Their goal is to combat what the attorneys general in these states have called Live Nation’s “monopoly” in the music events industry by breaking up its business and getting concessions from the company. Live Nation is the dominant music promoter in the U.S. (although not in Colorado, where AEG Presents holds the most sway) and owner of Ticketmaster.

“That’s what’s driving us now, because that DOJ settlement is a travesty,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser told The Denver Post. “This is what monopoly behavior looks like — (having) a chokehold in the market and taking advantage of consumers. It’s having an impact on fans and artists and culture, and it’s got to stop.”

The Justice Department, which had sued Live Nation in 2024 alongside the states, decided on March 9 to settle with the company for $280 million and drop out of the legal proceedings, which are taking place in federal court in New York. The settlement, which has yet to be approved by the judge, directs Live Nation to shed more than a dozen booking contracts with big venues and open up some of its ticketing business to competitors such as SeatGeek.

On Monday, Robert Roux, Live Nation’s president of live concerts, in court as an “artist-first company” that does 90% of shows in smaller venues, where it can groom artists to someday reach the large crowds and big paydays that come with stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters.

But Weiser and several other states’ attorneys general have assailed that notion, calling last week’s federal settlement anti-consumerist. As a result, the trial resumed on Monday in New York federal court with testimony from Roux, as well as rival promoter AEG Presents.

The antitrust lawsuit, which took shape under the Biden administration, accused Live Nation of having an illegal monopoly on live events, something that drives up prices for music fans.

“They own all these arenas and amphitheaters and facilities, and they have a monopoly in ticketing,” he said, citing venues such as Barclays Center in Brooklyn as having been blacklisted by Live Nation because it explored ticketing options other than Ticketmaster.

Weiser also suggested that politics may be at play. Richard Grenell, a friend of President Donald Trump, in May 2025, three months after being appointed as the director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (a position that last week).

“The sad and painful reality is that his Department of Justice is now making decisions not on merits about what’s harming consumers, but whether a company is politically connected and has the right lobbyist,” Weiser said.

Live Nation officials have repeatedly denied having a monopoly, casting themselves as good-faith competitors in a fast-changing market. Leaders say they’ve sunk millions of dollars into fighting bots, which can instantly buy huge amounts of tickets and drive up prices, as well as ensuring a level playing field for artists and venues.

“We have never relied on exclusivity to drive our ticketing business, it has simply been the result of having the best products, services and people in the industry,” said Michael Rapino, President and CEO of Live Nation, in a statement.

The Front Range is a little different than most markets across the country since Live Nation competitor AEG Presents Rocky Mountains books the majority of concerts here. But Weiser said he’s heard no concerns about their promotion and venue-operating practices, or as the owner of ticketing company AXS, the official ticket seller for the city of Denver’s events. (That includes the majority of shows at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, which often sell out hours after going on sale and have also prompted frustration from ticketbuyers.)

AEG Presents, also known as Anschutz Entertainment Group, was founded and is owned by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz.

“AEG is really an upstart in the ticketing market,” Weiser said. “They do own venues in Colorado and do artist promotion. But if you look at the market position, Live Nation is the goliath in this marketplace.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Stan Kroenke, the owner of the Colorado Avalanche and the Denver Nuggets, became the nation’s largest landowner in December, holding 2.7 million acres of mostly sprawling ranch lands in Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, and now New Mexico, according to .

His purchase of 937,000 acres of ranchland across New Mexico from the heirs of Henry Singleton, founder of the tech and industrial conglomerate Teledyne, allowed him to vault ahead of John Malone, chairman emeritus of the Liberty Media empire. Malone, who for years sat at the top of the list, dropped to third place with 2.2 million acres.

For anyone comforted when they see the vast Greenland Ranch Open Space when driving between Castle Rock and Colorado Springs, Malone had a big part in preserving that. And this Greenland isn’t for sale.

In between Kroenke and Malone is the Emmerson family, who are behind the lumber and wood products company Sierra Pacific Industries. The family owns 2.4 million acres of timberland in the Pacific Northwest.

Further down on the list is Colorado’s wealthiest resident, Philip Anschutz. The Land Report has him at 198,000 acres. His Overland Trail Ranch in Wyoming spans 320,000 acres, although about half of that represents public lands he operationally controls through federal leases and grazing rights.

Unlike Kroenke, Anchtuz is divesting rather than investing in land. Prior reports had incorrectly listed him as the largest landowner in his native state of Kansas, with 250,000 acres in Baughman Farms. But a representative for Anschutz told the Topeka Capital-Journal in November that those farm parcels, many of which were actually located in southeastern Colorado, had been sold.

And then there is Louis Bacon, a New York hedge fund manager, who owns the Trinchera Ranch and Bianca Ranch near Fort Garland in the San Luis Valley. He purchased Trinchera from the Forbes family in 2007, and they had owned it since the 1960s. Bacon’s Colorado land covers 172,000 acres. It is Colorado’s largest ranch, and most of it is under conservation easements. Other holdings bring Bacon’s total closer to 222,000 acres, according to the Land Report 100.

“They have been buying and owning properties for a long time. They like aggregating land,” Ken Mirr, owner of real estate brokerage , said.

Finding such large parcels is nearly impossible back East and becoming much harder in Colorado. But it remains doable in New Mexico and Wyoming.

From Colorado’s founding, people bought land for the economic use they could get out of it, whether it was to mine minerals or coal, to raise crops and livestock, or to cut timber. Anschutz in some ways reflects that older style of land ownership.

He is building wind turbine projects and raising cattle on his Overland Ranch Trail in Wyoming, and before selling his Kansas and Colorado farmland, he grew row crops on it. Ted Turner, the cable entrepreneur and the nation’s fourth-largest landowner, also has tried to generate cash flow from his land holdings.

He owns the world’s largest bison herd and uses their meat to supply his chain of restaurants called Ted’s Montana Grill. Cattle are common on many of the ranches.

But most of the new breed of buyers are more conservation-minded, purchasing land for land’s sake, even if it means locking up money in an illiquid asset. Raw land can rise in value, but over time, those gains don’t keep pace with stocks, private equity or the original businesses that generated the wealth to begin with.

But land does offer a hedge against inflation, diversification against economic upheavals, and provides a certainty that isn’t available with assets whose value can evaporate in a short time span, like Washington Mutual or Enron. There is also a beauty or aesthetic that comes with large land holdings, sometimes described as “psychic income.”

“We are facing uncertainty with what is going on in the marketplace and in the world. Things are a little unstable. People return to land as a stable form of property,” Mirr said, who said the motivation at times can be comparable to those who purchase fine art and jewelry.

The land holdings of the four billionaires add up to 5.32 million acres. To put that into perspective, they hold more land than that contained within four of the largest national parks — Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Glacier.

The square mileage they control would rank as the country’s 41st state, behind New Jersey, and it is comparable to the territory Israel covers.

And this may come as a surprise. Their land holdings are just shy of the span of the 10 counties that the federal government defines as the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan statistical area. Metro Denver covers about 1,000 more square miles than all of New Jersey, something to think about on the next layover at Newark airport.

All that is to say, they own a lot of land. And as humorist Will Rogers famously said, “Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.”

Even Colorado’s newest billionaires aren’t immune to the land bug. Alex Karp, CEO of Denver-based Palantir Technologies, purchased the St. Benedictine Monastery in Old Snowmass in December for $120 million. The purchase included 3,700 acres of Colorado’s most prime land, senior water rights and several monastery buildings.

John Malone, who for years was at the top of the private landholder list, explains what motivated him to devote most of his accumulated wealth to land in his recently released biography “Born to be Wired.”

“You can’t appreciate what a precious commodity open land is until you see it vanish over time. And then one day you look, and it����ap gone. Forever,” he wrote.

Malone describes moving to Denver 50-plus years ago with his wife, Leslie, and falling in love with the beauty of the Rockies, the cowboy culture, the clean air, and the ethic of freedom dominant in the West at the time.

Bob Magness, who hired Malone to run his cable company, hosted him at his Hidden Valley Ranch in the foothills near Golden. The Malones eventually purchased their own spread southeast of Denver. The financial engineer learned how to run a tractor, to plow fields and plant oats, to paint barns and work with horses.

But over the years, metro sprawl kept encroaching on the isolation they were seeking, forcing them to move three times. They always held onto the land. And Malone, who for long stretches outperformed even Warren Buffett in generating returns for his investors, poured much of his family’s net worth into buying more land.

“This pursuit will consume most of the material wealth that Leslie and I have built up in our lifetime, a key reason we formed the Malone Family Land Preservation Foundation. We will designate a vast portion of the 2.2 million acres in six states with a protected status that will ensure it stays natural and utterly undeveloped forever, and I hope to expand this even more,” he wrote.

Mirr said many buyers are motivated by the desire to protect something they consider valuable, to leave a legacy that will last beyond them.

The Trappist monks oversaw their monastery lands in old Snowmass for nearly seven decades, and when their time to say goodbye came, Mirr said one of the brothers told him after the closing, “We don’t own the land, we are custodians and stewards.”

People may buy land, even vast acres of it. And they may enjoy it. But in the end, they never truly own it.

“It’s not like you can take it with you,” Mirr said.

The rankings come from industry publications Pollstar and Billboard, which annually list the roughly 9,500-seat Morrison venue alongside much larger-capacity spots such as London’s O2 Arena (capacity 20,000) and New York’s Madison Square Garden (19,500). Both of those venues can fit about as many concertgoers as Denver’s Ball Arena.

The 2025 Red Rocks concert season saw more than 1.75 million paid fans attending 236 events, Pollstar Magazine said, making it the best-attended amphitheater for 2025. as the second most-attended venue in the U.S., only behind Madison Square Garden, according to the City of Denver’s Arts & Venues office, which owns and manages Red Rocks.

O2 Arena in London nabbed the first-place attendance spot with 2.5 million fans, Billboard reported, with Madison Square Garden and Madrid’s Movistar Arena landing on 1.8 million fans each.

“Red Rocks’ 1.72 million fans puts it in fourth place, in a virtual tie with The Sphere (Las Vegas) and Santiago’s Movistar Arena with 1.7 million fans,” according to an Arts & Venues statement. “Red Rocks will be visited by another 1.1 million unpaid tourists and others.”

City officials noted that Red Rocks is “the only venue making Billboard’s Top 10 that is outdoors and operational only part of the year, and is the only one with a capacity of fewer than 15,000 seats,” they said.

“It’s thanks to Red Rocks fans that the venue continues to post these fun statistics,” said Tad Bowman, venue director, in the statement. “For only operating part of the year and with a smaller capacity, the Red Rocks crew, our promoting partners and vendors all work pretty hard to get these results.”

That’s particularly notable with the high prices of concert tickets, with most shows at the venue costing a minimum of $50 to $75 per seat, and many more going for $100-plus per seat (to start). , however, that overall grosses and ticket sales dropped this year, “landing 6.1% short of the 2024 worldwide total, but it����ap still a massive $8.9 billion and 60.8% higher than 2019’s overall gross, the last full year prior to the pandemic.”

This year’s results add to an already stellar few years for Red Rocks, which has seen its concert season extended from March to November to fulfill demand for shows since 2021. Denver-based promoter AEG Presents Rocky Mountains books most of Red Rocks’ concerts and sells tickets through its AXS service — both owned by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz. The City of Denver has also signed multimillion-dollar contracts with AXS to make it the exclusive ticket seller for all city events.

Industry publications have rated Red Rocks highly in recent years, including last year for being the world’s most attended amphitheater, with roughly 1.6 million paid attendees in 2024, and for being the venue of the year in country and EDM publications.

Four of the seven seats on the ‘ Board of Education are at play this year. The election comes as DPS is facing financial challenges, including falling K-12 enrollment and scrutiny from the Trump administration regarding gender-neutral bathrooms in schools.

“This election really sets forth the next 10 years for DPS,” said Daniel Aschkinasi, the registered agent for an independent expenditure committee called “Getting the right board in place to be able to support students and teachers for the future planning of this district that has a lot of challenges, I think, is why it’s so critical.”

Aschkinasi’s group is by far the biggest spender in the election, having already paid about $751,587 for mailers and television and digital advertisements to support candidates endorsed by , which is hoping to cement its flip of the school board that began in 2023.

Denver Families Action is the political arm of Denver Families for Public Schools and one of the largest donors to Better Leaders, Stronger Schools.

The group has endorsed candidates for each of the seats that are on the ballot this election, including Alex Magaña, Mariana del Hierro, Caron Blanke and Timiya Jackson.

“Denver Families Action is committed to ensuring the voices of public school families are front and center in this election,” said the group’s CEO, Clarence Burton Jr., in an email about the spending in this year’s election. “Every dollar we invest is reported and spent to ensure that voters know which candidates truly reflect what families want from their public schools.”

Independent expenditure committees cannot work with candidates directly. The $1.2 million spent in the school board election as of Friday doesn’t include money candidates raised themselves, unless it was given by teacher unions.

The is backing its own slate of candidates, including incumbent Xóchitl Gaytán, Amy Klein Molk, DJ Torres and Monica Hunter. Notably, two incumbents — Scott Esserman and Michelle Quattlebaum — endorsed by the union in 2021 are not backed by DCTA this year.

DCTA has given candidates about $76,809 directly. Separately, an independent expenditure committee — backed by the — has spent $191,496 on advertising in the DPS election. A second independent group backed by the Colorado Education Association, Public Education Committee, has given at least $73,750 to DCTA candidates, campaign records showed.

The teacher unions in , �����Ի�����have also donated a total of $17,000 to candidates backed by DCTA.

“We’re all trying to help each other,” said DCTA President Rob Gould. “A union is unified in making sure we protect public education.”

He called the 2023 election a wake-up call to the millions of dollars that DPS school board elections are attracting.

Better Leaders, Stronger Schools emerged as a major player in Denver school board elections two years ago, which saw and the ouster of two incumbents.

But the group has drawn criticism from candidates and others for being a dark money group funded by donors outside of Denver. (Denver Families for Public Schools is partly backed by The City Fund, a national organization that supports charter and school reform, .)

“We keep seeing this significant increase in interest from wealthy individuals,” Gaytán said. “These millionaires and billionaires that are so interested in dumping these millions of dollars in school board elections, and it does leave people wondering why.”

While Denver Families remains a major backer for Better Leaders, Stronger Schools, the group has expanded its donor pool since the 2023 election, Aschkinasi said. More than 40 donors, including Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, have given to the group, which is up from about a dozen two years ago, he said.

“We were able to do something that folks didn’t think was possible in 2023,” Aschkinasi said of increasing the group’s donor base.

As spending ramps up in the election, so is the arrival of negative advertising, especially in the at-large race.

Better Leaders, Stronger Schools is circulating a digital advertisement that says Molk — who is endorsed by the union — fired teachers and replaced them with artificial intelligence.

Molk said the clip that the ad uses to make the claim was taken out of context. Her startup, called Beanstalk, failed in 2021 and she had to let all — about 15 — employees go. The employees were producers, not teachers, Molk said.

“I’m outraged and disgusted,” she said. “We need to have a serious conversation about campaign finance reform.”

Aschkinasi said his group is mostly spending to uplift candidates it supports. Of the AI ad, he said, “We just shared her own words with voters at a much more amplified level.”

The union’s committee — Students Deserve Better — has run a digital ad criticizing Magaña’s leadership of the Beacon Network Schools innovation zone, which was

Another independent committee called Colorado Families for Great Schools has also spent about $81,900 in the election, specifically the District 2 race where Gaytán is hoping to keep her seat. The group, which received a donation from the , spent the money on mailers supporting del Hierro and opposing Gaytán.

Nicholas Hernandez, the registered agent for the group, said he doesn’t expect to spend much more on the election.

“Our base is generally concentrated in marginalized communities, in places like southwest Denver,” he said.

The high-stakes election has already generated more than $255,000 in campaign spending from political groups, a number that candidates and organizers expect to increase in the month that remains before ballots are due on Nov. 4.

The deep-pocketed political group, which has charter-school ties, is hoping to complete the flip of the DPS school board that the organization began in 2023, when all three of its candidates won and unseated two union-backed incumbents. The organization is the political arm of Denver Families for Public Schools.

Candidates backed by the teachers union have controlled the board since 2019, but their grip began to erode in 2023. Four of the current board members were backed by the when they won their seats, but now the union is only endorsing one of the three incumbents in the race. (Board President Carrie Olson is term-limited.)

Denver Families CEO Clarence Burton Jr. insists — as he did two years ago — that the city has moved on from the decades-old “reform” debate about school choice and charter schools. Instead, he and Denver Families Action’s allies and candidates say the DPS board is dysfunctional and unable to guide the district and improve student academic outcomes.

“This is a moment where the DPS school board, specifically, is historically unfavorable,” Burton said. “Will we move toward a board that is more transparent, that is prioritizing student outcomes and serving the teacher population? Or will we continue to have a situation where we’re sort of waddling in the midst of dysfunction and confusion about the direction we go in?”

Others, including union leaders, disagree that the reform fight isn’t at play in this election. The amount of money being funneled into the school board race is indication enough that DPS remains a battleground for policies that in past administrations have included the expansion of charter and innovation schools as well as the use of school closures to improve academic outcomes, they said.

“It is not true that people don’t care about this issue,” said Van Schoales, senior policy director at the Keystone Policy Center, a nonprofit that conducts education research. “DCTA wouldn’t be fighting as hard as they are, or Denver Families… they wouldn’t be as engaged spending (on the election).”

Eleven people are vying for the four board seats, and both Denver Families and DCTA are the main spenders in this year’s election, just as they were in 2023, when between outside groups and candidates.

An independent expenditure committee called has spent $244,900 on digital and television advertisements for DPS principal — who is running for the at-large seat currently held by , who, in turn, is running to represent District 3 — according to the latest campaign finance reports.

Independent expenditure committees cannot work with candidates directly. Better Leaders, Stronger Schools receives most of its money from Denver Families Action, but others have also donated, including Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, who gave at least $40,000.

Denver Families has endorsed Magaña, Mariana del Hierro, Caron Blanke and Timiya Jackson.

DCTA has given at least $10,668 to three of the four candidates the union is endorsing, including incumbent The teachers union’s independent committee, Students Deserve Better, has not yet spent money on the election.

The union has also endorsed Amy Klein Molk, DJ Torres and Monica Hunter.

Two incumbents — Esserman and — are also seeking another four years on the board, but were not endorsed by the union despite receiving DCTA’s support in 2021.

The union isn’t backing Esserman and Quattlebaum because of certain positions they’ve taken, but the outcome of the 2023 election also changed who DCTA endorsed this year, union President Rob Gould said.

The union has advocated for smaller class sizes in schools for years, but Gaytán has championed conversations around class sizes more than her colleagues, he said.

“We’ve not seen enough focus around that,” Gould said.

In terms of individual fundraising, Blanke had raised more than $50,000, Molk more than $47,000, and Magaña more than $45,000, campaign finance reports as of Sept. 29 showed.

Incumbents Gaytán, Quattlebaum and Esserman have raised less money. Esserman has received more than $15,000 in donations, while Gaytán and Quattlebaum have raised more than $6,000 and $7,000, respectively.

Financial challenges ahead

Despite the money being spent on the election, this year’s DPS candidates aren’t talking about teacher contracts, school choice, charter and innovation schools, or other topics that date back to the district����ap reform years, Schoales said.

“Those fights have always been incredibly intense, but I don’t see that playing out in how the candidates are talking about their objectives,” he said. “…It����ap very hard to tell the difference between the candidates on their positions.”

This year, candidates and political groups are talking about how the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to pull federal funding from K-12 school systems for diversity, equity and inclusion policies that the government calls discriminatory.

The federal government has come after DPS for its policies related to transgender students, accusing the district of discriminating against girls for having gender-neutral bathrooms at a handful of schools. DPS has also gone head-to-head with the Trump administration in court, challenging federal immigration policies in an effort to prevent officers from conducting raids inside schools.

“We should all be proud of the job that our district has done standing up to the Trump administration,” Burton said. “…We’re not just a district that is resisting those policies, but actually at the forefront of standing against them nationally.”

DPS is facing financial challenges other than the Trump administration’s threats to pull funding. K-12 enrollment is falling statewide, leading to less per-pupil funding for schools. The outlook for the state budget also isn’t looking promising with a nearly $1 billion deficit projected.

Additional school closures loom

How candidates approach potential school closures is important, given the financial headwinds DPS is likely to face in the coming months. Schools get less money when there are fewer students in their classrooms, leading to larger class sizes and fewer resources, such as mental health support and extracurriculars.

“What����ap going to happen to our schools given the situation we are in?” Gould asked. “….Are we going to get people in here that are actually going to think about what we need to do for funding issues?”

The school board voted last year to close seven schools and restructure another three because of low enrollment. But board members were loath to do so, in 2022, before finally voting to shut down three in 2023.

“It����ap not an easy conversation to have, and there’s multiple things you have to consider,” Quattlebaum said.

The school board voted this summer to approve a four-year hiatus on school closures. Directors who supported the measure said it was intended to give schools and families a chance to breathe before another round.

Magaña criticized how the board has handled closures, saying the district needs a long-term plan on how many buildings need to close.

“We’ve known this problem for 10 years and still do not have a solution for it,” he said. “That����ap the responsibility of the board.”

Esserman defended how he and his colleagues have handled school closures.��The board can change the closure policy if Marrero tells directors that another round of school closures needs to happen sooner than four years, he said.

“The policy is not written in stone,” Esserman said.

‘Comes with the territory’

In the past four years, the DPS school board has gained a reputation for infighting that has largely focused on how to govern.

Most recently, board members scolded director John Youngquist, who was elected in 2023, for “behavior unbecoming of a board member toward DPS staff” and hired an outside attorney to investigate racial discrimination allegations.

Quattlebaum and Esserman pushed back on the notion of infighting, saying disputes are common when you have seven individuals with different personalities. “I’m not elected to win a popularity contest with my colleagues, but I am there to treat them with dignity and respect,” Quattlebaum said.

Critics have also questioned the school board’s decision earlier this year to extend Marrero’s contract for another two years and make it harder to fire the superintendent by requiring a “supermajority” of at least five members.

Marrero’s contract was set to expire in 2026 before the extension. Board members said at the time that they wanted to renew the contract to keep DPS leadership consistent amid federal funding threats.

Magaña was among a group of Latino community leaders and politicians who asked the board to pause the contract renewal until directors could review student academic performance. The board, he said, needs to do a better job at holding Marrero accountable.

If the superintendent is not meeting goals set by the school board, then directors need to decide whether it����ap time to “move on,” Magaña said.

“He is doing the job that he’s been assigned to do,” Magaña said of Marrero. “He’s interpreting it the way he is interpreting it. The problem is not the superintendent… the problem is the board. The board did not do its job.”

Marrero, in an interview Monday, acknowledged that one of the primary jobs of the school board is the hiring and firing of the superintendent. The chance that a new board could terminate his contract “comes with the territory,” he said.

The high court’s reversed a prior decision by an appeals court that found a government agency violated the country’s bedrock environmental law — the — by failing to analyze potential environmental impacts of the Uinta Basin Railway outside of the immediate area of the proposed railway, like in Colorado.

The 88-mile railway expansion would connect oil and gas producers in Utah’s Uinta Basin to the existing rail system and greatly increase the amount of crude oil transported across Colorado to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Plaintiffs in the litigation — led by Colorado’s Eagle County — argued that the U.S. Surface Transportation Board failed to consider in its environmental review how the railway could impact land, water and air away from the immediate construction site.

They argued increased train traffic raised the risk of wildfires along the railway and increased the chance of a spill of crude oil into the Colorado River, which provides water for a region of 40 million people.

“We’re very disappointed with the decision,” said attorney Nathaniel Hunt, who represented Eagle County in the case. “Overall, it kind of rocks the environmental world.”

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and filed briefs in the case, urging the Supreme Court to leave the lower court’s decision in place.

“Today, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the lower court����ap decision to block a risky scheme to transport waxy crude oil along the Colorado River, right alongside our most critical water resource and posing major risks to Colorado’s Western Slope communities,” Weiser said Thursday in a statement. “The court����ap opinion allows agencies to ignore the upstream and downstream environmental harms of projects.”

U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat, said the court’s decision “lays the groundwork for environmental catastrophe.”

“Increasing fracking levels and transporting them across the country would not only harm the communities through which the train travels, including those in Denver, but it would further devastate the communities surrounding the facilities where this oil would burn,” she said in a statement.

The justices found that regulators were right to consider only the direct, local effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impacts. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on “where to draw the line” on what factors to take into account while analyzing projects’ environmental impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock,” he wrote of the policy act reviews. “The goal of the law is to inform agency decision making, not to paralyze it.”

Four other conservative justices joined his opinion and three liberal justices wrote their own opinion, which reached the same conclusion but through different reasoning. Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case after , whose companies could profit if the railway is built. Gorsuch, as a lawyer in private practice, previously represented Anschutz.

The justices remanded the case back to the lower court, which will now reconsider the issues through the lens of the Court’s decision.

The Supreme Court did not rule on other issues that Eagle County and other plaintiffs won in the lower court, Hunt said. The plaintiffs will continue to fight the railway expansion when it returns to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

“We don’t think this changes things,” he said. “We look forward to going back to the D.C. Circuit.”

Environmental groups said the decision would have sweeping impacts on reviews and limit the scope of environmental reviews required by the law.

“As noted, the biggest project beneficiaries of this decision will likely be large energy, natural resource, infrastructure and transportation projects,” said Michael Drysdale, an environmental attorney with Dorsey and Whitney. “This is because these types of projects tend to generate a lot of upstream and downstream environmental effects, spur or involve numerous related but separate projects, and generate intense opposition. This has, for decades, made permitting such projects very challenging under NEPA. It may now be easier at the federal level, if not truly simple.”

The court����ap conservative majority has taken steps to curtail the power of federal regulators in other cases, including the decades-old that made it easier for the federal government to set a wide range of regulations.

The ruling comes after President Donald Trump’s vow to boost U.S. oil and gas drilling and move away from former President Joe Biden’s focus on climate change. The administration announced last month it����ap speeding up environmental reviews of projects required under the same law at the center of the Utah case, compressing a process that typically takes a year or more into just weeks.

“The court����ap decision gives agencies a green light to ignore the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their decisions and avoid confronting them,” said Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice.

Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said opponents would continue to fight the Utah project. “

This disastrous decision to undermine our nation’s bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy,” she said.

The project����ap public partner applauded the ruling. “It represents a turning point for rural Utah — bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,” said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.

___

Associated Press writers Lindsay Whitehurt and Hannah Schoenbaum contributed to this story.

Now, fans of the historic resort can spend the night inside one of its guest rooms — while sailing around the world on a cruise ship.

, a sister company to the 106-year-old hotel, has created near-exact replicas of Broadmoor rooms onboard several of its ships. Both brands are owned by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, under the parent company .

Today, guests will find one Broadmoor suite each on Star Breeze, Star Legend and Star Pride, three 312-passenger ships in Windstar’s six-vessel fleet. Those ships also each have a suite designed to look like a room at , the Broadmoor’s sister property in Georgia.

And, soon, Windstar will add the specialty suites to another vessel, the 342-guest Wind Surf.

Several hotels have announced or launched their own cruise lines in recent years, including The Ritz-Carlton and The Four Seasons. But Windstar is one of the only cruise lines around the world to tackle the reverse — and put a land-based hotel room onto a ship.

The specialty suites are so innovative that they earned Windstar a coveted industry award: best suite design at the in December 2023.

“It was a brilliant idea that was executed perfectly,” says Jack Damioli, the Broadmoor’s president and chief executive officer. “The sense of place they were able to achieve in the suites with the wallpaper, art and color tones is pretty astonishing.”

An ambitious idea

Windstar is unlike other cruise lines you may be familiar with. For starters, its ships are small, accommodating just 148 to 342 guests at a time, depending on the vessel. They feel more like private yachts than cruise ships.

There are no waterslides, no casinos, no raucous pool parties with hordes of sunburnt-to-a-crisp tourists. Guests tend to be affluent, well-educated folks in their 50s, 60s and 70s; they’re mostly married couples or small groups traveling together.

Against this backdrop, the idea for the Broadmoor and Sea Island Resort suites was born during a March 2022 meeting of executives from Anschutz’s various businesses.

Windstar, the Broadmoor and Sea Island Resort all have similar guest demographics so, at one point during a brainstorming session, Windstar’s president Chris Prelog mentioned: Wouldn’t it be great to have Broadmoor and Sea Island suites on the ships?

“Immediately, we fell in love with the idea and thought it was fantastic,” says Damioli. “But we also wondered if it could be pulled off. For one, there is just not the same square footage on a ship as in our hotels — could it be done and done well? Would you really get enough of a sense of each property to have it translate, especially for those who had stayed at the resorts?”

When Prelog returned from the meeting to Windstar’s offices in Miami, he tasked his team with bringing the ambitious plan to life. It would be wildly challenging for several reasons, on top of those Damioli mentioned.

For one, cruise ships must adhere to strict design and construction rules that are intended to keep guests and crew members safe. All materials must be non-flammable, which means interior designers couldn’t simply grab an extra roll of wallpaper from the Broadmoor’s storage closet and slap it on the ships’ walls.

“Designing ships is very different from designing residential or hotel spaces,” says Stijn Creupelandt, Windstar’s vice president of hotel operations and product development. “We have the most stringent regulations — there’s a whole 1,000-page book that says what types of materials we can and cannot use. You cannot just go to your corner antique store and pick up a few pieces. Everything has to be made specifically for cruise ships, really.”

They were also working on a tight timeline. The first ship to get the specialty suites, Star Legend, was scheduled to undergo an intense, two-week renovation period — called “dry dock,” in cruise ship parlance — in Cadiz, Spain, just eight months later. The team needed to work out a plan before then, so that construction crews could complete the work before the vessel returned to service.

“These things need to be planned out meticulously,” said Creupelandt. “The ship is in a certain location, all supplies need to be shipped in advance and coordinated with plumbing, electrical and everything else. There’s demolition, there’s buildup and then there’s time to clean it and put it back into operation. It����ap a very coordinated effort.”

Experiential research

But first, before they could dive head-first into the complicated logistics, the Windstar team needed to conduct some hands-on, experiential research. Creupelandt and Seattle-based interior designer took a whirlwind trip to Georgia and Colorado to check out the two resorts.

They explored each property thoroughly, making careful notes about the architectural features, the color palette and, perhaps more importantly, the overarching vibe.

“It����ap not just about the looks, because obviously you can see photos,” says Creupelandt. “It was really about getting the essence of the property and how it feels. We wanted to pick up some common elements that would make you feel like you were at the Broadmoor, versus just copying and pasting.”

When they returned from their research mission, Creupelandt and Schneider began tackling some of the design challenges. They found a vendor who could reproduce the Broadmoor’s signature bougainvillea wallpaper (designed by Broadmoor co-founder Julie Penrose herself) so that it met maritime specifications; they also designed custom furniture and fabrics in the Broadmoor’s unique Europe-meets-the-American-West style.

In the end, they managed to get everything ready by the time Star Legend entered dry dock. From there, it was just a matter of repeating the process on the other ships — Star Breeze in March 2023 and Star Pride in April 2024. On each vessel, crews stripped two classic suites down to the studs, then built them back up again in the style of either the Broadmoor or Sea Island Resort.

Positive reception

The specialty suites are located at the very front of the ships, an area called the forward. They have large windows that offer unobstructed views of the water and, depending on which way the ship is heading, colorful sunrises and sunsets. The ships sail all over the globe — from French Polynesia to Iceland to Greece and nearly everywhere in between — so guests can also gaze out at the local scenery.

Each suite has a bedroom, a living room with a comfy couch, a cozy dining nook and a private veranda. Inside the Broadmoor suites, archival black-and-white photographs of the historic resort hang in gilded gold frames on the walls.

The response from guests has been overwhelmingly positive, even from those who have no previous connection to the Broadmoor or Sea Island Resort.

“They are very different from what you expect from a cruise line,” says Creupelandt. “They make you feel at home.”

Spencer Penrose, the late founder of the Broadmoor, likely would’ve enjoyed the suites, too. Penrose and his wife, Julie, were jet-setters who made many transatlantic journeys together, according to Damioli. They even drew inspiration from their international travels when they designed the Broadmoor, so the Windstar suites are a bit of a full-circle moment.

And Anschutz?

He’s “very pleased,” says Creupelandt.

“The design award we received is actually on the way to his office because he’s very proud,” he adds.

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The long-expected lawsuit, for which the U.S. Department of Justice has been laying groundwork ever since the Taylor Swift ticket debacle in 2022, comes in the wake of record-high average ticket prices and complaints about bots and scalpers — and as the concert industry has roared back over the last three years with record revenue.

Now, the U.S. Justice Department and Colorado, 28 other states and the District of Columbia seek to break up what they call an illegal monopoly and force Live Nation to sell Ticketmaster.

“Ticketmaster is the dominant provider of ticketing services in the United States and both fans and artists face extraordinary pressure to use its monopoly,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “As a result, fans are paying exorbitant prices. This lawsuit calls for opening up competition in ticketing services and preventing Live Nation from using its other assets in ways that undermine competition.”

Live Nation has essentially become a vertical monopoly, the lawsuit alleges, by inserting itself “into nearly every aspect of the live music industry, including ticket sales, promotions, marketing and venues,” Weiser’s office wrote.

The , filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, echoes that language, saying Live Nation maintains its illegal monopoly “through a web of agreements, along with other anticompetitive acts, to make higher profits, stifle competition and innovation in the industry, and thereby harm concertgoers.”

“It’s time for fans and artists to stop paying the price for Live Nation’s monopoly,”��Attorney General Merrick Garland��said. “It is time to restore competition and innovation in the entertainment industry. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster. The American people are ready for it.”

Lawsuit is “baseless,” Live Nation says

Live Nation officials called the lawsuit “baseless” and said it won’t help reduce high ticket prices, according to a statement released to . Local Live Nation officials declined to comment.

“The DOJ’s lawsuit won’t solve the issues fans care about relating to ticket prices, service fees and access to in-demand shows,” Live Nation said in its press statement. “Calling Ticketmaster a monopoly may be a PR win for the DOJ in the short term, but it will lose in court because it ignores the basic economics of live entertainment, such as the fact that the bulk of service fees go to venues, and that competition has steadily eroded Ticketmaster’s market share and profit margin.”

Live Nation earlier this year said it had earned $22.7 billion in 2023 across more than 50,000 events that drew 145 million fans — .

In a late-Thursday update, Live Nation’s Dan Wall, executive vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, produced charts showing Live Nation’s purported lack of market power.

“Every year, competition in the industry drives Live Nation to earn lower take rates from both concert promotion and ticketing,” he wrote. “The company is profitable and growing because it helps grow the industry, not because it has market power.”

Weiser’s office said Live Nation plays by different rules. It has locked up venues in Colorado and across the country “through restrictive long-term, exclusive agreements and threats that venues will lose access to concert tours and artists if they sign with a rival ticketing company,” his office wrote. “Live Nation also leverages its extensive network of amphitheaters to force artists to select Live Nation as a promoter instead of its rivals, maintaining its promotions monopoly.”

“Denver is a different market”

Whatever the results of the lawsuit, they would likely affect the Denver and Colorado markets less than others. Colorado is the rare state where Live Nation and Ticketmaster have far less reach than rival promoter AEG Presents, founded and owned by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz.

Anschutz over the years has cherry-picked talent from Live Nation, including former AEG Presents Rocky Mountains president and CEO Chuck Morris, to build its business while aggressively booking and renting the top venues in the area.

Currently, AEG Presents Rocky Mountains books the majority of concerts at the Denver-owned Red Rocks Amphitheatre, owns Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre and the Gothic Theatre, and consistently rents and dominates venues such as the Bluebird Theater and Ogden Theatre.

AEG Presents built and runs Mission Ballroom, and books concerts at outdoor venues outside of the Denver metro area, such as Dillon Amphitheater and Colorado Springs’ newly built Sunset Amphitheatre.

AXS, the ticketing spin-off of AEG, is also the official ticket seller for Denver city events, the contract for which City Council members must approve every five years. Its current, $5 million contract was approved in 2019.

Live Nation, by contrast, has a much smaller footprint. It owns the Fillmore Auditorium and books that venue along with Summit Music Hall, the Marquis Theater and some — but not all — shows at Ball Arena, Empower Field at Mile High and Coors Field. Ticketmaster is the exclusive seller for Ball Arena’s concerts and sporting events, as well as for Denver’s historic Paramount Theatre.

The competition means Denver concert fans have more choices than just Ticketmaster, however.

“Denver is a different market than the national ones because you have AXS and Hold My Ticket and some others,” said Doug Kauffman, a partner in Denver promoter Nobody in Particular Presents, and owner of the Ogden Theatre. “It’s not as Ticketmaster-dominated.”

Musicians who have tried to take on the entertainment giant for decades , members of which testified at congressional hearings in 1994. Colorado jam-band titan The String Cheese Incident in the early 2000s also fought with Ticketmaster over sales fees and ticket availability.

“We’re scalping our own tickets at no service charge,” Mike Luba, one of the group’s managers, ��in 2012, alleging the band was forced to buy back its own tickets to take care of its fans. “It’s ridiculous.”

The band had sued Ticketmaster in 2003, saying the company was using its market power to deny acts the artist-specific tickets they typically get (or about 8% of the total available tickets, according to the Times). They settled out of court, but their agreement for the band to sell more tickets expired in 2009.

The focus now is on consumers — and how Live Nation’s tactics force fans to pay more for tickets amid limited options for Ticketmaster-sold concerts, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office said.

“For this reason, fans attending concerts at Live Nation-controlled amphitheaters get access to fewer shows and see fewer artists than they otherwise would,” Weiser’s office said in its announcement of the lawsuit. “Artists, meanwhile, are forced to go through Live Nation to reach music lovers, even if they are dissatisfied with Live Nation’s treatment of fans.”

“It’s time to end Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s anticompetitive tactics and ironclad grip on this market,” Weiser said in his statement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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“If you’ve been to those communities up and down I-25, you can see that there are a lot of folks living and working and playing there that can support their own shows,” said Fedrizzi, the co-president and COO of AEG Presents Rocky Mountains. “And now we have the extra tools to do that.”

Those tools include new venues such as Sunset Amphitheater, the Springs’ upscale space scheduled to host OneRepublic, Dierks Bentley and other big acts when it opens in August. The 8,000-capacity venue is helping to soak up a growing demand for live music along the Front Range and in the high country — and loosening Denver’s historic grip on the state’s biggest concerts.

Artists such as Vampire Weekend aren’t just playing Red Rocks Amphitheatre (July 19) when they visit Colorado. They’re also booked at the 3,656-capacity Dillon Amphitheater (July 20), and maybe even Vail’s Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater. When Slightly Stoopid this month announced its Aug. 8-10 Colorado run, it included all of them.

It’s a trend that doesn’t just benefit the average concert fan, it’s also one that’s being driven by them, promoters say. Now that Colorado’s live-music options are finally meeting demand, they’re also eroding what are known as “radius clauses,” or contracts that prevent artists from playing too close, too often, and cutting into sales. Now, artists are often hitting every stop along I-25, and many just off I-70, instead of playing there every other year from Denver.

“We don’t really feel that they cannibalize each other, and that’s what has changed,” Fedrizzi said. “Back in the day, people from the Springs just drove to Denver for shows. But now there’s a massive populace down there, so let’s try to serve that community in their backyard.”

As the largest promoter in the region, and one owned by Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, AEG Presents is happy to sell tickets to those people. But fans are increasingly saving gas money by not having to travel far to see their favorite artists. It’s a post-pandemic reality across the state as promoters double-dip in overlapping markets, scheduling artists at venues that are, in some cases, barely an hour away from one another.

“We’re the first real baby market that has become its own market,” said JW Roth, owner of Sunset. He praised Springs venues such as the Pikes Peak Center and Broadmoor World Arena for setting the stage. “We’re keeping more economic-impact dollars in the city these days.”

“We’ve tested the waters and been able to play off of a Denver show and still sell well here,” said Susan Trafton, assistant general manager of Loveland’s Blue FCU Arena (formerly Budweiser Events Center). “The old-school thinking was, ‘Oh my God, if they play Red Rocks we can’t possibly sell enough tickets to justify a show here!’ It’s the same with Ball Arena. But we’re our own market now, and not relying on Denver demographics to sell tickets.”

Average ticket prices have reached their highest-ever levels and outpaced inflation, last year increasing 23.33% from $106.07 to $130.81, , with service fees in some cases reaching 30% of face value.

And yet, attendance and sales have also hit record levels since the concert industry came back fully in 2022. Last year, promoters thanks to and others. Anyone who wants a piece seems poised to get one.

“If an artist can sell out Red Rocks and still have more demand (but not quite enough for a second night), it might make sense to add a second show at a smaller venue,” wrote Kathryn Griffin, events manager at Meow Wolf Denver, in an email. “Or a recent artist at Meow Wolf could have sold out a 2,000-cap room in Denver, but instead opted to play four or five smaller, more intimate shows around Colorado (including Boulder and Fort Collins) for roughly the same number of overall attendees.”

That translates to evenly spread options, as opposed to a consolidation of audiences with multi-night runs at the same large venue. Meow Wolf Denver’s own Perplexiplex joined the Denver scene in 2021, and has since gained momentum with a mix of touring and local bands, drag events, fashion shows and other performances. They’re pulling people in from across the metro area — but not as many as they might have a decade ago.

“What we tell agents is that there are a lot of people here who don’t live in Denver, or want to drive to Denver,” said David Weingarden, vice president of concerts and events at Boulder’s Z2 Entertainment, which books and operates the Boulder Theater and Fox Theatre. “Boulder and Fort Collins are so much more than just college towns now, with a year-round population of music fans.”

Loveland’s Blue FCU, for example, used to track a discrete, Northern Colorado metro area of 400,000 or so that it could draw from. Its latest data has seen that amount double, pulling people from Longmont, Windsor and Timnath. Loveland’s Ranch Complex is also set to host a brand new, 9,000-seat arena on the same site as Blue, Trafton said, which will provide even more flexibility in the size and schedule of Northern Colorado bookings. (Designs are still being finalized.)

But simply building a new venue does not ensure success. Bookings need to be attention-grabbing and competitive with similar-sized spaces. Neighborhood and city leaders need to agree it’s a benefit, as opposed to a noise, traffic and safety nuisance. Without those — or nearby restaurants, bars and other businesses that create a mini-entertainment ecosystem — venues can feel like an albatross instead of a jetpack.

The closure and impending demolition of the FirstBank Center in Broomfield, for example, is not likely to leave a hole in the music scene because there are other, more attractive venues waiting in line. The 6,500-capacity arena, which was built for $45 million and opened in 2006, hosted plenty of big acts over the years, including tour kickoffs for Tom Petty and The Killers, as well as massive EDM and jam-band stands.

But the FirstBank Center opened three years after Loveland’s same-sized Budweiser Events Center. Back then, shows were fewer and farther between, and despite its early success, FirstBank Center’s booking slipped post-pandemic. Contrast that with the iconic Red Rocks, which is hosting a record 200 or so concerts this year, nearly all of them expected to sell out.

It’s not unheard of for a big artist to play a high-priced show at Aspen’s Belly Up, for example, before hitting Denver and other Colorado markets. Some artists will play a show or two at Red Rocks as well as a “smaller” one at RiNo’s sliding-capacity Mission Ballroom.

But boutique plays, or unusual shows at venues such as Estes Park’s Stanley Hotel, are starting to rival high country folk-and-blues festivals as attractive stops for bands — and are all neatly packaged, thanks to AEG Presents’ dominance, which far outstrips national players such as Live Nation in the regional market.

“We could never get an A-level artist like Taylor Swift in our building. We’re just too small,” said Blue FCU’s Trafton. “But we can barely keep up with demand here. A lot of artists are realizing you can play three or four sold-out shows all within a three-hour drive of one another, and we all benefit from that.”

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Roth also knew that the ambitious, nationwide projects under his Notes Live umbrella — which at the moment have crested $1 billion in anticipated construction costs — could not click into place without a major corporate booking partner.

Only then could his $55 million Sunset Amphitheater��project thrive in a market like Colorado Springs, which usually plays second fiddle to the nationally ranked Denver concert scene, and serve fans along the Front Range’s ever-growing live music circuit.

“It was the hole in my business plan of ‘How do I put butts in seats?’ ” said Roth, whose upscale, 8,000-capacity Sunset amphitheater this week set a July 12 date for its official groundbreaking. “It was also a hole in (tour) routing for AEG Presents, and Colorado Springs is now at the point where it can stand as its own live-music market.”

New renderings shared with The Denver Post this week show a filled-in layout at Sunset, including a semi-circle wall enclosing tiers of seating, and elevated VIP suites that recall a baseball stadium as much as a concert venue. Next to it, the Roth Seafood & Chophouse and Hospitality Collection will be a luxury-focused, 45,000-square-foot development featuring Bourbon Brothers Smokehouse & Tavern and Boot Barn Hall, along with the anchoring Sunset amphitheater and Notes Bar.

The complex is part of the Polaris Pointe development along Spectrum Loop, south of the Powers Boulevard extension, Roth said.

“I’m an ambience and vibe guy, which is why I wanted to have views of the majestic Pikes Peak,” he said. “I was never going to build it in a boring cow pasture.”

When he first announced the $40 million project (now revised to $55 million overall) in April 2022, Roth said he hoped to open the Sunset amphitheater by sometime this year. Now the target date is June 2024 — although with major work already having been completed, it might be even earlier.

“We’ve already created the ‘bowl’ (excavation work and soil shaping), all the utilities are in, and we’re ready to start coming up out of the ground,” he said, noting that he plans to host 40 concerts per year at Sunset. “We don’t have the first act booked yet, but it should be the first half of June 2024.”

Finalizing the venue was tricky, given that it could potentially compete with other major Springs venues. Some in Colorado Springs might also quibble with the city’s designation as an entertainment desert — a provocative term Roth used last year — since the city also boasts multiple indie music venues (including the storied Black Sheep), the Pikes Peak Center (capacity 1,989) and the Broadmoor World Arena, which at 7,343 capacity can already host bands supposedly big enough for Sunset.

That’s not even including high-profile outdoor venues in the Denver metro area such as Red Rocks Amphitheatre (capacity 9,545), Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre (capacity 18,000) and Levitt Pavilion (20,000). It makes top-tier booking and promotion essential to drawing consistent music fans, Roth said. And since AEG Presents already books the Broadmoor and controls much of the Front Range market, it made sense to reach out to them early on.

“I really had three choices: Live Nation, AEG or Oak View Group,” he said. “It’s difficult to put something together as a (large-scale) venue builder without them.”

Now the Springs project — which includes the staggeringly priced, $20 million high-end seafood and steak restaurant — is helping Roth’s other Notes Live venues take shape, such as under-development concert halls and entertainment campuses in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Okla., and Houston.

Sunset will be the blueprint for the next year or so of development, helping the other projects “morph as they go,” Roth said. His Notes Live also has other planned venues in Georgia and Tennessee. The first of those — a 1,700-capacity indoor venue in Gainesville, Ga., that sits on an entire city block Roth purchased — will have its grand opening celebration on July 7 and 8. It includes the 14,500-square-foot Boot Barn Hall (named after the existing Colorado Springs venue Roth owns) and Bourbon Brothers Smokehouse.

“It’s a very collaborative process at this point,” said Roth. “The AEG partnership is 50-50, unlike some deals where they just lease the venue. We’ll win together, and we’ll lose together.”

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