One is a military veteran who pitches himself as a lifelong civic servant and recently tossed his name in the hat. The other is a political newbie who emphasizes his family’s deep Colorado roots and entered the race more than a year ago.

Both candidates — and — said in interviews that they decided to seek the Democratic nomination in the June 30 primary to challenge freshman U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd in response to overreach and corruption they see in the Trump administration. With little difference in their policy platforms — Kelloff even claimed Romero copied his — voters will have to look to their backgrounds to decide.

“This particular district is very large … it’s all these disparate economies: farming, ranching, tourism and steel production,” Romero said. “Because of all that, it’s hard to find some single thread that pulls everyone together. … (Voters) need to see someone that they can trust and they need to see a part of themselves in the candidate before them.”

Colorado’s 3rd District covers nearly half of the state, swooping from the desert and canyons of the Western Slope to the high mountains in southern Colorado and the southern end of the Front Range in Pueblo.

Larger than the entire state of Pennsylvania, the rural district encompasses 27 of the state’s 64 counties and takes in vastly different towns, including Aspen, Grand Junction, San Luis and Durango.

The district in recent years has leaned Republican, though voter data show 23% of the district’s voters are affiliated as Democrats, 26% as Republicans, while nearly half have no party identification.

The district has not been represented by a Democrat since 2011, when former U.S. Rep. John Salazar lost to Republican Scott Tipton. Tipton was then ousted in the 2020 Republican primary by Lauren Boebert, who in 2024 moved across the state to instead represent the 4th Congressional District.

In the 2024 election, President Donald Trump won the 3rd District by a 10-point margin.

But voting tallies show that Republicans’ hold on the district is not absolute. In both 2022 and 2024, Democrat Adam Frisch came close to clinching the seat. The Aspen businessman lost to Boebert in 2022 by less than 546 votes. In 2024, Hurd won the seat with 51% of votes — nearly 20,000 more votes than Frisch, who earned 46% of the vote.

Seizing on frustration with Trump

Both Kelloff and Romero hope to ride the momentum of what they see as rising frustration with the Trump administration to flip the seat back to blue.

“We need to bring back leadership in Washington,” Kelloff said. “I’m running to hopefully lead with moral clarity. I think this is the most corrupt administration that we’ve ever seen in the history of America.”

Both candidates listed addressing the rising cost of living as their top priority. Other goals include protecting public lands and Western Slope water interests.

“There is an absolute public outcry on affordability and the cost of living and making ends meet for rural families and working-class families,” Romero said. “What our current administration has done is absolutely ignore that.”

In interviews, both candidates emphasized their ties to Colorado and — despite their business success and affluence as adults — more humble upbringings.

Kelloff’s family has lived in the district since 1893, though he grew up outside of Washington, D.C. He traveled back frequently to the Centennial State to visit family before moving to Aspen permanently six years ago.

Kelloff, 52, spent 30 years in the telecommunications industry and also co-founded Armada Skis. While he’s never won elected office, Kelloff said he has decades of experience forging deals and leading large teams in the business realm.

He announced his candidacy more than a year before primary ballots were set to be mailed out — starting today — so that he could spend time traveling the state, talking to voters. By January, he had visited all 27 counties in the district.

“I’ve been in this race for almost 13 months,” Kelloff said. “To win this seat, to flip this seat, you need a fighter to take on Jeff Hurd and win. That’s why I got in 13 months early to do the hard work.”

Romero, 61, grew up on the Gulf Coast of Texas and, after 11 years in the military, moved to the Roaring Fork Valley in 1996. He leads that has sold more than $50 million worth of property since 2023. His wife, Margaret, has worked as a local schoolteacher in the Roaring Fork Valley for 25 years.

Romero, who entered the race four months before the primary, emphasized his history of serving on local boards: two terms on the Aspen City Council, two terms on the Aspen School District board, two terms on the local fire district board and, now, serving his second term on the local water and sanitation board. He also served for six months as the chief economic development director in then-Gov. John Hickenlooper’s cabinet in 2011 and for three years on the state economic development commission.

“Twelve months of driving around in the district and taking some pictures here and there is all well and good,” Romero said of Kelloff’s campaigning, “but that does not erase the body of work and the experiences and know-how we’ve achieved over the last 30 to 35 years — sorry.”

Hurd is ‘not a headline-grabber’

Frisch, the Democrat who previously tried to win the seat, endorsed Romero on the day he announced his campaign. The two men served on the Aspen City Council together and the address for Romero’s campaign is the same as that for the Frisch now runs.

Whichever candidate wins the Democratic primary will need to educate voters on Hurd’s voting record, said Nick Voss, the chair of The incumbent operates more quietly than his predecessor, whose controversial statements and personal life routinely made news.

“He’s not a headline-grabber, like Lauren Boebert is,” Voss said.

This year’s race , who previously endorsed a Republican candidate looking to challenge Hurd in the primary after Hurd split from the Republican majority on tariff policy.

However, Trump in March re-endorsed Hurd and said he convinced the other Republican running against him, Hope Scheppelman, to and instead work in his administration, where she as an adviser for the federal .

“Together with (the Scheppelmans), we decided that Congressman Jeff Hurd, of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District, should in no way, shape, or form, be impeded from winning the District in that the Democrat alternative is a DISASTER for our Country,” Trump wrote in a March 20 social media post.

In April, a former state representative announced he would challenge Hurd in the Republican primary. served in the state House, representing Fremont County from 2021 to 2023.

Hurd, a Grand Junction attorney, , winning 41% of the vote to Hanks’ 29% in a crowded open race.

As of the most recent federal finance reporting, through March 31, Hurd had raised $3 million, compared to about $1 million by Kelloff and about $500,000 by Romero.

Both Democratic challengers have loaned significant money to their campaigns: Kelloff loaned $450,000 of his own money to his campaign and Romero loaned $280,000 to his.

The number of high school graduates in the country peaked in 2025 at nearly 3.9 million and is expected to steadily decline through 2041, according to which has .

About 18 years ago, Americans stopped having as many babies.

Between 2007 and 2025, births in the U.S. declined by 16%. In Colorado, they decreased about 8% during the same timeframe, according to Neal Marquez, projections demographer at the .

The Boulder-based Western Interstate Commission between 2023 and 2041. A total of 60,387 Colorado students graduated in four years in the 2024-25 school year, according to state data.

Higher education officials have watched their pool of typical applicants dwindle little by little. Most have been in talks for years on how to pivot to stave off what education officials have collectively dubbed “the demographic enrollment cliff.”

In Colorado, many institutions have managed to keep a positive enrollment trajectory so far, but now they’re peering over the edge of the cliff, hoping they can incentivize enough new applicants with promises of affordability and resources.

“What we’ve tried to emphasize is that demography is not destiny,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of policy analysis and research at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. “We are here at this inflection point where there will be fewer high school graduates in the future, but throughout history, there have been points where the number of births and potential high school graduates have declined, and higher education has found ways to increase access.

“Are we able to do that now? That’s the key question.”

The reason for the decline is largely attributable to a dramatic reduction in pregnancies among teens and young women — in part due to more accessible contraception — coupled with , Marquez said.

Higher education experts predict fiercer competition among colleges trying to attract students from a smaller cohort, as well as potential enrollment declines that could rock an institution’s bottom line. Not to mention, critical jobs requiring a degree, like nurses and teachers, need the support of a workforce to best serve their communities.

How are universities responding?

a public regional institution in the San Luis Valley, experienced about 15 years of declining undergraduate enrollment before an upturn in the past few years, President David Tandberg said.

In the fall, undergraduate enrollment rose 4.7% from 2024 with 1,721 students attending.

“We’re really proud of that, but it����ap not going to get any easier,” Tandberg said.

There will be much more competition for students among institutions — not only when it comes to Colorado students, but also college-seekers nationwide — as fertility rates decrease across the country, Tandberg said.

“That is compounded by the fact that we, as a state, are not importing people at the rate we used to,” Tandberg said. “We’ve never been great at getting our Colorado high schoolers into our colleges and universities, and yet have had a comparatively high educational attainment rate because we imported people and imported a lot of out-of-state students as a sector, and it looks like that is going to be harder to do.”

Adams State bills itself as the most diverse public university in Colorado. The Alamosa-based college became the first in the state in 1998, and half of its students are the first in their families to attend college. The school’s largest demographic are students of color.

Lane and other higher education experts said institutions must focus on recruiting and catering to non-traditional college students. It’s a strategy that’s already foundational to Adams State’s mission, as it serves the lowest-income region of the state, Tandberg said.

“We’ve kind of had the market cornered on that and obviously every other college and university is going to want to move into markets of growth, so we expect increased competition in that regard,” Tandberg said. “We’ve got to be more innovative, hustle more and we’ve been doing that.”

The Western Interstate Commission also advises universities on potential ways to offset the decline.

Removing barriers for non-traditional students like prohibitive costs or complicated admissions and financial aid processes is one way to improve access, said Lane, who helps create the commission’s enrollment reports.

Lane pointed to Adams State’s direct admissions program as a smart intervention that attracts students who might have otherwise overlooked college.

Adams State bills itself as the first university in Colorado to offer direct admissions, meaning all graduates of San Luis Valley high schools and a few other districts across the state, including Adams County School District 14, are automatically accepted. That makes Adams State an open-access institution.

“We don’t have an admissions rate we can adjust to hit our enrollment targets,” Tandberg said. “We fight for every single student, and, in some ways, that exposes us a little bit more to the demographic declines because the pool we’re pulling from is the pool we’re pulling from, and we get who we get. From our founding, we have had a mission of serving the underserved. We do it tremendously well because that����ap our entire mission, and I think state leaders ought to consider that in their funding decisions.”

The also guarantees free tuition and fees for any in-state, full-time student whose family makes $70,000 or less.

“For institutions that are more selective, this won’t be a huge deal,” Lane said of the enrollment cliff. “They might just go further down their admission list. But for open-access institutions and community colleges, I think it’s a big deal because, ultimately, enrollment is a big deal.”

Staying relevant

Representatives of the state’s flagship university, for example, appeared less concerned about the decline.

“The is well-positioned to meet our for fall 2026, despite a nationwide demographic decline,” campus spokesperson Nicole Cousins said in a statement. “While enrollment figures will not become available until September, when we release our annual student census data, first-year confirmations are up compared to this time last year.”

At , enrollment has been on the rise, with the Auraria campus institution welcoming more than 18,000 students this fall, a  3.1% increase over last year’s enrollment, according to institutional data.

Notably, there was a 1% increase in students aged 18 to 24 — the shrinking, traditional college-going age.

“From a recruitment standpoint, our admit numbers look strong, so we’re hopeful we can still get one more year where we’re strong on enrollment, but it����ap really hard to tell,” said Megan Scherzberg, interim associate vice president of enrollment management. “However, we are preparing and having these conversations about what to expect as increased competition hits the state. All of us are also having this conversation of how do we keep our market share and increase our market share when our high school graduate numbers are going down.”

MSU Denver — known for serving a large population of , first-generation students, working students, adult learners and parents — is balancing being more appealing to non-traditional college students with competing for that smaller pool of high school graduates as it works to offset potential enrollment declines.

“When we think about the more adult learner, non-traditional student, they’re just harder to find,” Scherzberg said. “You don’t have a captive audience like a junior class, senior class, so that means we’ve got to get more creative: making connections with industry partnerships to think about what the industry needs, digital ads, marketing, branding and showcasing post-grad outcomes related to employment and compensation, too.”

The university is reaching out to veterans and military-connected students and transfer students while simultaneously hoping the traditional college student finds the university’s first on-campus housing project under construction appealing.

While enrollment is on the up and up now, Scherzberg extrapolated on why higher education institutions are taking these demographic shifts so seriously.

“Declining enrollment for an institution, depending on the institution’s ability to navigate these challenges, could mean closing doors for some smaller institutions if we don’t have the pipeline of students to enter,” she said. “It could mean losing jobs for faculty and staff, if we don’t have the students to fill the seats. It may mean institutions have to make some difficult decisions with regards to right-sizing and how many students are we able to serve and how many faculty and staff would we need to be able to serve those students.”

‘Perfect storm of fewer students’

The is going through that right-sizing process now as it grapples with a $30 million budget shortfall. Budget reductions at the private research institution have meant hard conversations about what and who to cut.

The demographic changes are one of several factors that led to cuts, said Todd Rinehart, DU’s vice chancellor for enrollment.

Enrollment declined the past two years at DU after years of growth, Rinehart said. Part of that decline, he said, was an intentional strategy by the university to keep the student population more sustainable financially and return to a class size from a decade ago that might be more manageable.

It’s not just the smaller number of high school graduates keeping enrollment offices up at night, Rinehart said. In recent years, about 70% of graduating seniors have gone directly to college, Rinehart said. , only 60% did.

Compounding that trend, larger, “name-brand” research universities are expected to expand their freshman class to make up for fewer international students and federal cuts to research dollars executed under the Trump administration.

“It’s a perfect storm of fewer students,” Rinehart said.

President John Marshall views declining enrollment a bit differently than his peers. He went so far as to call the demographic change “overhyped.” Enrollment at CMU has been increasing with 9,788 students signed up this fall, a few more students than the year prior, and nearly 800 more students than in 2023.

“Most universities are still fishing for kids in a shrinking pond,” Marshall said. “They’re still trying to go after those kids who have typically had access to college… are you conceding the other half of kids have no place in college? You have somewhere between 40 to 50% of high school graduates who are going nowhere, and we’re all wringing our hands as though there’s nothing to be done about that. Let’s go get serious about being relevant to everyone.”

CMU, located in Grand Junction, has invested in trade programs, advisers for first-generation students and merit programs to help support students from middle-income families, Marshall said.

In the K-12 school district , in CMU’s backyard, there were fewer high school seniors last year than the year before, Marshall said.

“The question is, can we still be relevant enough that students vote with their feet in greater numbers and students who haven’t typically gone on to college come to us? And if we can do that, I think we can continue to grow,” he said.

Each year, 10 junior college baseball teams from across the country make the pilgrimage to the largest city in western Colorado for the right to compete for a national title in the NJCAA Division I Junior College World Series.

Grand Junction has been home to JUCO, as it����ap simply known by locals and junior college ball clubs, since 1959. The tournament has not only energized the city of nearly 72,000 people in the six decades since its arrival, but also much of Mesa County and the baseball community on Colorado’s Western Slope.

Teams from across the U.S. battle through 60-game seasons for the right to play in Grand Junction. Those teams then duke it out in a week-long, double-elimination tournament until one is left standing on the final weekend of May.

It����ap not some folksy, podunk event. The fireworks game on Memorial Day usually fills or nearly fills the 10,000-seat stadium. The tournament also draws top-end talent. What Omaha’s College World Series is to four-year Division I schools, Grand Junction is to the JUCO world.

Kirby Puckett, the namesake for the tournament����ap MVP award,. in the late 1990s. Bryce Harper starred for the College of Southern Nevada in 2010 before being drafted No. 1 overall by the Washington Nationals in the MLB draft. And, in 2022, Milwaukee Brewers’ budding ace pitcher Jacob Misiorowski touched triple digits on the radar gun in a hail-delayed win for Missouri’s Crowder College. On Thursday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan called the JUCO World Series “the purest form of baseball” that he’s seen in ages.

Dusty Hart, the head coach of Blinn College in Texas, one of this year’s finalists, is well-acquainted with the tournament. He played for Texas’ Grayson College in the 1998 JUCO tournament and coached Grayson back to the tournament. He guided Blinn to the 2024 national championship.

“It����ap incredible. We’ll go eat lunch in the afternoon, and there’s 10 kids trying to get you to sign their Chick-fil-A bags at lunch,” Hart said. “I’ve had players that have played in Omaha after they played in Grand Junction. And they tell me, man, Omaha is awesome, but Grand Junction is right up there with it.”

This year’s field featured Blinn, Harford Community College (Maryland), Johnson County Community College (Kansas), Louisiana State University Eunice, Midland College (Texas), Miami Dade College (Florida), Salt Lake Community College (Utah), Seminole State College (Oklahoma), Wabash Valley College (Illinois) and Walters State Community College (Tennessee).

As of Friday, Blinn and Johnson County are the last two teams standing.

Grand Junction’s pastime

The first JUCO World Series was played in 1958 in Miami, Oklahoma. As the story goes, attendance was weak, the weather was bad, and the tournament experience was just lacking. So, JUCO moved to Grand Junction in 1959. Then-Mesa College earned auto bids early on as the hosts, though it eventually had to earn its way into the tournament. In all, Mesa made 13 JUCO tournaments before transitioning to a four-year school.

The Grand Junction Baseball Committee, also known as the JUCO Committee, had a series of short-term contracts with the NJCAA to host the tournament. It had to continually bid on those deals to keep the tournament in town. In 2010, the committee secured a 25-year contract with the NJCAA with the promise that it would construct a tower for special seating and a press box, and more seating in the stadium. That contract has since been extended, so .

JUCO is played at Suplizio Field, which also hosts independent baseball and high school baseball. Suplizio shares a facility with Ralph Stocker Stadium, a football stadium that also hosts track meets.

“The $10 million upgrade to the tower over there was done because of grants, income from the sales of tickets here, and getting people to contribute to it without having a tax increase in the facility, ” said Jamie Hamilton, who was the chairman of the JUCO Committee from 2003-2024 and first volunteered with the tournament in 1986. “People own this facility. High school players get to play in this facility. The community gets to walk on the football field and the track.”

Hamilton was born in Grand Junction, raised in Arvada, won a state baseball title with Regis Jesuit High School, played for Mesa State College and for the then-California Angels in their minor league system before returning to Grand Junction and helping out with JUCO.

Patti Arnold, a longtime Grand Junction sportswriter and JUCO volunteer who died last year, wrote in a 2017 book on the tournament that fans would camp in front of Suplizio Field the night before the first JUCO game, before seating was expanded at the stadium. She also wrote that, when putting together a special JUCO section for the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, coaches “bent over backwards” to help out when they heard “Grand Junction.”

Once the 10-team field is set and everyone arrives, the fun begins. Players and kids participate in a baseball clinic, and some teams get to play Challenger Baseball with kids who have physical or mental disabilities. Each team and some community members then attend a banquet the night before the first day of games to honor the latest inductees into the NJCAA Hall of Fame. The likes of Tony La Russa and Drew Goodman have delivered the keynote speech at the JUCO Banquet.

For Darren Coltrinari, the current JUCO committee chairman, the annual tournament is about community and tradition.

“You sit through a nine-inning game that could be two-and-a-half hours, it could be four-and-a-half hours. In baseball, less now, but there is dead time and a lot of the time, you’re sitting there talking,” said Coltrinari, who graduated from Grand Junction Central High School and played baseball at New Mexico. He’s also Hamilton’s godson.  “You’re reviewing the last pitch, you’re talking about what you’re doing tomorrow, things like that. There’s a social aspect to baseball.”

Coltrinari added: “Our goal as a community is to make this the best tournament possible.”

That effort comes through partnerships with local partners — the school district, business community, government, media outlets and about 83 volunteers. The regulars’ hearts are heavy this year following the deaths of longtime volunteers Arnold, the former sportswriter, and Greg Hazelhurst.

“Losing both of them was hard because they’re really the anchors; they’re really the rocks of everything that goes on up here,” said Jermaine Williams, who helps run media operations for JUCO. “(Saturday morning) was tough to not have them here. Obviously, we will continue to move on and do what we need to do. But both of them just meant a lot … I wish we had taken the time to hug them one more time.”

Thousands of people pack the stands for the first weekend of games. Chatter echoes through the ballpark, only to be interrupted by the smack of an aluminum bat, cheers and a foghorn sound effect after a player hits a home run. Sometimes, you’ll even hear the ball thumping off a car in the parking lot beyond center field.

Each team has a deck of baseball cards for sale. Local food vendors line the concourse, serving up foot-long corn dogs out of a 20-foot red tent, ice cream, or kettle corn, to name a few. No alcohol is served at the games, keeping in line with the family-friendly atmosphere.

Williams has been involved with JUCO since 2009. He once worked in athletics for Colorado Mesa University and is now an assistant athletics director at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. He and his family — wife Shayla, daughter Emma, and son Jaxon — still make the 1,600-mile trip every year for JUCO.

Williams has worked in athletics at five universities. While he hasn’t been to Omaha, he thinks it����ap hard to compare many college sports events to JUCO.

“The big events that I’ve been a part of are events that drop into a city, they’re there for four days and then they move on to the next city. The NCAA Regional or a Final Four or something like that,” Williams said. “The difference for me is just the homegrown feel of this event. It����ap been here for (67) years, and you’ve got people who grew up watching JUCO baseball that are now helping. You got families, kind of like ours, that are either in the Grand Valley or on the Front Range or anywhere in the country, and they come back for this week.

“And I think that����ap what makes it special.”

‘This was my big leagues’

Hunter Smolinski, the lead-off second baseman for Blinn, is from nearby Fruita.

Smolinski played for Division I Grand Canyon last season and was there until last fall, when it seemed unlikely he’d be an everyday player, he said. So, Smolinski got in touch with Hart, the Blinn coach, and got a spot on the Buccaneers’ roster.

Smolinski is one of three Colorado kids who played in this year’s tournament. The others were Erie’s Holden Pantier (Walters State) and Montrose’s Gage Wareham (Salt Lake).

When he was growing up, Smolinski’s parents would drop him off at the stadium for the morning game. He’d meet his friends there — they, too, dropped off by their parents, he said — and they’d spend all day hanging out at the stadium and watching baseball.

“There’s no money, no nothing involved in this. This is just straight passion for the game,” said Smolinski, who was hitting .500 with a 1.245 OPS on 20 at-bats as of Thursday.

Smolinski added that he thinks that mindset is clear to Grand Junction fans.

“I think that����ap the reason you see so many people coming out to watch these games,” he said.

Most of the schools that make it to JUCO come from areas of just a few dozen thousand people. And even those from larger areas — Miami Dade and Salt Lake, for example — are far from the main event in their communities.

And because many of these JUCO players won’t reach Omaha, let alone the majors, JUCO is their time to have that big-league attention.

Many JUCO teams don’t report their game attendance. Generally, though, those games are lucky to have 100 folks in the stands. Playing in the nightcap fireworks game on Memorial Day, Johnson County and Walters State drew a crowd of more than 11,000 people.

Hart����ap Buccaneers are on the precipice of another championship. His kids are in the midst of a week they’ll probably remember for a long time. It����ap been 30 years since Hart played in JUCO and he can still recall that experience.

Hart hit leadoff for Grayson in 1998. In his team’s second game, sent the first pitch he saw into Suplizio’s left-field bleachers.

“That����ap literally my best memory as a player … I don’t even remember going around the bases. It����ap just such a surreal moment,” said Hart, who admitted he probably played in front of bigger crowds later on in his career, “but never in a World Series type environment … This was my big leagues.”

Toasty spring temperatures on the Front Range and Eastern Plains will likely transition to severe thunderstorms with a chance of snow showers over the weekend and into early next week, National Weather Service forecasters said Friday.

The swing is “classic Colorado,” NWS Boulder meteorologist Dave Barjenbruch said.

“We’re going to see a pretty sharp change here tomorrow with scattered storms and the greatest risk for severe weather just east of Denver and over northeast Colorado,” Barjenbruch said.

There’s also a slight chance of a strong thunderstorm or two in metro Denver, he added, as well as a chance that could cause a slightly soggy Colfax Marathon on Sunday.

A moist air mass moving up from the Gulf of Mexico is expected to bring precipitation throughout the region starting Saturday, though when, where and how much is still up in the air, according to

Colorado’s mountains will likely see a few inches of snow starting Sunday night and the foothills could get up to an inch. It����ap about a 50-50 chance swirling in the sky on Monday, Barjenbruch said, but even then temperatures will be warm enough that there will be little to no accumulation.

Temperatures could fall low enough to put a layer of frost over early gardens, though a hard freeze is not likely, Barjenbruch said.

“We could dip to or just slightly below freezing Monday night, but most of the Denver metro should stay at or above freezing. We’re certainly keeping an eye on that over the next couple of days,” he said.

Most of the will see strong, gusty winds and low humidity on Saturday, which could cause elevated fire danger before transitioning to thunderstorms and rain showers on Monday, according to NWS offices in Grand Junction and Pueblo.

Brink, a Longmont resident, is a project manager for a metro Denver construction company and commutes to Cherry Hills Village every day in his truck, driving at least 40 miles one way. That doesn’t include trips between job sites.

“My family and I are on a shoestring budget anyway,” Brink said. “We have three kids and my wife is a teacher, and it just got to a point where we were looking around and saying, ‘Hey, we usually have a little bit of money at the end of the month. Why don’t we have any?’”

It����ap because Brink was paying almost double at the pump, jumping from a maximum of $600 a month over the summer to almost $1,200 recently. He’s now in the process of leaving his job in the south metro and starting a handyman business in Longmont.

Brink is one of many Front Range workers feeling the sting of rising gas prices, which increased by more than 55 cents a gallon on average in the last week, according to the fuel price comparison website and app GasBuddy.

The company surveyed 844 metro Denver gas stations and found an average price of $4.42 per gallon on Monday. That����ap 68.3 cents higher than that time last month, and $1.49 higher than that time last year, according to GasBuddy price reports.

As of Thursday, Denver’s cheapest gas was priced at $4.09 per gallon, and the most expensive was $4.59 per gallon, according to GasBuddy.

The national average gas price was $4.56 per gallon, up 42 cents from last month and $1.41 from last year, according to data from AAA.

“Gasoline prices rose in every state over the last week,” GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan said in a statement. “With so many moving pieces, the outlook remains highly fluid, and while some localized relief may emerge, broader price volatility is likely to persist in the near term.”

The increase is not isolated to metro Denver, according to AAA. The is now $4.40, up $1.26 from one year ago.

For truck drivers, the average price for diesel in Colorado is now $5.50, $2.11 more per gallon than one year ago.

AAA found the average gas price was $4.46 per gallon in Durango, up $1.48 from one year ago; $4.40 in Fort Collins and Loveland, an increase of $1.32; $4.71 in Glenwood Springs, a $1.19 increase; $4.53 in Grand Junction, a $1.32 increase; $4.34 in Greeley, a $1.27 increase; $4.36 in Pueblo, a $1.41 increase; and $4.71 in Vail, a $1.17 increase.

For some people, like Lindsay Ellsworth, simply choosing not to drive isn’t an option.

Ellsworth, 40, commutes from Brush to the Denver area at least once a week for her 4-year-old daughter’s medical appointments — a trip that takes, on average, at least 90 minutes in each direction. The closest Children’s Hospital satellite location is in Broomfield, and her daughter’s speech therapist is based in Aurora, she said.

Her daughter has a genetic disorder known as 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, Ellsworth said. She was diagnosed at roughly 3 weeks old, and since then has been in a variety of therapies and sees several specialists, the mother added.

“We go to Brighton or Denver anytime she is sick as well,” Ellsworth said. “Her (primary care physician) is in Brighton because good pediatric care is impossible to find.”

It����ap frustrating because she has no choice but to pay the increasing gas prices, she said. There’s no alternative.

Rideshare driver Joseph Guerrero counts himself lucky because he recently started taking on more work from a Colorado-based drivers cooperative that pays more than double what he could earn from Uber or Lyft. Guerrero asked to be identified by his middle name because he’s worried about retaliation from the rideshare companies for talking publicly about his experience.

Guerrero shared screenshots of payouts from different companies to drive customers to Denver International Airport from downtown. Uber and Lyft typically charge riders around $40 to $60 to get to the airport, and in recent trips offered to pay Guerrero less than $15. The Colorado Drivers Co-op charges customers similar rates, but paid Guerrero more than $50 for one trip.

“That’s what I rely on,” Guerrero said. “I only do Lyft just to get me out of an area and then switch back to the co-op. I have a lot of people who schedule their rides throughout the week, but they use on-demand as well.”

Even with the better pay, the increase in gas prices is hurting his budget, Guerrero said. He’s cut money from his grocery budget to pay for gas, which is now an additional $100 per week.

The idea of driving only for Uber or Lyft “is a joke right now,” he said. “Who would be able to make ends meet?” he said. “It would be a struggle.”

Traveling cooking instructor Bailey Snowmoore stopped driving for ride-hailing and meal delivery companies like DoorDash when she realized how much of her pay was going to gas.

Snowmoore and her wife used to bring home an extra $300 to $400 a month through gig work, which they saved up for unplanned expenses or fun activities.

“Now, our entire budget is rent, bills and maybe $10 extra toward going out a month,” she said.

Workers like Brink said that while they know there’s a certain amount of economic variability in gas prices no matter what, there are definitely bigger factors at play.

“I feel like the political choices that have been made in the past few months — it was pretty obvious what the consequence of a war in the Middle East was going to be, and yet we went and did it anyway, which was pretty stupid in my opinion,” Brink said.

Katie Kannen, owner of Denver meal delivery company , said she sees the impact of rising fuel costs across the board, like energy surcharges from trash and recycling companies to paying additional fuel stipends to the company’s contract delivery drivers.

“It’s harder and harder to run a small business when there are so many things happening on a national or global level that are beyond our control,” Kannen said. “It occasionally feels like an uphill battle — you’re controlling for all the things you can control, and then there’s a war in Iran.”

Guerrero said he was glad to see a bill recently introduced by state Rep. Jenny Willford, HB 26-1273, to limit how much money rideshare companies could take from a driver’s pay, but he’s not confident Gov. Jared Polis would sign it into law after the governor vetoed a ride-hailing safety bill in 2025 following pressure from Uber and Lyft.

“I do this every day, and people rely on us,” Guerrero said. “(Polis) doesn’t care about us, but everyone in our community can tell you that people are using rideshares to get to work.”

The train involved in the crash was the , a luxury passenger train operated by Canada-based . But Amtrak and various freight companies also use the Union Pacific-owned rails and, with the route closed to repair damage from the crash, those trains were unable to pass through on Wednesday and Thursday.

“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience,” on Amtrak’s train status page stated. The route spans dozens of stations between Chicago and Emeryville, California.

Amtrak suspended service between Denver and Grand Junction on Thursday because of the derailment the day before, according to the alert. The disruption affected trips from those two stations and from the Fraser-Winter Park, Granby and Glenwood Springs stations, .

“Bus transportation will be provided,” the alert stated. “Crews will be coordinating a bus-to-train transfer to get all passengers off and onto another train in a safe and organized manner to continue travel.”

Amtrak service is expected to resume between the two stations on Friday, with the California Zephyr scheduled to leave Union Station at 8:46 a.m., according to the company.

“Repairs to the railroad track near Rifle, Colorado, have been completed, and rail service has now been restored in the area,” Union Pacific spokesperson Mike Jaixen said in an email to The Denver Post. Union Pacific owns the tracks where the passenger train derailed.

Jaixen did not answer questions about the extent of damage to the track, which parts of the track were damaged or the cost of repairs.

Amtrak officials did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

The Utah-bound Canyon Spirit hit a tanker truck at about 9:40 a.m. Wednesday, just outside the town of Rifle in Garfield County, according to the Colorado State Patrol. The truck was on the train tracks along U.S. 6 when it was hit.

State patrol officials said the crash derailed six passenger cars and two locomotives, ripped open the truck’s tank of fuel and damaged the train tracks.

No train passengers reported any injuries, and the truck driver was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, according to the state patrol. Passengers were loaded onto buses to complete their trip to Moab, Utah.

The crash and derailment remain under investigation.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

It was the 2014 Division II national title game, and Colorado Mesa was locked in an extra-innings battle with Southern Indiana in Cary, North Carolina. CMU, the home team, got runners in scoring position in the 10th and 11th innings but couldn’t cash in, and then stranded the tying run at third in the 12th in

Mesa lost in the national title game again in 2019, falling 3-1 to the University of Tampa. Those two games were the closest the Mavericks — who have made 22 NCAA Tournament appearances and four College World Series in Hanks’ 28-year tenure — have gotten to the pinnacle of Division II.

But as Mesa looks capable of another title run this season, Hanks explains he’s looking through the windshield, not the rearview.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t ruminate on (the national title losses) a little bit, but it’s softened over the years,” Hanks said. “And I’ve let go. Winning a national title, that has to be a result of hard work and good timing and good fortune. I found that if you focus on that too much, you do ruminate, you do obsess, you do want it too bad.

“Getting there again and winning it, that drives me, but I refuse to let it define our program or my career or our coaching staff’s career. We’ve got to focus on some things we have a little more control over.”

The Mavericks are ranked No. 1 in Division II by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association. At 45-4, they have won 27 of the last 28 games, and finished 31-1 in Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference play to clinch their 19th RMAC title under Hanks. Mesa split a four-game series to start the season against Cal Poly Pomona, including a 5-1 loss in the opener, but has been defeated just two times since.

“Always gaining inches”

Hanks’ mindset from championship-obsessed to putting in the work, playing hard and letting the baseball gods take care of the rest began to shift in 2020. That was when a loaded Mesa roster, featuring many of the same players who carried the program to the national title game the year before, didn’t get the chance to fulfill their potential after the season was canceled 18 games in because of the COVID pandemic.

Since that shortened 2020 campaign — and in the couple of seasons that followed where talented Mavericks squads failed to make it back to the College World Series — Hanks is OK with letting the chips fall where they may.

“One thing that he’s talked about a lot this year is always gaining inches,” explained senior southpaw , the team’s No. 1 starter. “That just means every day you’re at the field, whether it’s for practice or a game, doing the little things to make yourself better. The team this year has really taken that to heart.”

With the RMAC tournament on the horizon this week and the start of the NCAA tournament looming next week, a new program record for wins (53 in 2019) is within reach. This year’s team isn’t as dynamic offensively as the national runner-ups of 2014 and ’19, but the know how to win close games (nine wins by three runs or less) and possess better defense and deeper pitching than those other two teams.

“The pitching and defense has been the biggest difference, then along with hitters who don’t strike out very much and walk a lot,” Hanks said. “Our on-base percentage is really good (at .468, fifth in Division II). But the biggest thing is this team is steady, and even-keeled.”

Beyond Ruter, a Faith Christian graduate, Mesa’s rotation also features junior right-hander Rafael Espinoza, freshman right-hander Jackson Eisenhauer and freshman right-hander Simon Lunsford (Green Mountain). And in the bullpen, senior right-hander Sage Ferguson (Elizabeth), redshirt freshman right-hander Jett Walker, senior right-hander Cayden Clark and junior right-hander Gabe Jacobs (Ponderosa) give the Mavericks plenty of options.

“We’re deep with power arms, and we have some really effective finesse guys,” Hanks said. “So there’s a lot of different looks we can give people. We have 16 kids that are over 90, including five that are in the 93 to 96 range.”

also features intriguing storylines. Senior right fielder Kolby Felix is the team’s leading hitter, with a .430 average, 14 homers, 20 steals and an .824 slugging. Plus, the Mavericks have Vin Scully’s step-grandson (third baseman ) and a player who spent three years in the Phillies organization before being released and coming to Mesa (outfielder ).

“True to our roots”

What the team doesn’t have is a wave of transfers.

In the new era of college athletics with the transfer portal and Name, Image and Likeness deals, the Mavericks get players out of the portal very sparingly. Mesa, which has lost some top players to the portal over the past few years, has only a few Division I transfer portal players among the 46 guys on its roster.

That is despite Mesa losing 25 players to graduation last year. And NIL remains a nonfactor for Mesa, as it is for the majority of Division II baseball programs.

“We’re staying true to our roots, which is high school-based recruiting, and then secondarily would be junior college transfers,” Hanks said. “We really reserve the portal for immediate needs. So there’s some purity to it still, and I think it’s the way (program-building) should be.”

Felix, who could potentially be drafted this summer, says the culture that Hanks has built in his decades in Grand Junction is why many of the Mavericks’ best players stay for their entire college tenure instead of jumping to Division I, where the norm has become high annual roster turnover.

Mesa currently has two players in the majors, pitchers Andrew Morris (Twins) and Kyle Leahy (Cardinals), and has put , the most notable of which was longtime Giants reliever and three-time World Series champion Sergio Romo.

“I believe Hanks and this coaching staff can progress you to a level that can surpass what many Division I schools can do for you,” Felix said. “For a D2 school, we’ve put a lot of players in pro ball, so the track record of that and consistent team success speaks for itself.”

Whether Hanks, 57, can finally achieve the final piece of his illustrious coaching resume this season remains to be seen. But the 1993 Mesa graduate who was MVP of the 1988 JuCo World Series with College of Southern Idaho isn’t going anywhere. And if the retirement timeline set forth by his wife, Nikki, is accurate, Hanks is going to have many more cracks at getting that elusive ring.

“My wife has always said, ‘You’ve got to coach until you’re 70 because I don’t think I can have you around the house that much,'” Hanks said with a laugh. “And then, when she found out Nick Saban retired at 72, she goes, ‘Well, hell, he went until he was 72 and that was big-time SEC football. Can you imagine the pressure there? If he can go to 72, you can go that long, too.'”

Those toll revenues — about $62 million a year from I-25 and I-70, not including fines paid by violators caught crossing double white lines — have been earmarked mostly for highway construction projects over the next decade. The projects include the overhaul of I-70 west of Denver and the proposed expansion of Interstate 270.

But the Bustang “has become a backbone of the state’s transit operations along the interstates,” giving Coloradans “more transportation choices to get where they need to go,” Colorado Department of Transportation Director Shoshana Lew said Friday.

The at current levels costs $50 million a year, and keeping the state’s fleet of 80 buses rolling over the next five years otherwise would require annual of around $30 million, CDOT officials told state transportation commissioners at a workshop session on Wednesday.

Colorado lawmakers’ initial grant funding to support the service as an experiment runs out in July.

run as frequently as every 45 minutes on I-25 and I-70, and on numerous “Outrider” routes around Colorado. Fares for riders boarding at Denver Union Station range from $10 to downtown Fort Collins, $12 to Colorado Springs, $28 to Glenwood Springs and $43 to Grand Junction (a 230-mile route).

This week, Lew told the state transportation commissioners that CDOT can tap “excess toll revenues” from I-25 express lanes to pay for the I-25 Bustang service. CDOT can do the same along I-70, though the high cost of the Bustang service linking Denver with Grand Junction likely will also require other funds, she said.

A 2009 state law allows the use of express lane revenues for public transit, in addition to road construction projects, along the interstates.  However, the  restricts the use of the revenues to projects along the roads where the tolls were collected.

Drivers in Colorado take more than 34 million express lane trips a year, according to a CDOT .

Sustaining Colorado’s intercity bus transit is “a top priority,” Lew wrote in a letter to commissioners. Bustang provides “vital connections across our state. …a national model of success,” she said.

Over the past two months, CDOT leaders have been meeting with city and county officials, and business groups, along I-25 and I-70, looking for ways to sustain Bustang. Lew told commissioners most would support using toll revenues “as long as there was a commitment that the capital projects in the 10-year plan would get built.”

Bustang has been expanding. CDOT officials last year added a second daily run between Denver and Crested Butte. They launched a Bustang Outrider route linking Sterling in northeastern Colorado with .

A state transit connections is exploring possible new routes, such as service between Gunnison and Montrose in southwestern Colorado; Limon and Denver; and Salida and Colorado Springs.

Statewide, Bustang ridership has tripled since 2019 – a counterpoint to the lagging ridership on Regional Transportation District buses and trains within metro Denver — with 385,248 intercity bus boardings in 2025, up 24% from 2024, CDOT records show.

Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein conceded Friday that prosecutors could not prove James Genrich carried out the fatal 1991 bombings — a concession that came three years after Genrich’s original 1993 murder convictions were thrown out because of faulty evidence in the high-profile prosecution.

Rubinstein asked Chief Judge Brian Flynn to dismiss the murder charges rather than proceed to a new trial, but left untouched Genrich’s underlying convictions and their 72-year prison sentence, a stance that suggests prosecutors still believe Genrich committed the killings, even if they don’t believe they can prove it.

“The decision today is not an acknowledgment of innocence, in our minds, but the result of a technicality and an injustice,” Carrie Yantzer, daughter of bombing victim Henry Ruble, said during Monday’s hearing.

Imprisoned for more than three decades for the murders of 43-year-old Ruble and 12-year-old Maria Delores Gonzales, Genrich will now be immediately eligible for parole. He has always maintained his innocence in the bombings, and his attorneys believe all of his convictions should be thrown out because of the flawed evidence in the case.

“It’s very, very frustrating that the same evidence that led to the overturning of the (murder) convictions is now being used, on a technicality, to keep him in prison,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to exonerating wrongly convicted people that is representing Genrich.

The end of the murder prosecution is just the latest turn in a case that riveted the Grand Junction community and was controversial from the start.

Law enforcement tactics during the extensive investigation — including one officer encouraging Genrich to commit suicide — and prosecutorial misconduct during the trial fostered early and lingering doubts about Genrich’s guilt. Two of 11 charges were dismissed as a sanction in the middle of the 1993 trial after a key prosecution witness failed to turn over evidence to the defense; that expert witness faced contempt-of-court proceedings, and his toolmark analysis — the linchpin of the prosecution’s case — was ultimately discredited decades later.

On Monday, Yantzer labeled Genrich “nothing but evil” and said he was not an innocent person.

“This was not just done to our family, this was done to this community, our community,” she said. “Grand Junction was terrorized. Families were devastated. Lives were taken. These people were loved, they mattered and they should still be here. There is something that cannot be ignored: for the past 33 years that you, James Genrich, have been incarcerated, there has not been another pipe bomb in Grand Junction. This community has had peace, and that matters.”

The bombings

Genrich was 28, living in downtown Grand Junction and working at the Two Rivers Convention Center when a bomb went off in the center’s parking garage on Feb. 14, 1991. A man was injured, but no one was killed in that bombing.

Then, in April 1991, a family got into their van in Grand Junction to go shopping, and a bomb under a wheel well exploded, killing 12-year-old Gonzales.

Just weeks later, in June 1991, Ruble and his wife were driving home from dinner in downtown Grand Junction when they spotted a strange object in the restaurant parking lot. Ruble picked it up and died when it exploded.

Investigators at the time faced immense public pressure to identify the bomber, and Genrich became a top suspect when he went to a bookstore after the three bombings and asked for a book that included instructions on bomb-making. Prosecutors relied heavily on circumstantial evidence to build the case, including notes Genrich wrote that were found in his apartment, in which he expressed a desire to kill women and said he might harm “innocents.”

Genrich had been seen in some of the areas where the 1991 bombs detonated, and lived within walking distance of two sites. He’d studied electronics, and investigators found two fuses in his apartment that were the same type as those used in one of the bombs. Investigators did not find any gunpowder, schematics or bomb-making tools in Genrich’s apartment.

They did seize some of his tools, which the prosecution’s key expert later matched to marks on an unexploded bomb that had been discovered in Grand Junction in 1989. Prosecutors pursued a theory that the same person made all four bombs, Fabricant said.

But Genrich lived in Phoenix in 1989 and was at work in a bookstore there when the first, unexploded bomb was placed in Grand Junction.

“An unshakeable alibi,” Fabricant said.

During the trial, prosecutors suggested Genrich may have worked with an accomplice, but never named anyone.

Other evidence also casts doubt.

A white vehicle was seen at each of the 1991 bombings, and Genrich did not own or have access to a vehicle. A witness also testified that he saw a “Spanish-looking man” handling one of the bombs; Genrich is white. He told The Denver Post in 1993 that the homicidal notes he wrote were a practice he picked up in therapy — to write down what he was feeling instead of going out and “losing his temper.”

Genrich never admitted to the bombings, even when investigators followed him round-the-clock for months, and his parents secretly wore a wire and tried to get him to confess. It was during that round-the-clock surveillance that an investigator accompanied Genrich to a bar and then to his brother’s grave and suggested there that Genrich commit suicide “so we can all go home,” according to a 1993 Denver Post story.

At another point, investigators took Genrich to lunch and suggested they’d help him get a better job, then “happened to run into” a polygraph examiner, who brought Genrich into a room that had already been set up with the testing equipment and enlarged, gruesome photos of the bombing. (The polygraph test results from that day were later thrown out by a judge.)

Conviction and appeals

In 1993, Genrich was tried in Weld County due to the extensive publicity in Grand Junction. The jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of using an explosive device to commit a felony and a single count of assault.

In 2019, the Colorado Court of Appeals found Genrich was entitled to a hearing to determine whether he should be given a new trial because of potentially flawed toolmark evidence in his case. That hearing took place in January 2022, and then-Mesa County District Judge Richard Gurley overturned Grenrich’s murder convictions in 2023.

Gurley found that the prosecution’s key toolmark evidence was flawed. The expert testified during the 1993 trial that marks on the bombs must have been made by Genrich’s tools. The expert — the same one who later faced contempt-of-court proceedings for withholding evidence — testified that his analysis ruled out the possibility that any other tools could have made the marks.

New science and forensics have since discredited the expert’s conclusion, prompting Gurley to throw out the convictions and order a new trial. That toolmark evidence was the keystone of the prosecution’s case, which was otherwise entirely circumstantial.

The murder counts were the only convictions affected by Gurley’s decision because the Court of Appeals ruled in its 2019 opinion that Genrich’s less-serious convictions of using an explosive device and assault were too old to be challenged.

Those lesser convictions, which together carried a 72-year prison sentence, still stand, though Genrich’s attorneys are challenging the convictions and expect to file a new appeal in the coming weeks.

“The courts have spoken that the crimes he was convicted of should remain,” Rubinstein said Monday. “And the sentence he is serving should remain.”

Genrich no longer faces the punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole that comes with first-degree murder convictions, making him eligible for parole. He is scheduled for a parole hearing in May, according to the Colorado Department of Corrections.

In the prosecution’s motion to dismiss the murder charges, Rubinstein outlined a number of problems with trying the case again three decades later, including that 28 of the original witnesses have since died, and that the toolmark expert who testified in the original case is now 84 years old and lives with a cognitive impairment. Modern experts who retested the tools and wires in January found that they could not conclusively tie the tools to the bombs.

Fabricant said that the renewed investigation as prosecutors prepared to potentially bring the murder case to trial again actually strengthened Genrich’s innocence claim. Investigators found a new fingerprint on a piece of tape used on a battery on one of the bombs that did not match Genrich’s fingerprints, Fabricant said.

Rubinstein said it is unclear who left that unidentified, new fingerprint. He noted that prosecutors had concerns about the chain of custody for the evidence in the case, as it was moved several times over the three decades since Genrich’s conviction.

filed the motion to dismiss on Friday, stating in the court filing that with this specific evidence now excluded from the case and no other forensic evidence, “we can no longer meet the high ethical and legal burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Genrich was accused of planting three bombs between February and June 1991 that killed 12-year-old Maria Delores Gonzales and 43-year-old Henry Ruble. He has maintained his innocence since he was arrested in 1992.

The case relied largely on circumstantial evidence as well as a key piece of expert testimony that markings on the bombs were made by Genrich’s tools and could not have come from other tools.

Genrich successfully appealed part of the case through the Innocence Project in 2023, when a district court judge found that the expert����ap testimony was flawed because he could not have definitively ruled out other tools from making those marks.

Rubinstein appealed that ruling, but the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision in May, and the Colorado Supreme Court declined to hear the case in December.

The DA’s office and Grand Junction Police Department investigators have also sought additional evidence but came up empty. There were no fingerprints or DNA found on evidence tested by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and another round of independent testing of the bomb fragments, wires and Genrich’s tools came back inconclusive, Rubinstein wrote.

It����ap also been 35 years since the bombings, and at least 28 witnesses who testified in the 1993 trial are dead. The expert witness who testified about the tool markings, John O’Neil, is now 84 years old, has a cognitive impairment and is not available to testify, the DA wrote.

“The District Attorney’s Office remains committed to the victims of these horrific crimes and their families,” Rubinstein wrote. “However, prosecuting a case we know cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt violates our ethical obligations. It risks further traumatizing the victims with a futile trial and wastes public resources.”

Genrich is still serving a 72-year sentence for his convictions for use of an explosive device and third-degree assault in the case, but will be able to apply for parole if a judge grants the DA’s motion.

A court hearing is set for 9 a.m. Monday.