Montoya contends would give tech companies too much power in determining if they needed to implement the protections or not.

If tech companies “cannot prevent their products from exploiting children, they need to keep them off the shelves — it����ap that simple,” Montoya said in the statement. The bill, including the new amendment, will just codify “widely gaping loopholes,” she said.

“The language is again very loose, and tech companies will likely use the same loopholes to continue their sexual abuse of children,” Montoya said. “When tech is allowed to make the laws, as they undoubtedly did behind the scenes on 1263, our children pay the price.”

Montoya called on Gov. Jared Polis to veto the bill, which still needs to return to the House for concurrence on amendments run in the Senate. Mullica said he was sorry that Montoya felt that way. He noted that he voted for a separate amendment that would have addressed Montoya’s concerns about the “technically feasible” language, but that amendment failed.

Mullica said he didn’t want to let that be the end of trying to shut down sexual exploitation by the AI bots.

“There’s more work to be done, obviously, but I don’t think that we just sit idly by and allow the sexual exploitation of children to happen,” Mullica said.

This story will be updated throughout the day.

6:12 p.m. update: Lawmakers voluntarily killed legislation that would have provided tens of millions of dollars in tax incentives to build data centers, ending half of one of the year’s most drawn-out and uncertain debates.

proposed to lure data center developers to the state by offering them sales tax breaks in exchange for complying with regulations. Data centers that skipped the tax breaks would’ve been unregulated.

“Unfortunately, we have to continue with the status quo, and I think that’s what is going to happen,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Alex Valdez, a Denver Democrat, said during committee debate Thursday night. “And that’s not good for us. Because that means Wyoming wins and Texas wins. No offense to them, but I’m playing and rooting for the home team here.”

In a tacit acknowledgement of the opposition his bill faced, Valdez voluntarily axed the measure.

But the data center fight may go on. A second bill backed by environmental groups is still alive. Senate Bill 102 wouldn’t offer any incentives and would instead impose regulations on large data center development in the state.

That measure still has not passed a single committee vote. Its sponsor, Democratic Sen. Cathy Kipp, said this morning that negotiations were still underway. Another of its sponsors, Rep. Kyle Brown, said the two sides were moving closer together. It remained unclear whether they would reach an agreement — or satisfy all sides — and clear the legislature in its final days, he said.

For his part, Gov. Jared Polis told reporters last month that he supported broad tax breaks for data centers, referring to them as the modern equivalent of 20th-century manufacturing. Critics, however, have pointed out that data centers use significant amounts of energy and offer fewer permanent jobs than the temporary work generated when the facilities are under construction.

5:22 p.m. update: The House sent to Gov. Jared Polis, passing the sole surviving legislation that would allow Coloradans to sue federal agents over civil rights violations.

The bill applies only to federal agents operating in immigration enforcement, and it seeks to plug a unique hole in state and federal law that offers only limited legal recourse against federal-rights violators. It passed the House on a party-line 41-22 vote.

Still, the measure faces an uncertain future. Polis’ office backed a broader bill, which would’ve allowed lawsuits against any federal agent. But that bill died at its first hearing earlier this week, after facing opposition from prosecutors, Attorney General Phil Weiser and local government groups.

That bill’s broader approach likely might have given it a better chance of surviving a likely legal challenge from the Trump administration, which has successfully sued over legislation like SB-5 elsewhere.

In a statement, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama noted the governor’s support for the broader bill because it “would have protected all constitutional rights in every instance.” He said SB-5 “protects constitutional rights only in limited situations,” and Polis planned to “review the final version of the bill, while keeping in mind the legal issues associated with the legislation.”

4:24 p.m. update: The Senate gave initial support to — a gambit to allow the state to count a recent over-refund given to taxpayers against future budget revenue limits — and immediately triggered a lawsuit threat today from the conservative activist organization Advance Colorado.

The bill would free up this upcoming fiscal year, which will run from July 1 to June 30, 2027, and $153 million the next fiscal year. Lawmakers argue the refund issued for the 2024-2025 fiscal year did not take into account losses to state revenue due to the federal tax changes enacted last summer. This bill would allow them to, in effect, count that overpayment against future refunds due under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

The budgeting maneuver ran into immediate concerns among legislative staff, however. The Joint Budget Committee staff running the bill because of legal risks it posed.

Advance Colorado, which frequently is a conservative foil to the Democratic-controlled state government, stepped in to provide that legal risk today. (See also Advance’s running of a natural gas ballot initiative that Democrats are responding to, below.) The organization pledged to file a lawsuit over the budget and that specific bill.

“The state cannot attempt to fix its budget issues on the backs of hardworking citizens who are owed their TABOR refunds by law,” Advance Colorado President Michael Fields said in a statement. “Refusing to follow the Colorado constitution for monetary benefit is unacceptable, and we will defend TABOR in court or at the ballot box whenever the government tries to take money that belongs to the people.”

Senate sponsors Sens. Jeff Bridges and Judy Amabile offered little preamble or debate of the bill when it was heard this morning. It’s a key piece to closing the $1.5 billion budget deficit and meeting the state’s constitutional requirement for a balanced budget. Shortly after the debate, Gov. Jared Polis signed the budget into law.

3:30 p.m. update: Days after moving to kneecap one potential fall ballot measure, lawmakers are preparing to introduce legislation that would blunt another proposed ballot initiative — one that would give .

The exact text of the bill has not been released, and it was still being drafted early this afternoon. But the Democratic lawmakers backing it said their proposal would add definitions and “guardrails” to Initiative 177, a two-sentence constitutional amendment that, if placed on the ballot and passed, would give the state’s residents the right to buy natural gas for cooking or heating. It would also give gas producers and utilities the right to sell the product to homes and businesses.

“There are a variety of potential implications from a ballot measure that is so poorly defined,” House Speaker Julie McCluskie told reporters, “and it is really our goal to combat any of those dangerous and concerning outcomes if the ballot measure makes it. Now more than ever, it is not the time to play politics with our energy environment and with our energy partners.”

The initiative, which has not yet qualified for the ballot, is backed by the conservative group Advance Colorado. The proposal has threatened to rip open a two-year-old armistice between environmental groups and the oil and gas industry, which had mutually agreed to pause their ballot and legislative conflicts.

In response to Advance’s proposal, that would hold oil and gas companies liable for various environmental damages. A fourth proposal from the environmental group would ban utilities from charging customers for pipeline extensions or decommissioning costs.

Kennedy-Ezra Kastle, spokesperson for the group, said it “remains to be seen” if Conservation Colorado withdraws its ballot measures. Kelly Nordini, the group’s CEO, was part of a governor’s office news release Thursday making a “renewed commitment” to the 2024 armistice. Advance was not part of that deal.

But McCluskie and other Democratic lawmakers said the group, which has wielded significant influence over the legislature and the state through its ballot campaigns, should respect the truce reached between the energy industry and the environmentalist community.

“Advance Colorado may not have been part of it,” said Sen. Lisa Cutter, a Jefferson County Democrat, “but certainly when you get such a broad group of stakeholders from all sides of an issue together, working in good faith to make sound policy — to have someone put out an ill-conceived ballot measure, whether or not they’re part of the deal, it seems like a bad faith effort.”

In a statement, Advance Colorado President Michael Fields said he’d seen a draft of the bill and that he didn’t believe it would impact the ballot measure.

“Our measure is going into the Colorado Constitution,” he wrote. “And the constitution obviously supersedes any statute. Our measure is simply about lowering energy costs for Coloradans. We believe people should be able to use natural gas for cooking and heating their homes.”

Fields is correct that the bill would attempt to set statutory limits on what could be a constitutional amendment. McCluskie said she hadn’t thought about potential legal challenges, should both the bill and the ballot measure pass. But she and other lawmakers said the legislature could weigh in on constitutional rights, like the Second Amendment.

“The legislature has had obligations, and courts have accepted that we’re able to legislate to the expectations of how that right would be expressed,” Rep. Jennifer Bacon, a Denver Democrat, said.

In a statement, Conservation Colorado criticized Fields’ ballot measure as “poorly written” and focused on “the interest of corporations.”

“Rep. Bacon’s bill is necessary and appropriate to minimize some of the risks of the initiative, which could increase energy costs, undermine property rights, and endanger public safety,” Nordini, the group’s CEO, said.

The legislature’s effort to neuter Initiative 177 comes a week after Democratic lawmakers unveiled a bill to curb another ballot measure that’s in the signature-gathering phase. That proposal, , would require that the state direct revenue collected from transportation-related sources only to road transportation.

drafted by lawmakers would shift state spending to other obligations while cutting the gas tax, making room for other spending under the spending cap imposed by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

1:40 p.m. update: Gov. Jared Polis signed into law the final state budget of his tenure this afternoon, a $46.8 billion spending plan that required some $1 billion in cuts to make up for changes to federal tax code and exploding costs in must-spend areas like Medicaid.

Polis hailed budget writers for preserving education funding despite making steep cuts for the third time in two years, but he chuckled when talking about healthcare cuts.

“Healthcare costs cannot go up at 10, 11% year to year, “ Polis said. “That����ap ridiculous, and what I’ve been kind of talking (about) is it����ap especially ridiculous because it����ap not like health outcomes are getting better at 10 or 11% (increases). And when health outcomes are the same, it����ap just idiocy to spend more money. When you get the same for less, you do it.”

Polis, who is term-limited from seeking reelection, did not take questions from the media at the bill-signing ceremony.

In a written follow-up statement to respond to a Denver Post question about people worried about Medicaid cuts, Polis said his office worked with disability advocates “to protect the most essential services” and highlighted efforts to expand access and funding in recent years. He warned that federal changes would put even more pressure on Medicaid in upcoming years.

“This budget required hard decisions, but we are protecting important investments in education and public safety, and slowing the growth of Medicaid to protect the sustainability of care for years to come,” Polis said.

Members of the budget-writing committee described lost sleep and tears as they wrestled with cuts, specifically those to Medicaid that would result in less coverage for low-income children. People with children and family members with severe developmental disabilities worry that cuts to their supports will mean they can’t afford to care for their loved ones.

The budget includes $17.4 billion in general fund dollars, which accounts for most of the state’s direct tax collections and its most flexible spending. The general fund increased by about $212 million compared to last year, which is less than the rising costs in Medicaid alone — meaning the state had to cut specific programs within Medicaid and elsewhere to make up the difference.

“This year was incredibly difficult and challenged each of us in a myriad of ways that put our values to the test,” said Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat who chairs the Joint Budget Committee. “It’s a zero-sum game. A dollar here means a dollar less over there.”

Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican on the committee, described “a lot of tears,” particularly when lawmakers listened to testimony from children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“That will go down for me as one of the hardest days I’ve ever had. I dropped my head so many times because I couldn’t wipe the tears out of my eyes,” he said. “This was a tough budget, and nobody won.”

Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican on the JBC who’s running for governor, highlighted a secondary bill that will require a deep dive into the state’s healthcare programs. Colorado Medicaid serves more than 1 million state residents. She called the state’s rising healthcare costs “the No. 1 that we have to consider” in any budget year.

While Polis and others celebrated that the state kept education funding at constitutionally mandated levels, Sen. Jeff Bridges pointed to a pair of that showed the state was still billions of dollars short when it came to education funding. “I don’t love this budget,” said Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat, and he called the cuts “extraordinarily painful.”

But he also praised the work of the committee and staff for the thoughtful approach to the cuts.

“We have done the least harm that is possible to do through the cuts that we have been required to make, through changes at the federal level and restrictions that we have here in place in our own constitution,” Bridges said. “That said, this has been the possible outcome.”

The state’s 100 lawmakers now have 10 days, including today and the weekend, to finish their work for the year. The nearing deadline means the Capitol will be even more abuzz than usual as lawmakers scramble to pass — or use the clock to kill — legislation. 

The fast approach of sine die (Capitol speak for last day) also means schedules will be even more tentative than usual, as deals get cut and chamber leaders try to squeeze in debate and procedural steps wherever they can.

Today

The House is scheduled to take a formal vote on a set of bills that would divorce Colorado’s tax code from some of the recent changes made by Congress to the federal tax code. In effect, they would end some state tax cuts for corporations. 

Backers hope to steer those tax collections to a fund that would mirror Colorado’s Family Affordability Tax Credit. That tax credit steered tax dollars collected above the revenue cap set by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights to low-income families — and in its first year, the program was credited with cutting childhood poverty in the state by more than a third. The state’s dire budget situation, caused in part by those federal tax changes, has left the future of the FATC program uncertain.

, , and will still need to move through the Senate before arriving at Gov. Jared Polis’ desk.

Also today, the House Finance Committee is set to hear , a measure that would limit so-called “swipe fees” on credit card transactions. That measure narrowly passed the full Senate last week. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hear , dubbed the “No Kings Act.” That bill would allow Coloradans to sue federal officials — including immigration agents — for alleged constitutional violations. It ran into early, staunch opposition from state district attorneys.

That committee is also set to hear , which seeks to further limit Colorado officials’ ability to work with federal immigration officials.

Tuesday

The much-awaited bill to update Colorado’s artificial intelligence regulations is set to have its first hearing in the Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee on Tuesday afternoon. 

The proposal would overhaul antidiscrimination AI protections that were passed into law in 2024, but have not yet gone into effect amid a wave of opposition from Polis and interest groups. Prior attempts to update the 2024 law have been some of the most controversial efforts in the legislature, leading to high drama at both the end of the 2025 regular session and earning a place in the governor’s call for a special session last summer.

Also Tuesday, the House Transportation, Housing and Local Government Committee will hear , which seeks to neutralize proposed ballot Initiative 175. That ballot initiative, backed by the construction industry, would require the state to pay for more road projects; Democratic leadership in the legislature contends that it would, in effect, gut other state services, such as education and healthcare, by mandating more funding for roads.

Wednesday

The Senate Health and Human Services Committee will hear , which would require public and private colleges to stock abortion pills in their campus pharmacies. That measure already cleared the House.

That committee is also set to hear , which would prevent psychologists, counselors, social workers, therapists and others from using AI to provide direct therapy to clients, to make treatment plans, or to detect emotional or mental states. That bill has also already cleared the House.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hear , a measure that would lower the severity of charges, from first-degree murder to second-degree, for a killing committed via “extreme indifference.”

First-degree murder charges carry the penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The second-degree murder charge, officially classified as a class 2 felony with an extraordinary risk of harm, carries an average prison sentence of 17 years, according to nonpartisan legislative analysts.

The bill would also make it so that prosecutors could consider how a person was driving a motor vehicle when they consider charging someone with criminally negligent homicide. Under the bill, a driver who kills someone while texting could face the same charge.