The 7,000-square-foot single-family residence at 10 Borders Road has long been owned by Marc Peperzak, founder of .

Completed in 2014 by local architect and builder Scott Turnipseed, the four-bedroom home sits on nearly 1.5 acres and borders more than an acre of protected Beaver Creek open space.

The property has four full bathrooms, one half-bath, a private office and a family room with three gas fireplaces. Other features include smart-home technology, air conditioning, heated floors, a private gazebo with a fireplace, a hot tub, a heated driveway and a three-car garage.

Walls of glass, a glass elevator and a copper roof are among the home’s architectural highlights. The sale also comes with an invitation for a charter membership at the , allowing the new owner to bypass the club’s current three-to-five-year waitlist, according to , which listed the property for sale.

Membership is limited to Beaver Creek homeowners and includes slopeside ski lockers and valet service, private dining and founding-family status.

The home is a short drive from Beaver Creek Village’s restaurants and the Vilar Performing Arts Center.

Peperzak founded Aurora Dairy Corporation in 1976 in Jerome, Idaho, and moved the company’s in 1984.

In 2003, Peperzak shifted the company’s focus exclusively to organic dairy production, laying the foundation for Aurora Organic Dairy. Today, the company supplies organic dairy products to retailers including Target, Safeway, Walmart and Costco and operates farms and facilities in several states.

Before establishing Aurora Organic Dairy, Peperzak was a co-founder and chairman of Horizon Organic Dairy. He has also worked as an international dairy industry consultant in Oman, Pakistan, Iran, Mexico and Belize.

Over his career, Peperzak has served on numerous nonprofit and corporate boards, and helped create several businesses. He was a founding director of First Bank of Idaho and GF&C, and is an active board member of Headwaters MB.

David McHugh and Heather Losa with LIV Sotheby’s International Realty are the listing brokers for the property.

Metro Denver home sales fell by nearly a fifth between July and August, according to a (DMAR).

“The general economic uncertainty continues to weigh heavily on real estate,” Amanda Snitker, chairwoman of the DMAR Market Trends Committee and a local Realtor, said in comments accompanying the report.

Stubborn inflation, shifting tariff policies, and mortgage rates that refuse to provide meaningful relief for affordability are all generating uncertainty, she said.

Buyers closed on only 3,068 properties last month. Sales volumes that low tend to cluster around the cold weather holidays. They are an anomaly in the heat of summer.

Activity does dip once the school year starts back. But with the annual decline at 17.3%, citing a seasonal slowdown won’t cut it.

Whatever shifted in the market has shifted recently. For the first eight months of the year, closings are down about 3.5% from the same period in 2025.

Snitker argues that many housing statistics in Denver have remained surprisingly stable over the past three years.

The inventory of homes and condos for sale stood at 13,080, not far from the 13,115 at the end of July and the 13,059 a year ago.

Normally, when sales slow in a big way, the inventory rises, but sellers have acted as a stabilizer.

Sellers listed about 10% fewer properties in August than July, and about 4.5% more than they did a year ago. 

For single-family home sales, August’s median home sold price came in at $649,500, down 1.65% from July and only $400 below the median a year earlier. Again, a sign of stability.

Condos and townhomes tell a different story, with a median sold price of $370,000 in August. That is down 2.6% from July and 4.9% from a year earlier.

The condo market had a 23.5% annual decline in sales. It was creaking in a big way, evidence of some unnatural twisting happening beneath the surface.

With sales already so weak, and the slower winter season ahead, some analysts are warning that metro Denver could see a big drop in prices.

Nick Gerli, who runs a real estate data platform called Reventure Consulting, has a

He predicts home price declines of 10% to 20% in some areas, with Denver challenging Austin, Texas, for the title of the nation’s most distressed metro housing market.

Denver suffers from an extreme mismatch between what homes cost and what people can afford, he argues. Would-be buyers in Colorado need 30-year mortgage rates to fall. Instead, they remain closer to 7% than 6%.

Gerli also believes that mom-and-pop real estate investors and short-term rental operators bet heavily on the Denver market between 2020 and 2022, contributing to a buying frenzy that distorted prices.

Those investors, along with large institutions, are under increasing pressure to sell. That could cause listings to rise in the coming months, disrupting the facade of a stable inventory.

And strong migration, something the region could count on in prior decades, won’t be there to shore things up this time around, he warns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Candidates had two weeks to gather 300 signatures to land on the ballot. Since the Aug. 20 deadline, the clerk’s office has been working to verify those signatures and determine whether each of the 19 initial candidates had sufficient signatures. As of Friday, the field was set.

are Jake Browne, Cynthia Diaz, Raymon Anthony Doane, Gabriel Konkle, Monica Martinez, Melissa Mejia, Alfredo Reyes, Julissa Soto, Whitney Traylor and Jeff Walker.

Five candidates who initially filed to run ultimately didn’t submit signatures. The clerk’s office found that three who filed petitions didn’t have sufficient signatures. One candidate withdrew.

Unlike the city’s 11 other council members, those in the two at-large seats represent the entire city as opposed to a geographic district. This election will be unusual because the winner will serve only about six months before the seat is up for reelection in April.

And the two elections’ outcomes will be determined in different ways. That’s because in 2025, voters approved a change to at-large elections. In the past, all the candidates for the at-large seats have appeared under one question, with voters choosing two. The winners have been the top two vote-getters, even if they received only a slim plurality of the votes cast.

Under the 2025 change, the seats in the regular election next year will be split into two separate positions, “At-large A” and “At-large B.” For candidates to win either seat, they must receive more than 50% of the vote in that race, or else a runoff election will take place.

But the Nov. 3 special election will use the old plurality system, meaning that whoever gets the most votes wins.

Here’s what we know so far about the candidates:

• Jake Browne was a marijuana critic for The Denver Post and has written for Westword.
• Cynthia Diaz is the owner of Tonantzin Casa de Café on Santa Fe Drive.
• Gabriel Konkle is a software architect.
• Monica Martinez is the executive director of the Fax Partnership, a nonprofit group based on East Colfax Avenue.
• Melissa Mejía, a former policy council aide for Councilwoman Jamie Torres, also previously worked as the head of state and local policy for the Community Economic Defense Project. She is supported by progressive politicians like state Sen. Julie Gonzales and state Rep. Javier Mabrey. (Torres has endorsed Monica Martinez)
• Alfredo Reyes is the former executive director of the Latino Cultural Arts Center and has served on the Denver Citizen Oversight Board, the Commission on Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s River Sisters Advisory Committee. He has the support of former at-large Councilwoman Debbie Ortega.
• Whitney Traylor is the managing principal at Traylor Law Group.
• Julissa Soto is a public health advocate and the founder of Julissa Soto Latino Health Equity Consulting.
• Jeff Walker is an infrastructure and housing advocate who has served on the Regional Transportation District’s elected board. He also unsuccessfully ran for an at-large seat in 2023, finishing eighth among 10 candidates.
• Raymon Anthony Doane does not appear to have a campaign website but listed “Amazon” as one of his employers on his campaign filing.

But in a seemingly contradictory trend that has continued from last year, a wide plurality of voters still view the city as headed in the right direction. Compared to other figures in city politics, Johnston’s favorability rating outpaced those of his lesser-known opponents in next year’s election — but fell short of congressional candidate Melat Kiros, who had a net-positive rating among voters.

The Colorado Polling Institute’s surveys have found that Johnston’s favorability has steadily fallen since 2024, when 48% said they have a favorable opinion of him and 38% said they viewed him in a negative light. In 2025, 46% saw him favorably and 46% unfavorably. In , 39% of city voters viewed him favorably.

Most voters have consistently said over the years that Johnston, who was elected in 2023, is moving the city in the right direction but that he still needs to do more, according to the results.

“It’s these voters who, early in his term, were saying: ‘I’m seeing some progress. That’s good. I think he needs to do more.’ And as his term has worn on, those voters have become more and more dissatisfied,” said Kevin Ingham, a pollster who is the Democratic half of CPI’s bipartisan research team. “I think we’re just getting to a point in his term where even if people can see something’s moving in the right direction, they don’t feel like the things have moved fast enough or that they have quite lived up to the promises that he made.”

The survey of 400 likely voters in the November election was conducted Aug. 11-15. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

In the 2025 survey, Ingham said most people who reported negative associations with Johnston had specific reasons. This year, nearly half of those surveyed just made general comments about him simply not doing a good job.

About a quarter of those who did approve of his performance cited his work on homelessness as the reason why. His efforts on homelessness had mixed results in the poll overall. When asked about that issue specifically, the share of people saying he has made “significant progress” doubled between 2024 and 2026, from 8% to 16%. However, that’s still lower than the 18% who said this year that Johnston had made homelessness worse.

Homelessness is still seen as voters’ top issue in Denver, followed by affordable housing and crime.

In a statement responding to the poll results, Johnston spokesman Jon Ewing said, “Denverites agree: the city is better today than it was before Mayor Johnston took office. From historic reductions in homelessness and crime to transformative investments in affordable housing and downtown recovery, Denver residents see the progress and believe the city is moving in the right direction, even as they expect us to keep delivering.”

Lori Weigel, the group’s Republican pollster, said it’s difficult for the group to say whether the results might be predictive of the 2027 mayoral election, when Johnston will run for a second term.

“Elections are about choices,” she said. “The focus is not going to be (only) on the mayor — there’s going to be an opponent, there’s going to be a contrast there.”

Other candidates and issues

As Johnston’s approval decreases, slightly more of Denverites surveyed said they viewed socialism favorably.

In CPI’s 2025 poll, 52% of voters said they had a positive view of socialism. This year it was 55%. The share of respondents who said they have a “very favorable” view of socialism rose from 20% to 25% during that time. About the same share of people reported having a positive view of capitalism — about 47% of respondents — in 2025 and 2026.

“There’s some pretty stark divisions of opinion towards socialism and capitalism by age,” Ingham said. “Younger voters are pretty down on capitalism.”

Voters appeared to be generally dissatisfied with the status quo more than specifically unhappy with capitalism, he said. Most people who mentioned a favorable view of socialism pointed to universal healthcare, a fairer economy and “taxing the rich.”

That’s in line with an electorate that recently chose Kiros, a democratic socialist, as the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District. Kiros, who made national headlines when she defeated 15-term incumbent U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in June, also saw a higher favorability rating than DeGette in the recent poll.

Nearly 45% of voters said they viewed her favorably compared to 35% who said the same of DeGette, according to the results. About 30% said they had a negative view of Kiros and nearly 50% said they view DeGette unfavorably.

The pollsters also asked for input about how voters view two of Johnston’s opponents in his upcoming bid for reelection: Lisa Calderón and City Councilwoman Shontel Lewis.

Lewis, whom the Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America just endorsed, had less name recognition and favorability than Calderón, who’s run twice before. About 65% of respondents said they had never heard of Lewis, while 47% said they had never heard of Calderón. Only 15% said they had a favorable view of Lewis and 19% said they had an unfavorable view, with the rest having no opinion. Calderón saw 27% favorability, compared to 25% unfavorability.

Slightly more respondents than last year said they viewed the City Council unfavorably, with 44% reporting negative associations. The Denver Public School Board continues to have a steady low favorability, with only 25% of voters viewing the board and its members in a positive light, according to the results.

Denverites reported that their top three issues for the city are homelessness, affordable housing and crime.

Global real estate firm Kennedy Wilson is seeking to rezone the 1.7-acre lot at 2246 Federal Blvd. so it can build a seven-story apartment complex. The 242-unit building would include 9,000 square feet of retail space along the busy thoroughfare.

The Denver Planning Board, which reviews rezonings before the city council does, advanced the rezoning application unanimously last week. But many neighbors and residents spoke in opposition at the meeting.

“Seven stories of building, surrounded by three-story buildings as far as the eye can see from that location, does not serve current and future generations well. It kind of rises like a middle finger to our community,” Jefferson Park resident Josh Rosenblum said at the meeting.

The neighborhood, sandwiched between Mile High stadium to the south and Speer Boulevard and the Highlands to the north, consists largely of low-rise residential and neighborhood retail. Much of its density is concentrated on the east side, overlooking Interstate 25 and downtown.

But Mile High is slated to be redeveloped in the next decade, when the Broncos move to a new stadium at Burnham Yard. The state, meanwhile, is considering building a bus rapid transit project along Federal Boulevard, much like the one underway on East Colfax.

“The BRT will be in effect about the same time this building opens, and density is smarter for water conservation and lots of other policies,” said Bruce O’Donnell, a consultant for the apartment developer.

That sentiment was echoed by Andrew Weller, a young resident of the 12-story Alcott complex near the highway. He took to the lectern during public comment donning a Penn State polo shirt.

“The people who would live in these homes can’t necessarily be in the room here today. As a renter myself in the neighborhood, I urge you to be in support of this rezoning,” he said.

The property is currently a single-story, 34,800-square-foot building, home to the Family Star Montessori School. It purchased the site in 2000 for $1.3 million and is under contract to sell it to Kennedy Wilson, according to the school’s website. A move to a new campus in Lakewood is planned.

“This is not displacement for us,” said Family Star Chief Operations Officer Jasmine Rougely.

She added that many of the children the school serves don’t live nearby.

“We made a deliberate decision to move because we believe this new home will allow us to serve children, families, educators and the broader community even better,” Rougely said. “The approval of the rezoning of this property is integral to achieving our goal of acquiring a new facility.”

Neighbors, meanwhile, lamented the impending loss of the childcare provider, which serves infants through six-year-olds.

They point their fingers at the developer. Kennedy Wilson is seeking a rezoning of up to five stories on the site, but is planning to build seven due to a city ordinance that allows extra height if more income-restricted housing is included in the project.

“We’re losing a space for children and families. If those community service uses are not being replaced, then what is the public benefit that justifies the additional stories? I personally don’t see it,” resident Katya Makarewicz said at the meeting.

Her neighbor and former city councilman, Rafael Espinoza, echoed those concerns. He was on the steering committee that drafted the neighborhood’s small area plan, a document outlining recommendations on future growth for Jeff Park.

“There is zero language in the area plan that supports seven-story rezoning,” he said.

But board vice chair Fred Glick noted that the neighborhood plan does show a maximum of seven stories at 22nd and Federal. He also said it����ap possible that childcare could take part of the ground-floor commercial space.

“When we speak of public interest, it����ap very important to recognize that we are speaking of the interest of not just the adjacent neighbors existing, but a broader public interest of the people of Denver. And I appreciate the commenters who mentioned those who are not at the table now, who are potentially future residents of a building that might get developed here.”

Read more from our partner, .

The grant will pay for design and preconstruction work for the bridge in the Baker neighborhood. It will allow people on foot to travel from the Regional Transportation District’s over the railroad lines and into the stadium district.

During Monday’s meeting, Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez said the bridge was needed in that community long before the stadium plan.

“This pedestrian bridge is essential to making Santa Fe Yards a truly transit-oriented, community-serving development,” she said. “It will connect the Broadway Station directly to the stadium, housing, businesses, parks and the South Platte River while safely crossing the rail lines that divide this area.”

The funding comes from a transit-oriented communities grant in the state’s Department of Local Affairs. Officials expect to complete construction of the bridge by 2030. The city additional grants and use property tax dollars for the construction itself.

The council approved the deal to build the stadium — and bring the women’s soccer team to Denver — in December.

Under the deal, city officials agreed to spend $70 million to purchase the land and the team said it would spend about $200 million on the stadium itself. The controlling owner of Summit FC, Rob Cohen, said the team making Denver its home was contingent on the city agreeing to the plan for a dedicated stadium.

Venerable, founder of Paragon Homes, and his wife, Amy, listed the Cherryville Road home for $7 million.

The 9,000-square-foot mansion sits on just under an acre backing onto the High Line Canal, in a pocket that pairs Cherry Creek School District boundaries with Greenwood Village tax rates.

Venerable paid $1.4 million for the lot in June 2023 and finished construction in 2024, working with architect Mike Woodley.

Giving Woodley creative control was an easy decision. “I have a ton of confidence and trust in him.”

The result is a style Venerable says is rare in Denver: Scandinavian Modern, heavy on glass and natural light, with a low-maintenance exterior built for a mountain climate rather than a metro one.

The roof is standing-seam metal, and the siding is factory-finished wood — choices Venerable said he leans on more in his Vail projects than in Denver.

“That����ap what makes the exterior maintenance-free,” he said. “You don’t have to mess with it constantly.”

Inside, the layout leans contemporary rather than ornate, with an open floor plan built around entertaining.

The kitchen — with imported Italian cabinetry and a Cristallo stone island — opens to a great room and a formal dining area, which in turn opens through multislide doors to a patio and pool.

“The kitchen is the heart of the house,” Venerable said. “Everybody ends up there. Without a good kitchen, a house has no soul.”

The primary suite includes his-and-hers closets, including a two-story closet for his wife built out to roughly 1,000 square feet with its own staircase to the basement for off-season storage — some friendly one-upmanship inspired that feature, Venerable said.

“One of her friends had an elaborate closet. I said I’d make one better.”

The basement has a commercial-grade gym with a cold plunge, along with a separate rec room intended to give kids their own space apart from the main living areas.

Venerable said the home was designed to meet the needs of his wife and sons. But now that both sons have finished college and are moving out of state — one to Arizona, the other to New York — the couple have more house than they need.

“We’ve got an 8,000-square-foot house, an acre yard, a hot tub, a pool no one uses,” Venerable said. “It was built for the previous chapter of our life, not the next one.”

Listing agent Libby Weaver of Helm Weaver Helm of Compass-Denver said the home’s flexible layout gives it broad appeal. The main-floor primary suite could suit empty nesters, while the finished basement and pool make a case for a family with teenagers.

“We’re seeing buyers who are empty nesters but want space that children and grandchildren can come and enjoy,” Weaver said. “They want more space, more amenities, so their families can congregate.”

Weaver said the pool — four feet deep throughout, popular for games and floating — along with the fire pit and hot tub, make the property a natural draw for a family with kids still at home.

“It����ap a real desirable house for a family,” Weaver said. “It����ap definitely an entertainer’s house.”

Read more from our partner, .

A key measure of U.S. housing affordability worsened for the first time in almost three years, as higher borrowing costs soaked up a bigger chunk of earnings for new homebuyers.

Monthly payments on a median-priced $410,700 home accounted for 34% of a typical family’s income in the second quarter of this year, according to data published Thursday by the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo. That����ap up from 32% in the first quarter, and it reverses part of the most recent improvement recorded since early 2025.

Thirty-year mortgage rates climbed steeply in the period, as the U.S. war with Iran drove borrowing costs higher across the economy, and they’re now close to a one-year high at around 6.8%. A 2% increase in median new-home prices during the quarter added to the squeeze, the builders association said

“Buyers faced high mortgage rates and economic uncertainty, while builders dealt with rising construction costs, unnecessary regulatory burdens and labor shortages,” NAHB Chairman Bill Owens, an Ohio builder, said in a release.

New-home sales that were hot four years ago have flattened more recently, forcing homebuilders to offer costly sales incentives or so-called buydowns of mortgage rates. A recent Bloomberg Intelligence survey of investment professionals showed 70% expect starts of single-family homes to decline this year.

The NAHB data is based on a median family income of about $107,000. Households earning half of that amount had to spend 67% of their earnings to cover the same new home’s mortgage costs, the group said.

©2026 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Bennet made the request in a Thursday morning letter to Sen. John Thune, the Republican majority leader, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader. It follows for the inspectors general of several federal agencies to investigate whether federal resources were used to target the state.

The request comes a week after attorneys for the state of Colorado disclosed a December email from a White House aide summoning officials from several agencies to discuss “immediate actions that your department or agency can take with respect to Colorado.” The email was then followed by funding cuts, the proposed closure of Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research and the denial of disaster assistance funds.

Echoing allegations raised by attorneys for the state, who called the email a “smoking gun,” Bennet in his letter to Senate leadership accused the Trump administration of targeting the state because of Tina Peters’ then-continued incarceration. Attorneys for the state have also argued that Colorado had also drawn the president’s ire because of its mail-in balloting system and its laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

In court filings, the administration has argued that it’s not unusual for the federal government to “make decisions based on political or geographic considerations.” The White House has denied that Colorado officials’ refusal to release or transfer Peters played a part in the email or subsequent administrative decisions.

An ally of President Donald Trump, Peters was serving a prison sentence for her role in giving an unauthorized person access to secure voting equipment in Mesa County. Her sentence was commuted by Gov. Jared Polis in May, and she was released June 1.

Bennet said that presidential administrations were entitled to advance their political priorities but that they couldn’t “dictate terms to states.” Three constitutional law professors told The Denver Post last week that the email — and the coordinated effort it appeared to reveal — was unprecedented and likely illegal. One also warned about a permanent rupture of trust between state and federal authorities, an argument that Bennet also stressed.

“Allowing this unconstitutional overreach to go unchallenged sets a dangerous precedent, and unsettles the relationship between states and the federal government,” Bennet wrote. “No state should ever be subject to punitive measures for decisions that simply happen to go against a sitting president’s desires — and no American should be denied relief from floods and wildfires, or see their opportunity for clean water ripped away, simply because they happen to live in a state at odds with a given administration.”

Emails sent to Thune and Schumer’s offices were not immediately returned Thursday morning.

The December email, first reported last week by The Post, was read aloud in federal court on Aug. 11, and a copy was released in federal filings Wednesday.

Under the subject line “brainstorm call,” the email was sent by a Trump assistant to 14 federal officials and White House aides. The recipients included the chiefs of staff for the departments of energy, education, transportation, interior and agriculture. A deputy secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development was also included, as was a White House lawyer and an associate director for the Office of Management and Budget.

Federal action against Colorado rolled out quickly after the brainstorm session. The next day, the Energy Department’s deputy general counsel summoned several people to a “portfolio review” meeting requested by the White House, according to additional records filed in federal court. Several emails withheld by the Justice Department, but described in a log turned over to the state, involved Energy Department staff discussing the portfolio review and “potential termination” of grants to Colorado in the days after the email.

Officials from within the U.S. Department of Agriculture swapped similar emails soon after the White House meeting. The log shows senior agency officials emailing each other about a new pilot program, which would have required Colorado to swiftly recertify Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program eligibility for 100,000 recipients. Some emails also included Emily Underwood, an assistant to Trump and the author of the initial “brainstorm” email.