The expenses show former Superintendent Christopher Smith — whose travel drew scrutiny in recent months — isn’t the only frequent-flying K-12 leader in metro Denver.

His peers at the Denver, Jefferson County, Aurora and Douglas County school districts have also had the chance to accrue miles in the past two years as they traveled to places such as Breckenridge, New Orleans and Helsinki, Finland, the expenditures showed.

It’s not unusual for K-12 district leaders to travel to conferences across the U.S. to receive professional development, but it’s becoming “increasingly more common” for superintendents to undertake international travel, said Melissa Gibson, executive director for the .

“Professional learning has always been a priority and, frankly, should be a priority,” she said. “…A lot of the highest quality conferences really occur at the national level.”

The expenditures reviewed by The Post covered a range of costs, including the superintendents’ airfare, mileage, meals, hotels and other travel expenses for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 fiscal years.

The travel costs for each superintendent reflect a small portion of each district����ap budget, but come as K-12 systems are tightening spending and closing schools amid declining enrollment and other financial pressures.

“It just sounds like a lot of money when schools are laying off teachers,” said Jane Feldman, an ethics consultant who previously was executive director of the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission, of the superintendents’ travel expenses. She is also chair of the. “…It’s a lot given the current economic pinch that all governments are under.”

Among the state’s five largest districts, Superintendent Alex Marrero spent the most money — $37,433 — on travel to conferences, including to Helsinki and Shanghai, China, documents show.

Marrero’s travel appears to exceed similar trips taken by his predecessors.

Former DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg spent at least $8,927 traveling to conferences during his final two years leading Colorado’s largest K-12 district — although records for him were incomplete. Susana Córdova, who preceded Marrero, spent less than $5,000 on travel as her tenure overlapped with the pandemic.

“It is important for the superintendent to also collaborate with, and learn from, other similar districts nationwide for the benefit of our students,” spokesman Bill Good said in a statement. “As such, travel is an expected and endorsed part of the superintendent����ap role and has been included in each of his contracts.”

Marrero traveled abroad to attend conferences held by the , an organization that Good said has a long history with DPS. Boasberg also attended conferences hosted by the organization, he said.

outgoing Superintendent Tracy Dorland spent the least amount of money — $6,408.53 — of the five metro Denver leaders, The Post found.

DPS and Jeffco Public Schools are the state’s largest and second-largest K-12 districts, respectively. They each operate a roughly $1 billion budget.

Superintendent Michael Giles and Superintendent Erin Kane spent $29,039 and $25,212, respectively, on travel during the same time period.

Smith, who previously ran Cherry Creek Schools, spent $23,499 on travel to conferences before he resigned in January.

An outside investigation found that Smith and his wife, Brenda Smith, the district����ap former human resources director, likely violated district policy by charging Cherry Creek Schools for costs of events they did not attend or only partially attended.

The district fired Brenda Smith earlier this month, citing multiple policy violations related to travel and contracts. The outside investigation did not find the Smiths violated district policy by accepting paid trips to Brazil and Guatemala, but ethics experts told The Post likely violated a state law that prohibits government officials from accepting gifts that can influence their decision-making.

The then- superintendent and his wife, the district����ap chief human resources officer, extended a work trip and joined other guests of a conference in visiting the centuries-old city during the peak Halloween season. The excursion to the city, which is known for its Baroque architecture, cobbled streets and surrounding volcanoes, was arranged and paid for by the American School of Guatemala, which also footed the bill for the Smiths’ entire trip to the conference in nearby Guatemala City.

“We would be happy to go to Antigua,” Brenda Smith wrote in an email to school officials when asked if she and her husband consented to the trip. “It sounds like a beautiful place!”

But the international school has a connection that ethics experts say raises questions about it paying for the Smiths’ trip: The school is a client of , whose executives, David Palumbo and Richard Boerner, ran the conference that week.

The businessmen already knew the Smiths well. The couple had signed off on nearly $3 million worth of contracts a year earlier, when Cherry Creek Schools hired Education Accelerated to help the district create a teacher residency program.

The school paid at least $2,149 for both Christopher and Brenda Smith to travel to Guatemala, including for their plane tickets and hotel rooms, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Denver Post via a request.

The Smiths’ travel to Guatemala, which has not been reported before, was one of at least two paid international trips the couple accepted after Cherry Creek Schools began working with Education Accelerated three years ago. Though they had traveled on multiple work trips involving Palumbo and Boerner, including domestically, their journey to Guatemala and another trip to Brazil are notable because — unlike the others — they were paid for by international schools tied to Education Accelerated.

The travel and other connections between the Smiths and the company shed light on how Colorado’s fourth-largest school district became embroiled in a leadership scandal that former Cherry Creek employees say was enabled by the school board’s lax oversight of the superintendent.

The district, The Post found, sets few restrictions on the gifts the superintendent can accept, allowing its top official to receive payment for travel, conferences, social events and other honoraria.

The Post reviewed hundreds of pages of emails, calendar items, plane tickets, hotel reservations, social media posts and other documents that shed light on the Smiths’ travel and ties to Education Accelerated — including to Palumbo, the company’s chairman, and Boerner, the chief innovation officer.

The relationship between the Smiths, Palumbo and Boerner appears to have gone beyond a business connection, with emails suggesting personal travel between the couple and the executives during the months Cherry Creek Schools awarded contracts to Education Accelerated.

“It got to the point where it is the tail wagging the dog, because the superintendent didn’t have a lot of check and balance with the board,” said Jennifer Churchfield, a former Cherry Creek school board member who has called for more oversight of the superintendent in recent months.

As the ties between Education Accelerated and Cherry Creek Schools grew, Palumbo also began seeking business with a second metro-Denver school district, emails show. eventually hired the firm, along with , another company run by Palumbo and Boerner.

In Cherry Creek, the acceptance of the paid trips to Guatemala and Brazil by Christopher and Brenda Smith appear to have violated that prohibits government employees from receiving a “gift of substantial value” that could influence their decision-making, ethics experts told The Post.

K-12 school districts, which receive billions of dollars of taxpayer money statewide, are largely left to govern themselves when it comes to ethical concerns, such as gifts, paid travel and other potential conflicts of interest.

Neither the nor the state’s has the ability to step in. Instead, the responsibility falls on local school boards, unless the violation is severe enough to involve law enforcement, experts said.

“The remedies there are political if (school boards) fail to do their due diligence in policing their own,” said Don Mayer, a professor of the practice of business ethics and legal studies at the University of Denver.

An attorney for Christopher and Brenda Smith pushed back on assertions that the Smiths’ travel to Guatemala was an ethical violation and denied that the paid trips influenced the couple’s decision to award Education Accelerated contracts.

“Absolutely not,” said the attorney, Tony Leffert.

He defended the Smiths’ interactions with Palumbo and Boerner, saying they were reflective of how vendors and districts operate in the education industry.

“This is how people do business,” Leffert said. “That����ap not a conflict of interest.”

The marriage of the top Cherry Creek officials had attracted some notice within the district. Christopher and Brenda Smith were married before either worked in the central office. Brenda Smith, who was first hired in 2019, began reporting to a deputy superintendent after the board hired her husband two years later, according to a 2022 district memo.

Christopher Smith resigned in January, just as the district was starting to face public scrutiny of his leadership. Neither he nor the school board has publicly given a reason for his departure. In early February, Brenda Smith was placed on paid administrative leave.

In the wake of the former superintendent’s departure, the district hired an outside law firm, , to investigate business travel expenses and vendor contracts approved by Christopher and Brenda Smith.

The investigation report hasn’t been released. But the firm found that “a preponderance of the evidence makes it more likely than not that Brenda Smith, and her husband former Superintendent Chris Smith, violated district policy in regard to their travel expenses and relationships with particular vendors,” according to a source briefed on the report who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the document hadn’t been made public.

The Board of Education and Interim Superintendent Jennifer Perry announced Friday, as The Post was preparing to publish this story, that the district had terminated Brenda Smith’s employment because of the investigation’s findings.

“The board did not have access to Chris Smith’s calendar and we were not aware of any trips that were paid for by vendors with contracts with the district,” Cherry Creek board President Anne Egan said in a statement. “Additionally, the terms of Chris Smith’s contract required him to notify the board in writing of all travel. That did not occur.”

The school board also launched an investigation into whether Education Accelerated overbilled the district for monthly travel costs and other reimbursements. Cherry Creek has since terminated any outstanding contracts with the company.

Palumbo, Boerner and Education Accelerated CEO Alicia Densford did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Post in recent weeks, including a list of detailed questions.

International travel raises questions

The Smiths arrived in Guatemala City on a Monday in late October. They spent seven days in the country, arriving two days before the conference and leaving two days after, according to plane tickets and itineraries reviewed by The Post.

Brenda Smith’s schedule showed she expected to spend the second day of the trip meeting with administrators of the , including the finance and HR directors. Christopher Smith was set to get a campus tour and other activities, documents showed.

The American School of Guatemala invited the Smiths to the country for a seminar of sorts that Education Accelerated refers to as a “think tank.” The event focused on apprenticeships, preparing students for postsecondary education and workforce readiness, said former board member Terry Bates.

“The hosting campus includes both a high school and a community college model, with pathways similar to those being developed in Cherry Creek,” Bates, who resigned April 24, said in an May 12 email. “The school specifically sought Cherry Creek’s guidance on building partnerships and advancing these types of programs.”

Cherry Creek Schools’ partnership with Education Accelerated developed the district����ap Aspiring Educator Pathway, which gives people an alternative way to obtain a teachers license by having schools train participants in their own classrooms while the students earn a bachelor’s degree from the .

The Guatemala event began on the third day of the Smiths’ trip to the country and lasted three days, itineraries showed. The Smiths went to Antigua on the Saturday after the event.

If employees decide to stay any extra days while on a work trip, they should pay for that additional time themselves, said Jane Feldman, an ethics consultant who previously was executive director of Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission. She is also chair of the .

“That����ap a gift,” she said. “It takes it out of ‘this is a conference that is relevant to your job’ and puts it in the boondoggle category.”

Documents do not detail what the couple did while they were in Antigua, but they show the American School of Guatemala booked the educators a room at the five-star hotel. The room cost $257 for the night, according to the reservation.

The Smiths traveled on a bus to Antigua with other guests of the think tank, but they did not stay overnight, said Leffert, their attorney, adding that the couple went back to Guatemala City. He did not know who paid for their accommodation for their final night.

Leffert provided an email to The Post from the school, dated May 13, that confirmed the Smiths did not stay at the hotel in Antigua. (The school did not respond to the newspaper’s request for an interview.)

“They had a flight to catch out the next morning, so they did not stay there,” he said.

The Guatemala trip was the second time in two years that the Smiths traveled internationally to attend a “think tank” event facilitated by Palumbo.

The Post reported in March that Christopher Smith traveled to Brazil in April 2024 for a think tank put on by Palumbo and paid for by , which Boerner was superintendent of at the time.

Ahead of the Brazil trip, Boerner emailed Christopher Smith and told him the school could pay for his travel expenses, including if he decided to extend his stay through the weekend to “enjoy São Paulo.”

Brenda Smith also attended the conference in Brazil, the Post found. The international school paid for her trip, Leffert said.

The Guatemala and Brazil trips posed potential ethical violations because they involved foreign travel and the acceptance of payment for that travel by a client of a company that does business with Cherry Creek Schools, ethics experts said.

“There seems to be a likely conflict of interest here; public officials have a duty to the public not to be influenced by any personal benefits a supplier might offer,” said Mayer, the DU professor.

The think tank events appear regularly in the Smiths’ and Cherry Creek Schools’ history with Palumbo, Boerner and Education Accelerated. The district hosted at least one of the events, The Post found.

The think tanks bring together educators, administrators and other “thought leaders” to build a community and consider “what could be, what should be, and boldly, what will be,” Palumbo and Boerner wrote in a.

“The Think Tank concept acknowledges that education’s most complex challenges need thought space,” Palumbo and Boerner wrote. “As the world grows more complex and tomorrow’s careers are uncertain, relevance for schools means embracing characteristics such as adaptivity and agility and pushing themselves to be forward-thinking.”

In February 2025, Palumbo and Boerner organized at an conference in Washington, D.C., which was also attended by Christopher and Brenda Smith.

Cherry Creek Schools paid at least $2,992 for the couple to attend the conference, including their hotel, meals and airfare, expenditures reviewed by The Post show.

Bates defended the Smiths’ travel, which he said was not connected to any contract discussions with Education Accelerated. School board members, Bates said, were also aware of the trip and district staff stayed in touch with the Smiths when they were in Guatemala.

“It is also important to note that this type of travel is consistent with common practice among school district leaders, both within Cherry Creek and across the country,” Bates said. “Ongoing engagement with innovative programs and global peers is an important part of maintaining relevance and effectiveness in a rapidly evolving educational landscape.”

Bates, who was elected in November, resigned last month during a meeting in which the board revealed he made racist remarks.

“Terry Bates and his wife, Kelly, who was on the board from 2017-2025, are suggesting they had information that other board members did not,” Egan, the school board president, said in a statement. “That raises questions about Mr. Bates’ sources and the timing of these comments.”

Other travel, connections with company

By the time Christopher and Brenda Smith landed in Guatemala, they had known Palumbo for roughly three years.

The pair met the businessman on a cruise in the fall of 2022 — a story both the Smiths and Palumbo told Cherry Creek employees after Education Accelerated began working with the district, former staff members told The Post.

“There was definitely a personal relationship there,” said Jill Schneider, a former Cherry Creek Schools HR employee.

Months after the cruise, Cherry Creek Schools hired Education Accelerated to conduct a study on the feasibility of a teacher residency program. It was the first of at least five deals between the district and the company, which, if fully realized, would have paid Education Accelerated more than $3 million through 2028.

After the district’s Aspiring Educator Pathway was launched, Christopher Smith extolled its promise.

“I do believe this is going to change the way we educate teachers to be teachers across the country,” he told The Post for a story on the program in 2024.

On June 11 of that same year, Brenda Smith had signed the first of two Education Accelerated contracts that received school board approval. The deal was for $368,000 and continued the work the district and company began a year earlier.

Two weeks later, Palumbo emailed Christopher and Brenda Smith and invited them to Pittsburgh to watch the Steelers play in his hometown in October of that year, emails show. One of the Smiths’ sons played soccer for the University of Denver, and the team played in Pittsburgh the night after the Steelers challenged the Cowboys in that game.

“We could do a two fer,” Palumbo wrote to the couple.

When asked about the email exchange, Leffert said Palumbo never showed up to the soccer game.“They did business together and they were friendly,” he said.

On a Thursday morning in October 2024, Boerner emailed Christopher and Brenda Smith and told them about a new company, TruFit Talent, that he was forming with friends as a “new ‘way’ to consider recruitment.” (Palumbo is chairman of the company, according to TruFit����ap website.)

Boerner included a link to a podcast about TruFit in his email, which was sent four days after the Steelers game in October 2024.

“It����ap only 10 mins, so hopefully you can sneak a few mins to listen. Perhaps on the plane…LOL,” the now-CEO of TruFit Talent wrote. “Anyways, the company we are forming is called TruFit Talent. You guys are so well positioned to offer your thoughts and frankly as things get rolling I was hoping, Brenda, you might be willing to sit on our advisory board for our startup.”

Brenda Smith responded to Boerner a few hours later.

“Of course! I will listen to it today!” she said. “We are developing our comprehensive learning plan which starts with recruitment so I’m sure I’ll learn more great information to incorporate into Creek! See you in two days!”

“Awesome, thanks Brenda!” Boerner emailed back. “See ya’ beachside soon :)”

Documents reviewed by The Post do not show where the Smiths traveled after the email exchange with Boerner. Their calendars and Cherry Creek Schools’ travel records don’t show either travel with Boener that weekend or a work trip.

Both Boerner and Leffert have denied that Brenda Smith served on TruFit����ap advisory board.

Twelve days after Boerner and Brenda Smith’s email exchange, Christopher Smith approved Education Accelerated’s largest contract, a multiyear deal worth $2.6 million.

Feldman, the ethics expert, said Christopher and Brenda Smith should have disclosed their relationship with Palumbo and Boerner to the school board because the connection could have altered the directors’ decision to rubber-stamp the contracts approved in June and October of 2024.

“Frankly, they shouldn’t have been involved at all in awarding the contract,” she said of the Smiths. “… If this was a no-bid contract, it����ap inappropriate and it appears to be illegal.”

The contracts, in fact, did not undergo a bidding process, which would have made Education Accelerated compete against other firms for the job. Cherry Creek Schools spokeswoman Abbe Smith said the work was considered professional services, a category that doesn’t require a competitive process.

But she added: “Former Superintendent Smith administered the contract and it did not run through the typical procurement or legal review process.”

No-bid contracts need rigorous vetting so school districts know what they are getting in the deal, said Mayer, the DU professor.

The two contracts approved by the board in 2024 were part of board meetings’ consent agendas, which directors usually vote on at the recommendation of staff and without discussion.

Churchfield, the former board member, said the contracts for Education Accelerated, especially the multiyear deal for $2.6 million, should never have been part of the consent agenda. Instead, she said, district staff should have singled out the proposal so that directors could discuss the contract.

“If the board didn’t necessarily catch that, it should have been Chris’s responsibility to highlight that and have a conversation,” Chruchfield said. “… These types of things were massive lapses in how business should be conducted at Cherry Creek.”

Lawmaker: ‘I would be mortified’ as a taxpayer

The Smiths’ travel to Brazil occurred after Cherry Creek awarded smaller contracts to Education Accelerated. The Smiths approved the two largest contracts, which were worth about $3 million combined, after the trip, documents show.

Cherry Creek Schools’ work with the company was well-cemented by the time the Smiths traveled to Guatemala last year. The district also awarded a $350,000 contract — which has since been terminated — to EA FLGA Campus Partners LLC in July 2025, three months before the Guatemala trip.

That entity has some ties to Education Accelerated. is a real estate developer based in Washington, D.C. The firm’s Executive Vice President Fred Greene III, is an operating partner with Education Accelerated, according to the company’s website.

The district hired FLGA as part of a plan to potentially make employee housing part of the teacher residency program, documents showed.

The company’s work was in the early stages, looking at feasibility, land use considerations and other planning, when the contract ended, Greene said in an email.

“As is common with initiatives of this nature, the work was iterative and exploratory and had not advanced to project authorization, final design or implementation,” he said.

He added: “Neither I individually nor FLGA as an entity is a formal partner of Education Accelerated. We did however collaborate as it related to work at CCSD surrounding the exploration of a district workforce housing initiative.”

Ethics experts said the Smiths’ travel and the Education Accelerated contracts raise questions because state law prohibits local government employees, including those at K-12 districts, from accepting a gift, which “would tend improperly to influence a reasonable person in his position to depart from the faithful and impartial discharge of public duties …”

Local officials are also “discouraged” from accepting a gift after they have already rewarded a person with an official action, such as a contract, according to state law.

But there’s a gap between the statute and the ability to enforce the law when it comes to K-12 districts. School systems don’t fall under the purview of the state Independent Ethics Commission, which places on the value of gifts that government officials might receive, such as paid travel.

The commission doesn’t oversee districts because the state constitution says jurisdiction applies only to municipalities and counties, said Dino Ioannides, the executive director of the commission.

State Rep. Tammy Story has tried repeatedly to pass legislation that would place K-12 school districts under the ethics commission’s purview. Had she been successful, residents could have filed a complaint with the commission against Cherry Creek Schools over the Smiths’ ties with Education Accelerated and the district����ap contracts with the company, she said.

“If I was a taxpayer in Cherry Creek, I would be mortified that public tax dollars were being used in this way,” Story said. “That just seems like a significant conflict of interest.”

Oversight of the superintendent and employees falls to the local school board since the commission doesn’t have jurisdiction, ethics experts said.

Cherry Creek Schools has its own , which is heavily influenced by state law. Still, it allows the superintendent to accept payment for travel to conferences, for social functions and for speeches.

By comparison, , the state’s largest district, explicitly prohibits employees, including Superintendent Alex Marrero, from accepting gifts of value from companies and organizations that conduct business with the district.

“It surprises me that a large district wouldn’t have pretty strict (policies),” Feldman said.

A $15,000 a month retainer fee

In June 2024, Palumbo emailed a superintendent at a neighboring school district to let him know he was in town.

He was persistently recruiting Aurora Public Schools’ business, including proposing a possible $15,000 monthly retainer to become a consultant to Superintendent Michael Giles, documents showed. Palumbo also asked Giles to meet in person when he was already in town meeting with staff at Cherry Creek Schools — which would later reimburse the businessman for those trips to the Denver metro, documents showed.

It����ap unclear if Giles, who previously worked at Cherry Creek Schools, ever hired Palumbo on a monthly retainer. APS did sign a $300,000 memorandum of understanding with Education Accelerated last year that ended in August. The district also worked with TruFit Talent until January.

The company helped APS with leadership development and in its hiring of the district’s chief information and technology officer and its talent acquisition coordinator, APS spokesman Corey Christiansen said in a statement.

“Education Accelerated and TruFit provided strong work and served as thoughtful partners as we transitioned new leaders into our school district,” Christiansen added.

As recently as April 7, Education Accelerated featured APS prominently on the company’s website. But the company has since deleted all but one mention of the district. 

The lawsuit, filed Friday, is the latest front in the intraparty fight over an October legislative retreat. Derrick Blanton’s suit asks a judge in Denver to order Sen. Lindsey Daugherty and Rep. Sean Camacho to turn over records related to the Colorado Opportunity Caucus and a retreat the group organized in Vail.

According to the lawsuit, Camacho, Daugherty and the Opportunity Caucus — a group of more than two dozen Democratic lawmakers who are generally more moderate on business issues — denied Blanton’s requests for records about the retreat, arguing they had no documents responsive to his request.

Blanton’s attorney, Scott Moss, wrote in the suit that Camacho and Daugherty — who co-chair the Opportunity Caucus — and the caucus itself should have records about the costs, fundraising and attendance of the retreat. He pointed to a grid he obtained elsewhere, which he said shows that the caucus charged organizations between $25,000 and $100,000 to attend the event and give presentations to the lawmakers in attendance.

“It’s obviously a lie to claim you held a multi-day retreat with overnight stays and meeting space at a luxury mountain resort without generating any records of payment,” Moss said in an interview Friday.

In a statement Friday, Daugherty said that she, Camacho and the caucus turned over the records “we were legally required to provide.”

“This frivolous lawsuit only validates the initial reasons for forming the Opportunity Caucus — to focus on collaboration and tackle the big problems on behalf of the people we serve — not performative politics,” she wrote. “It����ap unclear who benefits from this lawsuit moving forward besides Mr. Moss; it����ap certainly not Coloradans.”

The suit renews a simmering fight between progressive groups and the Opportunity Caucus, which formed in early 2025 with the help of One Main Street, a dark money group that financially supported the campaigns of several caucus members.

Last year, Colorado Common Cause — which Moss also represents — filed ethics complaints against almost every lawmaker who attended the retreat, accusing them of violating a constitutional provision that generally prohibits lawmakers from accepting gifts worth more than $75. The state ethics commission then began an investigation.

The caucus has refused to disclose how much organizations paid to attend the retreat, nor has it said how much it raised from the event.

The new suit invoking the open-records law, often referred to as CORA, asks for the judge to order production of the records — if, as Moss contends, additional documents exist — and, by extension, to declare that the Opportunity Caucus is subject to open records requests.

That’s an untested question: The state Supreme Court has ruled that caucuses are covered by the state’s open-meetings law, said Jeff Roberts, the executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. But whether they’re subject to CORA hasn’t been addressed by the courts, he said.

Colorado’s ethics commission voted unanimously Tuesday to advance 17 complaints against a group of state lawmakers, nearly all of whom attended a private Vail retreat funded in part by a dark money group.

The Independent Ethics Commission determined that the complaints were “nonfrivolous,” a first step in the ethics process that means the complaints will advance and be investigated further. The commission discussed the complaints, which are confidential, in closed-door deliberations and then voted to advance them in a bloc. They otherwise provided no comment on the complaints or their deliberations.

The vote came after negotiations to pull back the complaints, urged on by the head of the Colorado Democratic Party, failed to reach an agreement, and the commission’s decision to now investigate the allegations sparked warring statements Tuesday between the state Democratic Party, which defended the caucus’s leader and criticized the group that filed the complaints, and critics of the caucus, one of whom called the state party chair “shockingly two-faced.”

The complaints were filed by Colorado Common Cause, a government watchdog group, earlier this month. The group alleged that members of the legislative violated a state ban on receiving gifts when they attended a private October retreat in Vail, the hotel rooms for which were paid for by One Main Street, a prominent political group that doesn’t disclose its donors.

In its complaints, Common Cause asked the ethics board to weigh whether the lawmakers violated the gift ban, and the group proposed penalties that included fines, a more extensive investigation and the equivalent of a public reprimand. The group’s executive director praised the decision in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

“Most importantly, this decision affirms the power of the Independent Ethics Commission as an avenue for public transparency and accountability, that can act when public officials need to be held accountable,” Aly Belknap wrote. “No one is above the law or the state constitution. The trust the public places in our leaders when we elect them to office is sacred and not to be taken lightly.”

Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, an Arvada Democrat and the chair of the Opportunity Caucus, sharply criticized Common Cause in a statement from the caucus Tuesday afternoon. The caucus called the ethics complaints factually inaccurate, and the lawmakers accused Common Cause of trying to smear legislators and raise money off of the ethics process.

“This is a grotesque, intentionally orchestrated miscarriage of justice,” Daugherty wrote. She likened Common Cause to President Donald Trump for attacking Democrats and said Coloradans should reject their efforts to “score cheap political points.”

After the commission determines a complaint is nonfrivolous, the commission then notifies the person who’s subject to the complaint, executive director Dino Ioannides said Tuesday. Generally, the subject of the complaint has 30 days to respond. The commission then directs staff to conduct an investigation, provide a report of their findings to both sides and set a hearing.

Ioannides said there wasn’t a firm timeline for how long that process may take.

“Considering we got 17 new nonfrivolous (cases), that’s a whole new ball of wax for us in terms of coordination,” he said.

The Vail retreat was attended by more than a dozen Democratic members of the Opportunity Caucus, an invite-only group of generally more-moderate lawmakers. The event was part educational, part fundraiser: Lobbyists were also present, and organizations were required to pay a fee to attend. The Opportunity Caucus has not disclosed how much it raised or how it will use the money, and the retreat sparked criticism from other Democratic lawmakers.

A complaint was also filed against Rep. Shannon Bird, who helped launch the Opportunity Caucus earlier this year but has since stepped away from leading it. Bird, who is running for Congress, filed a motion to dismiss the complaint against her on Tuesday. Her campaign previously said she did not attend the retreat or play any role in planning it, and her legal filings note that the attorney who filed the complaints on behalf of Common Cause had endorsed one of Bird’s congressional opponents.

“We filed a motion to dismiss because this complaint is as false as it is absurd,” Bird spokeswoman Eve Zhurbinskiy said in a statement. “Shannon Bird was not at the event in question, she was not Chair of the Caucus, and she, quite literally, had nothing to do with it.”

Common Cause dismissed the complaint against Bird on Thursday, two days after the commission’s initial decision.

In a separate statement, Shad Murib, the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, defended Daugherty, and he referred to Common Cause as a dark money group. He said the Opportunity Caucus had taken “good-faith steps to address the situation … by making a sizable contribution to the Food Bank of the Rockies.”

He accused Common Cause of “trying to extract political concessions from lawmakers,” and he castigated them for being “ethically questionable” and using “gross tactics,” including by filing a complaint against Bird.

In an interview, Murib declined to comment on the private retreat at the center of the controversy and said the ethics commission should be left to decide whether it violated the law. But he criticized Common Cause and accused it of using the ethics process to raise money. He also criticized One Main Street and said it should stop participating in Democratic primary races.

Scott Moss, the attorney who filed the complaints on behalf of Common Cause, in turn blasted Murib, who he said had previously “implored” Common Cause to reach a settlement with the legislators. Moss said the food bank donation was for $25,000 and that Common Cause had initially suggested the contribution as part of settlement discussions with the Opportunity Caucus.

“An entity donating $25,000 of its own funds in no way remedies the violation of 17 legislators accepting illegal gifts,” he said. He criticized Murib as a “willing dupe of the corrupt” and accused him of being “shockingly two-faced.”

According to copies of draft settlement agreements obtained by The Post, Common Cause offered to delay Tuesday’s proceedings and later withdraw the complaints, so long as the Opportunity Caucus made the food bank donation and undertook steps to become more transparent, including by disclosing its donors. In a counteroffer, the lawmakers’ attorneys nixed the donation request but said legislators would form a new nonprofit entity to oversee the caucus and that the caucus would disclose its donors.

The caucus’s counteroffer also required Common Cause to issue a press release stating that legislators had done nothing illegal and that all of the complaints had been withdrawn.

Murib said he had intervened — in urging the sides to reach a settlement and in his statement criticizing Common Cause — because he wanted to ensure party unity.

“My interest is in the Democratic Party,” he said. “When we are divided and when we are fighting with each other, and if it appears to be for political gain, that just divides our political coalition.”

Colorado Common Cause, a government watchdog group, made public its allegations in the first of several complaints set to be filed to the state’s this week. The documents will focus on members of the Opportunity Caucus, a select group of Democratic lawmakers, and their ties to One Main Street, a political group that does not disclose most of its donors but has spent extensively to elect what it describes as “pragmatic” Democrats over more left-wing opponents.

The complaints allege that the legislators violated a state constitutional prohibition on accepting gifts of more than $75 when the caucus’s leader sought — and received — a $25,000 donation from One Main Street to cover hotel rooms at a private caucus retreat last month in Vail.

“You can’t accept as little as $75 of purchases within a year,” Scott Moss, an attorney representing Common Cause, said in an interview Wednesday. “And hotel rooms at a luxury resort hotel that cost several hundred dollars a night are gifts that every public servant knows you just can’t accept.”

A complaint will be filed against every member who attended the event, Moss said, with the first two submitted Wednesday against the caucus’s chair, Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, and its one-time co-chair, Rep. Shannon Bird.

Bird, who is running for Congress, has not been a leader of the caucus since August, did not attend the retreat and “played zero role in planning it,” her campaign manager, Eve Zhurbinskiy, said in a statement.

“This complaint is baseless and dishonest,” Zhurbinskiy wrote.

In a statement Wednesday, Daugherty said the caucus was confident the complaint “will be dismissed as the political theater it is.”

“For several weeks, the state legislature’s Opportunity Caucus has been the target of coordinated attacks for following the standards and laws that have been in place for years,” she said. “Make no mistake, these are the exact same standards and laws that have been followed by every other legislative caucus. The people who oppose our focus on affordability and jobs with good pay — the basic kitchen-table issues facing Colorado families — will do anything to stop us.”

Colorado Common Cause asks the five-member ethics board to determine that the caucus’s members violated the state constitution and to assess any penalties it sees fit. If the commission agrees, the complaint proposes penalties that include fines, further investigation or the equivalent of a public reprimand.

The ethics commission must first meet and determine if the allegations are “non-frivolous” and should proceed. Though it has levied fines against some prominent officials in the past, including now-U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper over a trip he took as governor, the commission rarely imposes financial penalties, said Jane Feldman, the commission’s former executive director.

The complaints center on the October summit held by the Opportunity Caucus, an invite-only group of Democratic lawmakers established earlier this year. In September, Daugherty asked the head of One Main Street to cover the costs of lawmakers’ hotel rooms. One Main Street’s executive director, Andrew Short, then asked his group’s board to swiftly approve the funds, according to an email obtained by The Post.

Short previously confirmed to The Post that his group approved the request, which he described as a donation to the caucus. One Main Street is considered a dark-money group because it does not disclose most of its donors.

While the state constitution allows some exemptions to the $75 gift limit, Common Cause alleges that the October summit doesn’t fit any of those allowances. The group argues that the summit facilitated “private interests wielding undisclosed influence over legislators, by leveraging corporate donations to procure legislator time, attention, and goodwill.”

The complaint also accuses the caucus of being a front for One Main Street that allows the group to “secretly” influence lawmakers. It points to a caucus staffer who has a One Main Street email address, as well as to One Main Street’s financial support for caucus members’ campaigns and its help in establishing the caucus itself.

Short has told The Post that One Main Street and the caucus are distinct entities that operate and raise money independently.

The retreat was an “educational” event, caucus members have said, where lawmakers held private discussions among themselves and were given presentations by lobbyists and representatives from private organizations who attended. The event was a fundraiser for the caucus, and organizations that took part paid an entry fee.

The caucus has not disclosed how much it raised, how much it cost to attend or what the lawmakers intend to do with the money they collected.

The summit was first reported last month by . When its existence became public, the event prompted criticism from other Democratic lawmakers, who accused their colleagues of “hobnobbing” with prominent lobbyists.

On Tuesday, word of the coming complaints leaked, Moss said, and Common Cause was pressured not to submit the allegations to the ethics commission. Moss declined to identify which people or groups applied that pressure.

“There have been efforts at persuasion — that everyone should just let this go because that����ap allegedly better for the Democrats,” he said. “I think that����ap a very dangerous trap that the corrupt set — the idea that you have to let corruption go or it hurts the political party. You know what actually hurts the party? Looking corrupt.”

The event was a summit earlier this month for the legislature’s “Opportunity Caucus,” held at Vail’s Sonnenalp Hotel. Nearly 20 legislators — who generally hew closer to the party’s mainstream than its more progressive wing — were invited for group discussions and educational panels featuring organizations that paid to attend the event. A number of prominent lobbyists also took part.

The hotel rooms were covered by a donation from One Main Street, a nonprofit group that doesn’t disclose most of its donors. Last year, the group supported several caucus members against more left-wing opponents in Democratic primaries that it and others viewed as an existential struggle over the party’s future.

The existence and details of the summit, by the Colorado Sun, triggered immediate criticism from other Democratic legislators, elevating simmering complaints about the caucus that had remained low-level earlier in the year. Critics, like Rep. Yara Zokaie of Fort Collins, accused the summit’s attendees of “hobnobbing with lobbyists for Xcel and the prison industrial complex,” and one ethics expert told The Denver Post this week that the circumstances of the event appeared “problematic.”

Sen. Lindsey Daugherty, an Arvada Democrat and the caucus’s chair, said the group formed earlier this year so that lawmakers could have open conversations about policy proposals in a “supportive environment.”

Echoing a national debate among Democrats for the past year, the caucus largely represents a response to concerns that the party is shifting too far to the left, crowding out ideological debate and risking — they argue — Colorado’s hefty Democratic majorities.

announcing the caucus’s founding earlier this year, Daugherty and co-founder Rep. Shannon Bird wrote that “political discourse has been dominated by extremes, leaving behind hardworking people who keep our state running. Divisive rhetoric and political theatrics have no place in the legislature when the stakes are this high.”

“We know that now more than ever, folks are really struggling to pay the bills, they’re struggling to pay rent, they can’t afford groceries, and we really want to talk about the kitchen-table issues that we feel resonate with our constituents in this state,” Daugherty said in an interview.

Several other caucus members declined to comment for this story.

One critic, Sen. Julie Gonzales of Denver, said she and other Democratic senators — who created their own group chat after the summit became public — were “appalled at the unprecedented nature of the retreat.” Sen. Janice Marchman, a Loveland Democrat, wrote on social media that she was “ashamed of the politicians I work with” who attended the event.

“This is the Democratic establishment in control of Colorado,” she wrote to describe participants.

Just as the Opportunity Caucus views itself as an effort to steer a beleaguered party into a more pragmatic, voter-focused future, its critics have cast the caucus’s existence as the sort of moderate, industry-friendly politicking that has hobbled the party’s brand.

Links with nonprofit group

The recent castigations from progressive Democrats were driven in part by the Opportunity Caucus’s ties to One Main Street. The lawmakers’ hotel stay was paid for by the group, which last year spent nearly $800,000 in largely untraceable funds to back several Opportunity Caucus members in safe Democratic primaries.

While the group has declined to reveal its donors, past support has come from select labor unions, charter school groups and business interests, like the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and Denver’s apartment association, according to tax and campaign finance filings.

To secure the Opportunity Caucus’s hotel rooms, the caucus requested $25,000 from One Main Street, according to an email that Andrew Short, its executive director, sent to the group’s board. The email was obtained by The Post.

In an interview on Wednesday, Short confirmed his group paid for the rooms. He said One Main Street was a separate entity from the caucus and that his group didn’t cover any other part of the retreat. He cast the payment as a donation and said it was similar to donations One Main Street had made to other political entities.

One Main Street did help start the caucus, he said, as part of “a need for the Democratic Party to get back to kitchen-table issues. And we provided limited startup assistance, but now they’re their own independent board. The caucus raises its own funds, manages its own operations. Our relationship is really one of shared values and collaboration.”

It’s unclear how much money the caucus raised from the early October event or what the entry fee was. Daugherty declined to discuss the event’s financing. She told the Sun that the caucus paid for the event.

Jane Feldman, an ethics consultant who previously worked for Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission, said the One Main Street donation and the event’s opaque financing likely warranted an investigation, though she cautioned that she was aware only of what had been publicly reported. Feldman currently serves as chair of , which weighs in on ethics complaints involving city government.

She pointed to a concerning a legislative women’s caucus that sought to raise money through a nonprofit partner.

In that case, the ethics commission wrote that a caucus partnering with or forming its own nonprofit — as the Opportunity Caucus and other subsets of lawmakers have done — was permissible under state ethics laws. But the commission also warned that legislators “should be careful to avoid an appearance of impropriety in the solicitation of funds.”

“I need to know more about how it was paid for and who paid for it and who was speaking,” Feldman said Tuesday about the caucus’s recent event. “But at first glance, it����ap problematic.”

Daugherty told the Sun that a lawyer attended the event to ensure it abided by state law.

Democrats’ popularity slips

The larger conflict among Democrats about the summit hits upon the uncertainty and ideological jockeying that has riven the national Democratic Party since President Donald Trump’s election win nearly a year ago returned him to office.

Polling — including some commissioned by One Main Street — has shown that Colorado Democrats’ popularity has slipped among voters, mirroring similar trends nationwide. Both caucus members and their critics have cited those data points as evidence that a fundamental change is needed within their shared party.

Though caucus members and progressive legislators had privately vented about each other and the other side’s approach throughout the year, the tension hadn’t previously devolved into open conflict, nor had it derailed policy debates in the Capitol.

But the summit, and its appearance to some as a private getaway for select legislators and lobbyists, pushed nascent disagreements into public view.

In a statement posted on social media after the retreat became public knowledge, Rep. Meg Froelich of Englewood wrote that Democrats “should not cater to corporate interests.”

In an interview, she said her statement wasn’t solely in response to the summit but was a call to arms for Democrats in general. She said voters wanted Democrats to fulfill promises and “be bold.”

Some Opportunity Caucus members felt that the more progressive voices in the party had made it more difficult for those conversations to take place, Froelich said. But that should prompt a broader discussion within the Democratic majority, she argued.

“I told them, my heart breaks for you that you don’t feel you have a voice. We have to be able to have those conversations,” Froelich said. But she said both party wings needed to unify and find a path forward together.

“This is tough,” she said. “The bottom line is, we need to wake up every morning and say, ‘How am I fighting fascism? How am I fighting authoritarianism? How am I doing right by Coloradans who are really hurting?’ And it isn’t by forming a faction that goes someplace” with high nightly hotel rates.

The commission did not levy any financial penalties against Palacio, who led Colorado Democrats from 2011 to 2017. That is because commissioners determined he had not “violated the public trust,” according to a report issued by the commission last week.

A complaint was filed against Palacio in 2021 by Defend Colorado, a conservative group, alleging he’d violated ethics rules the year before when he was hired as a consultant for Polis’ office immediately after serving as the governor’s interim chief of staff.

Palacio served as interim chief in late 2020, while the governor’s permanent chief of staff was on maternity leave. After then-chief Lisa Kaufmann returned to work in November 2020, Palacio remained on staff for the rest of the month.

He was then given a contract as a consultant beginning Dec. 1, 2020, to continue working on pandemic-related issues.

Colorado’s ethics law requires recently separated state employees to wait six months before they can be contracted by a state agency to work on anything they had previously been directly involved with, as Palacio was with pandemic efforts.

Still, the commission found that Palacio did not need to face any penalties because he had not violated the public trust. Commissioners found that he did not violate a state law barring state employees from using official acts to enrich themselves.

According to the report, Defend Colorado agreed that “Mr. Palacio’s consulting contract did not create a conflict of interest or a potential for unfair advantage in Mr. Palacio’s favor.”

In an emailed statement Friday, Palacio said the state was “confronted with a once-in-a-century pandemic” during his work with Polis’ office.

When “my state needed help, I was honored to step up and serve,” he wrote. “In moments of crisis, I have always believed it is our duty to contribute however we can, and I would hope that anyone else would do the same if called upon by their governor or president.”

In a statement, Polis spokesman Eric Maruyama said the governor’s office was “deeply grateful for (Palacio’s) exceptional contributions” and said the office was pleased that the ethics commission found that “Palacio’s actions never compromised the public trust or caused harm to the state.”

City Council is scheduled to look Tuesday at two proposals that could ease restrictions on the location of adult-oriented businesses to open more possible sites in town. Also on the agenda for a work session is discussion of putting the matter to a public vote.

But it’s unclear whether the City Council is inclined to make any changes. Members voted Aug. 6 against granting a permit to RCI Dining Services to operate an adult-oriented nightclub in a building it bought from the city for $2.4 million.

, parent company of RCI Dining Services and owner of nightclubs and sports-bar restaurants across the country, then filed a federal lawsuit claiming the city’s denial is unconstitutional.

Todd Williams, a member of the city council, said a possible change to the ordinances is to restrict adult-oriented businesses to industrial zones. He said that’s an option the city planning commission has discussed.

Williams proposed asking voters to decide whether and where sexually oriented businesses should be allowed. The mayor and another council member have recused themselves from acting on the issue because they have had relationships with RCI and want to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“I suggested that  because of the contentiousness of this particular item and the fact that two of our council members have recused themselves from voting on anything regarding RCI, it would probably be a good idea for us to have everyone in town give us their opinion on what should happen here,” Williams said.

RCI Holdings, whose businesses in the Denver area include the Diamond Cabaret strip club, said in its lawsuit filed Aug. 7 in U.S. District Court in Denver that a Central City ordinance prohibiting “sexually oriented businesses” from being within 1,000 feet of similar businesses, homes, schools, public parks and other places effectively bans adult-oriented entertainment sites.

City representatives have admitted that the restriction makes it impossible for sexually oriented businesses to get permits in Central City, according to the lawsuit. The result is a violation of the businesses’ constitutional rights of free speech and due process of law, RCI Holdings said.

The city approved the sale of the property on Main Street to RCI Holdings in 2022 knowing that an affiliated company “would operate the premises as an adult-oriented nightclub,” the lawsuit said.

Daniel Miera, city manager for Central City, said in an email Monday that under city policy, he can’t comment on litigation.

Mayor Jeremy Fey declined to comment because he has recused himself from deciding matters involving RCI Holdings. He said he recused himself to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest because of his friendship with Eric Langan, president and CEO of RCI Holdings.

In July, reported that two community members cited Fey’s personal relationship with Langan in complaints they filed against the mayor with Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission.

Mayor Pro Tem Kara Tinucci said in an email that she recused herself because her husband was a contractor at one point for RCI.

Messages were left with Langan.

When RCI Holdings closed on the $2.4 million property deal two years ago, city officials said the new business wouldn’t be a strip club. One council member said the community opposed having a strip club at the site.

The city planning commission in 2022 recommended approving two ordinances that would modify the restrictions on the location of adult-entertainment businesses to make more sites in Central City eligible for their operation. In May, city staffers also recommended adopting the changes, saying that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld limited First Amendment protections for strip clubs and a total ban on them is unconstitutional.

But in July, a city board rejected a permit for RCI Dining Services because the building is within 1,000 feet of homes. The council rejected the company’s appeal.

RCI Holdings is seeking unspecified damages for lost profits, loss of property and other costs.

Central City, about 38 miles west of Denver, is one of three historic Colorado mountain towns where gambling was legalized in 1991. The others are Cripple Creek and Black Hawk, Central City’s neighbor.

Updated at 2:30 Aug. 20 to add comments from a city council member.

An order of dismissal was filed Tuesday, following an investigation by the Enforcement Team with the Elections Division of the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. Investigators found that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support the complaint’s allegations.

“Having reviewed and considered the Motion and the contents of the file in this matter, the Designee now grants the Motion and dismisses the matter,” the dismissal order, signed by Secretary of State Chief of Staff and Strategy Michael Whitehorn, the designee, said.

Defend Colorado, a dark-money political group that funds conservative causes, filed the complaint, alleging Weiser, a Democrat, committed the state violations while on a trip to the Attorney Generals Alliance’s annual meeting at the Grand Wailea Resort in Hawaii on June 14-18, 2021.

The complaint alleged that at a June 15 fundraiser event:

• Weiser failed to report a campaign contribution
• Failed to report, or accurately report, a campaign expenditure
• Accepted a prohibited contribution
• Violated reporting and acceptance of gifts by an incumbent.

“In this case, Respondents (Weiser and his campaign — Phil Weiser for Colorado), hosted a fundraising event at the Resort and reported a $437.50 expenditure for the food and beverage consumed at the Event. Respondents provided ample evidence to verify the actual amount charged by the Resort for the Event,” the dismissal order said. “There is no evidence that Respondents incurred expenses in hosting the Event that were not reported on the campaign’s expenditure report.”

The Banquet Event Order form for the event quoted an estimated cost of $963.54, according to the dismissal order, and confirmed that there would be no “Food and Beverage Minimum” or “Meeting Room Rental.”

The event, scheduled for 45 minutes, was attended by about 30 people and included bar service for beer, bottled water, and individual pretzel snack bags, the dismissal order said. “The Resort charged Respondents $437.50 for the food and beverage consumed at the Event.”

The complaint also alleged that the Weiser campaign was provided the Grand Dining Room at the resort at a reduced rate or no cost.

“The investigation revealed that Respondents hosted the event in a portion of the Resort����ap Grand Dining Room, in a bar area between the Resort lobby and an outside balcony area, which remained open to the public,” the dismissal order said. There is “no evidence that Respondents rented or used the Grand Dining Room in the manner alleged in the Complaint.”

The use of the resort space for the Weiser event was also deemed acceptable because “the Resort allows free use of its space, including the area where the Event was held, to other entities in attendance at the Resort in the usual course of its business.”

The use of the space for the event was not a campaign contribution, according to the dismissal order.

The dismissal of the complaint by the Colorado deputy secretary of state has no impact on the complainant����ap ability to file with the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission, according to the dismissal order.

“Tell them, just tell them I don’t need help so stop it,” he grumbled to no one in plain sight.

The voices in Vinnola’s head can be so loud, so constant, he figures everyone can hear them. Chronic paranoid schizophrenia and an addiction to shooting up whatever he can find to still the voices have landed the 29-year-old Denverite in emergency rooms, psychiatric wards and jails so many times that his mother stopped counting.

Crisis after crisis, Janet van der Laak had to push the Mental Health Center of Denver to provide care for her son instead of finding reasons to deny it. Each time the center dropped him from treatment, Vinnola lost more faith in seeking help. And the more faith he lost, the harder his mother pressed.

“What kind of safety-net system blows off the hardest cases?” van der Laak once wrote in a note to herself. “Giving up on Matt, giving up on anyone in crisis should not be an option.”

The Colorado News Collaborative spent six months investigating a state behavioral health system that turns away some of the most vulnerable and at-risk Coloradans in crisis, with no recourse from state officials. We zeroed in on the 17 community mental health centers that are paid more than $437 million a year in tax dollars to serve as the core of Colorado’s safety net.

We learned that Colorado, the state with the nation’s highest rate of adult mental illness and lowest access to care, has been giving those centers non-compete contracts and a privileged rate status for nearly 60 years, without meaningful oversight.

Our investigation shows that the centers – most now facing workforce shortages – collectively have treated fewer clients during the pandemic than before it, despite skyrocketing mental health needs. At the same time, more than half the centers have been sitting on liquid reserves of $10 million or more. Denver’s center kept more than $40 million in liquid reserves while its clients faced record-long wait times for care.

COLab also found that, starting long before the pandemic:

• The state’s payment system inadvertently created a financial incentive for the centers to take on fewer ill people and charge higher costs, while also protecting them from competition.
• The centers have been charging taxpayers up to 17 times more than independent Medicaid providers for the same services, but with little transparency about the expenses those rates are based on.
• Several centers, including those in communities with sizable immigrant populations, have had no Spanish-speaking care providers.
• And some centers have been paid for programs they’ve not provided, with no pushback from the state agencies funding – and charged with regulating – them.

We learned that some of these and other questionable practices stem from a long record by the centers’ powerful trade association of pressuring the state to avoid reforms that would ensure greater transparency and accountability.

Even now, as Gov. Jared Polis’s administration is poised to launch a new cabinet-level department to carry out those reforms, we’ve found that state government, at the urging of the trade group, is backpedaling. Months before the new Behavioral Health Administration even launches in July, state officials already have ruled out key ways of regulating the centers more closely. They also have all but scrapped what was supposed to be a top safety-net priority for the new department: Stepping in when the centers fail clients like Vinnola and trying to catch them before they hit bottom.

Colorado’s “safety net”

The community mental health movement took root in the 1960s when President John Kennedy called to deinstitutionalize people with mental illnesses. Private nonprofits popped up around Colorado to offer the mental health services – and, eventually, addiction counseling – needed to keep people out of hospitals and in their communities.

Those organizations eventually became the 17 regional community mental health centers (CMHCs) the state has relied on for more than a half-century to treat Coloradans who are indigent, on Medicaid or underinsured and can’t pay for private treatment, and to stabilize people in crisis. They are each contracted to provide inpatient hospitalization, intensive outpatient treatment, outpatient psychiatric care, counseling, and other forms of assistance to residents of the counties they’re responsible for serving.

The centers have helped generations of people throughout Colorado, especially those with less complex mental health needs. According to the state, they collectively served 158,911 clients in the fiscal year ending in June.

“Colorado is lucky to have the system it has built with such a strong network of CMHCs,” Doyle Forrestal, CEO of the centers’ trade group, the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council, wrote in an email.

Still, we found vast disparities in the quality and speed of the centers’ services.

Last summer, a Greeley resident with severe depression could see a psychiatrist within a few weeks of calling the center there, but someone just as depressed in Rio Blanco or Moffat counties had to wait nine or 11 months, respectively, for the same kind of appointment, if Mind Springs Health – the center serving those counties – agreed to schedule one at all.

Multiple sources say at least four of the centers are providing addiction counseling by staffers who aren’t certified to counsel addicts. We spoke with people who either work in or with three centers that rely on clinicians with no pediatric training to prescribe medications to kids. Clients of four centers told us their clinics are so slow to renew prescriptions that they tailspin biochemically as they wait. And we found centers serving six communities with high immigrant populations that have no bilingual clinicians, leaving Spanish and other non-English speakers virtually iced out of care.

Annie Diaz of Cortez treated about 80 clients as a counselor for Axis Health System – so many, she says she struggled to remember their names and problems. “I did the best that I could under the circumstances, but it wasn’t my best and it wasn’t good enough,” she says.

Some centers’ staffers describe pressure to drop their toughest cases.

A former case manager at Mind Springs in Summit County says administrators made her stop treating an acutely ill client earlier this year because he made inappropriate racial comments. She says she objected because she knew he had no other support system, but complied for fear of losing her job.

The client ended his life shortly after.

“I blame myself for that every single day,” says the case manager, who quit right after his suicide. She asked to remain anonymous for fear the client����ap death will hurt her career.

Mind Springs cited privacy reasons for refusing to discuss the case.

Emma Harmon, a single mom and Medicaid recipient in Durango, called Axis Health System when she was so depressed she was thinking about suicide several times an hour. She says the center made her wait six weeks for an intake appointment, then three more to meet with someone for a treatment plan. She asked to see a psychiatrist in the meantime, but was told he was busy. Her mother took her to the hospital, which released her because she hadn’t actually hurt herself.

Axis’ spokeswoman would not comment on Harmon’s case.

“I was on the brink of death – so, so close to killing myself, and they said ‘You’re fine’ and never followed up with me,” Harmon says. “The way things seem to work there, you’d actually have to have killed yourself before they’d meet with you.”

A rainy day

Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council, the centers’ trade group, represents them in negotiations with Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which provides about two-thirds of their public funding through Medicaid, and with the Office of Behavioral Health, which provides approximately the remaining third through a complex web involving 18 state agencies and more than 75 programs. The state has handed the centers decades of automatic contract renewals despite long-standing local concerns about their services.

Commissioners in most of Colorado’s 64 counties have over the years complained that their law enforcement and human service officials end up handling mental health crises when the centers fail to do so. Parents raise their hands at support group meetings to describe the desperation of having to send teenagers experiencing psychotic breaks across the state because there were no adolescent psychiatric beds open near them. Some people with severe depression are limited to two or three therapy appointments, but prescribed drugs indefinitely, with little follow-up.

State mental health officials have long been aware of these and other problems.

“The centers and the state have been failing people,” says Robert Werthwein, director of the Office of Behavioral Health, which will morph into the Behavioral Health Administration when the new department launches in July.

The Council – whose members pay an average $66,000 in dues annually – has, in the meantime, spent years lobbying and litigating to limit the number of independent contractors the state authorizes to receive Medicaid dollars.

“The centers pretty much have a corner on their local markets and don’t want competition,” says Byron Pelton, a Logan County commissioner and member of the state task force aiming to increase access to behavioral health care.

The Council also has pushed to preserve its members’ favored Medicaid reimbursement rate status with the state. The Mental Health Center of Denver receives $592 in Medicaid reimbursement for an hour of counseling, for example, compared to the $91 Medicaid pays an independent clinician for the same service. And the Denver center receives $818 for an hour of crisis intervention compared to the $47.50 an hour paid the private provider.

Those reimbursement rates are based on a formula – developed by the centers’ trade group in conjunction with the state – that divides a center’s overall expenses for any given year by the total number of services it provided the year prior. The higher a center’s spending and the lower the number of times it treats clients, the more money it will receive through Medicaid reimbursement. The methodology effectively creates an incentive for centers to be less efficient with their spending and to limit or even refuse clients care.

“It is hard to imagine how that formula is in the best interest of Coloradans, especially when there are so many people waiting for care,” says Nancy VanDeMark, former director of the Colorado Office of Behavioral Health who now works as a consultant.

North Range Behavioral Health in Greeley and Mental Health Center of Denver have the lowest and highest reimbursement rates among the 17 centers, respectively, according to cost reports submitted to the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing. Greeley charges Medicaid $228 for an hour of counseling compared to Denver’s $592 for an hour of the same service.

MHCD says it needs the higher rates to bankroll the array of programs the centers are required by contract to provide and to subsidize others that don’t make money, such as food pantries and homeless shelters.

Forrestal, the Council’s CEO, refused multiple requests for an interview. In a series of email exchanges she said comparing the centers’ reimbursement rates to those of independent Medicaid providers is unfair because centers offer a greater “depth and breadth” of services. Besides, she wrote, “Behavioral health has been significantly underfunded, and without (the Council’s) efforts to secure additional funding, there would be no new money for (the centers) to expand services or build new programs.”

The trade group recently hired the state’s assistant Medicaid director, Laurel Karabatsos, as a consultant only months after she left the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF), and she has been attending meetings with that agency about changing the future payment methodology. Karabatsos has not sought an opinion from the state’s Independent Ethics Commission about whether that job breaks the state’s revolving-door ethics law prohibiting state employees from taking jobs in industries they regulate, and HCPF sees no conflict of interest.

The centers have received far more public funding since Colorado enacted Medicaid expansion in 2013, and watchdogs say some are wasting it with inefficiencies and other questionable spending.

According to a cost report it filed with the state that serves as the basis for its reimbursement, the Aurora Mental Health Center spent 48 cents on administrative costs for every dollar it spent on care in 2020. That����ap in sharp contrast to North Range Behavioral Health in Greeley – the most efficient of all the centers statewide – which in the same year, records show, spent 8 cents on administrative costs for every dollar spent on care.

Kelly Phillips-Henry, CEO of the Aurora center, attributes her vastly higher administrative costs partly to updating technology, including the systems required to convert to telehealth care.

Former state Human Services director Reggie Bicha long has frowned on an overuse of mental health funding for things rather than people. He points specifically to the aquaponics greenhouse at the Mental Health Center of Denver’s Dahlia campus, which recirculates water through fish tanks and garden beds.”

“It����ap a wonderful little concept,” he says. “But from an organization that was constantly saying they needed more financial resources, I wasn’t seeing nearly that kind of creativity put into fighting severe mental illness, reducing suicide rates, keeping people out of hospitals and jails and institutions.”

The $15.6 million Dahlia campus is funded partly through the center and private donations, but mainly through Denver Urban Renewal Authority bonds.

For the union representing workers at the Denver center, it is a sore point that CEO Carl Clark made $819,340 in 2019, including $331,583 in bonuses. That����ap 10 times more than an average clinician there earns. Clark defends his earnings, noting his pay is set by his board, not by him.

He made upwards of two and a half times more than the $301,337 average total compensation for CEOs of community mental health centers in Colorado in 2020, our analysis of financial disclosures found.

The Denver center’s audited financial report also shows it sat on $41 million in liquid assets in 2020. Clark says his board likes to keep sizable reserves on hand as a “rainy-day fund.”

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, Denverites have faced the longest-ever wait times for care as pandemic-related depression and anxiety rates skyrocketed. And Denver’s is not the only center sitting on reserves. Nine others kept at least $10 million in liquid assets last year while their wait times also grew and the state plummeted to the bottom of national ranking for access to care.

“If the CMHCs are not willing to reinvest their reserves to expand access to care now, then when?” VanDeMark asks.

As the pandemic gripped Colorado in early 2020, the centers halted most of their services temporarily, then moved to telehealth. Yet, they still managed to treat more patients in that fiscal year ending in June 2020 than they did the following fiscal year when the statewide caseload dropped by 7,200.

The Council attributes the decline to what Forrestal calls a “dire behavioral health workforce crisis,” which she writes has left more than 1,000 job vacancies among its members.

“There simply is not enough workforce to meet demand.”

Union members counter that the center could retain more staff by raising salaries far more significantly than it has – and by using bonus pay for executives like Clark to do so.

Leaving holes in the safety net

Despite the workforce shortage, the Council has fought a proposal that the soon-to-be-launched Behavioral Health Administration offer “care coordination” – regional teams to work with some of the hardest-to-serve clients to make sure they’re not dropped from the centers’ care and don’t otherwise fall through the cracks. The proposal was meant to help people like Vinnola whom centers commonly refuse to treat if they have pending criminal charges, or show up high or delusional or are otherwise hard to manage.

The trade group has sought to block the proposal, saying the centers already coordinate care for their clients and that the state stepping in to do so could divert funding away from their own services. The Council’s opposition comes after it has spent years fiercely opposing attempts to add “no reject, no eject clauses” to centers’ contracts preventing them from refusing to serve the sickest clients or dropping clients who are difficult to serve.

The Council has an unlikely ally in Vincent Atchity, president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado, the leading statewide group advocating for people with mental health challenges. On the task force responsible for recommending reforms, Atchity voted against making care coordination a priority for the new department as what he calls “an attempted appeasement of the (centers) that objected strongly to” it. He describes his vote as “more about diplomacy than actual opposition.”

The no-voters were outnumbered by task force members who supported prioritizing care coordination as perhaps the most important aspect of a reform package the state has made a point of branding “Putting People First.”

Nevertheless, a state report released in early November outlining how the new department will function does not, in 109 pages, mention the kind of hands-on care coordination the task force approved. It instead lists detailed plans for what officials call “care navigation”– ways to help the public on the phone or online find behavioral health providers.

Werthwein – who until this fall was a vocal proponent of providing care coordination –   at first said his office intentionally left plans for it out of the report because details about how to staff and fund it “have not yet been worked out.” In that same interview, however, he called the omission “an oversight” and insisted the new department will be prioritizing hands-on care coordination and will revise the report accordingly.

But so far, the so-called “care coordination working group” Werthwein’s office has gathered to address the issue has made no mention of plans for person-to-person care coordination. Instead, the group is focused only on making the state mental health care system more user-friendly technologically.

At least for now, there is no significant plan recognizing that sometimes the centers fail people, and when they do, somebody ought to step in and keep those people from free falling.

What we don’t know

Werthwein’s Office of Behavioral Health says it does not know how many indigent Coloradans the centers are serving or how many people with private insurance policies that don’t cover mental health care the centers are allowing to pay on a sliding scale.

State officials also say they don’t know what happens to tax dollars centers receive for services they end up not providing. The Center for Mental Health in Montrose, for example, was paid to set up a mobile crisis program in the six counties it covers. For logistical reasons, that program didn’t serve San Miguel County. County Commissioner Hilary Cooper spent months trying to figure out where money for her county’s piece of that program went.

“They showed me a bunch of fancy budget slides and explained that it����ap really too layered and complicated for someone like (me) to understand, and in the end, I got no answers,” she says.

The Center’s CEO, Shelly Spalding, did not, in response, indicate where her organization spent that money.

“I think we’re transparent. But maybe other people don’t think we’re being transparent enough. Maybe things are being lost in translation,” she said.

Summit County officials say they could not get an answer from Mind Springs Health about what it did with state money it was supposed to spend on a detox program there, which it shut down without telling them. They also say that, despite years of questioning, Mind Springs has never said how much in public funding it was – and should have been – spending in the county.

CEO Sharon Raggio told them, and us, that there is no such information because Mind Springs does not track services or spending per county, but rather more generally in the 10 West Slope counties it����ap responsible for covering.

“It����ap like a frigging ridiculous mystery when you ask about it,” says Assistant Summit County Manager Sarah Vaine, who refers to Raggio as “a liar” and to Mind Springs as “The Mob.” “The way the state contracts work and the way the money flows is so confusing. And I think the community mental health centers benefit hugely from that confusion because it makes it harder to hold them accountable,” Vaine adds.

The centers also benefit from their status as private 501(c)3 nonprofits, which, unlike government agencies, are not subject to open records laws. Federal tax law makes it so the centers can – and do, as we’ve discovered in our reporting – refuse to provide information about how they spend public funding beyond the few financial disclosures required by the IRS and state.

Voters in several counties, including Summit, have over the past five years passed tax measures to pay for mental health services they say they aren’t getting from the centers. And one, Eagle County, is for the first time in the 60-year history of Colorado’s safety-net system breaking off from its center, Mind Springs, to create its own – one that officials there say will be more responsive to their residents. Eagle County’s will be the only center in the state that won’t be joining the trade group.

County governments have spent years urging state government to reform Colorado’s safety-net system so taxpayers don’t have to double-pay for services. They embrace the creation of the Behavioral Health Administration, which is supposed to give county governments and the public “a better sense of the dollars flowing into their community, and the outcomes resulting from those investments,” according to a state report released in November.

Still, many county officials worry the new department will not be able to monitor centers closely enough because it still won’t have control over their Medicaid contracts. That responsibility will remain within the separate Department of Health Care Policy and Finance (HCPF).

“If no single agency is actually responsible for these pieces, we fear there won’t be real oversight and we’ll just see a repeat of what we have now,” says Gini Pingenot of Colorado Counties Inc., a consortium of county governments.

County governments specifically have urged the state to audit the centers’ finances and conduct performance audits to make sure they are complying with contract requirements and not being double-paid by the multiple state agencies and programs that fund them.

There are no plans for the new department to do so, despite state officials’ insistence that it will prioritize making the centers more transparent and accountable.

Bicha, the former state human services director, notes there long has been “significant political pressure” from the trade group not to monitor centers that closely.

“The Council has a tremendous amount of influence,” he says.

Free falling

Before it sought and received lawmakers’ approval to create the new department, the state Behavioral Health Task Force heard more than 200 Coloradans statewide testify about the mental health reforms they want – and desperately need – from state government.

Matt Vinnola’s mom was one of them.

Her son was in jail at the time in 2019, awaiting a competency evaluation after having been involuntarily hospitalized eight times in a year. The Denver car saleswoman had come, she said, as “Matt����ap mom, advocate and voice.”

Janet Van der Laak wanted to know why she could make a routine doctor’s appointment for her husband, but not an appointment at Mental Health Center of Denver for her adult son who is delusional, unable to remember his birthday or home address, and so sick he doesn’t always know he is sick.

She wanted to know what families like hers are supposed to do when the centers drop their loved ones from treatment.

She wanted to know what the centers are doing with hundreds of millions of tax dollars if not treating severely sick people like her son.

“MHCD dropped him… How do you drop someone who’s gravely disabled? How do you deny someone services like that?” van der Laak asked the task force. “We’re leaving out a huge, vulnerable population that we’re not treating.”

The Mental Health Center of Denver’s Clark says privacy laws keep him from discussing Vinnola’s case. “Could things have been dropped? It����ap possible for them to have been dropped,” he says, adding that if a client is not seeking care for himself, the center “need(s) to focus on someone who wants treatment.”

Five months after van der Laak’s testimony, one of her older sons, Aaron Ruiz, ended his life in March 2020.

Relatives say the family had not been aware of Ruiz’s mental health challenges, and had been focused on Vinnola’s for the 10 years since he developed symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

Five months later, Van der Laak took her life by suicide. She was 49.

Vinnola has been plummeting since his brother’s and mother’s suicides, both of which took place while he was home. He had a long jail stint last fall and winter, and for about seven months now, has been living on the streets, off his medication and untreated.

When time allows, his father goes looking for him. He searches Denver’s homeless encampments and drives by the condo where van der Laak used to live. The neighbors there sometimes spot Vinnola strung out and sleeping on the sidewalk out front.

Susan Greene can be reached at susan@colabnews.co. Freelance reporter LJ Dawson contributed to this report.

This investigation is part of the  “On Edge” series about Colorado’s mental health by the Colorado News Collaborative. “On Edge” reporting is supported by the Carter Center’s Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Reporting as well as by the Benjamin von Sternenfels Rosenthal Grant for Mental Health Investigative Journalism. To learn more about the Colorado News Collaborative, visit