An investigative report obtained by The Denver Post says Villagran was accused of conduct that included sexually suggestive remarks, touching and inappropriate gestures.

In a news release Friday morning, the county said the independent investigation confirmed that Villagran, a Democrat who was elected as treasurer in 2022, had engaged in a “consistent pattern of inappropriate conduct.” But officials did not provide details about what was alleged against him.

The allegations against Villagran come just four years after his predecessor in the office, Lisa Culpepper, was sued by the county commissioners for what they said was shoddy and delinquent bookkeeping by the treasurer’s office. A year later, Culpepper lost a write-in election effort to remain as treasurer.

Villagran won that election and took office on Jan. 1, 2023. The current commissioners are all fellow Democrats.

The Post obtained a copy of the investigative report, which was conducted by Flynn Investigations Group, through an open records request. It outlined a series of sexually suggestive remarks and behaviors that female county employees said Villagran had made toward them, including “mimicking sex by pumping his arms and pelvis” and adjusting a female employee’s bra strap when it had fallen off her shoulder.

Another employee said Villagran had spoken to her about his troubled marriage and how he had no sex life due to his wife going through menopause, according to the report. She claimed Villagran told her that her “husband will ‘need to be patient’ with her during menopause.”

Villagran was also accused of looking “women up and down,” hugging them, touching their shoulders and lower backs, and taking video of women getting married in the lobby area of the county building, the report stated.

Other employees said the treasurer had a habit of standing uncomfortably close to them when talking to them, the report says.

The report concluded that Villagran “more likely than not” made “unwelcome and objectively offensive remarks of a sexual nature to Adams County employees.”

Lynn Baca, the chair of the board of commissioners, issued a statement on Friday addressing the matter.

“We are deeply disappointed with this situation,” she said. “However, Adams County remains committed to a safe and respectful environment for employees and visitors alike.”

Baca didn’t respond to a request for comment from the Post. Villagran’s office referred all questions to the county’s public information officer.

In a response to the county from Villagran’s attorney that was included in Flynn’s report, the attorney wrote that his client “denies much of what is alleged and asserts that he has never treated any employees of his office or of other offices in Adams County differently in any manner based on the sex of such employee.”

The attorney’s name was not included in the report.

The attorney wrote that Villagran had been struggling with a separation from his wife after 23 years and that it had “affected his work and demeanor.” The attorney’s email also said Villagran had “physical limitations and cultural differences that may be perceived as other than what they are or are intended to be.”

That included the treasurer standing close to people when he spoke to them, in order to properly see and hear them, the attorney wrote.

Late Friday, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Shad Murib and Adams County Democratic Party Chair Beckie Bean released a statement asking Villagran to resign.

“We agree with the Adams County Board of County Commissioners and join them in ordering Treasurer Villagran’s resignation,” the two party leaders said. “Our party does not tolerate inappropriate workplace behavior from any elected official. We must serve the people with the highest level of integrity and dignity.”

As an independently elected official, Villagran can be removed from office only through a recall election or at the next regularly scheduled election. He has a year left in his term.

Villagran is the second Adams County treasurer in a row to raise the ire of the commissioners.

Several months after the county sued Culpepper, a Democrat, in late 2021 over claims of financial mismanagement, the county’s finance director said a communication breakdown with Culpepper’s office was jeopardizing her ability to complete a required annual audit. Without it, the director said, state officials could have withheld millions of dollars in property tax proceeds and “possibly bring county operations to a halt.”

A monthslong battle ensued over who should pay Culpepper’s legal bills in her fight with Adams County, culminating in a trip to the Colorado Supreme Court in the fall of 2022. The state’s high court ordered Adams County to cover her legal costs and said refusing to do so amounted to an “abuse of discretion.”

In their Friday news release, the Adams County commissioners said Villagran had so far refused to resign but had agreed to a “strict protocol ensuring all county employees feel safe, supported, and heard.”

“He has complied with these requirements,” the commissioners wrote.

Elizabeth Ann Davis, 61, was found guilty of two counts of forgery and one count of “personating an elector” by a Douglas County jury.

The forgery charges are felonies, and the election charge is a misdemeanor.

“Voter fraud threatens the core of our democracy. There must be consequences for those who break that trust,” deputy district attorney Chase Helseth said in a statement.

Davis was represented by the state public defender’s office, which does not comment on criminal cases.

She is set to be sentenced Jan. 9, with possible sentences ranging from probation to three years in prison, according to the district attorney’s office.

On Tuesday afternoon, fresh Christmas wreathes and holiday decorations garnered more attention from customers of the nursery at 2001 S. Chambers Road than the shelves of cacti displayed farther back. Even as two women paused to peer at eye-catching varieties like golden barrel cactus, the spiky, green San Pedro cacti sat largely unnoticed among more than 200 other plants.

“I think it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t have any shocking features,” horticulturist Colette Haskell, 49, said. Still, when the garden center stocks up on San Pedro cacti, or Trichocereus, “they definitely do sell out pretty quickly,” she added.

An enthusiastic following of both professional and amateur horticulturists is growing around the cactus, as they largely prize it for its appearance. But with the recent decriminalization of certain natural psychedelics in Colorado, interest in San Pedro cacti is rising for another reason: it’s a source of , a hallucinogen that can result in euphoric feelings, a boost in energy, distortions of space, time and perception, nausea and more.

Native to South America, the San Pedro cacti is illegally poached for its mescaline, as is the peyote cacti, or Lophophora williamsii – a plant endemic to the southern U.S. and northern México that’s considered a religious sacrament by some Native Americans. Horticulturists and members of the Native American Church worry about how to effectively keep these plants around for years to come, but Colorado’s growers see hope in their survival.

“People are into house plants again,” Haskell said. “It’s like the ’70s all over again.”

Store-bought vs. home-grown

Typically, Nick’s customers choose San Pedro cacti for collective purposes, religious reasons and preventative measures to keep it from extinction, Haskell said.

The business purchases from professional growers certified by the U.S. Agriculture Department to grow the plants from seeds, not people who harvest wild cacti. It can only buy them in limited amounts because they grow slowly, “and they shouldn’t be harvested irresponsibly,” Haskell said.

She pointed to one real fear in her industry: plant poaching. “You can’t just buy from some guy who comes in and says he’s got all these San Pedros,” she added.

Among the seven in stock, the smallest at 6 inches tall was priced at $44.99, while the largest — towering over patrons in its seven-gallon pot — could be bought for $429.99.

Meanwhile, Jacob Lara, a 28-year-old Denverite, sells San Pedro cacti fully rooted at $15 per foot on Facebook Marketplace, with his plants ranging in height from 6 inches to over 2 feet.

“In California, you’ll find, I’m talking like, 8- to 10-foot San Pedro cactuses in people’s front yards,” he said. “I did not have perfect growing conditions,” so his cacti usually reach an average size.

Many of his customers are other plant cultivators. “There’s not really a very big psychedelic culture around mescaline,” Lara said. “It’s still kind of like a very elusive hallucinogen.”

Last year, Coloradans voted to decriminalize the personal possession, growing, use and sharing of mescaline for adults, along with several other naturally-occurring psychedelics, through the passage of . The sale of these psychedelics and any underage access remains illegal, with the federal government labeling mescaline a under the Controlled Substances Act.

“A lot of people in this subculture really value just the aesthetic of the plants,” Lara said. “I’ve met nobody that cultivates them for the mescaline.”

Pre-Proposition 122

The 2022 reported that about 8.5 million Americans aged 12 and older who partook in illicit drugs over one year’s time consumed hallucinogens. Mescaline isn’t asked about specifically because “it’s not that prevalent at all,” said Joshua Kappel, attorney and founding partner of cannabis and psychedelics law firm Vicente LLP.

He said hundreds of cacti species contain various amounts of mescaline, with the plants legally sold across the U.S.

Even before Proposition 122 passed, “people have been selling San Pedro cactus in Colorado for decades. It’s not like this is something new,” Kappel said. “A lot of people buy these cactuses, and don’t know that they even contain mescaline.”

He called mescaline’s overall legal status “incredibly gray.”

“You can’t sell natural medicines in Colorado,” Kappel said, but “the commonly-accepted status is that you can grow cacti containing mescaline for ornamental purposes.”

“Special protections” are given to the peyote cacti, with “exceptions for religious uses of peyote by the Native American Church,” Kappel added.

“Original plant stewards”

The Native American Church considers peyote a sacred being, and “mescaline is part of that being,” said Troy, the Last Captive of the Comanches, taken in the old way by Eviyah and brought into the Ohnononuh band of Numunuh as Kwinnai mahkweetsoi okweetuni (He who saves the eagle from the water).

He also just goes by Troy. “Where the peyote grows is our homeland,” he said.

As a Kwihnia Puhakat (Eagle Priest), Troy’s part of the Piah Puha Kahni (Mother Church) of the Comanche Native American Church. The  settled in southwest Oklahoma after moving across the Plains states, including Colorado.

They’ve long held ceremonies where “all are welcome to pray, sing, and eat peyote,” according to the . “The Creator also said when you eat the peyote, you will know me.”

And in South America, pre-Columbian cultures similarly used San Pedro cacti for rituals, with shamans still turning to them today for healing purposes. The name San Pedro is an allusion to “St. Peter’s role as the gatekeeper to heaven,” the says.

The ritual includes “sniff tobacco with alcohol, ingest San Pedro, pinpoint the diseases, cleanse the evil and ‘florecer’ (flourish) the sick person,” according to the .

“The longer a cactus has been stored, the stronger and the higher its content in mescaline-derived alkaloids will be,” with an individual cactus’ mescaline content also varying based on its environmental temperature, levels of rainfall and more.

Mescaline can be consumed as a powder, tablet, capsule or liquid, with the option to chew peyote fresh or dried, the says.

The decriminalization of mescaline and other naturally-occurring psychedelics “puts a deeper stress on these plant medicines,” with thieves stealing the San Pedro and peyote cacti, Troy said.

Instead, he’s pushing for the societal acceptance of synthetic alternatives like LSD, which remains illegal, to mitigate the damage to nature. However, “if people want to grow things, I really don’t have a problem with that,” Troy said. “That would help the destruction of these different natural areas to slow down.”

He’s working to support Indigenous communities that serve as “original plant stewards” through , the practice of individuals, medical and psychedelic companies donating percentages of their incomes to create land trusts, build conservation infrastructure for sacred plants and more.

“Maybe, one day”

North of the Colorado line, in Cheyenne, 34-year-old Joshua Church grows San Pedro cacti, which occupy a sentimental place in his heart.

In 2019, he proposed to his now-wife at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Afterward, they visited their first cactus nursery, and spent about $400 on the spiny plants.

Two years later, their daughter was born with a natural green thumb. Church called her “very much involved, even only at 2 years old.”

He estimates that around 80% of San Pedro cacti cultivators grow them because of their love for the plant. “While some of the people that have been growing for years and years, they do partake” in mescaline, propagating them solely for that reason is considered “more of a newbie thing,” Church said.

He sells boxes made up of San Pedro cacti, succulents and other cactus variations – “collector’s items” – which average in price between $95 to $120 per box.

He’s turned down would-be customers who’ve tried to buy his cacti specifically for mescaline. “That’s not really the purposes of why I grow,” Church said.

Although he’s never taken mescaline, he’s not against it. “Maybe, one day, I will try that.”

The journey, which allowed them to lead traditional ceremonies and — a plant-based psychedelic brew — to others was long, and still ongoing, but sacred.

“This is my tradition and my path,” Castro said.

That����ap why the doesn’t take the use or distribution of psychedelics lightly. It����ap what drove them and other Indigenous people — as part of a group called the Native Coalition of Colorado — to protest at the conference this summer in Denver.

The members argue that Natives who have been using plant-based substances for generations should not only be more involved in the discussions but leading them. They worry that the measure decriminalizing psychedelics will allow the wealthy and the powerful to profit as psychedelics are misused and abused. And they are concerned that commercialization could make it harder for Native communities to find the plants they use in their practices.

The group is on a mission to raise awareness about these issues even as works with the state to establish rules for psychedelic sales and dilicensing facilities such as healing centers.

“The plant medicine is a renaissance within the Western system, and it has been happening for decades through the Indigenous people,” Castro told conference attendees.

Indigenous communities opened up their medicines to help people heal, not to have the medicines taken and their cultures erased, they said.

“Please stop. Think. Think critically,” Castro added.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which hosted the large conference, told The Denver Post that it did not have anyone available to comment.

In 2022, Colorado voters passed Proposition 122, the citizen-led . It decriminalized, for people 21 and older, using, growing and sharing five natural psychedelic substances, including two in psychedelic mushrooms — psilocybin and psilocin — and three plant-based psychedelic substances — dimethyltryptamine, ibogaine and mescaline. It tasks the state with regulating natural medicine use in licensed facilities and allows for expansion of the types of substances that can be offered.

This year state lawmakers passed , clarifying the regulatory framework for the , but they noted that the use of these medicines for health conditions should be balanced with potential cultural harms to tribes and Indigenous people.

The Natural Medicine Advisory Board, made up of governor-appointed volunteers, is working with state agencies on rules and implementation. By Dec. 31, 2024, Colorado has to start taking applications for natural medicine facilitators.

Department of Regulatory Agencies spokesperson Katie O’Donnell said DORA has worked to ensure it has tribal and Indigenous representation – two of the 15 board members are Indigenous and one practices psychedelic medicine within Native tradition. An Indigenous subcommittee and tribal working group were also formed, and the state is planning a public campaign to hear from communities across the state.

O’Donnell noted the new rules won’t apply to tribal nations, which are sovereign, but the tribes will be included since decisions outside their borders can affect them.

For Castro, that doesn’t go far enough. It keeps those already in power in control while decentralizing Indigenous voices.

They opposed Prop 122 even though it decriminalizes plant medicines traditionally used by Native people. Those who would be most affected were not making the decisions. And the law opens up the door for corporations to create synthetics and exploit the plants, Castro said.

“Right now because it has been legalized, or it’s moving into that, it’s pretty much open for people to do as they wish, as long as the system is saying it’s OK,” they said.

But Kevin Matthews, who works in consulting and education on psychedelics and was a proponent for the psychedelics campaign, said organizers tried to be inclusive and respectful of Indigenous communities. Backers prioritized decriminalization so Native communities could keep using natural medicines, and they excluded peyote (which ) — its main active ingredient is the hallucinogen mescaline — from the measure.

Matthews said he pursued the measure because changed his life and he viewed it as a way to address mental and behavioral health crises.

“Whenever you are embarking on a major effort to dismantle decades-old harmful policies, there will inevitably be missteps and we recognize we could have done more,” he wrote in an email. “We are committed to continuing to work with Indigenous and Native communities to embrace the lessons learned and implement a model that honors the benefit that these communities have been carrying.”

That effort should have included leadership from and communities that have been stewarding native medicines like ayahuasca, said Gabriela Galindo, who lives in Boulder and has Indigenous roots and a background in public health and alternative medicines.

“Indigenous communities need to be the voices,” she said. “Our communities .”

But now people have discovered the benefits of the medicines — the same ones Native people were often punished for using — and they want to profit from them. They’re trying to bypass hundreds of years of history, she said.

Galindo understands wanting them for healing, but she said they’re being taken at the cost of Indigenous communities instead of addressing the root causes of problems in Western society.

Indigenous communities, however, are not a monolith.

Veronica Lightning Horse Perez, a who uses psychedelics in her practice and incorporates Indigenous spiritual traditions, became a vocal proponent of Prop 122 because she said she sees so much suffering that could be alleviated with the medicines.

She also understands the frustrations.

“When we go to a conference and we see millions of dollars coming in and out the door, when we see a tent that says ‘poop Gods’ on it, and we see mushrooms with googly-eyed cartoon characters on it, it����ap painful,” she said.

So what’s the solution? Castro stresses that they’re not calling for non-Natives to stop participating in plant-based medicine ceremonies led by Indigenous people.

They just want recognition for those who brought the medicine and respect for their practices. That means white people who haven’t been trained or haven’t done the work to understand the relationship with nature shouldn’t be offering it or leading traditional ceremonies.

“It’s not just understanding the logistical piece of it. It’s not just understanding how to cook it or prepare it or how to hold space for people or how many people can be there,” Castro said. “Our medicines for us are our elders.”

Castro is calling for a separation between plant-based substances and pharmaceutical psychedelics created in a lab such as MDMA — commonly known as ecstasy and .

Indigenous people who spoke to The Post said they also want to see reciprocity. They want benefits for Indigenous people who provided the plant-based medicines, instead of just making them workers who get exploited.

“Rather than taking or centering themselves as the movement give it back so that they’re centering Indigenous people and then elevating us,” Castro said.

Editor’s note (at 1:46 p.m. Aug. 28): After this story was published, the references to Kuthoomi Castro were changed to reflect their preference for they/them pronouns.

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They worked for Grassfire LLC, a Wyoming-based petition and canvassing firm. The circulators’ job: Collect enough signatures for three candidates to make the ballot in their respective races. One targeted an open congressional seat anchored in Jefferson County. The other two concerned a statehouse candidate and a sheriff hopeful, both in Douglas County.

Investigators later would with forging signatures on two of the campaigns, using dead and out-of-state voters to fill their quotas.

That same month, 1,600 miles away, Florida authorities announced a into widespread fraud concerning a constitutional initiative to expand gambling. Election supervisors told the secretary of state they had thousands of invalid signatures streaming into their offices.

Now the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is probing the campaign, and regional state attorneys have filed charges against circulators — with more likely on the way.

The one commonality behind the two states’ investigations: Grassfire.

The now-defunct company garnered widespread attention last month after Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser announced felony charges against the six circulators. But a Denver Post review found the company also has been accused of malfeasance in Florida, with at least three other Grassfire workers convicted of similar charges related to forging signatures.

Former workers say the firm’s owner, Lee Vasche, directed them to break the law in Florida, including by instructing them to shred petitions that likely would be deemed invalid. Circulators told authorities that they were paid per signature collected — a practice outlawed in Florida.

Florida election officials, meanwhile, grew astonished by the number of signature forgeries they saw during the bitter 2021 campaign, which pitted monied Las Vegas casino interests against the Seminole Tribe.

“I’d never seen anything like this,” said Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Florida’s Marion County. He turned in 600 suspected forgeries to investigators — including fraudulent petitions submitted with his and his wife’s signatures. “There was no real deep thought in this — it was just a numbers game it seemed like.”

Vasche declined to be interviewed for this story. In a statement through his attorney, the Grassfire owner said the opposition paid its contractors to switch sides and make “baseless, politically motivated accusations against the campaign.”

Nobody at Grassfire has spoken with Florida investigators, Vasche said in the statement, but “we have fully cooperated with every request those investigators have made of us.”

The Florida and Colorado cases underscore the dark underbelly of American political campaigns and the legions of laborers who ensure candidates or referendums make the ballot. The charges and ongoing investigation also highlight the financial incentives that underpin signature-gathering — and whether those cash carrots invite fraud.

“We did not see anything political about it,” Mike Hogan, then-supervisor of elections in Duval County, Florida, in December 2021 after two Grassfire circulators were arrested. “It was… people who were greedy. There’s an incentive there to get as many as you can in.”

Rampant signature fraud roils 2021 petition efforts

Grassfire was one of several firms contracted in 2021 by a political committee, , with the goal of putting a contentious gambling expansion measure on the ballot. And the money was serious.

Las Vegas Sands, a casino and resort company, to bankroll the measure, which would have opened the door to Vegas-style casinos in north Florida.

The Seminole Tribe, though, over gambling in the state and spent at least $40 million itself to combat the initiative.

In order to propose amendments to the Florida Constitution, groups are required to turn in signatures equal to 8% of the votes cast in the last presidential election. In 2021, that magic number was close to 900,000. (In Colorado, groups need of the total number of votes cast for all secretary of state candidates during the previous election to get a statewide initiative petition or constitutional amendment on the ballot. That required number stands at 124,238 signatures until 2026).

Campaigns normally turn in more signatures than necessary since a certain percentage inevitably will be deemed invalid due to missing information or signatures that don’t match voter files. Election officials say they usually see 70% validity rates.

But toward the end of the 2021 campaign, with Florida Voters in Charge rushing to make the ballot, counties saw the number of invalid petitions skyrocket.

“By the end of the cycle they were in the 20% acceptance rate” or worse, said Wilcox. “They were turning in 100 and all of them — or 99 of them — would be a signature that doesn’t match.”

Wilcox grew especially alarmed when an employee showed him submitted petitions with his and his wife’s names scrawled on them. They never signed.

“It was quite shocking,” he said. “It wasn’t even an attempt at a facsimile of my signature — they didn’t really care.”

In early December 2021, Wilcox and election supervisors from five other north Florida counties sent a host of suspected forged petitions, and the names of more than a dozen circulators, to the Florida secretary of state. The petitions represented “widespread and continuing criminal acts,” the office’s counsel wrote in a to the state attorney general.

The AG’s office directed the statewide prosecutor to work with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and state attorney’s offices on a criminal investigation.

The Florida Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that it has received complaints regarding Grassfire and conducted “preliminary investigations into allegations made against petition circulators associated with Grassfire.” A spokesperson told The Denver Post that investigators referred potential violations to the attorney general and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Those agencies would not divulge any additional details, citing the ongoing investigation.

Charges, though, already have been filed in some cases — including against at least three Grassfire circulators.

Two men in November 2021 were charged in Jacksonville with more than 60 people to vote, including 10 individuals who already were dead. The same men later to forging signatures for a constitutional amendment petition.

The state attorney’s office that their motivation appeared to be for monetary gain, not political.

Vasche, Grassfire’s owner, told a Jacksonville TV station that his firm hired the two individuals to work as petitioners, not on voter registration. The company, he said, fully assisted law enforcement and provided all documentation they had on the two workers.

Six months before the Jacksonville arrests, another Grassfire circulator was in Highlands County, Florida, for turning in more than 400 fraudulent petitions — including the forged signature of a local elections official. The man and received probation.

Florida Voters in Charge contracted with several firms on the gambling measure, not just Grassfire. And authorities are honing in on them, too.

A St. Petersberg woman, paid by a group called Metropolitan Strategy and Solutions, was arrested in May and accused of forging hundreds of signatures during the campaign, the Miami Herald . The woman was one of 21 circulators who submitted petitions for Florida Voters in Charge who were investigated by the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office, the newspaper reported. Prosecutors filed charges in many of the cases this spring.

“Shred ’em, make them disappear”

The rancorous campaign ended up in court at the end of 2021, with both sides hurling accusations against the other.

Florida Voters in Charge sued the Seminole-backed committee, Standing Up for Florida, and its operators, alleging the group was harassing and intimidating its signature gatherers. The December 2021 complaint also accused the committee of paying off Florida Voters in Charge’s petition circulators to ensure they didn’t perform their duties.

Standing Up for Florida countered that the Las Vegas Sands-backed committee engaged in all sorts of illegal behavior. Specifically, it accused Grassfire and its ownership of overtly skirting Florida election law.

Larry Laws began working with Grassfire in June 2021. As part of their agreement, Law’s firm, L&R Solutions, would provide Grassfire with petition circulators and managers to collect forms supporting the gambling initiative.

Florida law states all petitions gathered must be turned in to election offices. But Laws and two other Grassfire employees testified that Vasche instructed them to shred petitions that likely were fraudulent or missing information.

Laws told The Post he was given a full cardboard box with four or five thousand petitions. Vasche “asked me to get rid of them,” he said.

“Shred ’em, make them disappear,” Laws said he was told. “Like they were never there.”

Laws, a 25-year veteran of political campaigns, knew this was illegal.

“But it’s politics,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of illegal (expletive) that goes on.”

Laws consulted a lawyer, who told him to send the petitions to the secretary of state.

Tina Frazier, a former Grassfire office manager, outlined in the lawsuit a bin system that Grassfire would use to sort petitions with missing information. The bins were labeled: “Name,” “out of state” and “address” among others. Another one was simply called “trash,” she said.

Vasche would direct Frazier and others to look up the voter information and fill in the missing sections, Frazier said in her affidavit filed with the lawsuit.

“When petitions were illegible or could not be fixed, instead of submitting those to the state, (Vasche) would direct me to place them in a ‘trash’ box,” Frazier alleged. When the box filled to 1,000 petitions, Vasche instructed them to be shredded, she said in the affidavit.

The owner would then allegedly take the bag of shredded documents to throw out near his apartment complex so they wouldn’t be tossed in the dumpsters near Grassfire’s office, Frazier said in the court document.

Why not turn in everything, even the bad petitions? Money, the lawsuit contends.

If Grassfire and other contractors fail to maintain a 70% validity rate for their signatures, they would be required to reimburse money per deficient signature, according to a copy of an agreement included in the motion.

Vasche, in a deposition included in the court document, denied asking Laws to destroy petitions.

“We submit every possible signature that is from a valid Florida voter because that’s how we are compensated,” he said.

But he added the likely fraudulent petitions or ones with “fatal errors” become “sort of a quagmire for us.”

“Dealing with those problem petitions has been a nonstop headache for us from the beginning,” Vasche said in the deposition.

Frazier and Laws also testified that Vasche and Grassfire instituted an illegal pay-per-signature scheme for its circulators, a practice outlawed in Florida.

A on Grassfire’s website shows workers were promised an hourly wage but could collect bonuses based on the number of signatures they collect. The more signatures, the higher the bonus.

However, if a circulator failed to collect enough signatures, their worked hours would be cut, Frazier alleged.

Laws and Frazier both spoke to state investigators about the illegal activity. In an interview, Laws said authorities were particularly interested in the pay-per-signature aspect along with the petition shredding.

A spokesperson for the office of the state attorney said he could not comment on pending investigations.

Grassfire sued Laws in November 2021, alleging he took money from the Seminoles to sabotage their campaign. A federal judge the company’s request for a permanent restraining order.

Vasche, in his statement to The Post, said Laws even asked him if he’d be willing to take money to help sabotage the operation, an offer he says he declined. Laws disputed any allegations of sabotage, saying it was simply a business decision for him to switch teams.

“The fact is Grassfire completed its work in Florida in compliance with the law despite significant financial incentives to drop the work,” Vasche said.

Incentive for fraud or First Amendment violation?

Florida is one of seven states that prohibit campaigns from paying signature gatherers based on the number of signatures collected.

Lawmakers, during debate over House Bill 5 in 2019, said the compensation structure incentivizes fraud by encouraging circulators to scribble as many signatures as possible in the name of money.

“We don’t allow people to do that because it corrupts the process,” Rep. Mike Beltran a Florida TV station in 2021.

Colorado briefly had a similar law on the books, only for a federal judge to rule the statute unconstitutional. Elected officials in 2009 cited the same reasons as in Florida when they passed

“The per-signature compensation system used by many petition entities provides an incentive for circulators to collect as many signatures as possible, without regard for whether all petition signers are registered electors,” the bill stated.

A broad spectrum of political players immediately challenged the law, arguing the legislature simply wanted to make it more difficult, and expensive, for citizens to place measures on the ballot.

A federal judge in 2013 agreed, ruling that Colorado’s law posed “an undue restriction” on First Amendment rights.

Suspicious petitions are not a new phenomenon. But the issue made significant waves last year when five Republican gubernatorial candidates in Michigan were for submitting at least 68,000 invalid signatures.

Experts point to in recent years — in some cases going from $2 or $3 a signature to $30 a pop — as one possible reason for increased fraud.

State Senate President Steve Fenberg told The Post he would support reviving the pay-per-signature provision, but that the court ruling makes it settled law.

The legislature did pass a bill this session that probits a petitioning entity from circulating ballot petitions if the entity or principal has been convicted of certain crimes. The bill, , also increased penalties for petition entities that violated state law.

But Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, wanted the law to hold people who run the companies accountable for employee violations, which did not make it into statute. Currently, prosecutors need to prove an entity — such as Grassfire — “knowingly” allowed fraud.

The Colorado attorney general, pointedly, did not charge Grassfire or its operators with a crime.

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“We’re screwed,” said Lisa Von Feldt, owner of The Wine Seller and Spirits Too at 600 E. Sixth Ave. in Denver. “I hate to say it’s the end of an era, but I’m afraid it could be for a lot of people.”

Von Feldt’s corner shop was handed down to her by her father, who bought it from her uncle. “All of the liquor stores in Denver started out that way,” she said.

Today, the Colorado market is no longer solely made up of family-owned liquor stores. Not only have national chains and big-box liquor stores entered the mix, but privileges once reserved for these establishments — the sale of wine and full-strength beer — are now shared with grocery and convenience stores.

At Von Feldt’s store, sales are now down “a solid 30%,” she said. Sales have fallen anywhere from 10% to 60% among the 250 members of the Colorado Licensed Beverage Association, which represents the interests of the state’s broader industry of 1,600 independent liquor stores, executive director Chris Fine said.

Across Colorado, grocery and convenience stores started selling wine on March 1 after Coloradans narrowly passed Proposition 125, with of the vote. The measure granted any store already licensed to sell malt beverages the ability to sell wine, too.

Full-strength beer also has been available on grocery store shelves since Jan. 1, 2019.

As of March, about 3,500 food and beverage retailers called Colorado home, bringing in more than $2 billion in gross sales, according to data. That’s a little more than March 2022, with reports showing around 3,350 retailers, with $1.8 billion in sales.

But the numbers don’t paint a full picture, as the Department of Revenue doesn’t break down its sales data further by type of retailer nor does the agency carve out wine or beer sales specifically, spokesperson Daniel Carr said.

Statewide, around 2,000 are documented by the agency, with familiar brand names collectively holding hundreds of them: 7-Eleven and Circle K convenience stores, Target retailers, Trader Joe’s grocery stores and more.

Around 150 King Soopers and City Market locations hold those licenses, according to state records. “Our customers are looking for the convenience of a one-stop shopping experience that allows them to pick up a bottle of wine with their groceries,” said spokesperson Jessica Trowbridge.

And statewide, 100 Safeway and Albertsons stores carry beer and wine, with 10 of those stores in Denver, spokesperson Kristine Staaf said. “We are always looking to expand our wine and beer offerings,” she added.

Months after the wine sales went into effect, some consumers still haven’t clocked much of a difference.

“My shopping habits for beer and wine have not changed one iota,” said 75-year-old Larry Feierstein, who takes brands and prices into account before making a purchase. “I have never been a mom-and-pop shopper. It’s big-box liquor stores that draw my attention.”

The Englewood resident voted in favor of the measure, but, “I have yet to see major savings by buying beer and wine at a grocery.”

Meanwhile, mom-and-pop shops are grappling with the combined competition of those grocery, convenience and big-box liquor stores, which could ultimately mean sink or swim for their businesses.

“We took a huge hit,” Von Feldt said. “I’d sure like to not see every single small liquor store close in this state.”

But establishments like hers “make a modest amount of money,” often operating without a plump cushion of savings.

Instead, she’s forced to keep other options in mind, including the possibilities of shortening her store’s hours or letting go of employees, “which, to me, is the biggest shame.”

Von Feldt said she treats several of her employees like her family – and three of her relatives even work there.

“Who do I tell that I’m firing?” she said.

“It’s only going to get worse”

Even the larger stores in the Denver market, such as Argonaut Wine & Liquor at 760 E. Colfax Ave., are feeling repercussions from the passage of the ballot measure.

“As soon as it went into effect, we started feeling it right away,” said President Josh Robinson. “I think it’s only going to get worse.”

Robinson is the fourth generation of his family to run the store that his great-grandfather bought in the 1960s. He notes that the earliest mention of Argonaut that they could find predates the Prohibition Era, which started in 1920.

Robinson serves as one of several sommeliers on the store’s staff, with wine making up Argonaut’s highest profit sector. Today, those sales are off by about 23%, he said.

“When you lose that, you’re losing a lot of your profit and the money you use to pay employees and keep your building up,” he said.

Meanwhile, he said total business is also off – close to 13%.

“We don’t have the cash flow we used to to be able to take some risks on some smaller brands,” Robinson said. Argonaut has not only cut down on its number of products, but it’s also reevaluated its plumbing, repair and other local service contracts to find lower-cost providers.

Its team, which is between 80 to 85 members, is also smaller these days, with around five fewer full-time employees.

Argonaut has started to carry snacks, “which is not our core business at all,” to compete with grocery stores.

“Convenience has a cost,” Robinson said. “There’s a huge widespread impact to your community, just based on where you decide to spend your dollar.”

“It’s a bigger deal than just us”

Peter Mitchell, 35, said his favorite mom-and-pop shop in Aurora shuttered its doors for good.

Now, he either frequents Alameda Liquor Mart or Big Liquor Warehouse.

“I voted against the proposals,” Mitchell said. “The quality of product at grocery stores isn’t good.”

The Colorado Licensed Beverage Association’s Fine attributes the downturn among independent liquor stores to several factors: a lack of foot traffic, the economy’s impact on consumers and Colorado’s now-saturated market.

Before Proposition 125 passed, internal estimates by Fine’s group indicated that 400 to 600 stores would be “in dramatic jeopardy of losing their businesses” if the measure became a reality.

Back then, “92 cents out of every dollar that was spent at those stores was staying here,” Fine said.

But he points to “repercussions that I think voters just did not see” — like money flowing out of Denver. “Now, it’s more along the lines of 30 cents for every dollar is staying here, and the other 60 is going to Cincinnati or out of state.” The headquarters of the Kroger Co., which owns King Soopers, is located in Cincinnati.

Today, “we have seen folks who have got out of the business” by selling their establishments, Fine said, although his association hasn’t yet seen “mass closings.”

Ultimately, “it’s a bigger deal than just us,” he added. Niche producers, including craft brewers, are also “freaking out” as their options for purchasers dwindle.

With beer and wine now permitted in grocery stores, “when are they going to come after spirits?” Fine asked.

“The importance of every single bottle”

Jason Hornyak, a Denver resident, voted in favor of Prop 125 in November. “But only because I don’t believe the government should get to somewhat arbitrarily decide what stores can sell what things.”

The 37-year-old, whose go-to wine and spirits store is Lowry Liquors, admitted that “it was not an easy decision for me.” He worried the proposal would hurt small shops.

So far, Hornyak’s unimpressed with the selection in grocery stores, pointing to “their inability or lack of desire to stock anything other than mass-produced, lower-quality product.”

“People like me who are more serious about buying wine are still incentivized to shop locally,” he added.

Many regulars at Joy Wine & Spirits at 1302 E. Sixth Ave. have promised to “never shop at the grocery store” for wine, said owner Carolyn Joy. She calls that “reassuring,” along with the slight uptick in sales during graduation season.

But generally, “it’s just been a gradual decline, month over month,” said Joy, who described herself as frustrated and discouraged. She employs five full-time workers.

“The impact on our business has been greater and greater,” she added.

Joy also pointed to a noticeably lower customer count, but couldn’t pin down a specific percentage that sales had fallen except to say they’re “down significantly.” She’s noticed dramatic drops in sales at different times of the week, including Sunday mornings when grocery stores are typically crowded with shoppers.

“It is costing us more to keep our regular hours,” which she’s considered cutting, but “we don’t want to give people a reason to go to another store.”

For now, she’s not focusing on the losses.

“I guess what I would like people to take away is just the importance of every single bottle,” Joy said. “We appreciate every single purchase.”

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David Wheeler and his group, American Muckrakers PAC, is accusing Boebert of hurting his fundraising with her own lawsuit threats and accusations that he made up the allegations lobbed at her during her re-election campaign. Wheeler’s group accused the Colorado lawmaker of a number of salacious activities that would be illegal or, given her staunch Christian conservative politics, hypocritical if proven true. Wheeler is a former Democratic candidate for the North Carolina state senate.

Following the accusations, Boebert took to conservative media with national footprints to claim Wheeler and his PAC made accusations they knew to be false — a claim Wheeler disputes. As part of his lawsuit announcement, Wheeler released audio recordings of many of his sources for the claims. The lawsuit states Boebert knew they were “publishing their sources’ reports … rather than making statements based on their own first-hand knowledge.”

“She went on multiple national shows, she was on the most-listened-to radio show in America, Sean Hannity’s show, to say we knew what we posted was a lie and posted it anyway,” Wheeler said in an interview. “I don’t know where you come from, but where I come from, that says you’re a scumbag.”

He added, “When someone says you’re a complete scumbag, where I come from, that means you stand up for yourself. In this case, that means taking her to court, so we’re taking her to court.”

In an interview, Wheeler acknowledged that they weren’t saying they had conclusive proof Boebert did what she was accused of, but that the allegations were corroborated by multiple sources and widely spread on social media. He notes that when one accusation was explicitly disproven, he took it down from his website.

U.S. libel laws generally give a wide berth for accusations made against public figures.

Wheeler said Boebert’s threats to sue him, his organization and his donors — the latter being an unorthodox if not unprecedented legal strategy — effectively shut off fundraising for his committee. The lawsuit states the group pulled in $20,000-plus in May and June 2022, when the accusations went public and . At the same time, Boebert took to multiple media outlets to deny them and hit back at Wheeler and the PAC, including allusions to a pending lawsuit.

In the following months, American Muckraker reported pulling in a quarter or less of its previous fundraising totals. The group estimates its lost fundraising to be about $158,000, according to the lawsuit.

While Boebert’s lawsuit hasn’t happened, the threat did effectively stifle American Muckrakers’ fundraising, Wheeler alleges. He said he was prepared for and even looking forward to the suit.

“We were looking forward to it because there’s this very defining moment between amateurs and professionals when they discover they have to go before a judge and possibly a jury and tell the truth,” Wheeler said. “Then they tend to back down from their ridiculous claim.”

Wheeler previously won recognition for releasing of former U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican, ahead of his unsuccessful re-election bid in 2020. Cawthorn, like Boebert, was aligned with the furthest right wing of the party and among former President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters.

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“It was a party,” said the full-bearded, 66-year-old resident of this former Colorado mining town perched in the shadows of the Spanish Peaks in Las Animas County.

Van Heesch was one of nearly 1.3 million Coloradans last November to vote for Proposition 122, which decriminalized the growing, use and sharing of psilocybin and psilocin — key compounds found in “magic mushrooms” — along with ibogaine, mescaline and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.

But his was a rare yes vote in Cokedale, a tiny hamlet of 150 hardscrabble residents seven miles west of Trinidad. The town, with its 350 defunct coke ovens signifying its legacy as a one-time coal mining hub, isn’t jazzed about psilocybin healing centers coming in.

Residents cite concerns about crime, transients, exposure of psychedelics to children and any funding that might be needed to regulate the industry.

“It’s a quality of life thing here,” Cokedale Mayor Jason Swetky said.

Van Heesch agrees, saying the final word on psychedelics should rest with the residents of Cokedale.

“Does the town have the right to say ‘no’ to it? Yeah,” he said to murmurs of approval from a dozen or so fellow residents recently gathered inside the town’s century-old mercantile building, which houses the post office, town hall and a mining museum.

Despite the nod to local control here, city and county governments in Colorado are, in fact, from inside their borders.

“Proposition 122 specifically prohibits local bans,” said state Sen. Steve Fenberg, a Boulder Democrat and the Senate president. “So a municipality can’t ban — but it can regulate time, place and manner.”

The state legislature is expected to start crafting an implementation bill for Prop 122 in the coming weeks, Fenberg said. Psilocybin remains an illegal Schedule I drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Colorado’s measure only permits use of psychedelics by those 21 and older.

Despite the ballot measure’s explicit prohibition on local opt-outs on psilocybin healing centers, municipal and county leaders from the Kansas line to the Utah line are intent on inserting as much local control as they can into whatever psychedelics-related legislation emerges at the state House this spring.

The refrain at the Colorado Municipal League’s annual legislative workshop in Denver in February was clear: regulate mushrooms like marijuana.

“Colorado has established a precedent with marijuana that allows Colorado communities to choose whether, and to what degree, they want to allow controlled substances in their communities,” league executive director Kevin Bommer said. “That precedent has been working well for state and local governments, but Prop 122 deviates from this model.”

Cities and towns, Bommer said, should be able to “choose whether the presence of natural medicine and healing centers makes sense for their communities,” given that and “plenty of communities across Colorado have made it clear they do not support the allowances in Prop 122.”

More than half of the state’s counties — 36 of 64 — voted down the mushroom measure in November, noted Eric Bergman, policy director for Colorado Counties Inc.

“We are not looking to take away personal possession, use and home grows,” he said. “We just want to be able to decide locally if we will have commercial psilocybin businesses in our communities.”

The jostling over the introduction of magic mushrooms is just the latest clash in a long-running dispute over what power and authority belongs to Colorado’s cities and counties versus the state. In recent weeks, municipal leaders have vociferously attacked Gov. Jared Polis’ sweeping land-use reform bill as a massive overreach by the state. And four years ago, a new state law gave local governments significantly more control over oil and gas operations — powers that were once the sole province of the state.

Greenwood Village Mayor George Lantz invokes the “home rule” powers that many Colorado municipalities possess to assert that his city, which voted against Prop 122, should be able to curtail the psilocybin sector the way it did cannabis.

“We are concerned, as are most municipalities, over the availability and adverse effects of all mind-altering drugs on our citizens and especially our children,” Lantz said. “We are facing a drug crisis where the availability of mind-altering drugs of all types is creating a drug culture with increasing homelessness, crime (and) dangerous conditions on our roads…”

Defense of local control is shared by communities that both embrace and reject retail pot and cannabis cultivation. In the state’s southwest corner, Cortez has a thriving marijuana scene, with several dispensaries and a grow facility. But it’s that way, said City Manager Drew Sanders, because residents willed it so.

“It’s not fair we have something imposed on us without any say,” he said. “Oftentimes, we feel our voice is not heard on the Front Range.”

More than 400 miles to the east, Lochbuie said ‘no thank you’ to recreational or medical pot sales. The rapidly growing Weld County town of 8,500 wants the same discretion on psychedelics.

“So little is known about these products that it makes sense that local elected officials get to make the decision on it,” Town Administrator Brian McBroom said.

“Changed my life”

Allison Wilson, founder of , said much is in fact known about psychedelics and their healing properties. Her Parker-based organization helps female veterans, military spouses and gold star wives with counseling and support via “psychedelic healing journeys.”

Wilson said she was introduced to hallucinogens when her Navy Seal husband tried ibogaine, an extract from an African shrub, six years ago. Wilson, who had been taking anti-depressants for 16 years, decided to go on a journey of her own. She used MDMA, or ecstasy, along with psilocybin in a controlled setting and under guidance.

She has since been on two more journeys, and she microdoses with mushrooms too.

“It really changed my life,” Wilson said. “Psychedelics are able to break down that armor and get to the problem.”

She hasn’t had to use prescription painkillers since her first psychedelic experience.

“I was able to get to exactly where my trauma was,” Wilson said.

Prop 122 proponents asserted during last fall’s campaign that psilocybin has shown promising results in treating , �����Ի� and . Even though the substance remains illegal under federal law, the Federal Drug Administration designated it in 2018.

Denver decriminalized magic mushrooms nearly four years ago, becoming the first city in the nation to do so.

Because of psychedelics’ therapeutic potential, Wilson said it isn’t right to deny people medicine as close to where they live as possible.

“If we do have a county opt out, what happens to the people there who need that support?” she said.

And comparing the mechanics of the cannabis industry to the psychedelics industry is a faulty contrast, Wilson said. Prop 122 doesn’t call for magic mushroom retail shops.

“It’s so different from medical cannabis — we’re not selling psilocybin in a store, we’re providing support before, during and after (its use),” she said. “This isn’t us trying to get mushrooms on the streets — this is us trying to give help that we know works.”

Kevin Matthews, a Prop 122 proponent with the Natural Medicine Health Act, said “limiting access to therapeutic services will increase already existing mental health disparities, especially in rural communities where some people cannot afford the additional expense of traveling to other cities or counties where healing centers are allowed.”

Something as vital as healthcare, he said, shouldn’t be balkanized across counties and cities.

“Because access to natural medicines is a matter of statewide concern, making it more difficult for people to access these medicines across the state creates additional and unnecessary burdens for those who can likely benefit the most,” Matthews said.

Oregon, the only other state to have decriminalized psilocybin, took the opposite tack when its voters passed Ballot Measure 109 in 2020. The state included a local opt-out, and so far have banned or limited psilocybin cultivation and “service centers.”

According to , an advocacy group that tracks progress on psilocybin bills in state legislatures, almost the entire eastern half of Oregon decided against playing host to the industry. The two counties that encompass the southeast corner of the state — Harney and Malheur — are together larger than Maryland and eight other U.S. states.

The nearly 40,000 rural residents that live there will have no easy access to service centers.

“We can’t handle that”

Cokedale Trustee Bob Holman said there are many specialty healthcare services that are simply not available to residents in rural areas of the state and psychedelics shouldn’t get special status.

“I know someone who had to drive (92 miles) to Pueblo every day for four weeks for radiation treatment,” he said of a neighbor. “We should have some freedom to say we don’t want it here.”

Residents worry about replicating some of the problems in Cokedale that they see down the road in Trinidad, where they say 20 or so pot shops amongst a population of fewer than 9,000 have led to a noticeable transient and homeless population.

“I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night with someone on my lawn tripping on mushrooms,” said Laurie Johnson, a three-year Cokedale resident.

In rural Baca County, which borders Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, Commissioner Rick Butler worries about traffickers moving mushrooms and other psychedelics out of Colorado along U.S. 287/385.

“That’s a major thoroughfare between Dallas and Denver,” he said. “You’re talking about a county with four or five deputies. We can’t handle that.”

Baca County, with a population of just 3,500, voted down Prop 122 and allows no marijuana grows or retail stores. On the other side of the state, Montrose County Commissioner Sue Hansen said no one knows the “long-term effects of allowing this in the county.”

That’s why the decision about its spread should remain local, she said.

“The diversity between counties is evident and what works in the metro corridor doesn’t always work well in the rural and smaller counties,” Hansen said.

But backers of Prop 122 are adamant that their measure not get watered down. In February, proponents of psychedelic medicine faced off with state lawmakers in a legislative town hall in Boulder to demand that the General Assembly not gut the spirit of what voters passed.

Wilson, with The Hope Project, said the voters have spoken and local opt-outs were not part of the ballot measure.

“You vote to see who has the higher number of yes votes — and we won,” she said.

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March 1 marks the first day that wine can be sold at grocery and convenience stores in Colorado, the result of a bitterly close ballot measure in November that will change the way people purchase alcohol across the state.

As of this month, around 1,900 grocery and convenience store licensees in Colorado will be able to begin selling wine, according to the Department of Revenue.

That includes all 143 King Soopers grocery stores, all 100 Safeway locations and all eight Trader Joe’s stores throughout the state.

“Customers have told us they want the convenience to be able to pick up a bottle of wine to have with a nice steak or a bottle of champagne for a special occasion,” said Kris Staaf, a Safeway spokesperson. “We are really excited.”

Representatives of Whole Foods and other grocers operating in Colorado couldn’t be reached Tuesday to discuss their plans to carry wine in their stores.

Proposition 125 was too close to call for weeks after the election, with 50.6% of the vote.

A coalition of independent liquor store owners vehemently opposed the measure, arguing that the expansion of wine sales to big-name grocery chains would cripple their businesses.

Meanwhile, giant out-of-state conglomerates — including the companies behind King Soopers and Safeway — spent millions as they attempted to open up the state’s liquor laws.

While Colorado voters narrowly approved the wine measure, they rejected two other alcohol-related propositions that would have allowed liquor stores to open unlimited locations and permitted third-party companies like Instacart to deliver alcohol to your home.

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The result of all those ballots cast since Glenwood Springs first lifted the restriction on municipal broadband in the spring of 2008 is the installation of hundreds of miles of new fiber-optic lines throughout the Centennial State, from tiny Wray near the Kansas border to even smaller Mountain Village near Telluride — and dozens of communities in between.

The big pipes delivering data to homes and businesses mean an increasing number of Coloradans are now receiving gigabit-speed internet service — a lickety-split connection that makes online video or high-resolution gaming seamless and glitch-free. One gigabit-per-second can be as much as 100 times faster than the broadband speeds many residents get now.

“Forward-looking communities are starting to understand that fiber is a critical asset,” said Tim Scott, a project manager overseeing the buildout of Boulder’s broadband backbone.

The pandemic, which shifted work and schooling en masse to the web, shone a light on just how important a reliable and fast connection is in today’s world. And internet service from CenturyLink and Comcast, the two biggest players in the state, didn’t always hold up, Scott said.

“Why do we accept this duopoly of service? That’s what we’re trying to do in Boulder is to make it more competitive,” he said. “What the pandemic did is it brought the delivery of broadband services to the attention of every mayor.”

For Lakewood Mayor Adam Paul, internet connectivity is “as important as having water and electricity, and we need to ensure we have robust systems in place to serve our residents and our businesses.”

It’s why Lakewood chose to team up with Google Fiber to bring gigabit service to the city of 156,000. The company’s first “fiber-to-the-home” service in Colorado is scheduled to start going into the ground in the state’s fifth-largest city in the first quarter of 2023.

For every city, it’s a different calculation when it comes to bolstering connectivity.

A few, like Longmont and Fort Collins, chose to build — and own — the fiber network themselves, and are selling internet service to residents and businesses directly. Others, like Centennial and Colorado Springs, have built or are building a “dark” fiber backbone that they lease to a third-party internet service provider, which turns around and markets plans to the public.

Still, others are taking a regional approach, like Region 10 on the Western Slope, a non-profit organization that uses state matching funds to build and lease fiber in a remotely populated six-county area of the state, stretching from Telluride to Delta and Gunnison to Lake City.

Corey Bryndal, regional broadband director for Region 10, calls the investments in the network — made possible by voters’ choices at the ballot box — a “game-changer” for a rural swath of Colorado that had given up on ever getting a speedy connection.

“The cable companies and phone companies have been modest in their investments in western Colorado,” he said. “We don’t have to live stuck where we are.”

Different approaches

The effort to come out of the shadow of Senate Bill 152, a law passed by state legislators in 2005 and designed to keep municipal governments out of the online infrastructure space so as not to compete with the private sector, has been slow but steady. The bill includes a provision allowing communities to override the law.

Aside from one defeat at the polls in Longmont in 2009, voters have given a green light to opt out of the state law 122 times over the last 14 years. On Nov. 8, Castle Pines, Lone Tree, Pueblo and Trinidad became the latest Colorado municipalities to say no to SB 152.

But Kevin Bommer, executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, said a yes vote “just allows the door to be opened” but “doesn’t put one inch of fiber in the ground.”

Infrastructure buildout looks different for everyone and depends on access to resources and expertise, geographic location and population density. And because each community in Colorado is moving at its own pace, some planted the broadband flag years ago while others only recently held an election on the matter.

Fort Collins was early out of the gate, with 83% of voters there overturning the restrictive law seven years ago. Two years later, voters passed a $150 million bond measure to fund the city’s broadband network, dubbed Connexion.

Construction on the 700-mile fiber backbone began in 2019 and is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks. Fort Collins is taking a full-service approach.

“The city is building the fiber backbone as well as fiber to each premise when those premises sign up,” said Chad Crager, Connexion’s executive director. “We are operating the entire ISP.”

Connexion charges $59.95 a month for 1-gigabit speed service, on both the download and upload side. Crager said the city has signed up nearly one in three households so far.

“The pandemic has made high-speed internet much more important, especially high upload speeds,” he said. “The pandemic resulted in a higher number of residents teleworking and students doing school work from home, thus the overall need for bandwidth and upload speeds has increased and high-speed internet has become a necessity.”

Centennial voters cast off SB 152 two years earlier than Fort Collins, and the city completed construction of a nearly $6 million, 50-mile dark fiber backbone in 2018. But the south suburb doesn’t have its fingers as deep in the broadband basket as its northerly neighbor.

Centennial’s fiber ring chiefly serves as a conduit between “community anchor institutions,” like the Cherry Creek School District and city buildings, said Centennial spokesman Eric Eddy. The 432-strand fiber network also provides a connection to the city’s intelligent traffic signaling system and powers free public Wi-Fi in Centennial Center Park.

The city is relying largely on Ting Internet to bring a gigabit broadband signal from the city’s unused fiber strands to individual homes and businesses.

“The city’s role is a neutral, non-exclusive middle-mile provider,” Eddy said. “Ting has leased city-owned fiber and built its own last-mile fiber network to provide services.”

Ting, which boasts “crazy-fast fiber internet” as its main offering, declined to comment for this story.

Colorado Springs is also turning to Ting to provide internet to the home in the state’s second-largest city. Colorado Springs Utilities, the city’s municipal utility, just started building its $600 million fiber backbone in September. It expects the first customers to receive internet service from Ting next year.

“When this fiber-optic network is complete in 2028, Colorado Springs will be one of the largest gig-cities in the country,” said Jamie Fabos, general manager of public affairs for Colorado Springs Utilities. “It will connect every address to the highest speed internet available and enable us to deliver utility services more efficiently and effectively.”

Rural broadband challenges

The Colorado Broadband Office has long aimed to ensure that rural and underserved areas of the state aren’t left out of the broadband revolution. According to a study published in June 2021 by BroadbandNow, nearly 675,000 people in Colorado lack access to an internet service that can provide 25 Mbps (million bits per second) download speeds and 3 Mbps upload speeds — the government’s definition of broadband.

There may be as many as 80,000 to 90,000 rural Colorado households with subpar internet, state officials estimated right before the pandemic arrived in the state.

Lauren Francis, broadband marketing communications manager with the Governor’s Office of Information Technology, said the state is preparing for a gush of dollars from last year’s $1 trillion federal infrastructure bill, some of which is earmarked for internet expansion.

“Our office is focusing on understanding broadband coverage across the state by building comprehensive maps to support future grant decisions when we are ready to deploy millions from federal broadband programs over the next few years,” she said.

In early December, state officials unveiled a $171 million grant program from the federal government to connect 18,000 homes, businesses, and farms to high-speed internet. That represents about 15% of locations that currently lack high-speed internet in the state.

At the same time, U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet announced $43.7 million from the infrastructure bill to deploy high-speed internet to the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in Colorado’s southwest corner.

“Tribal communities too often find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide,” Bennet said in a statement. “With this funding, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe can bring their families, farms, businesses, and schools online, help communities within the reservation boundaries improve their broadband services, and begin to close that digital gap.”

All in all, Gov. Jared Polis said the state expects to receive between $400 million and $1 billion over the next few years for broadband efforts. Francis said the state government wants to help fill gaps in coverage while not unfairly impacting companies that already successfully provide internet service in Colorado.

“We also do not want to overbuild, so if a provider is offering fair pricing and reliable service to the residents of that town, then competition may not be necessary,” she said.

Access to good internet connections can be a big problem for rural parts of Colorado, Region 10 broadband director Bryndal said. His organization, he said, isn’t in the business of displacing companies already providing service.

“We’re just trying to lower the barriers for the internet service providers,” he said, noting that laying fiber in remote, topographically challenging areas doesn’t pencil out for most companies.

Region 10 has acquired or installed about 600 miles of fiber-optic cable in its six-county footprint, lighting up more populated areas like Ouray, Montrose, Delta and Telluride with high-speed internet. But Bryndal said there are still plenty of pockets in his part of the state where broadband doesn’t exist, including some areas around Crested Butte, where he lives.

“We’re not competing or overbuilding — we’re just trying to build infrastructure where it hasn’t been able to be built,” he said.

CenturyLink’s parent company, Lumen Technologies, said the industry is best managed by private hands. The company announced last month the launch of its gigabit-speed Quantum Fiber service in metro Denver and Colorado Springs. Danielle Spears, a Lumen spokeswoman, said “private sector providers have proven to be better positioned and more motivated to deliver on innovation.”

“Programs that favor government-owned networks have proven not to be in the best interest of consumers or taxpayers,” she said.

For its part, Comcast emphasized its role in bearing “the entire risk of its investments” in Colorado, which it pegged at $1.2 billion last year.

“Over the last few years, as internet usage increased, our fiber-backed network continued to thrive as overall demand rose to historic levels,” said Leslie Oliver, a company spokeswoman. “We regularly provide automatic speed increases to our customers over our fiber-backed technology that already exists in their homes and businesses, without the need to do disruptive construction.”

Scott, with Boulder’s broadband project, acknowledged the disruption created by burying 60 miles of fiber under the city’s streets and sidewalks. But he said the city is 75% done with the installation and expects the first customers to come online in a couple of years. Meanwhile, the city’s new fiber backbone will power its traffic signals and connect its municipal facilities via gigabit speeds.

“We need to figure out how to be in the game of owning our own fiber infrastructure,” Scott said.

Google Fiber in Lakewood will take several years to build out. But Mark Strama, director of expansion for Google, said the company is using a technique called micro-trenching — the width of the cut in the pavement is only about an inch or two — to lay its fiber.

“We’ll be in and out of your neighborhood in a day,” he said.

The message from Colorado voters at the ballot box over the last 14 years is clear, Strama said: They want whatever barriers exist to accessing affordable and reliable high-speed internet removed.

“The message voters are sending is that they want more competition for internet services,” he said.