But here she was again, on the steps of the Capitol on a cold, cloudy and windy January day, pleading with the state’s leaders to create stronger environmental laws to protect Colorado’s most vulnerable and pollution-impacted communities.

“We know environmental racism exists. You’re killing us,” said Millard-Chacon, who leads the environmental group . “I’m honestly tired of regulatory systems that think we should wait. At this point, we’re not going to wait. We will go back to the streets because I’m expecting that Trump will make it worse.”

Millard-Chacon went on to call out Gov. Jared Polis and the for what she sees as weak responses to the climate crisis that is causing more smog in metro Denver, more intense wildfires across the state, hotter weather and more contaminated drinking water — especially in disproportionately impacted neighborhoods like Commerce City, where so much of the industry that creates pollution exists.

“I know what CDPHE’s method is and I’m sick of it,”�� Millard-Chacon later told The Denver Post in an interview. “If we are going to meet the moment and face the threats from the federal government that weaken our cause, we’re going to need CDPHE to bring welcome relief and step up and do their jobs.”

As President Donald Trump and his new administrator, Lee Zeldin, begin weakening the agency, those in Colorado who fight for clean water, air and land say it’s more important than ever for the state’s leaders to fill the gap — especially when it comes to environmental justice and protecting the people who live in the state’s most polluted neighborhoods.

Colorado is in a position to stand up for those people because it is one of just 12 states that has a law defining environmental justice and outlining how state regulators should use it to influence decisions.

Since the Colorado Environmental Justice Act was passed by the legislature in 2021, the state health department has created an 11-person , an advisory board and a task force. It now requires businesses to complete an environmental justice impact analysis when they apply for air-pollution permits, and it maintains a database that helps the public track permitted pollution.

Most of the work is available in English, Spanish and other languages upon request.

Skeptical about Colorado’s commitment

But those who fight the daily battles over environmental policy are skeptical that Polis, his appointed air and water commissions and the Department of Public Health and Environment have the will to tackle environmental justice in a meaningful way.

Too often, state officials pat themselves on the back about their environmental justice work, but when faced with hard decisions that would curb pollution — such as denying more permits — they lack resolve, said Guadalupe Solis, environmental justice director at , a public health nonprofit based in Adams County.

“Our reliance on them and our hope to rely on them is bleak,” Solis said.

Officials at CDPHE declined interview requests from The Post, but, in an emailed statement, spokeswoman Gabi Johnston wrote, “We are steadfast in our commitment to serving all Coloradans, ensuring every community has a healthy environment to thrive in — as well as acknowledging that some communities are more polluted than others and therefore need more resources.”

The department maintains that it is a national leader in environmental justice and that it was the subject of a recent EPA civil rights compliance review because of that status.

“The EPA came to us and said it was interested in learning more about the work that we have done in regards to air permitting and civil rights,” CDPHE spokeswoman Kate Malloy said in an email to The Post. “EPA said it felt Colorado would be a good example to highlight and that we could work together to advance this issue, so we voluntarily agreed to fully participate in the review in order to share more information with EPA. The review was not the result of a complaint, as it typically is.”

As for Polis, he already is pushing against Trump’s budget cuts that target renewable energy and is defending other programs that help improve the climate, said Eric Maruyama, a spokesman for the governor. He pointed out legislation and executive orders aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and statewide investments in clean energy.

“Governor Polis is committed to protecting Colorado’s clean air, keeping our communities healthy and safe, with or without the federal government,” Maruyama said in a statement. “Colorado has been and will continue to be a national leader in environmental protection, justice and on climate. No matter who is in the White House or Congress, Colorado will continue to lead on air quality and clean energy.”

While the EPA did not determine the state health department had violated people’s civil rights in its permitting and enforcement of polluters, it did get the agency to agree to sign a resolution pledging to change how it reviews permits for major polluters such as Suncor Energy. Those changes must be approved by the and would require companies that hold Title V air-pollution permits to undergo more public scrutiny whenever they want to make changes that could impact their emissions.

KC Becker, appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the EPA’s in Denver, said the civil rights compliance review was initiated by the EPA’s because a study found Colorado had some of the highest COVID mortality rates among communities that also had high levels of air pollution.

The agreement was a priority of hers and she insisted it be signed before she resigned on Jan. 20.

Becker focused on Suncor’s Commerce City oil refinery during her tenure, ordering a study that determined Suncor had more malfunctions than other comparable refineries and twice sending its Title V permits back to the state for review after environmental groups objected to certain provisions.

So far, Trump has not appointed a replacement, but Becker said it is safe to assume that Suncor won’t receive as much attention from the EPA under the new administration. Which leaves monitoring and enforcement up to Colorado, she said.

“Critical backstop for clean air and clean water”

The state health department’s is capable if it makes it a priority, she said.

“I think CDPHE could fill in the gaps, but for them it would mean hiring more people to closely review permits,” Becker said. “It really will take focusing in on the permitting staff and being as transparent with that information and being as inclusive with the public as they can. It also means taking a good hard look at enforcement.”

But there’s a $1 billion state budget crunch and every agency across Colorado is being forced to make cuts, including CDPHE. On the environmental side of the department, only the Air Pollution Control Division has been targeted for a budget reduction, Malloy said.

The cuts include the elimination of a $38.5 million electric school bus grant program and 19 vacant positions, which would save $2.5 million in the 2025-26 budget, she said. No environmental justice vacancies are being put on hold.

In 2022, the EPA downgraded the northern Front Range to being in severe violation of national air-quality standards, which prompted the General Assembly to infuse the Air Pollution Control Division with money. The state expected more companies to fall under federal Title V air permit standards following the downgrade, meaning more oversight and more paperwork for regulators.

The division hired more than 100 full-time employees with that budget increase, but there have been fewer Title V permit applications than expected, Malloy said. So the division is eliminating those 19 unfilled jobs.

Joe Salazar, a former state representative who fought a gasoline storage facility’s expansion last year as an attorney for , said the state will be stretched thin by the budget crunch and must find creative ways to fund climate-related projects.

“We’re going to have to have leaders including the governor and others who are committed to environmental concerns and environmental justice,” Salazar said.

Over the years, the EPA has forced Colorado and companies that have ruined land, water and air to clean up, said Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate with the . Those cleanups include abandoned mines and chemical weapons manufacturing sites.

“The EPA is a critical backstop for clean air and clean water for Colorado. The state can’t do it all on its own,” Nichols said. “They’re the ones who wag their fingers at the state at times to say, ‘Whoa, you’re not doing this right.’ ”

But Nichols said he lacks confidence in the state’s willingness to crack down on polluters. He has been especially disappointed in a lack of resistance, thus far, from Polis in denouncing Trump’s tearing down of the EPA.

“I’d like to hear that he’s got us. He’s got our backs,” Nichols said. “That, in the face of Trump’s efforts to erase our environmental bedrock, he’s got a plan.”

Severe violator of ozone standards

One example of the state’s failure is the ongoing violation of ozone standards across the northern Front Range.

Colorado has known for years that it has dirty air, yet continues to record excessive pollution that creates the blanket of smog that contributes to climate change and makes it harder to breathe, especially for those who suffer from asthma and other lung diseases. Those failures also cause summer gasoline prices to go up for drivers because the federal government requires a different blend of gasoline and increases regulations for businesses.

And while Polis and his administration tout their environmental chops, their critics insist it’s not enough, saying regulators often cater to polluters when creating new rules that are supposed to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

As one example, critics point to a 2023 rulemaking that required the state’s 18 largest manufacturers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but created what environmentalists describe as a pay-to-pollute system through which companies can buy and sell credits on an exchange market.

Meanwhile, the state continues to issue drilling permits for oil and gas companies, said Micah Parkin, co-founder of , a group that promotes alternatives to fossil fuels.

Parkin said she hopes there will be a shift as Polis finishes out his second term, but she fears Colorado may have to wait on a new administration.

“Our state leaders and our regulatory agencies are going to have to take their jobs of protecting public health far more seriously than they are at protecting the fossil fuel industry,” she said. “But that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

KC Becker, a former Colorado House speaker who was President Joe Biden‘s political appointee to lead the in Denver, raced to secure one more agreement with Colorado regulators before she resigned on Inauguration Day, as is customary for federal political appointees.

She had made it a priority of her tenure to enforce the federal jurisdiction over the oil refinery in Commerce City — one of the state’s largest polluters, with a long history of violations — and she wanted the to take a step that could lead to more public notification and input on permits for major polluters.

She got the needed signature five days before Trump took office.

“I thought it was important because having more public transparency on these major permits is just going to lead to better air quality, and, because of that, better health for communities that carry the biggest burden of bad air quality,” Becker said. “I figured if we didn’t get it done before we left, it would fall by the wayside.”

The agreement exemplifies how a presidential administration’s decision to prioritize environmental justice can influence state policy, in this case giving people living in highly polluted neighborhoods a stronger voice when it comes to regulating industries that make them sick. It also illustrates how Colorado has benefited from strong federal oversight even when it has one of the more robust environmental justice laws in the country.

Yet the agreement between the EPA and CDPHE is not a done deal. Colorado’s air quality regulators still must write a proposed policy, present it to a state commission for approval and then follow it once it’s in place.

There will be no penalty if Colorado fails to follow through, especially with the sharp transition to a new administration that is now — making it even more vital for the state to commit to protecting people who live in neighborhoods that bear the brunt of air and water pollution, advocates said.

“I am concerned. Without EPA’s oversight we’re going to have to be very diligent in pushing CDPHE to do the right thing,” said Ean Tafoya, vice president of state programs for .

Environmental advocates say the returning president made it clear on Day 1 that he has to protect air, water and land, especially in communities such as Commerce City, where the residents suffer a disproportionate burden of pollution from industries that all Americans rely on for gasoline, cement and other industrial products.

Trump rescinded two of Biden’s executive orders that had prioritized environmental justice shortly after he was sworn into office. The dismantling continued from there.

The president’s decision to freeze EPA funding via grants created by Congress and the Biden administration is undergoing a legal challenge, but, if successful, would strike programs to address methane pollution from oil and gas wells, train workers for the clean energy sector, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, and clean up asbestos and other contaminants from public property.

Trump’s new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has pledged to as major workforce reductions are . Ten people who specialize in environmental justice in the EPA’s Denver office already have been put on administrative leave.

Zeldin issued a memo Feb. 4 titled that outlines five pillars that will guide the agency’s work. While the first pillar is to provide “clean air, land and water for every American,” the other four address industry and economic needs — restoring energy dominance, permitting reform, making America the artificial intelligence capital of the world, and reviving American auto jobs.

When asked about the agency’s commitment to environmental justice under Zeldin, EPA spokesman Richard Mylott said in an email, “EPA will follow the law and our statutory duties to protect human health and the environment.”

But Colorado environmentalists are skeptical that the Trump administration will protect the environment, especially since the president has scoffed at the science of climate change.

“By and large, we had an EPA we could turn to,” said Joe Salazar, an Adams County attorney and former Democratic state legislator who has worked on environmental issues. “With a Trump administration, No. 1, we might not even have an EPA or, No. 2, we have a blunted EPA or, No. 3, we have an EPA that reverses course and defends polluters in weird ways. We don’t really know what����ap going to happen, but we know it����ap not going to be good.”

Roots of environmental justice

Environmental justice first became a federal priority during the Clinton administration when the president in 1994 directed the EPA to shift resources to marginalized communities that bore the brunt of pollution.

That directive grew from an increasing understanding in the 1980s and ’90s that people in poor communities that had been built around refineries, factories and landfills were sicker with asthma and other illnesses than people in other neighborhoods, said Chris Winter, an environmental lawyer and executive director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s .

People who live in those more polluted neighborhoods often are Black, Latino or Indigenous; earn less money; live in homes with lower values; and sometimes do not speak English as their first language. Those circumstances make it difficult to move away, forcing children to be raised around polluters such as the Suncor refinery.

Other areas of the state that have been designated as disproportionally impacted communities include Pueblo, the Western Slope and the San Luis Valley.

“Folks who are marginalized in low-income communities have less mobility,” Winter said. “They’re trapped.”

Trump undid Clinton’s order when he took office in 2017, Winter said.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris restored that priority on environmental justice during their administration, creating advisory councils, directing money toward communities overburdened by pollution and creating stronger regulations that cover air quality, asbestos use, coal ash cleanup and PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, which contaminate water.

“Environmental justice is saying let’s focus government efforts around pollution to where it’s needed most,” Becker said. “Where is the pollution the worst? Where is the investment the least? At the end of the day, that����ap all environmental justice is asking.”

But Trump and Zeldin are again rolling back policies that benefit those who are most at risk from pollution, Winter said.

The plans to downsize the EPA will strip the agency of scientists and drain it of institutional knowledge on complex environmental laws and how those laws protect land, water, air and people, he said.

Americans also can expect the Trump administration to reframe the story about environmental justice and disproportional impacts, Winter said.

“They’re going to try to downplay the importance or severity of those concerns,” he said. “Changing the narrative will be a part of their playbook.”

The administration also will roll back the EPA’s practice of conducting environmental justice analyses on air- and water-pollution permits, which establish the amount of toxic chemicals that companies can release, leaving those communities to continue drinking more contaminated water and breathing dirtier air than their neighbors.

And it will cut funding for projects such as increased air-quality monitoring in polluted neighborhoods, Winter said.

“That was a big part of the Biden administration,” he said. “Those types of funding opportunities are really important to disproportionately impacted communities to have a say in their communities.”

Major vs. minor modifications of permits

All of those moves are what gave Becker a sense of urgency to get CDPHE to sign that agreement that would put more scrutiny on air permits for big polluters.

“The recognition of the intersection with environmental laws was a priority of the Biden administration and we knew it would not be a priority for the Trump administration,” Becker said.

To that end, the EPA’s inspector general under Biden — who has since been fired by Trump — realized the agency had never conducted a review of its compliance with civil rights laws and ordered it to be done.

The EPA’s studied COVID-19 death rates in cities with poor air quality and found Commerce City and north Denver were among the worst in the nation, Becker said. So the agency picked Colorado as a focus.

Suncor was already on Becker and the EPA’s radar because CDPHE had been slow to renew the Commerce City refinery’s two and because public complaints about repeated permit violations were rampant. Becker thought the EPA could push the state to change the way it reviews those permits, which ultimately must receive EPA approval.

In March 2022, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice informed CDPHE that it was launching a review of the state agency’s to investigate whether it followed federal civil rights laws in administering the Clean Air Act.

“We looked at Colorado and determined that part of the way Colorado manages Title V permits is that communities are excluded from the process,” Becker said. “We never reached a conclusion that said, ‘You’re violating the Civil Rights Act.’ But we said the process you’ve set up has limited opportunity for public comment. And because the majority of these pollution sources are in low-income, diverse communities, there could be a Civil Rights Act violation.”

Becker’s team at the EPA met with people in the community to hear their complaints and to collect ideas for a resolution. Ultimately CDPHE agreed to change how it addresses minor changes to Title V air permits.

When a company receives a Title V permit, it’s valid for five years. During that period, a company must seek CDPHE and EPA approval if it wants to change the amount of pollution it releases into the air.�� But if a company wants to make minor changes that would create more pollution, but below a certain threshold, it does not have to go through the more robust approval process, which includes a public comment period.

The issue has been that polluters avoid more intense scrutiny by claiming they are going to make small changes in the amount of pollution coming from their facility by separating out projects rather than aggregating them into one larger plan, said Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate at the . Those polluters tell the state the changes will be minor, and the state approves the request with no public review.

“What happened is people discovered that small changes that polluters claimed were minor were actually pretty significant,” he said.

Three groups representing the oil and gas industry declined to comment for this story. But in the past, representatives from the industry, chambers of commerce and other trade associations have argued that, while they are committed to protecting the environment, too many government regulations threaten their economic stability and the future of their businesses.

In January, the sent a seven-page memo to the EPA with its priorities for the new Trump administration. The institute’s list included actions on auto emissions, ozone standards, methane emissions and clean water rules. The memo reminded the new administration that the federal government’s regulations “directly shape the industry’s ability to innovate, maintain economic stability and meet evolving energy demands — all while prioritizing environmental protection and public health.”

Over the years, environmentalists like Nichols have accused Suncor of dividing its major alterations into smaller projects to avoid the more intense scrutiny. Environmentalists raised questions about it last year in petitions that asked the EPA to object to both of Suncor’s permit renewals.

Efforts to reach Suncor officials for comment were unsuccessful.

, on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity and the , noted in its petitions that Colorado regulators have allowed Suncor to begin making changes at its Commerce City refinery as soon as it files a minor-modification notice. No modeling was used to determine whether emissions changes would increase the amounts of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides the refinery released and without any public determination as to whether the changes would trigger a violation of federal air quality standards.

The EPA asked the state’s Air Pollution Control Division to revisit those sections of Suncor’s air-pollution permits.

“Colorado ultimately did that analysis when they did the Suncor permit and decided there wasn’t an issue and EPA was satisfied with that,” Becker said.

But Becker and the community wanted to make that process for minor modifications more transparent so the public would know what Suncor is doing.

“We thought CDPHE would be open to this,” Becker said. “It seemed like it wasn’t something CDPHE was going to initiate on their own and we didn’t think the Trump administration would do it.”

The Colorado health department voluntarily agreed to propose a new rule that would change how it reviews those minor modifications to air-pollution permits by creating a process for public notifications and public comment. It would give people who live near the refinery — with the help of groups like the Center for Biological Diversity — a chance to review projects and provide input as to whether they would result in major or minor increases in toxic emissions.

“EPA stepped up and Colorado made concessions”

The state has one year to bring a proposed rule to the , which creates air pollution regulations that state health officials must carry out. That commission, whose members are appointed by Gov. Jared Polis, is not legally bound by the agreement with the EPA and could reject any proposals submitted. There would be no penalty for Colorado failing to uphold its end of the deal.

While CDPHE signed the agreement with the EPA, the agency continues to maintain that it has a strong environmental justice program and is a national role model for its work.

Colorado is one of 12 states that , and CDPHE manages an environmental justice office that helps carry it out. Since the law was passed in 2021, polluters are required to include environmental justice analyses in their permit applications and do more to notify the impacted communities of their plans.

“CDPHE viewed this partnership with EPA as an opportunity to further examine its civil rights and environmental justice work, and explore potential areas for improvement above and beyond current practice,” department spokeswoman Kate Malloy wrote in an email.

The Air Pollution Control Division plans to file a rule proposal by January, Malloy wrote.

“The agreement itself does not change our process, as it currently, and previously, complies with federal requirements,” Malloy wrote. “We committed to raise the topic of minor modifications with the Air Quality Control Commission. The commission will determine whether to adopt any changes.”

While the agreement could fall through, further weakening protections for Colorado’s most environmentally vulnerable communities, it illustrates the important role the EPA serves in the state, especially when it comes to environmental justice, said Nichols, of the Center for Biological Diversity.

“EPA stepped up and Colorado made concessions,” he said. “It speaks volumes as to how the state doesn’t get it right all the time. They need scrutiny.”

Lucy Molina, an environmental activist who lives in the shadow of the Suncor refinery, started questioning environmental policies several years ago when she realized her family and her neighbors were frequently sick. They suffered from nose bleeds, asthma attacks and cancer. No one seemed to care about their suffering until they started speaking out.

While there is uncertainty over the EPA’s future, she plans to continue participating in marches and rallies and speaking during public meetings.

“This is a matter of life and death. We’ve been fighting for our lives,” Molina said. “This administration — they’re murdering us. We are going to continue to fight for our lives. We’re going to continue to speak our voices and share our stories.”

As the freshman Democratic congresswoman campaigned on a recent weekend, abortion rights were never far from center frame, whether her audience was on the sixth floor of an office building in Denver’s congested northern suburbs or in a quiet backyard in rural Larimer County.

Caraveo invited Dr. Rebecca Cohen, a self-described Colorado abortion provider, to warm up about 100 volunteers at her Northglenn campaign headquarters before a day of canvassing. Caraveo, a pediatrician and former state lawmaker, told the volunteers about a 14-year-old girl who came to her office with a stomach ache.

It turned out the girl was pregnant —��a situation that has since become more fraught in many parts of the country following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision ending Roe v. Wade.

“I never thought I would be in a country where I couldn’t have that conversation (about abortion),” Caraveo said, even if Colorado has been on the forefront of protecting access to the procedure.

While the congresswoman’s comments prompted whoops and hollers of support in the room, abortion is not the only driving factor in the tight 8th Congressional District race between Caraveo and Republican Gabe Evans. The economy, immigration and housing affordability are far more pressing for voters in the heavily Latino district, according to a , and Caraveo’s political foes have launched millions of dollars’ worth of ads to highlight what they claim are her failures on border security, crime, oil and gas jobs, and the fentanyl crisis.

She has also upset allies on the left by moderating some of her more progressive past positions — most notably on immigration and energy extraction — as she negotiates a race where polling shows her locked in a tie with Evans, a state lawmaker. It’s viewed as one of the in the Nov. 5 election.

At a gathering of three dozen or so friendly voters earlier this month in a backyard in the Riverglen neighborhood, south of Berthoud, Caraveo said she was chasing the 12% of voters who have yet to make up their minds.

“We’ve gotta keep the seats we have now that are very close,” Caraveo said of House Democrats, as guests wolfed down empanadas hot off the grill. “That (House) majority is going to run right through the middle of the 8th District.”

Sitting down with The Denver Post, Caraveo, 43, hearkened back to her roots growing up with three siblings in south Adams County. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. from Chihuahua, Mexico, and her father supported the family with construction jobs. That modest upbringing motivated Caraveo to go to college, to earn her medical degree and, eventually, to enter politics.

As a doctor, Caraveo found that two-thirds of her patients were on Medicaid, a reality that she has said gave her a close-up view of the struggles working-class and immigrant families regularly face.

“The biggest issue is cost of living, right?” she said. “In Colorado, we’ve had issues around affordable housing for a very long time. Inflation is cooling, right? We just saw good numbers, in particular for Colorado — but people are still worried about making ends meet.”

Given voters’ ambivalence on economic issues, Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders said there was little use for stridency on either side in a race this tight. He’s not surprised Caraveo has steered toward the middle.

“The path for both of them is to be as moderate as possible without demobilizing their base — that’s political skill, that’s political acumen,” he said.

Health care as motivator

The 8th Congressional District, drawn in 2021 after Colorado gained another seat in Congress, knits together the northern suburbs of Denver with the farms and oil fields closer to Greeley.��In the first election to represent the new seat the next year, Caraveo won by a whisker over Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer.

Caraveo, a fluent Spanish speaker who learned English by watching Sesame Street, made history as the state’s first Latina representative to Congress.

This time, she has the benefit of incumbency: She’s outraised Evans more than 3-to-1, with a nearly $7 million haul so far. But even as allies have supported her with millions of dollars in outside spending, she’s faced an onslaught of negative ads by Republican-aligned groups, making Caraveo attack ads a mainstay on local TV newscasts.

Caraveo connects with her profession as a pediatrician to steer through the criticism.

“Affordability of prescription drugs is one of the reasons that I decided to run for office in the first place — and making sure that health care is accessible and affordable for the people like the ones that I saw in clinic,” she said.

Caraveo, who lives in Thornton, graduated from Regis University with a biology degree and earned her medical degree in 2009 from the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. She completed her residency in Albuquerque, then worked in private practice in the north Denver suburbs before running for the state House in 2018.

Now in Congress, Caraveo speaks fondly of a bill she spearheaded that directed the National Institute of Standards and Technology to focus its research on existing and emerging illicit drugs containing xylazine, or “tranq,” a powerful and potentially lethal animal tranquilizer. Despite being in the minority party, her bill made it to Biden’s desk to be signed — “one of only 44 in one of the least productive Congresses since the Civil War,” she said.

Her focus for a second term, Caraveo said, will be trying to get bills out of the House that address her constituents’ bread-and-butter concerns.

“So whether it’s health care as a whole, whether it’s prescription drugs, whether it’s food, focusing on affordable housing, looking at utilities — everything that people need to get through every day,” she said. “Making sure we vote on it is going to be a priority.”

Former state Rep. Susan Lontine, a Denver Democrat who served with Caraveo on the Colorado House’s Health and Insurance Committee, said she always “associates her with kids’ health.” She called Caraveo, who served two terms in the state legislature, “really smart and a really determined person.”

“She was a great believer in the fair treatment of others,” Lontine said, a point echoed by Denver City Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez. She ran for the state House in 2018 alongside Caraveo and fondly remembers their time in the Latino Caucus.

“We were doing what we could to ensure immigrants had the ability to be members of our community,” Gonzales-Gutierrez said. “She was very strong in advocating for immigrant rights and protections.”

But Caraveo’s increasingly public work has not always been easy. She this summer, the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier in the year to get treatment for depression.

In her recent interview with The Post, the congresswoman said she has struggled with depression since she was a teenager.

“You don’t really know when it’s going to rear its head, but the important thing is getting treatment,” she said. “And because of the position that I’m in, I’ve had access to incredible doctors at Walter Reed, at Johns Hopkins (University). … And because of that, I’ve gotten better. And so the reason I decided to speak out about it is because everybody should have access to that level of care.”

Immigration in focus

As Caraveo has moved into the general election, a myriad of issues beyond health care have intruded on the race, complicating her prospects for reelection.

Chief among those is immigration, one of the most salient discussion points in the top-of-the-ticket presidential matchup between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Migrant encounters at the southern border , though they have declined sharply in recent months, since Biden ��claims at the border.

Her political foes claim Caraveo’s past positions make her unfit for Congress. Notably, as a state lawmaker, she signed on to a letter , along with congressional leaders, to “divest” from agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee supporting Republican candidates, that blamed Caraveo’s stance for the surge of fentanyl into the country and for migrant impacts on hospitals and public services in Denver.

“Yadira Caraveo is making her party’s out-of-control illegal immigration crisis even worse, and her constituents are paying the price,” CLF spokesperson Courtney Parella wrote on the organization’s website.

Rob Preuhs, a political science professor at Metro State University of Denver, said it is no surprise that Caraveo’s position on immigration has evolved.

“The big picture for Caraveo on immigration is that she’ll want to distance herself from the Biden administration as much as she can, and not embrace the (potential) Harris administration as well,” he said.

Caraveo did just that this summer, signing on to a “strongly condemning” Harris for the Biden administration’s “failure to secure the United States border.”

Her move to the right on immigration infuriated members of the left flank of her party, prompting former state Rep. Joe Salazar to that Caraveo owed Latinos in her district an explanation for her “hypocritical public support of racist, conspiratorial right-wing immigration stances.”

“Compromising principles is not leadership,” Salazar told The Post nearly three months later. “That’s being a damn politician.”

Salazar said he was particularly disappointed because he sees Caraveo as a good person who “leads with a kind heart.”

“I think her first term in Congress has been trying for her,” he said.

Representing a “very divided” district

Caraveo said she represents a district “that is very divided,” and she is “voting and speaking to topics in line with what my constituents want.”

“Immigration is an issue that they are concerned about,” she said. “I hear that from the Latino community, in terms of people having been here for 30, 40 years, and they can’t legalize their status — and they’re upset about the process that they’re seeing at the border right now.”

For decades, she said, neither party has been able to fix the U.S. immigration system.

Caraveo supported a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump pressured Republicans to kill earlier this year. She then unveiled a package of bills that aimed to break the logjam, so far unsuccessfully, by providing law enforcement with more resources, helping cities like Denver deal with the mounting costs of assisting migrants, and shortening those migrants’ wait for work authorization.

In a district where , Caraveo’s heritage likely proved instrumental to her victory two years ago, according to an exit poll conducted after the election. But Preuhs is among those who think that dynamic will be blunted this time, given Evans’ own Latino lineage.

Latino concerns, Caraveo said, are in large part the same as those of the larger electorate. And they are the issues she has been toiling on for months.

She’s hopeful, she said, because of “the fact that I’m focusing on lowering costs for people, that I’m focusing on actually getting a solution to the immigration crisis, that I’m focused on giving women the right to do what they will with their own bodies — which is something that Latinos do care about,” she said. “Those are the issues that Latinos tend to focus on, and so they’re really looking for the candidate that is going to have the right positions on those — and not necessarily what our race is.”

The Denver City Council approved the settlement Monday afternoon, ending a case stemming from an unusual incident that played out five years ago just south of downtown. Mary Quintana’s son shot and wounded two Denver police officers, and the standoff ended after Joseph Quintana shot himself. He died the next day.

Denver police entered the house at 622 Inca St. on Jan. 27, 2019, to arrest 35-year-old Joseph Quintana on an outstanding warrant after receiving a call reporting shots fired in the area.

When one officer went down to the basement, Quintana shot him, striking him in a Kevlar vest protecting his abdomen, according to the lawsuit first filed by Mary Quintana’s attorneys in January 2020. In an exchange of gunfire that followed, another officer was struck in the leg, according to that suit.

Both officers survived their injuries.

In the ensuing standoff, SWAT officers used chemical grenades to help neutralize Joseph Quintana, a decision they communicated to their command center, according to the suit. Several rounds of chemical agents were tossed into the home inside ammunition boxes meant to contain them.

A short time later, the house burst into flames.

According to the lawsuit, a Denver Fire Department report determined that the cause of the fire was a chemical grenade designed specifically for outdoor use due to its “fire-producing capability.”

Shortly after the fire started, Joseph Quintana shot himself. He was taken to a hospital, where he died the next morning. Officials ruled his death a suicide.

Among the claims in Mary Quintana’s lawsuit was that Denver police — including then-Chief Paul Pazen and three officers — acted negligently during the standoff. It alleged that the department did not properly train officers on the use of chemical grenades. Quintana also sought compensation for being detained by police for six hours during the standoff.

A federal appeals court in March ruled that Denver police officers Justin Dodge and Richard Eberharter were immune from legal liability. The three-judge panel found that their action during the standoff did not amount to a willful or wanton disregard for the harm that could be done by their actions.

When reached by phone Monday, Quintana’s attorney, Joe Salazar, declined to discuss how the two sides arrived at the $95,000 settlement’s amount. In an interview with a Denver Post reporter in 2020, Salazar noted that Quintana’s insurance company had paid a portion of the cost of rebuilding her home, but not all of it.

“This matter is finally resolved,” Salazar said Monday.

Yet the situation left people feeling disappointed when it comes to Colorado’s new and whether or not the state’s air pollution regulators followed it in the first real test of how the new law would work.

The Dupont neighborhood where the storage tanks sit is classified under the act as a disproportionately impacted community because the people who live there are mostly Latino and earn less money than the rest of Colorado. They suffer higher rates of asthma and other health problems. And they are surrounded by industrial polluters such as the Suncor Energy oil refinery.

The Environmental Justice Act was intended to protect neighborhoods like Dupont from more pollution.

“The intent of the Environmental Justice Act is clear, but maybe not as clear as the division’s outright failure to conduct any significant and meaningful outreach to our community,” said Laura Martinez, manager of environmental justice programs at , a nonprofit that advocates for the environment and improved public health in Commerce City and north Denver. “The community experienced discrimination in this permitting process.”

Martinez and others who fought the proposed expansion said they feel a key mandate in the Environmental Justice Act was missing: communication.

They learned about the Magellan Pipeline Company’s planned expansion in late July when contacted by a reporter from The Denver Post rather than state officials or the company itself. Those who would have been impacted the most by the increased toxic air emissions from additional gasoline storage, including faculty and parents of students at , said the company’s plan to post a notice on its front gate — which was preliminarily approved by the state — was not enough.

They also criticized the for giving preliminary approval to the project even though the company’s plan to build five additional gasoline storage tanks would release more volatile organic compounds, which contribute to the state’s already severe ozone pollution, as well as more benzene, toluene and other toxins into the neighborhood.

While Magellan’s parent company, ONEOK, ultimately withdrew its application, citing it as a business decision, the case was the first — and very high profile — test of how the state health department applies Colorado’s 2021 Environmental Justice Act when reviewing a permit to pollute.

The department’s critics believe more accountability is needed.

“Colorado has a lot of work still to do to ensure that communities have their health and the health of their environment prioritized,” Andrew Klooster, Colorado field advocate with the environmental group , said at a neighborhood rally after the permit was withdrawn. “And that work needs to start in communities like this one, communities that are already disproportionately impacted, that for generations have been bearing the undue and disproportionate burden of having to live next to polluting facilities. And so we need to hold them accountable until they fully commit to this work. We need to ensure that they hear community voices.”

Bearing a higher burden

The Colorado General Assembly passed the Environmental Justice Act in 2021 and Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law that year. The , which sets the state’s air pollution rules, approved in 2023.

The intent was to acknowledge through state law that everyone in Colorado has benefitted from oil and gas production and other industries, but not everyone has paid equally for it, said state Rep. Mike Weissman, D-Aurora, and co-sponsor of the bill.

“Commerce City bears a higher burden,” Weissman said. “We’re not paying a pro rata share of the pollution burden.”

Legislators’ intent, he said, was that when certain communities show they have higher asthma rates and other health problems, “the least we can do is to stop adding to the burden. That����ap part of what the EJ act was saying in how permitting should go.”

In Commerce City, children have a 22% higher admission rate to emergency departments for asthma attacks than the rest of Adams County, according to data.

However, environmentalists and community activists have been disappointed in how Colorado has implemented the law.

Last year, GreenLatinos, 350 Colorado and Earthworks argued in a lawsuit filed in Denver District Court that environmental justice rules written by the Air Quality Control Commission failed to follow the law by creating too many loopholes for polluters. They want a judge to tell the commission to try again.

Michael Ogletree, the Air Pollution Control Division’s director, insists his agency cares about environmental justice, but that he and other regulators are limited by state and federal laws in what they can demand of companies submitting applications for permits that allow them to pollute.

Ogletree met Tuesday night with about 30 people at a Commerce City recreation center to talk about permitting and how the department makes its decisions. But fed-up residents refused to hear his presentation and demanded that he listen to their concerns. They spent more than two hours expressing anger over their polluted community, various health problems they believe are caused by chemicals in the air, and how they feel ignored by the state.

Karla Loria, superintendent of , said she was angry that she learned about the Dupont expansion from the media rather than state officials. At one point, she scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper and thrust it toward Ogletree, saying she expected a call from him next time.

Loria said the exposure to air pollution impairs students’ learning and development and Magellan’s application clearly identified the neighborhood around Dupont Elementary as a disproportionally impacted community.

“Your department has a statutory obligation to consider the community,” she said.

The department receives hundreds of permit applications a year from all sorts of companies that send toxic emissions into the sky. Those companies include oil and gas drillers, paint-makers, food factories, cement producers and other industrial facilities. The rules governing how the state reviews permit applications and makes decisions about them are highly technical and very specific.

It’s almost impossible for regulators to deny a permit, Ogletree said, because his staff must follow federal and state laws that determine how much and where a company is allowed to pollute.

Determining a disproportionately impacted community

After the Environmental Justice Act was passed, all companies must include an environmental justice summary in their permit applications. The state health department created a tool called that companies use to determine whether or not their projects will be in a disproportionally impacted community.

But that determination does not mean the Air Pollution Control Division can deny a permit.��Instead, it means regulators who review permit applications can order companies to add more equipment or technology to reduce harmful air emissions.

In the community where the Magellan storage terminal is located, nearly 45% of residents qualify as low income, 79% are people of color, 31% are burdened by the cost of housing and 12% speak limited English, according to the environmental justice summary submitted with the company’s permit application. The residents there also have higher rates of hospitalizations because of asthma than in other zip codes in Adams County.

That meant Magellan wanted to expand its facility in a disproportionately impacted community.��So regulators ordered the company to add internal floating roofs onto the five additional tanks being proposed to better control the volatile organic compounds, benzene, toluene and other pollutants that escape the tanks. Those roofs can move up and down, depending on the level of gasoline in the tank, so there is less space for fumes to escape into the air.

The division also told Magellan to install technology to better seal the seams where the roof meets the tank to further decrease vapor leaks.

Magellan’s permit application marked the first time the state required a company to implement additional technology since the environmental justice rules were written in 2023.

Since January, the Air Pollution Control Division has received more than 30 permit applications that could also meet the threshold for additional pollution-reduction requirements, said division spokeswoman Leah Schleifer. So far, though, no permits have been issued under the new rules for facilities in disproportionately impacted communities

The air pollution division can only deny a permit if there is a technical flaw in the application, Ogletree said. Denying a permit because a proposed project would be in a disproportionately impacted community would lead to lawsuits, which would tie up limited resources, he said.

“And we’d still end up issuing the permit,” Ogletree said.

Lack of communication with public

But the thing that most angered the Adams 14 school board, the Adams County Commission, Commerce City’s City Council, the Adams County Health Department and Cultivando was the lack of communication about the planned expansion.

In its application, Magellan said it planned to provide copies written in English and Spanish, and its community outreach would be performed via a notice posted at the site’s entrance gates on Krameria Street. The company eventually tacked its notice to a fence on East 80th Avenue, a busy thoroughfare that separates its property from the school.

People in the community said they never found a Spanish version online, and a poster on a fence was not a satisfactory way to communicate plans, especially since some people did not know where the front gate was and the storage facility is off of a busy road with semitrailers constantly passing by.

The Adams County Health Department wrote an opposition to the Magellan project and cited the Environmental Justice Act’s mandate that communities affected by air pollution permits receive equitable and accessible engagement. A poster on a fence failed to do that, the county health department’s opposition letter stated.

“This flies in the face of the intent of the act, is a wholly insufficient form of public outreach, and severely downplays the history of environmental injustice and harm faced by this community and similar communities across Colorado. Again, we believe this sets an unnerving precedent that is detrimental to public health and meaningful community engagement,” the document stated.

On Tuesday night, Ogletree pledged to do better and to meet more frequently with people who live in Adams County.

Joe Salazar, a lawyer who represents Adams 14 and a former member of the Colorado House of Representatives, said the community would have to stay vigilant so other harmful projects are not approved without proper public notice. He also said the community would need to hold politicians accountable so the state’s Environmental Justice Act realizes its full potential.

One recommendation Salazar made at a recent rally was to have state employees file a permit application’s environmental justice report rather than allowing the companies to fill them out for their own projects.

“We have to ensure that it’s the agencies that file those environmental justice reports,” Salazar said. “That way we can hold them accountable because we’re not board members of Magellan. We’re not board members of the other oil and gas industry businesses. We can hold elected officials accountable, and that’s what we need to do. We can hold appointed officials accountable because they ultimately work for us.”

Michael D’Agostino, a state health department spokesman, said the staff reviews all environmental justice summaries and even reruns the data to make sure the companies are correct in their assessments. The state wants the companies to write the reports so they are aware from the outset what the implications are.

At the same time, parents whose children attend are organizing to fight the construction of five additional storage tanks at the terminal at 8160 Krameria St., which is across the street from the school in the Dupont neighborhood.

The additional tanks would increase the amount of volatile organic compounds, benzene and other hazardous chemicals emitted into the air.

And Cultivando, a nonprofit that focuses on community health and clean air in Commerce City and north Denver, is joining Adams 14 officials at 10 a.m. Saturday to rally resistance during an event at Adams City High School.

About 40 people gathered last week at the elementary school to learn about Magellan’s expansion plans, their environmental impact on the neighborhood and how parents and nearby residents might push back against the new storage tanks.

Parents and neighbors are concerned about how increased pollutants would impact people’s health, especially school children who play outside, and about more truck traffic in the neighborhood — another pollution source.

“Let’s do it! Vamos!” one father shouted as Wednesday night’s meeting concluded.

Magellan applied in the fall of 2023 to build the five additional gasoline storage tanks at the site. Twenty already are there, and those tanks store fuel delivered via a pipeline that is then trucked around Colorado to fuel vehicles. The company wants to expand, in part, to store reformulated gasoline, which is a special blend required from June to September along the Front Range to reduce ozone pollution.

But people in the neighborhood, including the school principal and residents who live next to the storage facility, were unaware of the project until The Denver Post reported on it in July.

School officials, environmental activists and neighbors are furious about the lack of communication from the company or from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s , which has the authority to approve, amend or deny the expansion application.

In their application to build the new tanks, Magellan officials wrote that they would notify the neighborhood of the plans by posting signs on the front gate. When Guadalupe Solis, Cultivando’s environmental justice programs director, mentioned the signs at the Wednesday meeting and asked the crowd whether anyone had seen them, multiple people scoffed and laughed.

“That����ap what we thought. That����ap why we are here,” Solis said. “They are doing this because we are people of color. We are immigrants, and they are sure we are not going to say anything, that we are going to be silent.”

Annelle Morrow, a spokeswoman for ONEOK, Magellan’s parent company, said the Dupont terminal expansion was in the works when in September 2023.

“Whether the proposed project is ultimately approved or denied, ONEOK intends to be a good neighbor to the school and surrounding community for years to come,” she said. “We have already reached out to the school district, and it is our genuine hope that — over time — we can demonstrate ONEOK’s commitment to engaging meaningfully with the communities in which we operate.”

Determining the environmental impacts

As part of its permit application, Magellan was required to submit an environmental justice impact analysis, to determine whether the work would take place in a disproportionately impacted community.

That analysis determined nearly 45% of the residents in the neighborhood surrounding the terminal qualify as low income, 79% are people of color, 31% are burdened by the cost of housing and 12% speak limited English. The environmental impact on the surrounding community is supposed to be taken into consideration by state regulators when they review the permit application.

The parents, school board and neighbors have an uphill battle.

Magellan filed for a construction permit, which doesn’t require the same level of scrutiny as other permits, and the Air Pollution Control Division already has given it preliminary approval.

Michael Ogletree, the division director, said his staff’s work is defined by the law and they must follow it when making decisions on permit applications.

“We must approve permits that comply with the law,” he said.

In the wake of the complaints over the permit’s secrecy, the Air Pollution Control Division extended the public comment period to 60 days, instead of the usual 30.

Ogletree also said the state health department plans to install air monitors near the school to detect emissions. He told The Post that plan was in the works before the newspaper published its July 22 story about the project, but people at the school and neighborhood residents said they had not heard about air monitors until they started complaining about the expansion project.

When asked about that discrepancy, a division spokeswoman, Leah Schleifer, sent an email to The Post saying Ogletree meant monitors were in place “in the area of the school district,” and he directed his staff to explore the possibility of adding monitors near the school.

Ogletree said his agency will listen to community feedback and offer support.

To that end, the health department is planning a community listening session from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 17 at Eagle Pointe Recreation Center in Commerce City. Schleifer said attendees must register in advance at . If not enough people sign up, the meeting will be moved to online-only, she said. She also noted that the meeting was not about any specific permit application.

“This is not fair”

Joe Salazar, chief legal counsel for Adams 14, said “the cake has been baked,” but he still believes there is a chance organized opposition could halt the permit. The school board voted unanimously last month to allow Salazar to fight the project on behalf of the district. He said it was unusual for a school board to take that step.

The Center for Biological Diversity will join the parents’ group, Cultivando and the school district in resisting the project, Salazar said.

“We’re up against it right now and we’re going to have to fight really hard to get the Air Pollution Control Division to change their minds,” he said.

Parents who attended last week’s meeting were worried about their children playing outside, but Dupont Elementary Principal Amanda Waller said she hoped to allow outdoor playtime as long as she feels it is safe.

“I pray we are not going to have to go that far,” Waller said. “It����ap not fair to our kids.”

Waller broke down in tears as she talked about the gasoline storage expansion, saying she had been caught off guard when she learned about it. She also called it “a big deal” for the school.

“I just want you to know that I love and care for this community so much that this is really painful to me and I’m going to do everything I can to encourage all of us to join together because it����ap about the kids,” she said. “This is not fair. This doesn’t happen in Cherry Creek.”

The wells that Kerr McGee wants to drill in southwestern Weld County are fewer than 2,000 feet from 87 homes. Rules approved in late 2020 as part of an overhaul of state oil and gas regulations required that wells be set back at least 2,000 feet from homes and schools — with some exceptions.

One of the exceptions allowed in the rules is a finding by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission that a company’s plan provides protections that are “substantially equivalent” to a 2,000-foot setback. COGCC director Julie Murphy said in a Feb. 2 document that Kerr McGee’s application complies with the rules, but didn’t recommend whether the commission should approve the plan.

The five-member commission was scheduled to consider the application in a public hearing Wednesday.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a letter to the COGCC that it should deny the application unless Kerr McGee agrees to 13 steps to minimize the potential health and environmental impacts of the wells. The steps include air-quality monitoring, equipment to capture emissions, procedures to minimize noise and odors and using electric drill rigs to reduce emissions.

The COGCC staff agreed with Kerr McGee that some of the recommendations from the health department aren’t feasible, such as using an electric drilling rig rather than one fueled by natural gas.

The COGCC has previously approved one application that will allow wells within 2,000 feet of homes after the landowners gave their consent, one of the carve-outs permitted under the regulations.

Andrew Forkes-Gudmundson with the community group League of Oil and Gas Impacted Coloradans called the findings by the COGCC staff “wildly frustrating and confusing.” The group, represented by Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, opposes the two well pads Kerr McGee wants to develop.

“This application is exactly what (Senate Bill) 181 was passed to prevent,” Forkes-Gudmundson said.

The bill, passed by the legislature in 2019, mandated revamping state rules to prioritize public health, safety and the environment when regulating oil and gas. Before that, the COGCC was tasked with balancing mineral development with protecting public health and the environment.

“This is residential drilling all over again. This is a massive, mega pad with 26 wells on it plus another with seven more wells on it within 2,000 feet of 87 homes and hundreds of people,” Forkes-Gudmundson said. “There are thousands of homes within a mile.”

The 33-well pad, called McGavin, would be 763 feet away from the closest home, according to the COGCC director’s report.

“I don’t know how they can on one hand say that the COGCC has the most protective regulations in the country and on the other hand not deny this,” Forkes-Gudmundson said.

Bill Coffee and his wife moved in September 2021 to the Falcon Point at Saddleback subdivision in Firestone. He estimates his home is a little over 2,000 feet from the proposed 26-well McGavin pad, but is still concerned the noise, truck traffic and emissions from the equipment and oil and gas production will be problems.

“Technically we would be outside of the zone that was set up by Senate Bill 181, but things that go into the air don’t know a border,” Coffee said.

His wife is immunocompromised, Coffee added, and he worries about air pollution and emissions of fracking fluids, which can include such cancer-causing substances as benzene.

The Firestone Board of Trustees approved the locations of the two well pads in January. Under an agreement between the town and Kerr McGee, the company will give Firestone a 78-acre tract of undeveloped land.

Proponents of 2,000-foot setbacks pointed to a 2019 report by the state health department that outlined certain short-term health impacts for people living within 2,000 feet of fracking sites. Industry representatives opposed the setbacks, saying they would hinder oil and gas development and that Colorado voters previously rejected a ballot measure requiring 2,500-foot buffers.

When approved, the 2,000-foot setbacks were described as among the toughest in the nation. But at the time, Joe Salazar, an attorney with the environmental group Colorado Rising, said the exceptions to the rule amounted to loopholes for the oil and gas industry.

“I had indicated pretty early on that I believed abuses could happen through this rulemaking, through these exceptions, these variances,” Salazar said.

The COGCC staff said Kerr McGee held a community meeting in July 2020 and a virtual meeting in August 2021 to discuss its plans. Other outreach included mailings, phone calls and visits to homes.

The company submitted several letters of support to the COGCC.During the public comment period, from Oct. 1-31 last year, the COGCC received 20 comments on the proposal, some that were opposed to oil and gas operations in Firestone.

Forkes-Gudmundson said several residents his organization has talked to didn’t know they could file protests or believed it was a done deal. He contended that Kerr McGee hasn’t sufficiently proved that its proposed technology and procedures will provide the same protection that drilling farther away would.

The COGCC cited the company’s plan to automate some of the work, use pipelines to deliver water rather than trucks to the site and use noise-reduction equipment on its drilling rigs as some of the “most stringent best management practices” in Colorado.

However, Forkes-Gudmundson said he wants to see more evidence, including computer modeling of the site’s emissions, to show Kerr McGee’s proposed operations would adequately protect area residents.

“It would be a lot of work. I’m not trying to sugarcoat it,” Forkes-Gudmundson said. “But these are impactful decisions. These locations, if they get approved, are going to be in people’s backyards for decades.”

by the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and others reviewed the effects of Pennsylvania’s 2012 law that said oil and gas wells have to be set back at least 500 feet from buildings. It found that through 2018, one out of every 13.7 unconventional natural gas wells was within 500 feet of buildings.

“The high-level, take-home message here is just because the state of Pennsylvania passed a setback regulation of 500 feet, it didn’t mean that zero wells were going to get drilled within 500 feet of buildings,” said the study’s lead author, Drew Michanowicz, a visiting scientist at Harvard.

Michanowicz, on staff at the research intsitute Physcians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, said the study is the first to systematically track the effects of setback rules. New 2,000-foot setbacks took effect in January in Colorado as part of a sweeping overhaul of the state’s oil and gas rules that was mandated by a 2019 state law.

Colorado’s setbacks are considered the strictest in the country and are seen by the industry as a drag on development.

“I followed Colorado’s setback rule-making process very closely, and I think it’s going to be really interesting to see what is the overall effectiveness or adherence to setback regulations because we know exemption pathways exist, variances can be obtained by operators,” Michanowicz said.

The study acknowledges differences between the exemptions allowed by Pennsylvania and Colorado. Pennsylvania exempts new wells drilled on well sites that predate the 2012 law. Researchers estimate that about 35% of the wells drilled within the 500-foot setback were on well pads established before the law took effect. Most pads have multiple wells.

Colorado Rising for Communities spoke against variances because it believed they could be abused to undermine safeguards, Joe Salazar, a former legislator and the environmental group’s executive director, said in an email.

“The Harvard study demonstrates the absurdity of setback regulations when exemptions and variances are available,” Salazar said

But Jeff Robbins, chairman of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, said he was pleased by the study’s recommendations that exemptions should be reviewed and protections should be added for health and safety where warranted.

“I was actually pleased to see that the siting requirements we’ve developed in the state of Colorado are very much in line with this approach,” Robbins said.

Colorado allows exemptions when the wells are part of an approved comprehensive drilling plan; the property owner or tenants sign a waiver; equipment producing the most noise and emissions is more than 2,000 feet from buildings; and the commission finds that companies have taken “substantially equivalent” protections for public health and safety.

Exemptions, or offramps, as the COGCC calls them, will be allowed only after a public hearing before the commission, Robbins said. Permits previously were approved by the COGCC director unless a public hearing was held for a particular reason.

Robbins said it appears that companies in Pennsylvania can obtain permits for new wells that don’t follow the setback distance as long as the well pad where it is drilled was established before the setback law. “That’s not the case in Colorado,” he said.

However, new well sites whose permits were approved but not drilled before Jan. 15, when Colorado’s new rules took effect, don’t have to meet the 2,000-foot setback. Several of those permits are moving through the system, spurring numerous complaints from neighbors.

Robbins said the wells will still have to meet other new rules intended to protect public health, including regulations on air quality and water monitoring and noise levels.

Lynn Granger, executive director of the American Petroleum Institute-Colorado, said the Harvard study results don’t seem to apply Colorado. She said Colorado’s setback requirements followed comprehensive discussions and provide for specific variances.

“It is far too early to speculate as to the frequency of their application, as relatively few permits have been filed with the COGCC since the new rules became active in January,” Granger said.

Months of hearings and testimony failed to produce evidence that setbacks beyond 500 feet were necessary, said Dan Haley, president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. “We’re hopeful the commissioners’ judgement will continue to be based on what is necessary and reasonable, rather than just the precautionary principle.”

For people, policy and Colorado politics

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“Senator after senator kept coming up to me and saying, ‘Who is that guy? Who is that guy?’” U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet told a Capitol Hill pool reporter Wednesday night, after Day Two of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

That guy is U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a 36-year-old Democrat from Lafayette who’s serving as one of nine impeachment managers (read: prosecutors). The rising Democratic star has been given a national stage this week and has impressed.

“He’s showing us, right now as an impeachment manager, what I’ve seen in him since I first met him in college — he is smart, he is humble, he is a leader,” Democratic state Rep. Leslie Herod told The Post����ap Alex Burness this week.

The praise has been bipartisan, according to Bennet, and even Trump’s attorneys tipped their hats in his direction.

“I thought the House managers who spoke earlier were brilliant speakers … I thought they were brilliant speakers and I loved listening to them. They are smart fellas,” Trump attorney Bruce Castor said Tuesday.

It����ap a popular parlor game among Colorado Democrats to guess how high and how fast Neguse can rise. When asked if Neguse could be president one day, Herod said, “I absolutely believe and hope that for our country.”

“I don’t know if he thinks that about himself,” she added, “but it����ap definitely time that he does.”

Want to get caught up on Neguse’s speeches? On Tuesday, he told jurors the trial was constitutional. On Wednesday, he outlined the prosecutors’ case against Trump.

To support the important journalism we do, you can become a Denver Post subscriber .

Questions?

Have a question about Colorado politics? Submit it here and it’ll go straight to The Denver Post politics team.

Top Line

Since 2004, taxpayers have been pitching in to get the long-promised RTD line from Denver to Longmont. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis showed up at a virtual public meeting this week, the Post����ap John Aguilar reported, saying the agency’s now 20-plus-year estimate for the B-Line is not a legitimate timeline for discussion.

Capitol Diary • By Saja Hindi and Alex Burness

Immigrant advocacy

Former Colorado state Rep. Val Vigil, most known for his efforts to get in-state college tuition approved for students who came to the country illegally, died last week at 73.

The Democrat from Thornton pushed the legislation for three years, from 2003-2005, but it didn’t pass until after he was out of the legislature on Democrats’ seventh attempt in 2013.

Joe Salazar, who served in the Colorado House from 2013-2019, helped carry the torch forward.

“There were thousands upon thousands of people affected by (Vigil),” Salazar said.

The week Vigil died, immigration advocacy groups denounced actions by Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, who sided with Republicans on a non-binding vote to block stimulus payments for immigrants who came to the country illegally.

The Action Fund for the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights said it would be an understatement to call Hickenlooper’s vote a disappointment.

“Candidate Hickenlooper promised Coloradans in 2020 that he’d learned from his past mistakes that harmed our undocumented brothers and sisters,” the group said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Senator Hickenlooper seems to have forgotten his promises to our communities, at the first opportunity, he has voted against our communities.”

A sneak peek at 2021 bills

A flood of legislative proposals is coming next week when lawmakers return to the Capitol to restart their 2021 session.

While most bills won’t be introduced until the restart, we got a sneak peek at a handful that were approved for early release.

There’s the bill to allow dead bodies to be composted, which was sidelined last year because of COVID. Another would allow in-state tuition for members of Indigenous tribes with historical ties to Colorado. , if you’re interested.

One early-release bill to watch would grant benefits to military veterans who were dishonorably discharged under anti-LGBTQ policies like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

It����ap personal for first-year state Democratic Rep. David Ortiz, believed to be the first openly bisexual man elected to the legislature. He’s also an Army veteran who was paralyzed from the waist down in .

“There was a great injustice done, bottom line,” he said of the need for a bill to return benefits like in-state tuition to veterans who lost their jobs because of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

“When you’re coming for me — like in my helicopter crash, for example — I don’t care who that medic is sleeping with or what they identify as,” he said. “They’re American.”

Ortiz said he wasn’t out to his Army colleagues, because even after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed in 2020, he didn’t quite feel comfortable.

“I wasn’t interested in making my career more difficult than it needed to be, to my shame,” he said.

More Colorado political news

• Colorado Democrats want to ban plastic bags and foam products in restaurants and stores.
• Former Colorado House speaker who donated land to Staunton Park dies at 99.
• A legislative fight is brewing over whether students should take standardized tests this year,
• Colorado’s COVID-19 vaccines expected to increase by about 27,000 in coming weeks.

Mile High Politics • By Conrad Swanson

“This library should have been in Globeville …”

Denver City Council members had to pick Monday night between opening a new library branch and opening it in the place that needed it the most. They picked the new branch.

It was a fine line to walk, Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca said before voting in favor of the new branch for the well-to-do River North Art District.

“This library should have been in Globeville or should have been in Swansea,” CdeBaca said.

Although she supported the affordable new branch — which will — CdeBaca said residents told her the move was a slight to the neighborhoods to the north.

The newest branch will aim to highlight the district����ap namesake: art. There will be a maker’s space, possibly featuring a tool library, 3-D printer and sound studios — some of which can be found at other libraries.

It’ll also have a traditional lending library, which Globeville-Elyria-Swansea residents say they need — books, internet access, job hunting and adult education services.

“We do have a very small library in the Elyria neighborhood, which is supposed to serve all three (neighborhoods) and is just totally inadequate to meet the needs of the three neighborhoods,” Councilwoman Debbie Ortega said before also voting in favor of the new branch.

Ortega was optimistic, though, saying there might be another city-owned property on Washington Street in Globeville that could serve as an affordable way to bring the neighborhood its own library branch.

More Denver political news

• Up to five unrelated people can now live in a single home, the Denver City Council decided early Tuesday morning after hours of public comment over the controversial decision.
• Denver residents who identify as Latino need not worry about health insurance, money or proving citizenship when they seek the COVID-19 vaccine.

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The appeal comes although the new oil and gas regulations don’t take effect until Jan. 15 and county regulators have already approved the project. The location of the well pad was approved in 2018 and the drilling permits were approved in November.

The upshot is that the 11 wells that Great Western Petroleum plans to drill soon in northwest Adams County fall under the old regulations. The new rules mandated by a 2019 law require, among other things, bigger distances between homes and wells, stricter air-quality monitoring and a look at the cumulative impacts of oil and gas development.

Great Western and Adams County officials have said the site’s plan includes air-quality monitoring and measures to reduce noise, odors and threats to nearby Big Dry Creek based on extensive collaboration and input from the county and area residents. But that hasn’t eased everyone’s concerns.

“It����ap not fair. They haven’t started drilling, so why should they not follow the new rules that are in place?” asked Cassandra Andersen. “I’m not against oil. I’m against oil in neighborhoods.”

The house that she and her husband, Rob, bought in 2017 is about 1,300 feet from on the other side of 152nd Parkway. The new regulations that take effect later this month include 2,000-foot setbacks between new wells and homes and school.

The Andersens, who joined neighbors Sunday at a protest near the well pad, said they knew about existing wells when they put money down on their house, but not about the proposed drilling across the street

“With the new regulations coming in, others will have 2,000-foot setbacks, but not them. It’s just very unfair that they will have to live with the consequences of the old regulations,” said Christine�� Nyholm, a member of Adams County Communities for Drilling Accountability Now.

Nyholm has worked for a number of years with residents who don’t want drilling in the neighborhood, which includes an elementary school and daycare center. Great Western said those two buildings are more than 2,800 feet from the well site.

A public meeting held Tuesday by the Adams County commissioners was prompted by the request from Nyholm and others that the county assert its authority under Senate Bill 181 to require Great Western to comply with the new regulations. In addition to mandating an overhaul of state oil and gas regulations, the law gave local governments more authority to regulate oil and gas development.

The commissioners said the meeting was just to share information and no action would be taken. But they did hold a closed session with the county attorney to discuss legal questions about an agreement with Great Western.

The 2015 agreement between Adams County and the former owner of the Ivey site, later applied to Great Western, anticipated that state regulations might change, said attorney Joe Salazar, executive director of Colorado Rising. He wrote in a Dec.17 letter to the county that the agreement states if any provisions ultimately conflict with state law or rules, the stricter standards will apply.

The letter signed by five community organizations along the Front Range asks the county commissioners to halt the drilling “and begin the process to ensure that the strictest standards will be applied to this project.”

Salazar said Monday that he believes Great Western wanted to get the drilling permits approved before the new rules kick in.

Throughout the writing of the new regulations, community activists urged the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to halt approval of all permits until the new rules were in place. Oil and gas companies and some local governments voiced frustration with delays in permitting.

With thousands of permit applications pending, companies face the prospect of having to redo applications�� under the new regulations.

The COCCC took a temporary timeout on new permits to develop criteria meant to enforce the spirit of the new law while the rules were being written. The new law prioritizes protection of public health, safety and the environment when regulating oil and gas.

A proposed project would get closer scrutiny if it met any of the criteria, such as being in a city, a floodplain or within a certain distance of homes and schools. Great Western’s Ivey site checked some of the boxes, triggering more review.

Great Western has approached the Ivey site and other projects in anticipation of the new regulations, said Susan Fakharzadeh, a vice president with the Denver-based company.

“It certainly wasn’t something that we snuck in two months before the new rules came into effect. It’s something we’ve literally been working on for years,” Fakharzadeh said.