The state’s newest district — covering a Front Range area spanning from Greeley down to the northern suburbs of Denver — has seen only two elections. The first went to a Democrat, the second to a Republican. And both victories hinged on very thin margins.

The Republican victor in 2024 was Gabe Evans, of Fort Lupton, who is hoping to turn his freshman term in Congress into at least two more years in office. His challenger, fresh off a resounding victory in the Democratic primary last Tuesday, is state Rep. Manny Rutinel of Commerce City.

And in the middle of it all are the political prognosticators and party operatives, desperate to decipher what voters’ choices this November in Colorado’s most competitive congressional race might say about future trendlines in the electorate at large.

“There’s no doubt this is a race that will attract national money,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes congressional races as U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report.

Cook lists the 8th District among .

While the typical campaign issues will likely be prominent in the race — immigration, healthcare and economic well-being among them — there are additional complications for the candidates to navigate this fall.

For Evans, 39, it’s President Donald Trump, a Republican whose . The president is particularly disliked in Colorado.

Cost of living continues to be a pressing issue, despite the fact the president campaigned on bringing down prices that spiked under his predecessor. And both Trump’s foreign policy — especially the war in Iran — and his immigration enforcement tactics have alienated voters across the political spectrum.

The more Democrats can link Evans to the president, the better for his opponent, said David Boian, a Democratic political strategist.

“Gabe Evans has been right there with Donald Trump — arm in arm,” he said. “That’s a huge liability for him.”

Rutinel, 31, can expect attempts to place him within the surging left corner of the Democratic Party, exemplified by the stunning primary victory Tuesday of democratic socialist Melat Kiros over 15-term U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in the congressional district that covers Denver.

There is no doubt, said former Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams, that campaign ads will highlight comments Kiros has recently made about 9/11, Israel’s legitimacy as a nation, and the deadly firebombing attack on Jews and others demonstrating in Boulder last year — an act she refused to call antisemitic.

Those statements, which drew rebukes from  and even some , could be used in an attempt to taint Rutinel’s campaign if he doesn’t sufficiently disavow Kiros. She’s one of a handful of far-left candidates who have toppled Democratic members of Congress in recent primaries.

“Her anti-semitism is palpable,” Wadhams said. “Everything she says will reflect on the Democrats statewide.”

Asked for Rutinel’s thoughts on Kiros, his campaign sent The Denver Post a statement from the candidate: “I believe that no terrorist attack is inevitable, whether that is 9/11 or the attack in Boulder,” Rutinel said. “Israel has a right to exist, and the Boulder attack was an antisemitic act of terrorism, and antisemitism has no place in this country.”

Challenges on the trail

Boian’s advice to Rutinel would be that he “keeps his distance from Kiros,” given that the political composition of the 8th Congressional District — which was drawn by an independent commission to be competitive — is a far cry from that of deep-blue Denver. The candidate, he said, needs to focus on the voters in the district who have grown tired of Trump and his administration’s policies.

“The key to winning this race is unaffiliated voters,” Boian said.

Unaffiliated voters in the 8th District outnumber both Republicans and Democrats combined — by a factor of more than 2-to-1, according to state election data.

Covey, with the Cook Political Report, thinks Trump might be a bigger problem for Evans than Kiros might be for Rutinel, namely because he is the president and has a far greater impact on voters’ lives.

“Trump is going to be a real anchor on Evans,” she said.

For his part, Evans has attempted to create some daylight between himself and the president. He has , which have an outsized impact on farmers and ranchers. He also joined GOP lawmakers last year in expressing concern to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about whether it was still prioritizing the deportation of criminals.

Whether that will be enough to allay concerns among voters in the 8th — Colorado’s most heavily Latino district, with roughly 40% of voters identifying that way — is yet to be seen. But nothing will go either candidate’s way without a big megaphone and the money to keep it sounding.

While Evans has the advantage in fundraising — with $3.5 million cash on hand as of June 10, nearly four times as much as his opponent — Rutinel’s success in attracting cash is notable, Covey said. It helped him fend off primary challengers, one thing Evans lacked this time around.

But it’s the outside money that could well have the most impact on the race. It factored big in the Democratic primary — with more than $8 million poured into the race either on behalf of or against Rutinel and his opponent, former state Rep. Shannon Bird. Rutinel defeated Bird by about 30 percentage points.

Already, the pro-Republican super PAC Congressional Leadership Fund has to the Denver media market for advertising in this fall’s election cycle. On the other side, the House Majority PAC plans in Denver market ad buys on behalf of Democratic House candidates this fall.

Because Rutinel is the newer face on the national stage, his challenge will be solidifying his image before others do it for him. He’s off to a rough start, Wadhams said, after on several issues on which he used to stand farther left.

In an interview with a five years ago, Rutinel called animal agriculture a “horrific, exploitive industry.” He doesn’t say that anymore. Rutinel also once opposed fracking, a position he said in a May primary debate he no longer held.

Agriculture and ranching, along with oil and gas development, are major pillars of the 8th District’s economy outside its urban areas.

“To attack the very nature of the 8th District — it goes beyond just adjusting his position,” Wadhams said. “He’s gone from being a vegan to loving beef. He’s a chameleon.”

Boian, the Democratic strategist, said voters aren’t going to focus on candidate positions that may have evolved over the years.

“I think where the race is going is strictly to people’s pocketbooks,” he said. “Can they get to the store and get food for their kids?”

Evans has his own background story “to clean up,” Boian said, referencing an published last summer into multiple generations of Evans’ family, in which the publication alleged that Evans had misrepresented his family’s immigration story.

Compelling personal stories

Ultimately, Wadhams said, both candidates have “very compelling” personal stories to tell.

Rutinel is the son of a single mother who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic. The candidate often talks about having to help her fill out applications for food assistance and Medicaid benefits when he was young.

Previously an economist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rutinel, who’s also an attorney, was appointed by a vacancy committee to the Colorado House in 2023 to represent a portion of Adams County and Commerce City. He was elected to his seat the following year.

Evans is the grandson of Mexican immigrants, and his grandfather became a U.S. citizen through his military service in World War II. He served a dozen years in the U.S. Army as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot, then nearly a decade as an Arvada police officer.

For Joe Petrocco, who helps run his family’s farm in Brighton and serves as president of the Colorado Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, his vote will go to Evans in November.

Petrocco, 55, likes the Republican’s support for efforts to keep farmworkers’ wages in check. Past increases in federally mandated wages for H-2A workers, who are foreign nationals working in agriculture, have made it impossible for farms like his to compete with countries like Mexico, where he says workers are paid “not $20 an hour but $20 a day.”

“He’s helping make us profitable again,” Petrocco said.

He also credits Evans for helping introduce the bipartisan last year. The bill seeks to reform the country’s asylum system and provide a path for workers who are in the country unlawfully to obtain legal status.

“He’s a Latino man and he respects his heritage,” Petrocco said.

Abby Hicks, a physical education teacher who lives in Mead, said Rutinel is the “real deal.” His rags-to-riches story appeals to her, and she appreciates his focus on bringing costs down — something he addressed as recently as Tuesday night at his election watch party in Commerce City.

Hicks, 44, said many of her students at Mead High School don’t see themselves represented by the older generations that still dominate politics in Colorado.

“He’s different from all the other politicians you meet,” she said of Rutinel. “He’s so eager to listen and learn — in today’s politics, we’re missing that.”

Next month, the city will bid goodbye to a parcel at the northwest corner of East Arapahoe Road and South Olathe Street that’s owned by Regis Jesuit High School. It will revert to Arapahoe County’s oversight in a rarely used legal process in Colorado known as .

Before year’s end, the largely vacant property is expected to be absorbed into Aurora through an annexation request from the high school, boosting the size of Colorado’s third-largest city by the same 18 acres and change.

It’s unusual for a city in Denver’s expanding suburbs to willingly give up territory, and the proposal initially landed with a thud for a Centennial city councilman who’d lose part of his district.

“I never expected to shrink my city,” Councilman Don Sheehan said. “My first reaction to the proposal included words not suitable for print.”

It’s an understandable reaction from an elected leader in one of Colorado’s newer municipalities. Centennial , and has been on a steady growth trajectory over the last quarter-century. The city, with a population of nearly 110,000, covers just over 30 square miles south of Aurora and east of Littleton.

When the details of the jurisdictional shift were sorted out, however, Sheehan’s concerns about becoming a diminished city were allayed.

“In the end, the positives outweigh the negatives for all concerned,” he said.

The Centennial City Council approved the disconnection on June 16. It goes into effect in mid-July.

For Regis Jesuit High School, which initiated the disconnection process two years ago, it came down to a desire to consolidate its campus on South Lewiston Way fully into Aurora, where it opened 36 years ago.

But the school’s history . Founded by Italian Jesuits in 1877 in Las Vegas, New Mexico, the school soon made its way to northwest Denver, where it was located on the campus of Regis University. Both entities formally separated in 1979, and a decade later, the high school moved south to Aurora.

Regis Jesuit, which enrolls around 1,600 students, bought the 18-acre parcel in 2017 with plans for it to host multipurpose artificial turf fields, a fieldhouse, a retreat center and a 175-space parking lot. Regis Jesuit built seven tennis courts on the land three years ago.

Diana Rael, the vice chair of the private Catholic school’s board of trustees, said having the southern portion of the campus in a different city from the front office just a few hundred feet away is a recipe for confusion and aggravation.

From who provides water (Aurora Water charges a premium to provide water outside its service area) to which city’s land-use codes apply to who responds to 911 calls at the school, it all adds up to a bifurcated mess, Rael said.

“Being in two different cities for emergency services is very confusing,” she said. “Essentially, all of our utilities go through Aurora. It’s a melting pot of codes out there.”

Municipal disconnection is “extraordinarily rare” in Colorado, said Andy Peters, a land use attorney with Otten Johnson Robinson Neff and Ragonetti.

“The possibility of disconnection is typically used as leverage in a conversation about what a landowner could get from a city,” he said. “People rarely go through with it.”

Rare doesn’t mean never. Centennial itself has approved disconnections twice since the city’s inception — once in 2007 and once in 2013.

And two years ago, Greenwood Village disconnected a 5.78-acre parcel stranded from the rest of the city by Interstate 225, according to . The land was transferred to the jurisdiction of Arapahoe County. At the heart of that move was the city’s stated inability to meet adequate emergency response times to the property, where a developer planned to build homes.

Neil Marciniak, the economic development director for Centennial, said the city made sure to come away with an agreement with Regis Jesuit that looked out for its interests, too.

“We understand Regis’ desire to consolidate their campus in one jurisdiction,” he said. “And we fully expect Regis Jesuit to continue being a good neighbor to residents of our city.”

The disconnection agreement comes with a list of conditions designed to ensure that the property’s future absorption into Aurora doesn’t turn into a nightmare for residents of Centennial’s Cherry Creek East and Lazy Hills Ranchettes neighborhoods to the east.

“We wanted to make a crystal clear agreement about what land uses are allowed and what land uses are prohibited,” Marciniak said.

Regis Jesuit can’t build a stadium, a mortuary, a group homes or after-hours clubs on the 18 acres. It is also barred from placing a marijuana dispensary or a sexually oriented business on the property, the agreement states.

“That’s probably not something a private Catholic high school would be looking to do,” Rael said wryly.

There are more practical land use limits in the agreement. The height limit of any building would be 38 feet along the eastern edge of the parcel, with an exception for a 60-foot-tall fieldhouse on the west side.

“If there are buildings, they need to push them as far to the west of the property as possible,” Marciniak said.

Regis Jesuit’s facilities must screen its athletic operations from the nearby neighborhood with trees and landscaping. Access to the parcel will be restricted from Arapahoe and Olathe, forcing traffic to enter the school’s property from Lewiston Way in Aurora.

Those concessions helped sell the disconnection to Sheehan, the Centennial councilman. Because the high school is a nonprofit entity and isn’t taxed, it sends little revenue to the city. Yet Centennial has had to provide public safety services to the property, Sheehan said.

“From a fiscal standpoint, it’s a net positive to the city to not be serving this property any longer,” he said.

While losing 18 acres may look bad on paper for a city, Centennial has, on net, gained far more land than it has lost. In fact, the city was on a bit of an annexation tear a decade or so ago, inviting criticism from Arapahoe County residents that Centennial was engaged in a land grab.

Similar protests a decade and a half earlier were what led to Centennial’s incorporation in the first place. In the 1990s, residents in unincorporated Arapahoe County grew tired of Greenwood Village’s attempts to annex adjoining land to bolster that city’s tax base.

After a legal challenge that went , voters living inside the proposed boundaries of Centennial .

Once the new disconnection from Centennial is complete, there are just a few details to work out, as Regis Jesuit prepares to file a formal annexation application with Aurora. It can’t come soon enough for the school.

“We’re ready to submit tomorrow,” Rael said.

Proponents of the resolution, which passed 6-4, called it a move that will put an end to what they described as editorializing on social media by the Aurora Police Department, including Chief Todd Chamberlain, that puts potentially innocent people in a bad light.

“If he posted the facts, I would absolutely vote no on this,” Councilwoman Amy Wiles said of the chief.

But other council members pushed back, saying the new rules would stifle the department from posting information about the arrest of potentially dangerous suspects living in Aurora neighborhoods.

“Getting information out to residents right away is transparency,” Councilwoman Francoise Bergan said.

Chamberlain expressed frustration with the council’s resolution in a statement he issued hours ahead of the evening meeting.

“The community deserves timely facts and direct communication from the professionals closest to these incidents and operational realities,” he wrote. “Restricting that communication risks creating confusion, speculation, and managed narratives rather than greater public understanding.”

The chief took a shot at protesters who have frequented Aurora City Council meetings over the past couple of years to demand police reform and seek justice for a Black man who was fatally shot by Aurora police nearly two years ago.

When information and perspectives “do not align with the views of certain groups, the answer is to silence those voices rather than allow open and honest public discussion,” Chamberlain wrote.

“And if I, as a public safety leader, cannot discuss or share concerns without reprisal from the local level, my department and I are unable to effectively be what Aurora needs — candid, forthright and open about how our work impacts the daily lives of those we serve,” he wrote.

The Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police also weighed in on the resolution Monday, saying it would “centralize and restrict law enforcement communications in ways that risk delay, confusion and reduced transparency — the very opposite of what communities deserve.”

But Auon’tai Anderson, a frequent attendee at Aurora City Council meetings and a critic of the city’s police department, said the department publicizing photos and names of suspects who haven’t been found guilty of a crime can gravely impact individuals’ futures.

“Jobs disappear, opportunities disappear, reputations disappear — but APD gets its press cycle,” he said.

Even City Attorney Pete Schulte told the council that the police should be able to post important information for the public safety — “we just don’t need the editorializing.”

Another resident at the meeting said the resolution is the “bare minimum” the city should do to place greater control over a police department that has been on a turbulent ride for the better part of a decade, with several fatal police shootings of unarmed Black men grabbing headlines.

Following the death of 23-year-old Elijah McClain, who in 2019 was stopped by police while walking home and injected by paramedics with a lethal dose of the sedative ketamine, the department entered into a consent decree with the Colorado Attorney General’s office.

The multiyear agreement calls for the police department to change its use-of-force, hiring and training policies. An outside monitor was assigned to send progress reports to the judge overseeing the decree to ensure the city is complying with it.

In the meantime, often boisterous crowds have regularly gathered at council meetings since Kilynn Lewis, an unarmed Black man, was shot and killed by an Aurora SWAT officer on May 23, 2024. The disruption in council chambers spawned a federal lawsuit from a protester alleging the city was limiting her ability to express herself.

The issue was resolved through a settlement between the parties. In March, the city agreed to provide up to one hour for the public to speak at the start of regularly scheduled meetings.

Monday’s resolution specifically states that the city’s communications department “must approve all social media posts and all media releases” before the police department releases them.

The department “shall not post booking photographs (‘mug shots’) and/or suspect names publicly until the subject of the arrest has pled guilty or been convicted of a crime,” unless the city manager OKs publication on a case-by-case basis.

“City Council understands that the police department wants to highlight their good work, which can be done without using names or booking photographs prior to case adjudication,” the resolution reads.

The new rules also forbid members of the police force from posting on official city social media sites about any “pending or enacted city, state or federal legislation” without city approval. They can post about such issues on their personal social media accounts, the new measure says.

Aurora’s city council flipped from a conservative majority to a progressive majority in the November election. Several of the winning candidates campaigned on continuing the city’s efforts at criminal justice reform.

For months, public safety unions in this small suburban Adams County city of 14,000 have clashed with the city manager’s office as Federal Heights’ elected leaders have been paralyzed in trying to find a solution to the dispute.

In January, the city’s police officers and firefighters in City Manager Jacquie Halburnt, claiming there’d been a breakdown in communication over requests for staffing and equipment upgrades for their departments. Three months later, the city sacked the police and fire chiefs, announcing the decision late on a Friday.

And now there have been mounting calls from the community for Halburnt, along with the city attorney, to be put on paid leave. But those have stalled after the City Council was unable to make up its mind on what to do over several meetings last month.

At one of those meetings, which was packed with residents taking to the microphone during a public comment period, Mayor Linda Montoya said she was to be mayor following an executive session that yielded no decision on the city manager’s fate.

All of the drama in this working-class community — wedged between Westminster and Thornton and less than 2 square miles in size — has longtime resident Jim Fenimore, 70, feeling despondent. And he’s not the only one.

“They’re frustrated, they’re completely disheartened about it — they have no confidence in the city,” he said of the dozens of fellow Federal Heights residents who have shown up at council meetings this year. “They’ve lost hope.”

Federal Heights Cmdr. Jason Schlenker, who until recently served as president of the police department’s union, said the trouble started last fall. An officer was injured when a squad car was rammed by a suspect who exchanged gunfire with police.

The late-September confrontation prompted the already-strained police department to request more support from the city manager’s office, Schlenker said. And crime reports in Federal Heights accelerated across several categories from 2024 to 2025, , with a nearly 21% jump in domestic violence cases and a whopping 82% leap in sexual assaults over that time.

“We were just asking for more resources and more officers,” Schlenker said, hoping to pump up the patrol officer headcount from 17 to 22. “She just ignored us.”

In January’s no-confidence vote, the unions for both the fire and police departments wrote in a statement that communication between first responders and the council “was strictly prohibited by the city manager.” Requests to boost staff or update safety equipment “were intentionally prolonged or simply never communicated to the City Council,” the joint statement said.

Attempts to communicate with the council or mayor about the requests, the statement read, were “met with the threat of retaliation.”

Manager disputes underfunding claims

Halburnt has been , working as the city’s top administrative official. She declined to grant an interview to The Denver Post for this story.

In a written response to emailed questions, she said she was “unaware of requested resources that haven’t been provided to the Police and Fire Departments.”

She cited in the police department’s budget recent funding to pay for four new police officers, at a cost of $560,000; the purchase of three new Chevy Tahoe police vehicles, for $300,000; and improved lighting and additional carports at the police building, also for $300,000.

On the fire side, Halburnt wrote that this year’s budget calls for a new fire marshal and two new fire trucks at a cost of more than $2.5 million total. The budget also sets aside $375,000 for a new ambulance, she said.

“The additional police and fire personnel were budgeted out of the city’s reserve fund,” Halburnt wrote. That will work for a few years, she added, but isn’t sustainable in the long run without “offsetting revenue.”

Overall, she wrote, “things are stable and we continue to operate and grow.”

“I, and the mayor and City Council, have always been supportive of the police and fire departments,” she wrote. “They play a vital role in the safety and well-being of the city, providing essential emergency response and protecting lives and property.”

Halburnt wouldn’t comment on why Police Chief Robert Grado and Fire Chief Marc Mahoney were let go early last month. Attempts last week to reach several members of the council, including the mayor, were unsuccessful.

Adams County District Attorney Brian Mason says he doesn’t see the stability in the city’s emergency services departments that Halburnt insists is there.

“I’m concerned about public safety in Federal Heights,” he said in an interview with The Post. “I’m concerned about stability in the police department in Federal Heights.”

Grado, who was chief for nearly 2 ½ years, showed “exceptional leadership,” Mason said, especially in the wake of a failure by the Federal Heights Police Department to investigate serious felony cases over a four-year period, including sexual assaults on children, shootings and suspicious deaths.

Mason’s office produced a 30-page report on the shortcomings at the police department in late 2023.

“He helped to turn that department around,” Mason said of Grado’s efforts over the last couple of years to address the backlog. “My concern now is that there’s going to be backtracking. I don’t understand why (Grado) is not there anymore.”

Former police chief files complaint over firing

Deputy Chief Karl Ballard was appointed as interim police chief following Grado’s departure, while Finance Director Tim Weitzman was tasked with overseeing operations at the Federal Heights Fire Department, according to an internal email obtained by The Post.

The former police chief told The Post that he filed a complaint letter over his termination, which he described as “unfair.”

“It has been devastating to my family financially,” Grado said of his dismissal. “I have had a lot of success in Federal Heights. It was a very troubled department when I arrived.”

Grado served for 12 years on the Regional Transportation District’s police force, five of those years as chief, before . Earlier, he was an officer with the Monument Police Department for 20 years.

Ken Murphy, who served on the Federal Heights council for nine years, said fortifying employment at the police department is critical to maintaining public safety in the city.

“The more presence of police you see, crime will go down,” he said. “If we had the right staffing and the right equipment, these guys could do their job.”

Murphy, who is married to the mayor, said he was on the council when Halburnt joined the city 14 years ago.

“Which was a big mistake,” he said of her hiring by the council.

Murphy, 67, speculated that much of the council was “afraid” of the city manager, explaining its unwillingness to place her on administrative leave. In the meantime, he said, he worries about what is happening to the civic soul of Federal Heights as the controversy drags on.

“From the outside looking in, it looks like a dictatorship,” he said. “No city should ever be ruled by one person.”

The business of Federal Heights will continue as usual on Tuesday, with the gaveling in of the next council meeting. , as of Friday, was a fiber-optic agreement, a sewer manhole lining project, and the appointment of a planning and zoning commissioner.

There was no mention of the city manager and her employment status.

The 3-2 vote by , in favor of the State Sunlight/Long well pad proposed by Crestone Peak Resources, came after about five hours of testimony and deliberation. The decision ends what had become one of the more contentious battles over energy extraction in Colorado.

Board Chair Jeff Robbins acknowledged that the application from Crestone had evoked a strong reaction from homeowners living nearby. But in the end, the company complied with rigorous state oil and gas regulations enshrined in a law known as Senate Bill 181, which was passed by state lawmakers seven years ago.

“At the end of the day, State Sunlight/Long achieves the balance we were told to look for,” Robbins said.

The two commissioners who voted no were Trisha Oeth and John Messner. The approvals process for the Sunlight/Long well pad encompassed seven hearings before the commission, stretching over several months.

Nearby homeowners rose up in opposition, claiming that the project would pose health hazards to those living nearby — in particular, to school-age children. They also worried about the drilling’s potential environmental impacts on the Aurora Reservoir, which is a water source for the 400,000 residents of Colorado’s third-largest city.

“I cannot believe that the state came down on the side of the industry yet again,” Randy Willard, the president of opposition group , said in an interview minutes after the vote came down Tuesday afternoon. “The group as a whole is severely disappointed.”

The group had pushed back on the proposed project using the 2019 oil and gas reform law as a guide, Willard said.

The 2019 law prioritized public health, safety and the environment when regulators consider oil and gas development — a profound change from the industry-focused approach Colorado had taken for decades.

“We’ve done everything we feel is possible under 181, only to find the industry comes out on top yet again,” Willard said. “I don’t know what else we’re supposed to do.”

In December, the state commission voted 4-1 to put a stay on the project, ordering Crestone to return with a list of alternative sites from which it could drill.

Crestone, a subsidiary of Denver-based SM Energy Company, came back this month with a slimmed-down proposal, knocking down the number of wells at Sunlight/Long from 32 to 24.

The company insisted that after examining 11 other potential sites, most of which were farther away from homes, its preferred site near Aurora’s Southshore neighborhood and the reservoir remained the best place to locate its wells.

Civitas Resources was Crestone’s parent company until late January, .

Jamie Jost, an attorney for Crestone, spoke to the commission during an online hearing Tuesday that, at one point, was attended by nearly 1,000 people. She called the site the “most vetted, most analyzed” location for the pad.

The company said the site would have the least impact on wildlife and waterways across 26,500-acre Lowry Ranch, a stretch of rolling prairie owned by the Colorado State Land Board where Crestone has plans to drill just over 100 wells in total — down from 166 just a couple of years ago.

Dan Harrington, SM Energy’s asset development manager, told the commission that reducing the number of wells at Sunlight/Long would curtail the time needed for drilling and fracking.

“This will reduce operational duration by about 25%,” he testified.

And the scaled-back operation will emit fewer emissions, including of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds and methane, the company in favor of its preferred site.

Mike Foote, a former Democratic state lawmaker who represents the neighbor opposition group as its lawyer, testified that Crestone didn’t conduct an honest comparison of alternative sites.

“It found things wrong with everyone else’s suggested sites instead of coming up with something that worked,” he said.

But Nathan Bennett, SM Energy’s director of permitting and compliance, said Crestone looked at other potential locations with an open mind. The company, however, said the alternate sites had problems, with questions raised about whether Xcel Energy could provide electricity to some of them to power electric drilling equipment.

Other locations, the company said, would have required much longer truck trips and called for running pipe over more ecologically sensitive areas.

Commissioner Mike Cross said Crestone’s proposed site for Sunlight/Long was well outside the state’s required 2,000-foot distance buffer from homes. He said the company’s commitment to use quieter and cleaner electric equipment on site was a positive aspect of the project.

“The best practices that we’ve seen from operators in the state, we’ve seen in this application,” he said. “It does meet our rules.”

But Willard, who has been working to defeat the application for nearly two years, said neighbors were already complaining of noise from other Crestone drilling operations on Lowry Ranch. In a presentation that the opposition group ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, the group claimed that more than 40 noise complaints were filed with the agency last month alone.

That, Willard said, will only increase once drilling starts at Sunlight/Long in the coming months.

After all that work, the Lakewood City Council finished the job in December, passing final changes to the city’s land-use blueprint designed to pave the way for the construction of more diverse and dense housing, like triplexes and quadplexes, anywhere in Colorado’s fifth-largest city.

“It was very condensed, very intense in terms of the time we put into it,” Lakewood Mayor Wendi Strom said.

Fast-forward to the April 7 special election brought to a ballot by residents unhappy with the changes. When the initial results popped up on the city’s website at 8 p.m. — showing — Strom was dumbfounded.

“In that first 10 seconds when you get those results, it was a pretty good kick in the gut,” she said.

How Lakewood might proceed from here is anything but clear. The special election result was just the latest twist in a yearslong battle over how to make housing more affordable for Coloradans, especially those in low-income and working-class families who have largely been priced out of the market.

The election also highlighted a battle that has played out in other Colorado communities in recent years. In , Steamboat Springs and Littleton, among other places, attempts by elected leaders to spur housing price relief through zoning changes or affordable housing initiatives have run headlong into residents’ desire to keep their communities as they are.

Lakewood’s mayor is still committed to changing the city’s zoning code, but she acknowledged that she and her colleagues may need to take a different approach.

“The code is so complex — it’s hard to expect a voter to understand it to that degree,” Strom said.

Karen Gordey headed up the Lakewood Citizens Alliance, one of several issue committees that formed last year to collect signatures for a citizen ballot initiative to repeal the city’s zoning updates. The 15-year Lakewood resident said the city tried to do too much all at once, while failing to appreciate how important the look and feel of a neighborhood is to those who live there.

“The hope is that this election sent a strong message to the council — to listen to the citizens and not make radical zoning changes,” Gordey said. “This went way too far.”

State Rep. Rebekah Stewart, a former Lakewood councilwoman, worked on earlier iterations of the code changes that voters spurned. She said the city’s leaders crafted ambitious ordinances that provided the tools and incentives to alleviate Lakewood’s housing shortage.

The state had an estimated shortfall of 106,000 homes and apartments in 2023, the most recent year available, and needed to build at least 34,100 housing units per year, not counting vacation homes, over the next 10 years to keep up with slower population growth, according to .

Despite a recent slowdown in metro Denver home prices that have surged upward for a decade or more, the median sale price of a single-family home came in at $630,000 in February — up 2.4% from January’s $615,000.

Price relief won’t come, Stewart said, if everything simply stays as it is.

“This has been years and years of work and community stakeholding that was undone in a single night,” she said of the Lakewood council’s redrafting process during the last half of 2025. “We have a problem, and the election didn’t solve that.”

Complying with state housing law

Voters’ decision earlier this month may also have raised another problem: Lakewood’s compliance with state laws passed in 2024 and last year that aim to increase and diversify housing stock across the state.

The bills, passed by legislative Democrats, broadly require cities — especially those on the Front Range — to implement various zoning changes and undertake detailed planning to ease and incentivize housing development. The measures push accessory dwelling units, the packing of more residential units around transit stops and a reduction in the square footage that must be devoted to parking.

“I do believe Lakewood is now out of compliance with state laws, which is really unfortunate,” Stewart said.

But Strom isn’t convinced that her city is crosswise with state law. The mayor is confident the city can tweak its code less comprehensively to ensure it is complying with the state’s housing mandates.

“There may be instances where we can do little one-offs (to come into compliance),” Strom said.

A shows 18 cities out of compliance with one or more of the housing laws passed over the last two years. Lakewood is not one of them, but the list is current as of April 1, which preceded Lakewood’s special election.

Cities and counties that don’t comply with the laws run the risk of losing out on tens of millions of dollars in state grant funding, Gov. Jared Polis’ office has said.

Several metro Denver cities sued the state last year over the laws, claiming that the mandates encroach on their home-rule authority to manage land-use policies as they see fit. Several of those plaintiff communities, including Aurora, Westminster, Lafayette and Centennial, appear on the state’s list as being out of compliance with the state statutes.

The Lafayette City Council is in the homestretch of , an effort that began last year. A survey conducted by the city showed mixed support for the proposed changes, with about 48% of respondents backing “missing middle” housing in a limited way, particularly if it’s paired with strong design standards to maintain neighborhood character, according to .

Missing middle refers to housing of slightly higher density, including duplexes, triplexes and attached townhomes, that might fit near single-family homes without being as imposing as large apartment buildings.

The Denver Post requested an interview with the governor, or an adviser on housing policy, to ascertain what effect the special election results could have on Lakewood’s standing. Polis’ office provided a statement instead.

“The governor is committed to working with Lakewood and other local governments to reduce or eliminate government imposed barriers and red tape that block or increase the cost of housing and we are assessing the impacts of this election,” said Eric Maruyama, a spokesman for the governor.

Max Nardo, a housing and smart growth senior associate with the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said it wasn’t clear what price communities might pay if they don’t comply with state housing laws. Colorado, he said, didn’t really start addressing housing and zoning issues at the state level until about three years ago. And many of the measures passed by the legislature, he said, are still being rolled out.

The problem is bigger than mere compliance with state laws, Nardo said. Lakewood had gone beyond what the state required, he said.

“Lakewood was doing more — its reforms included smaller homes on smaller lots throughout the city,” Nardo said. “It followed a two-year process and had favorable polling in the community. What more can you ask for?”

His organization put out a news release two days after Lakewood’s special election, calling it a “low-turnout” election that didn’t accurately reflect the will of the city of 156,000 people. The release noted that just over 22,000 voters overturned the zoning changes, “roughly 20% of all registered voters in the city.”

“Research consistently shows that the residents most likely to participate in local zoning debates and special elections tend to be older, wealthier homeowners who bought into their communities years ago at much lower prices, and have more time and capacity to engage in public processes than renters, essential workers, or young families,” the organization said in its release.

Housing policy is necessarily a statewide issue because the housing market is not confined to any one community, Nardo said.

“This outcome underscores that this is a collective action,” he said. “A city cannot solve it by acting alone.”

‘Checks and balances’

Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, called the notion of local governments in Colorado needing to defer to state lawmakers on the subject of housing policy “hogwash.”

Cities and towns are best equipped to know what is needed inside their borders, he said, not part-time legislators who convene for less than five months a year in Denver. The housing laws that the General Assembly passed over the last couple of years created pressure and artificially accelerated a process that takes time and public input, Bommer said.

“If folks at the state Capitol hadn’t pushed this forward with mandates, the municipalities could take the time to work with their citizens and come up with a long-term vision,” he said.

It didn’t surprise him that residents would revolt when they didn’t feel their elected representatives were taking the right approach to overhauling zoning codes in a way that could potentially impact their neighborhoods.

“This clearly shows that residents are the ultimate form of local control. And ultimately, they said the vision that was laid out (by the City Council) was one that they aren’t on board with,” Bommer said. “The last time I checked, that was called participatory democracy — it isn’t always pretty.”

Godrey, who led the charge to repeal Lakewood’s zoning rewrite, said the city could find other ways to address the housing shortage without opening up the city’s many single-family neighborhoods to “blanket upzoning.” Converting vacant office space to residential uses is one approach, she said.

“This election was about having checks and balances — and you got to hear the voice of the people,” she said.

Peter LiFari, the executive director of Maiker Housing Partners, says it’s the powerful emotional element that comes with homeownership that makes the issue difficult to solve locally. Maiker is the housing authority in Adams County.

“Homeowners are highly motivated to protect their most precious asset,” he said. “There are some things that we can’t easily make a decision about at the local level because they’re so visceral.”

Despite the council’s loss at the ballot box this month, LiFari said Lakewood’s attempt to address its housing challenges was far from over. Crafting and refining housing policy takes years, if not decades, he said.

But without that thoughtful work, he said, Colorado is never going to fix its affordable housing crisis.

“I would tell Lakewood to go at it again — it takes a couple of bites at the apple for people to get comfortable with this,” LiFari said.

Strom, the mayor, said the issue may go quiet for a little while as she and her colleagues lick their wounds from what was a bruising electoral battle. But the need to adjust the city’s zoning code to account for Lakewood’s evolving housing situation is not going to disappear.

“This is not over — we have things in the code that need to be updated,” she said.

It’s unclear whether a vote to place City Manager Jacquie Halburnt and City Attorney Bill Hayashi would have passed, but while a motion was being read, Hayashi said the motion was inappropriate because the agenda listed a discussion item and not an action item.

Councilors spent more than 90 minutes in executive session Wednesday during a special meeting to discuss the employment status of Halburnt and Hayashi.

The meeting took place less than two weeks after Police Chief Robert Grado and Fire Chief Marc Mahoney were abruptly fired on April 3. Staff was informed of the firing in an email sent out at 6:40 p.m. on a Friday night.

Read more at .

An ongoing debate over how much the tipped minimum wage should rise, if at all, is highlighting a stark divide on the Boulder City Council, and between labor advocates and restaurants.

The tipped minimum wage allows for tipped employees, such as restaurant servers and bartenders, to be paid below the city’s standard minimum wage with the understanding that their tips will make up that difference. If a worker’s income is still short, then employers make up the difference. Boulder’s hourly tipped minimum wage is $13.80 and is on pace to rise next year to $15.15. The city’s minimum wage will rise by $1.35 to $18.17. In 2028, as scheduled, the tipped minimum wage will rise by a slightly higher percentage than the minimum wage, which will grow with inflation.

The core question the council is exploring is whether the tipped wage should rise as scheduled or if it should slow, meaning that the offset between the tipped minimum wage and the standard minimum wage grow larger.

Supporters for increasing the tipped wage offset argue it will offer vital relief for an industry that has struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic began and still faces tight margins in the best of times.

But workers and labor activists maintain that increasing the tipped wage offset will only harm people scraping by as economic challenges worsen and it becomes more expensive to live in Boulder.

“Workers leaving the city matters just like restaurants leaving matter,” Councilmember Nicole Speer said during the April 2 council meeting, “and I would argue that having more workers in the city helps our restaurants because then we have more people there.”

During the April 2 meeting, the council asked staff to explore four options to address the tipped wage — keep the current tip offset at $3.02; have the tipped minimum wage match inflation growth beginning in 2028; have the tipped minimum wage match inflation growth beginning in 2029; or have the tip offset be 20% of the city’s minimum wage, up from the current mark of 18%.

The council is expected to hold a public hearing on the issue on June 18, although Speer has campaigned for the hearing to be pushed back to August or September so that college students can attend.

While Scott Wasserman, a contract consultant for the restaurant advocacy group Eat Denver, doesn’t work with Boulder restaurants, he has seen the debate over the tipped wage and tip offset play out in the state capital.

“The most frequent talking point that I hear from restaurant owners and operators is that if you want a city full of chain restaurants and just luxury restaurants, then by all means continue down the road with this policy,” Wasserman said.

Denver’s tipped minimum wage was $8.08 in 2019 and has increased by about 139% to $19.29 this year, according to data from a Denver restaurant report released earlier this year.

Industry advocates say this has put a preventable strain on restaurants and has forced closures, layoffs and a reduction in operating and staff hours.

Some restaurant owners are also hesitant to speak out about the issue out of fear of being review-bombed online — a practice in which users leave a deluge of negative reviews, which can endanger a business’ reputation — or harassed, Wasserman said.

Wasserman said Denver offers a cautionary tale.

“The good news for Boulder is that they are not as far along in their minimum wage schedule as Denver is,” he said.

However, labor activists staunchly believe that increasing the tipped minimum wage and not increasing the tip offset is vital to making Boulder more livable for the working class.

During the open comment section on April 2, Autumn Archer, an area labor advocate, and Rachel Rose Isaacson, a 2025 Boulder City Council candidate and barista, both pushed back on a claim from an area restaurant report that claimed restaurant workers make around $40 per hour.

“This figure omits entirely two crucial details impacting the earnings of tipped workers across the U.S.,” Archer said. “First, that tips are inconsistent, varying night to night, week to week, season by season, and secondly the pervasive issue of wage theft within the industry, and the lack of clear oversight ensuring that tipped-wage earners do not have their tipped earnings stolen or minimum wage credit withheld during periods of time which the tipped income falls below the threshold of being below the hourly minimum wage.”

A line in the sand?

Council straw polls on the options drew clear lines on the council, which was mostly unified last year and welcomed only one new member — Rob Kaplan — after the 2025 election. Each council member indicated their support for the options presented to them.

Speer, Taishya Adams, Mayor Aaron Brockett, Tina Marquis and Ryan Schuchard showed support for staff to keep the status quo.

For the tip offset mirroring inflation, six council members showed support in Brockett, Marquis, Matt Benjamin, Rob Kaplan, Mark Wallach and Mayor Pro Tem Tara Winer. That same group, sans Brockett, supported freezing the tipped minimum wage and increasing the tip offset to 20%.

“I think that if we give our restaurants a little bit of breathing room, they can actually put more money into the restaurants, creating more vibrant places, potentially hiring more workers, having more hours,” Kaplan said. “My fear is that if we don’t do anything and keep the status quo, those restaurants are just going to see declining revenue.”

The special election vote strikes a blow against those who have been pushing for more density in the state’s fifth-largest city in the hopes of increasing housing supply and lowering home prices.

The four measures passed by nearly 2-to-1 ratios, with more than 15,000 votes in favor of repealing each ordinance and approximately 8,700 votes to keep them, according to

Tuesday’s special election was set in January after a group of citizens gathered enough signatures to get the measures on the ballot as part of an attempt to reverse the city’s zoning changes. Cathy Kentner, who headed the anti-rezoning committee Lakewood For All, said she was “very happy” with Tuesday’s result.

“It’s truly a win for the people over big-money special interests,” she said, noting that her side was far outspent by those pushing for the zoning changes. “I think the voters are saying they expect more from their (city) councilors. They voted for these councilors, and they expect them to represent them. And this zoning change is not representing your constituents.”

Kentner said this was the second citizen initiative put on the ballot in Lakewood in the past decade, a sign the city needs to do a better job talking to its 156,000 residents before enacting big changes to land-use policy.

“To move forward with zoning, they need to talk to the people whose property rights they’re changing,” she said.

Sophia Mayott-Guerrero, a former Lakewood City Council member who serves as campaign manager for Make Lakewood Livable, conceded that the rezoning effort had failed Tuesday.

But she said the special election was a “low-information, low-turnout” election that was marked by “fear-mongering” on the other side.

“I understand if what you believe is that you will lose your home, that you would vote this way,” Mayott-Guerrero said. “But we have a system of housing and zoning that needs to be updated. It’s based on things from 50 years ago, and with this defeat tonight, we will continue to have a housing affordability crisis.”

The City Council passed four ordinances in 2025 that together encourage the construction of more varied housing types, and by extension, greater density — with the ultimate aim of lowering home prices in a notoriously expensive metro housing market.

Despite a recent slowdown in metro-Denver home prices that have galloped inexorably upward for a decade or more, the median sales price of a single-family home came in at $630,000 in February — up 2.4% from January’s $615,000.

The median sales price, however, remains 2.2% below where it was a year earlier.

The changes the City Council made last year allow diverse housing types — duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes and townhomes — anywhere in the city. They also limit new home sizes to 5,000 square feet and encourage the conversion of vacant or underused commercial buildings to housing.

The new rules went into effect Jan. 1.

Opponents of the rezoning effort said the changes would endanger the character of established neighborhoods while not actually helping reduce home prices. In a news release issued this year, the opposition called Lakewood’s rezoning efforts “a blueprint for crammed, profit-driven development, bulldozed trees and ignored infrastructure.”

Those backing the city’s rezoning effort countered that without policies designed to diversify Lakewood’s housing inventory, working-class families representing teachers, firefighters and health care workers will never be able to afford a home in the city.

Mayott-Guerrero told The Denver Post last month that “the idea that we can keep structuring our housing in the same way and get a different result doesn’t make sense to me.”

The battle over affordable housing runs deep in Colorado, with the state mandating higher density in recent years and, in turn, being sued by cities that claim the legislation treads on their home-rule authority. Last fall, Littleton voters passed a measure that better protects single-family-home neighborhoods from multifamily housing projects.

The campaign to retain Lakewood’s rezoning regulations has outraised the opposition by a ratio of nearly 6-to-1 — $269,000 to $46,000, according to on March 31.

The issue committee Make Lakewood Livable — which supports keeping Lakewood’s rezoning ordinances — has pulled down big-dollar contributions from developers, including $10,000 from Cardel Homes and $50,000 from Boulder-based Conscience Bay.

Its top donor is the Action Now Initiative. The Houston-based nonprofit advocacy organization, which is a part of the national philanthropy Arnold Ventures, gave Make Lakewood Livable $75,000.

Arnold Ventures was launched by John Arnold, a former Enron executive and hedge fund manager who previously spent in support of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s election and a 2024 Denver affordable housing sales tax proposal that was rejected narrowly by voters.

The top contribution on the side in favor of repealing Lakewood’s rezoning, which was supported by three issue committees, is $2,500.

The city’s decision comes as Front Range rail officials move toward placing a measure on the November ballot that would fund the Fort Collins-to-Pueblo intercity train system. The new line could feature as many as 10 round-trip journeys a day, and Littleton is among cities planning for the potential development it could spur near stations.

But first, Littleton had to deal with practical considerations in determining where to put the first stop south of Denver’s Union Station. The cost difference between the two potential station locations, as described by Deputy City Manager Kathleen Osher at a , constituted a “wild span.”

By the numbers, engineering and construction costs for a new train station near West Mineral Avenue, east of Santa Fe Drive, were projected to run less than $15 million. To design and build a new station in downtown Littleton could cost anywhere from $100 million to as much as $1 billion, according to the two locations.

The city attributes the explosive downtown price tag to the significant work that would be required to widen the rail corridor to accommodate a platform and passing tracks, including land acquisition and the reconstruction of several bridges.

That stark differential was enough to convince the council last week that Mineral Station, which is a few miles south of downtown Littleton and serves as the final stop on the Regional Transportation District’s southwest light rail line, is the best site for a new passenger rail platform.

plans to run its trains on nearby freight tracks under a sharing agreement with the railroads that own them.

“Downtown would have been cool — but pricey,” Councilman Joel Zink said March 17.

Littleton’s decision further solidifies the necessary infrastructure for a train line that is expected to begin full service in 2031, featuring a dozen stations. Other include Loveland, Longmont, Boulder, Westminster, Denver and Colorado Springs.

The only station still in question lies one stop south of Littleton in Douglas County.

Front Range rail district general manager Sal Pace said that will likely be settled this week, when the district’s board meets to decide between a proposed site near Monument and one farther north near Sterling Ranch.

Pace told The Denver Post in an interview that he will recommend the Sterling Ranch site to the board. Located where Titan Road meets U.S. 85, it’s the best place for Douglas County’s rail stop, he said.

Economic driver for Littleton

For Littleton Mayor Kyle Schlachter, the potential for a rail station to inject economic life into his city is huge. A consultant’s report that was discussed in depth during last week’s council meeting projected a potential $750 million benefit to Littleton’s economy over the next 30 years from a station at Mineral.

More specifically, Matrix Design Group and ArLand Land Use Economics projected that a Front Range rail station at Mineral would spur $325 million in new development investment in multifamily housing, retail and office space, while generating 1,620 jobs over 30 years.

“This is going to be a transformative project for not just Littleton, but for the whole Front Range,” Schlachter said.

But first, there is the matter of getting a measure on the ballot this fall. Pace said the district is envisioning asking voters living in the 13-county district for a 0.4% to 0.5% sales tax to fund the system.

“We’re operating as though we’re going to be ready (for the November election),” he said, noting that ballot language would have to be filed with state election officials by July.

Earlier this month, the district launched a contest for the public to choose a moniker for the future passenger train.

Front Range rail officials are also awaiting a decision from RTD’s board about whether the transit agency will help pay for a “starter service” along the northern Front Range, including a train linking Denver and Boulder. It would begin operating by 2029, before the full service begins a couple years later.

RTD’s pending vote comes at a particularly challenging time for the agency. Just last week, managers told the board of directors that the agency needed to address a $215 million deficit by 2027 — or risk reducing or eliminating bus and train service across its 2,345-square-mile service area.

A budget of $885 million has been set for the starter service. RTD’s portion of that has not been determined.

Despite the uncertainty, RTD Director and board Chair Patrick O’Keefe said a new passenger rail platform in Littleton would be an “economic driver” for the city of 45,000. O’Keefe represents the district that would encompass the new rail station.

“I’m very hopeful that there will be another viable asset in that part of the metro area to move people around,” he said.

The details for track sharing with BNSF Railway have been “heavily negotiated,” Pace said, though final design plans are still pending.

“We fully expect the Class 1 railroads to be willing partners with us,” he said.

Both downtown Littleton and Mineral Station sit next to the BNSF right of way and, as such, have been candidates for the Front Range rail stop since the district was formed five years ago. The city’s downtown area is well known, with pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares lined with handsome brick buildings, specialty shops and restaurants.

But downtown is far more constrained as the site of a rail station. The consultants’ analysis estimated that creating the room for a platform could require the purchase of more than $57 million worth of adjoining property, with potential impacts to the Colorado Center for the Blind, a nearby apartment building and the Alamo Avenue bridge.

“With Mineral, it is a little more of a straightforward station,” said Kenna Davis, a senior transportation planner for the city.

Compared to downtown Littleton, the Mineral site has more than six times as much space for the station and parking. And the zoning is more generous at Mineral, allowing for buildings as high as six stories, versus downtown’s four-story height limit.

The area around the Mineral light rail station has been filling in with housing and retail for more than 20 years. The Aspen Grove shopping center is situated just to the north of the station and is rising just to the south.

Less than a mile away, work crews are assembling , a large residential and commercial development that will feature a long-awaited Costco that’s set to open this summer. And last year, Littleton embarked on a project to make major improvements to the intersection of Santa Fe and Mineral Avenue — which sees 90,000 vehicles per day on average — with a that should reduce congestion.

The work is expected to wrap up in 2027.

“I think the big thing with Mineral is that there’s a lot of opportunity,” Davis said.

Questions remain

Schlachter, the mayor, still has questions about how standing up a station at Mineral will roll out.

“How much is the city going to be involved?” he asked. “How much investment does the city have to make, versus the (passenger rail) district?”

While firm numbers haven’t been announced, Pace said there will be a “share-back,” amounting to tens of millions of dollars shared with municipalities from revenues generated by the proposed sales tax. He estimated Littleton could see as much as $50 million in share-back money over a quarter-century.

“We’ll be sending money back to the communities with stations,” he said. “The stations aren’t just a train station but an anchor for development and a transportation hub.”

With the anticipated hoopla over the possibility of an intercity train station at Mineral, Littleton’s mayor doesn’t want the city’s downtown being overlooked. The city just started its , an effort to beautify the shopping district with new lighting, new street designs, enhanced bike connections and newly planted trees.

The overhaul is expected to be completed in 2028.

“We’re not just going to forget about downtown,” Schlachter said.