But when legalized sports betting debuted in Colorado in 2020, another tradition took hold at those Lot W tailgates: sports gambling. Now, when the family assembles before the home games, they discuss parlays and point spreads almost as much as they talk about Bo Nix and Sean Payton.

On a warm January day, while partying outside their late-model Winnebago painted with blue-and-orange stripes, they figured out the wagers they planned to put on the Broncos’ final regular-season game, against the , and other NFL matchups.

They weren’t alone. Sports betting and fantasy football dominated conversations throughout the parking lots as tailgaters speculated how much they might win.

The gameday bets — putting a little money on the line — are all part of the fun of football Sundays, said Joe Canales, a family friend who joined the tailgate.

“We all get excited when somebody wins,” he said.

Legalized sports betting is changing the face of sports and fandom in Colorado as people wager billions annually on games and on the athletes who play them. In the six years since voters approved Proposition DD, the state’s gamblers have wagered more than $30.6 billion on sports, averaging $425 million a month.

For years, sports betting was taboo within the professional leagues as commissioners and team owners kept gambling at arm’s length for fear of scandal. Now, leagues and teams promote their partnerships with gambling companies. Fans watching games on TV are inundated with sports-betting ads, and those in the stands can see gambling companies’ names painted on courts and fields.

Bettors often care more about individual athletes’ performances than about their hometown teams as they wager on how many three-point shots a basketball player will make or how many touchdowns a quarterback might throw, multiple people told The Denver Post. Athletes feel the pressure, whether it’s because they receive angry messages on social media from people who lose money or from gamblers seeking an edge from inside information.

Legalized gambling is also threatening the integrity of sports, with fans fearing athletes, coaches and referees may alter calls or plays to influence the outcomes of bets. Just before the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament kicked off, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, that found a majority of Americans — almost 60% — believe sports betting affects the integrity of college basketball.

“It����ap ruining the relationship between a player and their sport, and it����ap ruining the relationship between fandom and the athletes,” said Montee Ball, a former Broncos running back who leads the , which focuses on athletes’ mental health.

All of that is forcing coaches and administrators to incorporate gambling and mental health awareness into athletes’ training, with education now starting as early as high school for athletes in Colorado.

In the past six years, sports betting scandals have rocked professional and college leagues, ensnaring Colorado athletes such as hometown basketball legend Chauncey Billups, who was implicated last fall as an unnamed co-conspirator in a rigged NBA betting scheme.

This story, which examines how gambling is changing sports, is the third in The Post’s series about legalized sports betting’s impact on Colorado. The first story looked at an alarming rise in gambling addiction, while the second installment covered how sports wagering’s tax revenue benefits water projects in Colorado.

Sports betting has existed in America as long as athletes have laced up their high-top sneakers. In the past, gamblers sought bookies in secret to place bets, collect winnings and pay debts. Gamblers turned to offshore sportsbooks once the internet became accessible.

Now, sports fans place bets from their phones, often in the middle of games, thanks to a that overturned the , allowing states to set their own laws regulating sports betting. Colorado acted quickly, putting the question to a ballot referendum in November 2019; voters allowed sportsbooks to open for business in May 2020.

And, almost as quickly, Denver’s professional sports teams announced business deals with gambling companies.

An evolving relationship

Just a little more than a decade ago, the was so antagonistic toward sports gambling that the league’s commissioner threatened to suspend Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo over his plans to attend that was being organized by a company he owned.

The NFL prohibited players from participating in any event sponsored by a gambling-related company, and the league so narrowly defined gambling that fantasy football was included, even though those games pit people against each other rather than the house, which keeps the profits.

Players are still not allowed to bet on the NFL, play daily fantasy games or visit sportsbooks during football season. But the league and team owners have embraced sports betting.

Denver’s major sports teams are reluctant to talk about those new business relationships, with every professional team as well as the University of Colorado Boulder and its football coach Deion Sanders declining The Post’s interview requests.

The Broncos and the Colorado Rockies sent prepared statements via email, declaring that they follow the rules while protecting their players and the games’ integrity.

“In compliance with the NFL’s gambling policy, all members of our organization undergo comprehensive training on the subject,” the statement from Broncos spokesman Patrick Smyth said. “For players, this includes mandatory in-person education as well as in-season communication and other resources from the team and league.”

The Broncos inked their first business deal with sports-betting app in June 2020 — one month after Colorado’s sportsbooks opened for business.  The team also partnered that summer with , which opened a now-shuttered luxury lounge inside the stadium, and . Today, BetMGM is the team’s lone sports-betting partner.

The Colorado Rockies partner with Denver-based , allowing the company to have a sign on the outfield wall.

also partners with bet365 as a sponsor for the and . That , which allows bet365’s logo to be placed under the Avalanche’s ice and on the Nuggets’ baseline, is in place through the 2028-2029 season.

Courtney Brunious, an assistant professor at the , said he was not surprised Denver’s teams did not want to talk about their business relationships with gambling companies.

“There’s still a certain stigma attached to it,” said Brunious, who teaches sports business. “It’s still — I don’t want to say an uneasy relationship — but it’s an ongoing and evolving partnership. It’s not necessarily something they want to put a spotlight on.”

The gambling companies are eager to associate with professional sports because it puts their names in front of enthusiastic fans, Brunious said. The teams benefit from sports gambling because people who bet money on games are more likely to watch them on television, boosting coveted audience numbers.

The sure thing, Brunious said, is that those relationships will not dissolve. There’s too much money at stake.

“It’s not going away,” he said. “It����ap going to require adjustments to make sure all parties are protected as much as possible.”

The sports teams and betting companies are entwined with each other’s success.

Every decision a team makes is analyzed by gamblers and can move a betting line up or down, changing the fortunes of those who wager and those who make money off of it.

When the Los Angeles Rams on June 1 traded for reigning defensive player of the year Myles Garrett, that team became Las Vegas oddsmakers’ favorite to win the next Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the odds for Garrett’s former team, the Cleveland Browns, dropped to 200-to-1 from 115-to-1, according to a news release from Circa Sports.

Peter Jackson, the chief executive officer of , FanDuel’s parent company, explained in a February how “player narratives” impact his company’s revenue. When the NFL’s most popular players are not in the playoffs, the fans bet less money, he said.

“There was one player we had on our books over the course of the year that had more money bet on him in the course of the season than the Pats did,” Jackson said, without naming the player. “This player stuff is super important, and when we don’t have those key players making the playoffs or the Super Bowl, it really does impact player engagement and betting volumes.”

Pressure and harassment

Players are well aware that fans’ interest in their performance is more intense when money is on the line.

They already face performance anxiety because players are super competitive and want to win, said Ball, who played for the Broncos during the 2013 and 2014 seasons. Professional athletes also know that an injury or a bad game can cost them playing time and shorten their careers. Now, they also have pressure from fans who want to win money by betting on whether they throw a touchdown pass or catch an interception.

“The athletes can’t escape it,” Ball said. “They shouldn’t have to turn everything off because John is screaming on Twitter, ‘I hope you tear your ACL.’ ”

Athletes in all sports are reporting an increase in harassment since sports betting became legal.

Nuggets guard Bruce Brown brought it up on Oct. 23 in the wake of an NBA sports-betting scandal, telling reporters, “Obviously, after every game, we get DMs about not hitting people’s parlays. There’s been games where I’ve been called every name in the book, just because I didn’t hit a three or two. I mean, that����ap just the state of the game we’re in, since sports betting got legal. So I mean, just kind of deal with it. Not think about it. Don’t check your DMs after games.”

Cory Fox, senior vice president of public policy and sustainability at FanDuel, said the company banishes gamblers from its app if they are caught harassing athletes. The other legalized sports books have similar policies.

“First and foremost, we find the harassment of athletes abhorrent,” Fox said.

In June 2025, FanDuel who heckled Gabby Thomas, an Olympic gold medalist in track. The fan, who goes by “Mr100kaday” and describes himself as “The Track and Field Bully,” posted a video of himself hurling insults as Thomas signed autographs and claimed that his heckling caused Thomas to lose the race and allowed him to win a $1,000 parlay bet.

FanDuel is working with sports leagues to develop a process to identify and investigate harassers so they can be banned from the app, Fox said.

“It’s also true there has been an increase in bad behavior,” he said. “This is something we’ve seen globally and it has a lot of factors involved.”

Temptation lurks

There is another dark side to sports gambling — rigged performances.

A major betting scandal rocked the NBA in October when the Terry Rozier, a former Charlotte Hornets point guard, who stands accused of participating in an illegal sports-betting scheme using inside NBA knowledge to defraud sportsbooks and for checking out of a game early to benefit bettors. He has .

And the city of Denver was shocked when Billups, who was then the head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, was linked to the Rozier scandal as an apparent unindicted co-conspirator. Billups was also for allegedly participating in a Mafia-backed illegal poker scheme to defraud unwitting players during card games. He has also pleaded not guilty.

Other sports-betting scandals involving athletes with Colorado ties:

• Denver Broncos defensive lineman Eyioma Uwazurike was suspended for the 2023 season for gambling on NFL games, including five involving the Broncos
• Colorado Rapids midfielder Max Alves was removed from the team in 2023 in the wake of a match-fixing investigation in his home country of Brazil
• Jontay Porter, the brother of former Nuggets starter Michael Porter Jr., was banned from the NBA in 2024 after he disclosed confidential information to sports bettors about his health and limited his participation in one or more games for betting purposes while playing for the Toronto Raptors

Sports betting scandals are almost as old as sports themselves. Think of the Black Sox scandal during the 1919 World Series, when multiple team members conspired with professional gamblers to throw games.

, who played in the NBA for eight years and overseas for three, said gambling is part of the culture for professional athletes.

During his 11 years of pro ball, teammates would bet on anything — trick shots during practice, card games on the road, even which referees would call a playoff game, Funderburke said. It’s the nature of being competitive and confident.

“You’re taught at an early age to bet on yourself,” he said. “You’ve overcome the odds, right? Little League, high school, college, now in the NBA, you’re playing against the best in the world. You always feel like you can overcome the odds. And with athletes, they feel like they can win at just about anything.”

Funderburke, who now works as a financial adviser, speaks out against gambling and tells his clients there are better things to do with their money. He traveled to Colorado in May to encourage lawmakers to pass a bill that would establish guardrails on sports betting in an attempt to curb addiction rates.

“Here’s the problem with the culture,” he said. “Most of the guys that I know — and I won’t say names — who had issues with gambling, not only end up having financial constraints and issues, but their marriages and their families deteriorate at the same time, which I think is much worse than any type of financial problems.”

The professional leagues and universities know the temptation is there and they are working to combat it.

But they are not always successful.

The controversy surrounding Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby serves as the latest example.

‘A source of heartburn’

Days before the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, sent a warning to all of its athletes: Sports betting is against the rules.

“It is still to a large degree one of the worst violations you can have,” said , CSU’s associate athletic director for compliance. “With sports wagering, the door pretty much gets shut down. Like a positive drug test too many times, your eligibility is just shot.”

However, the Sorsby case upended that policy for college football.

Sorsby made thousands of impermissible bets worth at least $90,000 on college and pro sports, including some on his team when he was a freshman at the University of Indiana. The NCAA suspended Sorsby after he was caught and admitted to gambling, but he sued in an attempt to play his senior season.

A Texas judge ruled June 8 through a temporary injunction that Sorsby should be allowed to play during the upcoming season after serving a two-game suspension. The ruling could overturn NCAA rules, and it propelled college football into uncertainty as to what happens if other student-athletes bet on their own games.

The decision undermined a longstanding NCAA policy that forbids college athletes from gambling on sports and bans them if they’re caught betting on their own teams.

College sports are rapidly changing, with athletes able to earn money from their schools, booster clubs, television commercials and social media feeds. They have more money in their pockets now — in some cases, millions of dollars, Siemer said. The temptation to bet on sports lurks, he said, especially for high-level athletes who believe they know more about their sport than anyone else and can predict wins and losses on sports-betting apps.

“That’s a source of heartburn for us,” he said. “We don’t want to legislate morality, but they have more money now than when they just had a scholarship, and we want them to be smart with it.”

Every student-athlete signs a gambling agreement, acknowledging that they cannot place bets and cannot provide insider information to others, Siemer said.

Each year, CSU brings in experts to talk to students about the risks of gambling and to educate them on the NCAA’s rules that prohibit gambling. The athletics department wants them to understand how important it is that they do not leak tips about injuries or game strategies to others, who might benefit from the inside knowledge, Siemer said.

Last year, a presentation to students revealed just how much money was bet on each sport during a single season, and while Siemer said he could not remember the specifics, he recalled that it was “jaw-dropping.”

While football is the most popular sport for gamblers who bet on CSU sports, other teams also see healthy amounts of wagers, he said.

“I think the presumption is everyone is betting on football,” Siemer said. “Well, it’s not just football. It’s all of the sports. These sports-betting companies will put a line on anything. It doesn’t matter. Women’s tennis. Women’s soccer. The presumption that it’s all on football and basketball should be put to bed.”

Nip it in the bud

Aside from talking to athletes about the pitfalls of gambling, the leagues and teams are turning to professional monitors for help. The NCAA’s major conferences contract with , a company that specializes in sports compliance and integrity.

Matt Heap, a former deputy director, manages IC360’s , a program that monitors betting among athletes at more than 150 universities and more than 25 professional sports leagues.

“That monitors every game, every goal, every pitch,” he said.

Prohibet coordinates with sportsbooks to detect irregular gambling patterns, Heap said. The colleges also provide identifying information — dates of birth, driver’s licenses, phone numbers — on every student-athlete, making it easier to detect prohibited bets. Prohibet also monitors coaches, trainers, administrators and referees to identify irregular betting patterns.

The program can even find crossover bets from different internet addresses that can connect student-athletes to accounts owned by friends and family, he said. Word is spreading among college athletes that they can get caught, he said.

“It nips it in the bud,” Heap said. “The ones that continue to do it and push it are the ones they need to keep an eye on.”

IC360 also works with NCAA athletic departments to educate athletes on the rules surrounding gambling and to warn them about the pitfalls surrounding them. Even telling a friend, family member or classmate about a team member’s injury can sway bets, Heap said.

“Something that seems as innocent or innocuous as that can be the first sign someone is trying to get a hook into a player,” he said. “You guys are targets because someone who wants to manipulate a game outcome has to have a player, a ref or some other game official.”

Those who work with athletes believe education about sports betting must start at a younger age.

Last year, the paired with the to start a gambling awareness program for high school athletes.

CHSAA officials wanted players, parents and coaches to understand the rules and the consequences of violating them, commissioner Mike Krueger said. It’s becoming a national issue at the high school level.

Legal sportsbooks don’t take wagers on high school sports because it is prohibited by state laws, but offshore betting sites accept those wagers, as do emerging prediction markets. People must be 21 to open a legal sports betting account in the U.S., but young people access them through family members and older friends.

“It’s recognizing the reality,” Krueger said. “That’s where we’ve got to have the awareness. While sports betting continues to expand across our society, our responsibility remains unchanged. We look at it as a student well-being issue and not just around rules enforcement.”

READ MORE FROM THIS SPECIAL REPORT: Colorado’s gamble on sports betting

The rusted structure was barely hanging on, and its operation was time-consuming for the busy ranchers, who had to lug special tools on all-terrain vehicles and on foot to open or close the mechanism. But it seemed impossible for the tiny district to find the $6.8 million needed to replace the headgate and the rocky diversion dam that pushed water into the canal.

Then legalized sports betting came along, and, with it, millions of dollars for Colorado water projects. The tiny irrigation district, in Moffat County in the far northwest corner of the state, soon became the poster child for how gambling money is benefiting Colorado’s waterways.

The district received a $750,000 grant from the , which doles out money from sports betting tax revenue, said, sustainable food and water program director for , which helped the district land the grant. That led to a matching grant from the program. With those two grants in hand, other organizations jumped on board, and money poured in, she said.

In 2024, the Maybell Irrigation District installed a new headgate that can be opened or closed via cellphone. If a rancher is cutting hay and doesn’t need to irrigate, he can close the gates to match the amount of water he actually needs at that moment, Lane said. And the diversion structure no longer uses boulders to control the water flow. Instead, it’s a modern structure that is the right height for water control.

The project also benefited four fish species, including the threatened humpback chub, and it made river navigation easier for boaters, helping the region’s outdoor recreation economy.

“That $750,000 was really the ball that got it all rolling, that showed people, ‘Oh, this is going somewhere,'” Lane said of that initial state grant.

Since sports betting became legal in May 2020, the state has collected more than $154 million in taxes, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board has funneled $140 million to various projects that preserve and conserve Colorado’s precious water. Supporters say the gambling money is a godsend for ranchers, fishermen, paddlers and others who want to protect the state’s water and those who depend on it for their livelihoods. Critics, however, say legalized sports betting has come at a cost — fueling an addiction crisis that the state was unprepared for and is underfunding.

This is the second story in The Denver Post’s three-part series exploring the impact of legalized sports betting in Colorado, including the billions spent on wagers, rising addiction rates, and the impact on athletes and the games they play.

Erin Karney Spaur, executive vice president of the , said she reminds her family members and friends who bet on sports that every time they place a wager, they are helping ranchers like those in Maybell access precious water.

“It����ap exponentially more than we could ever imagine,” she said of sports betting’s impact on ranches and water. “Coloradans like to gamble on sports, and water is the beneficiary.”

‘That’s our ticket’

In 2015, the Colorado Water Conservation Board — at the behest of then-Gov. John Hickenlooper — released a report on how to best conserve and protect the state’s water.

“It made a lot of plans. It set a bit of policy, and it identified two big funding needs,” said , director of western water for the .

The board determined at the time that Colorado needed $100 million per year for projects to improve river and stream health and restoration, to replace the agricultural industry’s aging irrigation systems and to conserve as much water as possible.

“The 2015 water plan put up that price tag and then continued on its merry way,” he said.

But the money wasn’t there.

A consortium of groups with interests in the state’s waterways — including environmental, agricultural and recreational organizations — began meeting to figure out how to fund the water plan. They considered various tax schemes, such as asking the state to put a levy on bottled water or rental cars. But none of their ideas came with an easy path to voter approval — something necessary to raise statewide taxes in Colorado.

“We sat around a table for over a year and a half trying to figure out how to do this, and there were no good options,” Jackson said.

Then, in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a ruling that offered the answer to funding water projects in Colorado: . That decision overturned the , paving the way for states to legalize sports betting.

“I said, ‘That’s it. That’s our ticket,’ ” Jackson said.

Jackson thought Colorado voters would be sympathetic to the state’s water crisis, caused by decades of drought and climate change. They also wagered that a tax on sports betting would be easier for voters to digest because it would only be paid by those who chose to gamble; if someone didn’t want to pay the tax, then they didn’t have to participate, he said.

The legislature agreed to put it on the 2019 ballot, and voters approved with 51% in favor. The bill established a 10% tax on sports betting companies’ revenue.

“Water certainly pushed it over,” Jackson said.

Sports betting was slated to open in Colorado on May 1, 2020. But the big date was a false start. The COVID-19 pandemic hobbled betting like a quarterback with a bum knee.

“Sports betting was legal, and there were no sports,” Jackson said. “And I thought to myself, ‘What the hell did we just do?’ ”

Gross sports betting revenue in Colorado was $2.6 million, with 25% of wagers placed on table tennis. Tax revenue was just $96,544.

But that freeze on sports did not last, and the gambling money began flowing as rapidly as Clear Creek during the early summer snowmelt.

The revenue stream

Colorado leaders soon realized sports betting was far more lucrative for tax revenues than had been predicted. In the first six years of legalized sports betting, the has reported record-setting figures each year.

“It����ap been hugely successful,” said Drew Peternell, Colorado state director at . “Revenues from sports betting have greatly exceeded any expectations when these mechanisms were put in place.”

By May 2021, when sports betting in Colorado hit its first anniversary, monthly tax revenue hit $635,640 — more than five times what sports wagering had brought in during the same month just a year prior, according to data from the Department of Revenue.

In its most recent report on sports-betting taxes, the department reported it collected $4.4 million in April. The news releases often tout the success of sports betting and the benefits it brings to state waterways. They also include links to , the state’s website for problem gambling resources.

The April tax revenue was 28% more than the amount collected in April 2025, and taxes collected for the current fiscal year through April were at $40.7 million, up 35% over the same period last year.

Thus far, the largest single-month record for tax revenue came in January when the state collected $5 million from $57.8 million in revenue. Coloradans bet $630.2 million, with $119 million wagered on professional football in a month when the Broncos made a run to the conference championship game.

Proposition DD’s 10% tax on net proceeds from sports betting means casinos and companies doing business in Colorado pay the tax after they pay out winning bets and federal taxes.

But the Colorado General Assembly placed a $29 million-a-year cap on sports betting tax revenue when it approved Proposition DD for the statewide ballot. If the state collected more than $29 million each year, the overage was to be refunded to the casinos and licensed gaming companies.

Proposition DD also determined how sports betting proceeds were to be divvied up between programs, with water projects receiving 93% of the tax revenue.

The first projection estimated that sports betting would generate about $16 million annually and that water projects would receive $14.9 million.

Six percent of the tax revenue, or an estimated $960,000, would be set aside in a special fund that would be distributed to Colorado’s three casino cities and other entities that received gaming revenue if they could prove that the new sports betting market caused them to lose money due to decreased bets on traditional gambling and horse racing.

So far, no one has tapped that fund.

Problem gambling would receive just $130,000 annually for establishing a crisis hotline and training for gambling addiction counselors. That amount was increased to $2.5 million annually in 2023.

The Post interviewed seven people whose agencies receive sports betting tax revenue, but only one — Jackson — said they bet on sports themselves. And only one person, who did not want their family’s story to be told publicly, said they sometimes were bothered by the addiction problem because a loved one had died by suicide after gambling away his money.

The tax revenue proved so lucrative that water proponents returned to the legislature to ask for another statewide ballot. This time, which voters approved in 2024, eliminated the $29 million cap, meaning casinos and licensed sports betting companies can no longer receive refunds. And more money will pour into the water conservation fund.

In 2025, water proponents returned to the revenue well again.

This time, they asked the General Assembly to eliminate a clause that had allowed sports betting companies to use their free bet promotions as tax write-offs.

In those promotions, DraftKings, FanDuel and others lure prospective gamblers by offering “free bonus bets” when users apply a promo code advertised on television.

During the NFL’s wild card playoff weekend between Jan. 10 and 12, for example, FanDuel offered a promotion in which bettors would receive $300 when they placed a $5 bet on a game. In the past, FanDuel would have been allowed to write that $300 off as a tax deduction.

But starting in January, that tax deduction was no longer allowed, which means FanDuel and other companies doing business in Colorado pay even more in taxes.

For years, the sports betting companies had argued that losing the tax deduction would force them to pull back on those offers and lead to fewer players, Jackson said. But Colorado watched other states that did not offer similar tax deductions and realized those promotions were still available to gamblers.

“It’s still the primary marketing scheme,” Jackson said. “Colorado was very much an outlier in allowing the deduction.”

Colorado’s water woes

As the planet’s temperature rises, Colorado’s rivers and streams become more threatened by drought.

Last year was for Colorado after the state marked its 10th-warmest year out of 130 years of data, according to the at .  It was the 51st driest year on record, and a swath of northwestern Colorado fell into exceptional drought — the most dire category recorded by the .

And 2026 has brought even hotter and drier weather, with the winter being the warmest on record and snowpack at its lowest levels since records started being kept in 1941.

While drought dries up lakes, rivers and streams, it also impacts almost every person living in Colorado. People live with a shortage of drinking water supplies, irrigation becomes trickier for ranchers, rivers dry up for rafters and fishermen, fish and wildlife struggle, and manufacturers must cope with less water.

Less water also boosts the state’s risk for devastating wildfires and can cause insect infestations or forest diseases to spread.

“Climate change is water change in Colorado, and we need every resource we can to put towards building a more resilient future,” said Lauren Ris, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s director.

The conservation board intends to help Coloradans address all of those issues with the  through the state’s water plan.

“It primarily focuses on water supply, not water quality,” Ris said.

Projects awarded money during the most recent grant cycle in September included:

• to build a new water storage facility at the Jurgens Reservoir in Weld County that will increase the Lower Latham Reservoir Company’s irrigation supply
• to Adams 12 Five Star Schools to evaluate 54 irrigation systems across 475 acres of irrigated landscape and develop a water conservation plan for the district
• for a Colorado River conservation exhibit at the Confluence Center of Colorado in Mesa County

The water board employs a team of regional grant managers who live and work in the areas they serve. They become familiar with their region’s needs and help decide which projects are worth funding, said Jeannine Shaw, the grants section chief at the water board.

The more organizations applying for a grant together, the more competitive the application becomes, she said. And all of the grants awarded require the applicants to find matching funds, doubling the amount of money available.

And, as more money is spent on sports betting, Colorado can expand its outreach to all four corners of this parched state.

“The difference that makes on the ground is pretty incredible,” Ris said.

In the San Luis Valley, ranchers have long spread water over their grasslands when temperatures start to freeze to create a sheet of ice over the vegetation. As the ice slowly melts during the spring thaw, it seeps into the ground, recharging the water table. It also helps revegetate retired farmland and creates a habitat for wintering birds and wildlife, said Fay Hartman, conservation director for the southwest region of .

In September 2025, American Rivers received a $199,761 grant funded by sports betting to study how the winter ice sheet practice actually benefits the environment. The grant will provide the money for a groundwater study so scientists can collect data by placing groundwater wells at the near Saguache. American Rivers secured $145,956 in matching funds.

There just wasn’t good data on the benefits of creating the winter sheet ice, Shaw said. Different groups wanted to quantify what happens so they would be better informed about the practice and find ways to improve it.

The project, named Frozen Assets, demonstrates the water conservation board’s desire to support innovative ideas for Colorado’s water management, Ris said.

“We’re really able to test some of these theories and use this funding where there is not a whole lot of other opportunity out there to really test some concepts and pilot some things that could have pretty big benefits,” Ris said.

So far, Ris and others who are working to solve Colorado’s water woes believe sports betting revenue is the lifebuoy the state needs to start solving the crisis. It’s not enough, they said, but it’s charting the right course as the state responds to increasing drought, floods and wildfires worsened by climate change.

“We’re thrilled,” she said. “What we really needed was a steady funding stream for water projects, and that����ap what this proved to be.”

READ PART 3 NEXT: Sports betting is changing the game for Colorado’s fans and athletes as big money adds new pressures

Set to launch down a ski slope at Breckenridge, where he was celebrating his engagement with his fiancée and their friends, Everett glanced at his phone before pushing off.

A notification informed Everett that he had just won $55,000 on a $15 fantasy-golf wager on the . The money was in his PayPal account by the time he finished the run.

“That was more than my salary at the time,” he said. “You convince yourself that you’re so good.”

The money was gone almost as fast as Everett, high on dopamine from his big score, flew down that mountain. By the end of the ski weekend, he had blown the entire $55,000: drinks and food for his friends, a gold watch and, worst of all, more bets, including an $18,000 loss with one tap on his phone to bet — incorrectly — on the Big 10 football championship. He did not have enough money to buy gas to get home.

For Everett, the next two-and-a-half years would be “incredibly off the rails.”

“After I lost that money, I couldn’t get it out of my head chasing that,” he said. “I was basically trying to win it all back.”

Colorado, much like Everett, plunged headfirst into legalized sports betting after voters approved it in 2019. Since online sportsbooks opened in May 2020, the state’s residents have bet more than $30.6 billion on the outcomes of games and on the performances of the athletes who played them, netting the state more than $154 million in tax revenue.

But the growing popularity comes at a cost.

Mental health and addiction experts are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis that Colorado was not prepared to handle. The state does not sufficiently fund services for people who become addicted to gambling via the sports-betting apps on their phones, mental health experts say, and there are not enough therapists trained to treat gambling addiction. Colorado also provided little funding to promote awareness about gambling addiction and put limited guardrails in place to help people slow their betting habits.

It’s not clear how many Coloradans have gambling problems. There’s never been a study to determine that, but the results of a national survey suggest that more than 100,000 people in the state could suffer from that mental health disorder.

Jamie Glick, executive director of the , calls gambling addiction the “next big public health crisis.”

“Unfortunately, we are hearing a lot of rock-bottom stories,” Glick said. “People aren’t seeking help until they hit rock bottom. We are seeing people whose marriages are destroyed. They’re financially destroyed.”

Six years after legalization, Colorado is trying to catch up. The General Assembly this spring passed a bill that will put some controls on sports-betting apps, including by limiting the number of daily deposits a person can make. The state also increased the share of tax revenue funneled annually to problem-gambling awareness and prevention.

Gambling companies told The Denver Post they are creating new features to help people limit how much they spend, saying it is in their best interest to retain customers who view betting as entertainment, not a problem. Five sportsbooks stopped accepting credit cards in the past year amid growing criticism that people should not gamble with money they don’t have, and Colorado will ban credit card deposits, beginning in August.

“We want our customers to play with us month over month or year over year,” said Cory Fox, senior vice president of public policy and sustainability at . “If they have a problem, they will be off the platform.”

The Post examined the impact of legalized sports betting in the state by interviewing those involved in the industry and those who regulate it, mental health professionals, the groups who benefit from the tax dollars, athletes and coaches, and the gamblers. The Post also analyzed the money spent to show how much people are wagering, which sports are most popular for betting, and how much revenue sportsbooks are earning.

The first installment of this three-part series looks in-depth at gambling addiction and the attempts to get it under control before it becomes a public health crisis. The second part will examine how water conservation advocates bet on sports gambling to obtain funding to rescue communities and industries dependent on the state’s scarce water resources.

And the final story will explore how betting is changing sports itself as professional leagues embrace sportsbooks as business partners, even as gambling scandals make headlines and athletes report increasing hostility from fans who lose money when players fail to perform.

The launch of sports betting

Colorado was among the early adopters of legalized sports betting when voters approved Proposition DD in November 2019.

The state had moved quickly after the the 1992 , a federal law that had prohibited states from allowing sports betting.

In exchange for legalizing sports betting, Colorado voters agreed that sportsbooks should be taxed at a 10% rate to fund water conservation. That bargain pushed Proposition DD toward a narrow win, and the rushed to put rules in place.

By May 2020, sportsbooks in Colorado were open for business, and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, people found a new avenue for entertainment. Although the pandemic paused major sports in the U.S., including the Kentucky Derby, the NCAA basketball tournament and the NBA season, Coloradans still found sports to wager on.

Bettors spent more than $25.6 million that first month, with the largest percentage of bets being placed on table tennis at $6.6 million.

Table tennis remains one of the most popular sports for Colorado gamblers to bet on, with $989 million wagered since legalization. In April, it was the fourth most popular sport for wagering, with $28.5 million bet on it.

Those who want tighter controls on sports betting cite table tennis wagers in their arguments, saying it’s an example of problem gambling because Americans do not care about or understand ping-pong and only bet on it because it’s played in other parts of the world when most people in this country are asleep.

Professional basketball is the state’s favorite sport when it comes to betting, with $7.3 billion wagered on the NBA and overseas leagues, as of April. The NFL is second, followed by baseball, tennis and NCAA basketball, according to the revenue department’s data.

Sports betting continues to grow year after year.

In April, the most recent month of data available, Coloradans bet $521 million on sports — 20 times more than that first month in 2020. The state raked in $4.4 million in taxes.

, director of the state Division of Gaming, said interest in local sports teams is driving the growth, especially with the Broncos, Nuggets and Avalanche fielding championship-caliber teams.

“It’s becoming more and more exciting to watch our teams here in Colorado,” he said. “Every time we have a lot of interest in sporting events featuring our local teams, we see that continued growth. It’s more accessible with attention and advertising.”

Colorado has a healthy sports-betting market with 13 online companies and 10 in-person sportsbooks, Schroeder said. The goal, he said, is to have the best odds available for the gamblers.

The state also offers a with 5,866 approved events and wagers, ranging from which team will win the Super Bowl to whether someone will get knocked out in the U.S. SlapFIGHT championship to who will win the Chinese Basketball Association’s Club Cup.

At the same time, Schroeder said the state is committed to responsible gaming, which is the term the industry uses instead of gambling.

“We want individuals to bet smart,” he said. “Betting should be entertainment. It shouldn’t be something where you’re adding on a second level to the house by gambling.”

Colorado offers a through which gamblers can ban themselves from online apps and in-person sportsbooks at the state’s casinos. There were 1,245 people on that list as of June 15.

The state also promotes March as and operates the . Each year, the state awards millions in grants to nonprofits that are focused on gambling addiction.

Yet even as sports betting grows, public opinion is becoming more critical.

An found 43% of Americans say sports betting is bad for society, up from 34% in a 2022 poll. Still, 22% of respondents said they had bet on sports in the past year, up from 19% in the prior study.

Chasing the high

It’s impossible to know how many people in Colorado bet on sports, let alone to understand how many might suffer from a gambling addiction. Sports betting companies do not release their data and the state does not conduct public health monitoring of gambling addiction.

Sports betting is prolific among young people, said Evette Marquez, a 26-year-old, diehard Broncos fan.

She learned to gamble on a sports app from an ex-boyfriend and routinely places wagers on her favorite sport — pro football. Most of her friends do, too.

“Everyone is betting these days, especially at my age,” she said. “Some people may not be paying rent.

“I think people my age get stuck on the dopamine. You get that green ticket,” she said, referring to an icon on the DraftKings app that signifies a winning bet, “and it����ap the best feeling.”

That dopamine hit certainly contributes to the addictiveness of gambling, said assistant professor of psychiatry at the .

“It’s something pleasurable like hearing your favorite song or eating chocolate,” she said.

People who become addicted to gambling can naturally have lower dopamine levels, making them crave a high, Hemendinger said. And some people are just hardwired to take risks, and that makes them more prone to gambling addiction, she said.

Researchers have also linked gambling disorders to the parts of the brain that respond to rewards and regulate social behaviors and impulse control, Hemendinger said. But the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until a person reaches their mid-to-late 20s, making young people more susceptible to impulsive behavior while gambling.

The profile of a heavy sports bettor is a male younger than 35 who is single, employed and well-educated, according to the . And they think sports betting involves skill, not luck, which makes them “prone to distortions in thinking,” according to a coalition summary of sports wagering and addiction studies.

Matt Ferraccio, 38, started gambling in middle school, continuing into adulthood. He found it an escape from other problems in his life.

Ferraccio said he used legal gambling apps as well as the unregulated, overseas sportsbooks and bookies. He took advantage of special promotions, and when he ran out of credit on one, he opened another account.

“A compulsive gambler just doesn’t stop,” he said.

Ferraccio and Everett each talked about “chasing” their losses. Both men said they were never satisfied with a big win. They placed more bets rather than pocketing their winnings, and when they lost, they tried to win the money back — usually losing even more.

“It’s really hard to replicate that feeling you get when you win a lot of money,” Ferraccio said. “It means higher bets and longer sessions. You’re just chasing.”

Gambling addicts can stay awake for days, betting on obscure sports happening in other countries.

“You can log in at 3 a.m. and find tennis that����ap going on in China, ping-pong in Russia, basketball in China, cricket games. The possibilities are endless if you want to be compulsive and keep going, which I did,” Ferraccio said.  “Obviously, you don’t know anything about them, but you just pick.”

Ferraccio always promised himself he would stop once he dug himself out of a financial hole. It never happened.

Unprepared for a crisis

The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that 9 million Americans have a gambling disorder, which is recognized as a mental health illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Brianne Doura-Schawhol, director of the , said a 2023 study by the estimated about 2.4% of the population struggles with gambling addiction, which would mean about 110,000 adults in Colorado suffer from it.

But Colorado never conducted a study to gauge the prevalence of problem gambling before it legalized sports betting, and public health officials have no plans to do one.

“How can you make policy decisions without the proper data?” Doura-Schawhol said.

Colorado also ranks among the worst in the nation when it comes to funding gambling addiction resources, multiple people told The Post. The state law that legalized sports betting established a 10% tax on net sports betting proceeds, but only allocated $130,000 annually to problem gambling.

In 2023, the legislature boosted the annual amount to $2.5 million. Since 2023, the Colorado Division of Gaming has awarded $11.2 million in grants to organizations that raise awareness about addiction and help those who suffer from it.

The state allocated less than a penny per person for gambling services in 2023, by the National Association of Administrators for Disordered Gambling Services.

The bill passed in May did not include additional money for prevention and treatment. And as lawmakers faced down a $1.5 billion budget deficit, there was little room to set aside extra money. The legislature could shift some funds set aside for water to gambling addiction issues, but that has not been proposed.

Nationally, there is no federal revenue stream to support gambling addiction prevention and treatment, even though experts estimate that the social cost of gambling addictions exceeds $14 billion annually in the U.S.

In March, a group of bipartisan representatives in Congress introduced the Providing Opportunities for Individuals In Need of Treatment and Support, also known as the , which would divert a third of federal taxes collected on gambling to awareness, prevention and treatment of gambling addiction. If approved, it would raise an estimated $100 million per year, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling.

But in Colorado, there is no movement to increase funding for gambling addiction, even as the state rakes in tax revenue from sports betting.

Doura-Schawhol said the National Campaign for Fairer Gambling ranks Colorado at the bottom of the 39 U.S. states that have legalized sports gambling when it comes to funding treatment and prevention for gambling addiction.

Liesl Leary-Perez, co-founder of , said Colorado has long ignored mental health problems, and sports betting addiction is now one more thing on the list that needs to be addressed.

“To answer your question of ‘Were we prepared?’ No! We were not prepared,” Leary-Perez said of Colorado’s swift entry into the online sports-betting world. “And no one seems to care because we aren’t increasing that budget.”

When legalized sports betting came online, those who work in the addiction-treatment field were not prepared for clients struggling with gambling addiction.

The , which establishes the best practices for counseling gambling addicts and issues certifications to professional therapists, lists just 17 people in Colorado who have received certification. Only two are practicing in Denver, the state’s largest city.

The Problem Gambling Coalition of Colorado lists 18 counselors who treat gambling addiction and two behavioral health centers that offer telehealth appointments for gambling addiction on its website. And the coalition has developed a four-hour certification program for counselors on college campuses to help them recognize and treat the problem, Glick said.

Daniel Umfleet, founder and chief executive officer of , a behavioral health company focused on gambling addiction, left the United Kingdom to move to Colorado to start up his company after sports betting was legalized in the U.S.

Treatment for gambling addicts is in its infancy in the United States, Umfleet said.

“The unfortunate reality today is there are not enough health systems that understand this and have adopted it into their service mix,” he said. “The infrastructure wasn’t there.”

Ryan Canaday, founder of the in Denver, said he received a warning in 2020 from a doctor who called sports betting the “new dopamine dump,” and recommended his church and its associated nonprofit, which focuses on addiction recovery, prepare for it.

Then more people started showing up, seeking help, and Canaday had to learn what those addicts needed to recover.

“When I heard someone say, ‘Last night I lost $100,000,’ it was hard for me to fathom. I thought, ‘Well, why’d you place that big of a bet? And why couldn’t you just stop?’ and all the questions a rational mind asks,” Canday said, “but this disease of addiction is not rational, or else none of us would be here, right?”

‘Modern-day get-rich-quick scheme’

Arty Smith, a math teacher, last year launched the , a program that teaches teenagers the pitfalls of wagering.

Smith’s lessons on sports betting involve PowerPoint presentations with bar graphs and pie charts as he breaks down how it’s nearly impossible to beat the house.

He gathered data from every NFL game since 1966 and crunched numbers to show that picking the over/under bets — guessing what the total points scored by both teams in a game will be and whether it will be higher or lower than the points total set by the house — is no different than picking heads or tails on a coin toss.

It is a certainty that people lose money in the long run, Smith said.

“It doesn’t matter how well you know the game of football,” he said. “You could be Peyton Manning for all I care, you still won’t be able to pick football games any better than you could pick the outcome of the coin flip.”

On the over/under bet, the house has a 4.5% edge, Smith said. But when it comes to parlays, the house edge jumps to 40%. In a parlay, gamblers wager on multiple things happening at one time.

For the April 30 playoff game between the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Timberwolves, offered a “Joker Jackpot” parlay that would pay out if all-star center Nikola Jokic scored more than 30 points, recorded more than 10 assists, grabbed more than 10 rebounds, and hit more than three three-point shots. In gambler parlance, that’s a “four-leg parlay.” A winning bet on a $10 wager would return $70.

The parlays are wildly popular with gamblers because they have higher payouts, and they benefit sportsbooks because they have higher odds and bigger profits.

“It����ap a way for the sportsbooks to take gamblers’ money even faster,” Smith said. “It’s the modern-day get-rich-quick scheme. It doesn’t seem that hard to win the bet.”

Smith developed the Gambling Awareness Initiative after a friend consulted him about how to respond to his preteen son’s request to create an online sportsbook account because the boy was too young to open his own.

“He knew what he wanted to tell his boy about drinking and drugs and unprotected sex, but he was unprepared for the question about gambling,” Smith said. “It occurred to me that we need to talk about this.”

Zach Everett’s love of gambling started as a child at a race track when his father allowed him to pick a horse and placed a bet on his son’s behalf.

He gambled through a bookie for a couple of years in college. In 2018, Everett obtained his first credit card while earning $36,000 per year. Sports betting would not be legal for another two years, but daily fantasy sports were legal and growing in popularity in the U.S.

The daily fantasy sports apps run by DraftKings and FanDuel were not considered gambling because participants played against each other rather than the house. But those games gave both companies footholds in the market before sports betting became legalized, and they continue to reign as the biggest sports-betting companies in the country.

Everett, a self-described “big-time sports fan,” used his new credit card to make deposits into a DraftKings account to enter those fantasy sports contests. But he couldn’t handle winning a big prize.

“My brain couldn’t comprehend it was life-changing money,” he said. “You’re not holding the cash and you don’t have a moment to breathe. It����ap just so fast and then you blink and it����ap gone.”

Sportsbooks and responsible gaming

The sportsbook operators say they take measures to promote responsible gambling, arguing it would be short-sighted to drive people away through increasing addiction.

Lori Kalani, chief responsible gaming officer at DraftKings, said it is in her company’s best interest to establish controls that players can use to limit themselves.

“It����ap the right thing to do,” she said. “If people are out of control and they’re spending money on entertainment that they don’t have to spend, they’re not going to be a happy customer and we’re not going to be a happy business. We want long-term customers. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do.”

At DraftKings, Kalani has a staff of 50 who work on the company’s responsible gaming programs. Those include a budget builder that lets players determine how much they want to spend and how long they want to be on the app. They can set alerts that notify them when they’ve hit their limits.

DraftKings also provides customers with a personal stat sheet they can use to review how much they’ve deposited, how much they’ve wagered, how much time they’ve spent on the app, and even which sports they’ve bet on. It’s like getting a monthly spending report from a credit card company, she said.

Meanwhile, Kalani’s staff also manually reviews individual accounts flagged for abnormal betting patterns, such as a customer suddenly making much larger or more frequent deposits. Last year, 92,000 accounts were reviewed, she said.

When Kalani, who is a lawyer, first took the job at DraftKings, she was surprised by how few people used the various tools that help control time and money on the app. People saw responsible gaming tools as something only those who have problems need, she said.

“I thought that was upside down,” she said. “The whole point is you use them so nothing gets out of control. It����ap a lot of work to change how people think about that.”

Fox, Kalani’s counterpart at FanDuel, said his company also makes an effort to boost participation in the app’s responsible gaming features.

FanDuel’s parent company, , wants 75% of its average monthly players to use its responsible gaming tools by 2030. Individual performance bonuses for employees on his team will be tied to that goal, Fox said.

One tool introduced in the past year by FanDuel is an artificial intelligence program that can quickly detect when a person has deposited an amount that is much larger than that player’s previous deposits on the app. The program then asks the player if they are sure about the amount, Fox said.

A staff of 30 people reviews accounts that get flagged for abnormal betting patterns, and after users threaten customer service representatives or even mention they can’t pay their mortgage. Those employees can send emails with responsible gaming information, put players in time-out, set deposit limits and, in some cases, ban them from the app, Fox said.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done in this field. We are not declaring victory,” Fox said. “We are working hard to figure out the best ways to identify and protect that small percentage of our user base who may be struggling to manage their play on our site.”

While the sports betting companies say they limit problem gamblers, others insist that’s not the case.

Josiah Clarke, 40, is a lawyer and a sports betting sharp — meaning he figured out how to win consistently.

Clarke played fantasy football for years and casually bet on offshore sportsbooks. But when sports betting was legalized in Colorado, and the pandemic gave him a lot of spare time, he decided to “take a real go at it.”

Clarke, who lives in Greeley, built a system of analyzing games and created his own model for statistical analysis. He raised the stakes as his model improved.

He won — and the sportsbooks noticed his winning pattern.

DraftKings was the first to limit him after he won $24,000 over two football seasons, Clarke said. FanDuel followed.

“I’d try to bet like $2,000 on an NFL game, and they’d say you can bet up to $47,” he said. “And I was like, it����ap not worth all the effort I’m putting into it for $47.”

Ferraccio and Everett said no sportsbook ever cut them off, even when it was clear they were gambling too much.

“Responsible gambling from these sportsbooks doesn’t even come close to identifying people,” Ferraccio said. “If they see me spending all night doing it, guess who’s getting the free bet? Guess who’s getting the big promotions? It����ap not the people who are winning.”

Bonus bets are not free money. Instead, gamblers must put something into their accounts first. Gamblers are never allowed to withdraw those “bonuses,” and they expire.

FanDuel’s Fox took exception to accusations that sportsbooks do not actually limit gamblers who show signs of addiction.

“First and foremost, we absolutely identify problem gamblers and prevent them from being on our site any longer,” he said. “Any suggestions that we don’t actually do that on that basis are inaccurate and wrong.”

Doing a lot with a little

Colorado has boosted its addiction awareness and prevention efforts in the six years since sports betting went online.

The state’s Gaming Division funds responsible gaming grants, doling out $3.8 million in March. Those grants were awarded to nonprofits, including the Problem Gambling Coalition of Colorado, which will use its $1.5 million to certify therapists treating gambling addiction, to support a project that works with college students, and to promote gambling addiction awareness.

The , a nonprofit advised by Umfleet, received more than $1 million to work with the military to address gambling addiction within the ranks. He said Colorado is doing a lot of work with little funding, and some efforts are gaining national attention.

“You’re doing it half the speed of what you would prefer,” he said.

In its most recent legislative session, the General Assembly passed , setting some first-in-the-nation standards to control addiction through state law. The law will go into effect in August.

The new law bars gambling companies from sending push notifications to their app users, something that emerging research shows triggers people into betting more. It also restricts advertising from targeting people younger than 21.

The new law will limit gamblers to six daily deposits on an app. But it does not limit the amount a person can deposit, and people can have multiple apps, meaning they still could deposit an unlimited amount of money in a 24-hour period.

The bill was watered down after its sponsors, under pressure from the gambling companies and their lobbyists, struck a provision that would have banned all proposition bets. A prop bet allows gamblers to wager on an individual athlete’s performance, and those prop bets can be rolled into the wildly popular parlays. Colorado already bans prop bets on college athletes.

Sen. Matt Ball, a Denver Democrat who was one of the bill’s bipartisan sponsors, said the new law should put some friction between gamblers and their impulse to place bets.

It was needed, he said, because technology has rapidly changed since Colorado legalized sports gambling, making it easier and faster for people to bet. Industry advertising works, Ball said, because he sees its effect on his preteen son.

“It works on his brain,” Ball said. “He asks me about placing bets. He thinks he can make a big hit, win $100. We need to put reasonable guardrails on sports betting to protect our kids.”

‘There is hope’

Ferraccio has no idea how much money he lost over the years. He said he could go on a winning streak and have as much as $200,000 in his accounts, only to lose it all over again.

“It����ap a lot,” he said. “Everything I’ve ever earned basically.”

Ferraccio placed his last bet on July 1, 2024.

“I was hitting a point where I had nothing but debt and darkness, and it just made me sick,” he said. “When you get to that point, it doesn’t feel like you have a way out.”

Ferraccio was afraid that if he did not stop and get help, he would become part of the statistic that haunts gambling addiction — the high suicide rate.

Multiple studies in the U.S. and internationally have found that people with gambling disorders have higher suicide rates than people suffering from other addictions, such as alcohol. One in five people with a gambling addiction has attempted suicide, according to the National Problem Gambling Coalition.

Ferraccio found help in recovery groups. He formed friendships with other recovered gamblers, and they hold each other accountable.

“There is hope,” he said. “You have to look in the right places. You have to admit you lost control. If you can’t admit you have a serious problem, you’re never going to get right.”

For three years after his big fantasy golf prize, Everett said he gambled so much that he alienated almost all of his friends and family.

He maxed out six or seven credit cards. He burned through at least six payday loans. He ran out of friends and relatives willing to loan money. He pawned a $12,000 TAG Heuer watch that his dad had given him as a wedding present. He wrecked his car — also on loan from his dad — while checking a bet on his phone.

Everett, who worked as a sales director and ranked first in sales for his company, was fired after his boss learned he had asked a client for a loan.

“Getting called into the office that day…” Everett said, unable to finish explaining what happened.

He dreaded telling his wife he had lost his job because of his gambling. She quit wearing her wedding ring.

Everett gambled away his severance. Loan sharks came calling. His first inpatient stay had failed, and support groups and regular therapy were not helping. He considered fraud. He considered overdosing.

So he flew home to Minnesota and the one person who still took his calls — his dad, Brad Everett.

Looking back, Brad Everett said he did not realize that gambling addiction strangles people much like alcohol and drug addiction.

“I didn’t understand why he just couldn’t stop,” he said. “It was a complete lack of understanding. And a complete lack of understanding of how easy it is with your phone and the apps.”

Brad Everett had already flown to Denver multiple times to help his son, crafting lists of people from whom his son had borrowed money. “But it was never the end,” he said.

Brad Everett checked his son into another rehab center in Minneapolis with a warning: If Zach Everett did not complete rehab and stop gambling, he would be financially cut off.

“He’s the most generous man in the world, and it was eye-opening to me to see him get to his breaking point,” Zach Everett said.

Everett placed his last bet on April 24, 2024.

Since then, he said he has kept his promise to his father. He repaired his marriage. He is slowly paying off debts and earning his old friends’ trust. He attends regular meetings with other recovering gamblers.

And he is becoming more comfortable telling his story in hopes of helping others struggling with gambling addiction.

“It’s such a hidden problem,” Everett said. “You’re definitely not alone. I know how scary it is. If you do not address it, it����ap only going to get worse. You’re not going to win yourself out of whatever hole you’re in. You can’t bet yourself out of it.”

READ PART 2 NEXT: How sports betting became Colorado’s ticket to funding $140 million in water conservation projects

Updated 10 a.m. June 18, 2026: This story has been updated to clarify Daniel Umfleet’s relationship to the Kindbridge Research Institute.

But though some of their party, it’s far less certain if that discontent is strong enough — or focused enough — to pull off a seismic upset against Hickenlooper, the former brewpub owner and onetime Denver mayor and Colorado governor now finishing his first term in the Senate.

Gonzales’ progressive bona fides in Denver and the state Capitol will have to overcome Hickenlooper’s experience, his comparably vast fundraising and the inherent advantage that comes from being a fixture of Colorado’s political scenery.

“There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of collective outrage at Colorado’s incumbents — like John Hickenlooper, like (fellow U.S. Sen.) Michael Bennet,” said Seth Masket, a political scientist at the University of Denver. “We’ll see what actually happens in the election. But that����ap really Gonzales’ best ticket to office — if there’s a lot of anger for incumbents seeming too complacent nationally or not willing to fight hard enough against the Trump administration.”

Gonzales, a 43-year-old two-term state senator from Denver, has framed her candidacy in large part as a progressive critique and challenge to the Democratic Party’s more moderate standard-bearers, like Hickenlooper.

“Does Colorado want to continue with more of the same, go-along-to-get-along politics?” said Gonzales, whose legislative work has focused on immigrant rights and progressive staples like tenant protections. “… Over the past six years, (Hickenlooper) has not met that moment in responding to (voters’ economic) pain — versus my track record, where I have shown up, done the work, advanced progressive and durable policy that has made concrete impacts on people’s lives.”

Hickenlooper, in contrast, repeatedly spoke of his candidacy — and his desired return to office — as laser-focused on responding to President Donald Trump. In a phone call last week, he didn’t acknowledge Gonzales and sidestepped a question about anti-incumbency feelings among Democratic voters.

He said his campaign was about “fighting back” against the president and responding to healthcare cuts and the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. He highlighted his own extensive experience as mayor and governor, and his work in helping to pass the

“Right now, with Trump in office, that����ap what we need,” said Hickenlooper, who raised $40.7 million in 2020 on his way to defeating Republican U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner. “We need that experience of being focused on his lawlessness and combating his reckless attacks on our traditions, on the American way.”

The primary election is June 30, and mail ballots will be sent to voters beginning Monday. Both Democratic and unaffiliated voters can weigh in on the race.

The winner of the Democratic contest will face off in November against state Sen. Mark Baisley, of Woodland Park, who is running unopposed in the Republican primary.

In a nod to the progressive messaging adopted by both Hickenlooper and Gonzales’ campaigns, Baisley said they appeared to be trying to “out-liberal the other person.” He, too, was hoping to harness voter dissatisfaction — albeit in a far more conservative direction — to fuel what would be an upset win in November.

“There has been such a long run of single-party control in Colorado that everyone’s realizing that their freedoms have been curtailed in an enormous way,” he said.

Hickenlooper seeks a final term

Now age 74, Hickenlooper’s potential second term would end a month before his 81st birthday. He has already said he wouldn’t run for a third term, and he told The Denver Post that he would serve the entirety of his second term, should he be reelected.

“We’re going to have to rebuild better,” he said of his plans for a second term, echoing a slogan from the early years of Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration. He has called for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be overhauled, and he’s backed broad reforms to the agency’s practices. “That����ap part of what I’m committing to, in my six years — I think we cannot just build back what we had, but build back in a much better form from what we should’ve had.”

Gonzales has served in the legislature since her election in 2018. A Yale University graduate, she was an organizer and worked for a prominent immigration law firm in Denver.

She said she would support “Medicare For All,” a proposal that typically means single-payer health insurance coverage for all Americans in a program run by the government. To achieve its passage and other reforms, she would advocate for ending the Senate’s filibuster, the rule that requires at least 60 senators to agree to end debate and move to a vote. She supports expanding the U.S. Supreme Court and instituting term limits for both justices and federal lawmakers.

She said she would not support U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York to continue on as the Democratic leader. She also said she would not support sending any military aid to Israel.

“I’m not only going to talk about standing up to Trump,” she said. “I also want to share the vision where all Coloradans can thrive.”

Hickenlooper said he supported giving Americans “universal (health insurance) coverage” but did not commit to supporting Medicare for All specifically. He highlighted to increase healthcare pricing transparency.

He said he was open to court reforms that would include term limits and a set number of appointments per presidential administration. Asked about Schumer, he said that he didn’t think the New York senator wanted to continue as minority leader and that other, younger lawmakers were interested.

He noted that the filibuster had prevented some Republican priorities from passing under the Trump administration, but he said he wasn’t “ruling out addressing the filibuster.” In 2021, he said he wanted to “change the filibuster” to pass voting rights legislation.

Hickenlooper recently voted against sending bulldozers and some munitions to Israel. Campaign spokesman Jess Cohen said Hickenlooper “would continue to vote against weapons that fuel the war,” which Cohen said included the conflicts in Iran, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

Scant polling has been released about the race. showed Hickenlooper with a 32-point lead — 45% to 13% — over Gonzales, with his other challengers in the low single digits. Thirty-seven percent of respondents were unsure.

But the race tightened significantly after the respondents — 739 likely Democratic primary voters — were read “neutral-to-positive” biographies of the candidates. Those biographies were not included in the poll release. The results had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Gonzales faces name ID disparity

When it comes to fundraising, meanwhile, Hickenlooper has been dominant.

, the most recent reporting deadline, he had raised $5.7 million in total contributions and had more than $4 million in the bank. Gonzales, who entered the race in December, had raised $443,000 by March 31 and had just over $114,000 on hand, .

The fundraising disparity will make it harder for Gonzales to increase her name recognition across the state, already at a deficit against a well-known figure like Hickenlooper. Hickenlooper is taking the race seriously enough that he’s running ads to support his campaign, Masket noted. But the strength of his name recognition alone presents a formidable challenge.

“That’s hard, particularly against someone like Hickenlooper, who’s been in public life in Denver and Colorado for several decades now, and he was a popular governor, a popular mayor,” he said. “That’s very hard to overcome.”

Gonzales has criticized Hickenlooper’s support for several Trump cabinet nominees; , the third-most among Democratic senators.

He voted against 13 cabinet nominees last year, according to Ballotpedia, and Hickenlooper said he’d voted against 96% of Trump’s appointments overall. He said he wouldn’t vote again for any of the nominees he did support.

“I thought they would push back on the president,” he said. “I thought that a good executive — even a bad executive — if they get a senior staff that challenges them and pushes back, they make better decisions. … And yet this group of appointees, not one of them have come outside their shell and pushed back.”

To offset the fundraising disparity in the campaign, Gonzales has launched a statewide tour, and she earned her place on the ballot at the party’s statewide assembly earlier this spring. (Hickenlooper initially participated before withdrawing from the assembly process, instead filing petitions to make the ballot.)

Last month, Gonzales appeared , a leftist personality who has backed progressive Democratic candidates in other states. On Wednesday, Gonzales’ campaign announced that she and Melat Kiros, who is hoping to ride a similar upset wave and unseat longtime incumbent U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette of Denver, would participate in a Denver rally with Piker on June 14.

But winning the attorney general’s race won’t come easy if her Democratic primary opponents have anything to say about it.

Ask them, and they’ll say Griswold is guilty of false advertising, is under-credentialed for the job, has skipped multiple campaign debates and forums, or is simply on a laddered quest for higher and higher office — with ultimate aspirations to land in the governor’s mansion.

For months, the best-known candidate in the race, who’s a lawyer but hasn’t done as much litigating as her competitors, has been a magnet for attacks.

“(Attorney general) is one of the most important offices to fight for the future of our country,” said David Seligman, 43, who heads up the nonprofit public interest law firm Towards Justice and is one of three Democrats taking on Griswold in the June 30 primary. “It’s too important to be a stepping stone.”

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty, another primary candidate, attacking Griswold for falsely claiming that she argued the lawsuit at the U.S. Supreme Court that aimed to keep Donald Trump off Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot. The court later ruled against that lawsuit, which was brought by Republican and unaffiliated voters. Griswold was a named defendant due to her position and filed a brief in support of the ballot challenge, and an attorney representing her was allotted time in arguments.

“The woman who argued the case at the Supreme Court was not Jena Griswold,” Dougherty told The Denver Post. “I would expect someone to call me out if I said I handled a case when I didn’t.”

Griswold, 41, called it “unfortunate” that her Democratic opponents had gone negative, saying the field should be “laser-focused on the problem ahead of us — it’s the Trump illegality.”

“As secretary of state, I helped lead the fight to defend democracy against (President) Donald Trump, and as attorney general, I’ll stand up to Trump and MAGA extremists to protect our democracy and fundamental rights,” she said.

Griswold cited her record of holding former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters accountable for her criminal role in an election equipment security breach following the 2020 election. Peters was released from prison earlier this week after Gov. Jared Polis granted her clemency in May.

She also pointed to her efforts to keep Trump off the Colorado ballot following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, “despite facing death threats,” as well as her refusal to “hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voter data to the federal government” after Trump retook the White House last year.

“The most burning issue is protecting Coloradans, our state and doing our part to protect the nation from Trump’s lawlessness,” Griswold said. “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop this administration from breaking the law and hurting our state.”

Griswold has a sizable target on her back because she is the candidate holding the most prominent position in the Democratic pack. The only statewide officeholder in the contest, she’s raised nearly twice as much money as her nearest competitor — $1.9 million as of Monday, the most recent filing deadline.

Two Republicans — El Paso County District Attorney Michael Allen and attorney David Willson — are facing off in their own primary at the end of the month for their party’s nomination for the November general election.

‘She’s a politician’

While Griswold has more name recognition than her Democratic opponents, a distinct advantage in a down-ballot race, University of Colorado at Boulder law professor Douglas Spencer said that doesn’t mean she has the contest wrapped up.

Griswold, he said, has cast herself in a political light — in large part by intensely focusing on Trump. (Griswold mentioned Trump or his administration 20 times during a 15-minute interview with The Denver Post for this story.)

It’s a focus she has been criticized for in her current role as chief overseer of elections in Colorado. While potentially strategic in a battle for a strictly political post like governor, such outspokenness may rub voters the wrong way if they’re looking for a more law-and-order approach from their attorney general, Spencer said.

“It is the chief law enforcement office, and the office gives you discretion over which cases to bring or not bring,” he said. “Some voters may say, ‘Let the political people go after Trump on the political front.’ Griswold’s biggest strength is probably her biggest weakness — she’s a politician.”

How much that will be a liability is uncertain in a state like Colorado, where the dislike for the president runs particularly deep and is borne out in Trump’s repeated losses in the state over the last three presidential election cycles.

The current attorney general, Phil Weiser, has aggressively gone after the Trump administration since he returned to office early last year. Weiser, who is term-limited from running again, has either brought directly or joined other states in filing 65 lawsuits against the White House over a multitude of issues, including immigration, federal funding cuts and tariffs.

In nearly half of those actions, the plaintiffs have won a preliminary injunction against the administration or a favorable ruling, said Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesman for Weiser’s office.

Weiser, a Democrat, is running for Colorado governor against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet in the primary. Griswold said she would keep up his robust pace of resistance to Trump if she succeeds him in his current office.

“I will absolutely continue to keep this administration at bay,” she said.

Her Democratic opponents share Griswold’s revulsion toward the man in the White House, but they say it matters how litigation is pursued. And that’s where courtroom experience comes in, they say.

Dougherty, who worked as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office before moving to Colorado to head up the DNA Justice Review Project of then-Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, said Griswold lacks courtroom experience.

“As a leader, you should be willing to do the work you’re asking others to do,” he said.

Dougherty, 54, was the lead prosecutor in the 2021 Boulder King Soopers mass shooting and the 2025 Pearl Street Mall antisemitic firebombing cases. Both resulted in convictions.

It’s not just a matter of bringing cases, Dougherty said, but of figuring out which will most likely result in successful outcomes.

“Do we have enough evidence to take Donald Trump to court? That’s a decision that requires legal experience and leadership,” he said. “I believe the next AG has to have legal experience and integrity.”

Hetal Doshi, a former federal prosecutor in Colorado, said on-the-ground experience is crucial. Her pursuit of cartels, fraudsters and scammers as an assistant U.S. attorney wouldn’t have been as effective without courtroom experience in front of a jury, she said.

“We just can’t risk having that type of figurehead leader instead of a real leader,” said Doshi, 47, who later served as deputy assistant attorney general overseeing the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.

And candidates have to show up for the voters — Doshi said Griswold has missed a number of recent debates.

“The failure to show up and not answer people is a failure of accountability,” she said. “You, as the voter, are entitled to know what I think.”

Griswold makes her case

As secretary of state, a mom and an attorney general candidate, Griswold said she’s had a full schedule.

Still, she said she’d attended nine forums as of late May and held 10 town halls. Two of her opponents, she said, “bought their way on to the ballot” — a reference to through the petition process rather than the caucus system. Griswold and Seligman secured their spots through the party’s state assembly.

Griswold, who is a 2011 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, acknowledges that she is not a career litigator but says the job of attorney general doesn’t require that.

“We are fortunate that Colorado has an attorney general’s office that is full of literally hundreds of legal experts on all aspects of Colorado law,” she said. “The AG is not the lead trial attorney — it’s the person setting the legal direction and managing a very large organization.”

The Colorado Attorney General’s Office has just over 700 lawyers and staff.

Her lists Griswold as having been a litigation associate for two years at the law firm in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, where she “practiced general litigation with a focus on Latin America and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.” She has also worked in the offices of then-Gov. John Hickenlooper — as a liaison between his administration and the federal government — and U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette.

Griswold said voters want someone to stand up to Trump and appreciate the perspective she brings from growing up in a working-class family and living through many of the challenges Coloradans face.

“I’m the candidate best-equipped to deliver for Colorado voters,” she said.

Griswold’s biggest stumble as secretary of state came days before the November 2024 election, when it was revealed that partial voting system passwords had inadvertently been leaked online months earlier. An investigation found that her office violated two state information security policies that contributed to the release of the passwords, but it absolved her and her staff of wrongdoing.

In March, on the day of the Democratic state assembly, Griswold faced allegations from a former employee who publicly accused her of creating “a hostile and volatile workplace” and a “climate of fear of retaliation” as secretary of state. That employee, Reese Edwards, served as the office’s director of government and public affairs in 2019 and 2020.

He wrote in a statement that he was speaking on behalf of six other “former executive and senior level staff” at Griswold’s office who “fear retaliation and retribution for their jobs and their careers.” They were not identified in the statement.

“They fear what she might try to do to them if she gets her hands on the most powerful judicial position in Colorado,” Edwards wrote.

Griswold declined to address the situation during her interview with The Post. She said she oversees an office of more than 150 employees with a $50 million budget and is “really proud of everything that the staff has accomplished.”

Spencer, the law school professor and an election law scholar, said voters will have to cut through the campaign noise and decide a fundamental question when it comes to who will become their next attorney general.

“Are we choosing somebody we trust to wield discretion in a way that will benefit our state and protect the rule of law?” he said.

Backers opened the 30-student Riverstone Academy in Pueblo County nine months ago with hopes of sparking a religious liberty lawsuit that would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Instead, the school faced setbacks — including that forced it to move and with the parents of a young student — and the legal effort fizzled.

Citing the new provisions in state law, Riverstone Executive Director Quin Friberg wrote in a legal document that the school’s efforts “will be directed to winding up its operations and shutting down” after the last day of school last week.

The filing signed by Friberg on Thursday is against the Pueblo 70 school board alleging open meetings violations related to Riverstone’s launch.

— the one backers hoped would go to the Supreme Court — came in February when Riverstone and its authorizer sued the state for religious discrimination, citing the possibility that the state could eventually claw back the school’s public funding.

Emails obtained by Chalkbeat show the school was created to spark such a lawsuit after the Supreme Court deadlocked on a last spring. The firm, Alliance Defending Freedom, asked an education lawyer named Brad Miller if he could “find a way for a parallel case to be initiated out of Colorado.”

The case was short-lived. The school and its authorizer, a public education co-op based in Monument, .

The death knell for Riverstone was in the last few days of this spring’s legislative session. One bars co-ops like the one that authorized Riverstone from starting schools or programs outside their member school districts. The other bars school districts or co-ops from having brick and mortar schools that are entirely run by contractors.

The new limits effectively put Riverstone’s authorizer — Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services or ERBOCES — at odds with state law, making Riverstone ineligible for state funding. That����ap because Riverstone is located outside of ERBOCES’ two-member school districts and is run by a contractor.

Riverstone opened quietly last summer in a former office in an industrial area in Pueblo County. It described itself as a public elementary school that offered a Christian foundation, but its religious affiliation wasn’t widely known until October. That����ap when Ken Witt, the executive director of ERBOCES, that Riverstone was Colorado’s first public Christian school, surprising members of the public and some government officials.

The fallout included of Pueblo 70 school board member Anne Ochs after a district parent criticized her for her role in bringing Riverstone into the district and for failing to disclose a conflict of interest.

Friberg and Witt did not respond to requests for comment about Riverstone’s closure.

This story was , a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

The legislation — , titled Civil Actions for Conversion Therapy Survivors — was sponsored by Rep. Alex Valdez, D-Denver; Rep. Karen McCormick, D-Longmont; Sen. Lisa Cutter, D-Jefferson County; and Sen. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton.

“People shouldn’t be ripped off by those falsely claiming that they can change who you are attracted to or who you are,” Polis said in a statement. “In our Colorado for all, everyone can live authentically, and should not be subject to hateful and simply ineffective conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is harmful, can traumatize kids, and is a scam to waste people’s hard-earned money.”

Starting in July, the bill will allow people subjected to “conversion therapy” to bring a civil cause of action against certain professionals whose efforts to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity caused them harm.

The law removes an existing time restriction requiring claims to be filed within two years and allows representatives of a victim who has died to bring an action within five years of the person’s death.

“Conversation therapy is ineffective and has dangerous repercussions, and we’re creating a clear pathway for someone who is harmed by these practices to seek justice,” Valdez said in a news release. “This law is for all of the LGBTQ+ Coloradans who were told that something about them was wrong because of who they were or who they loved.”

Polis’ , which, like the bill, was signed on the first day of Pride month, directs Colorado state agencies to “take appropriate steps to ensure no state funds are allocated or spent by their respective agencies for sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts.”

In 2009, the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation found that and increases the risk of depression, suicidality and anxiety.

Many mental health and medical organizations, including the , the and the , have concluded “conversion therapy” is harmful and ineffective.

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a 2019 Colorado law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids.

The 8-1 majority sided with a Christian counselor in Colorado Springs who argued the state law’s ban on talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns, but didn’t strike it down. They sent the case back to a lower court to decide whether it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.

“While the U.S. Supreme Court����ap ruling on Colorado’s conversion therapy ban law is deeply harmful, we’re not giving up the fight to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ Coloradans,” McCormick said in a news release. “The LGBTQ+ community faces higher rates of depression and suicide, and conversion therapy only increases those rates. With this new law, we’re ensuring that LGBTQ+ Coloradans can seek justice for the harm caused by conversion therapy.”

Her exit from the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo comes roughly 30 months earlier than originally scheduled, after Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence in mid-May and ordered her release at the start of June.

The one-time top election official in Mesa County, Peters will be released almost exactly five years after she helped an election conspiracist surreptitiously copy information from her county’s secure election systems. Some of that information was later published on right-wing media.

Peters, 70, did not have a parole hearing ahead of her release so it was unclear the conditions under which she will be released. In an interview earlier this month, one of her attorneys, Peter Ticktin, said the parole board would set her conditions at some point after her release. On Friday, the Department of Corrections said she is being released under a parole agreement, but the document was not immediately available.

According to a copy of Peters’ inmate file, two state law enforcement officers completed a “pre-parole investigation” of Peters’ home on Wednesday “and found nothing of concern.” The file also notes that Peters had a video call on May 15 at noon, nearly three hours before Polis’ office publicly announced her commutation. Ticktin said she had been called into the warden’s office, where she learned the news.

It’s unclear when or where exactly she will be released Monday. Corrections Department spokeswoman Alondra Gonzalez-Garcia said in a statement that the DOC doesn’t disclose release times or logistics for any individual cases for safety and security reasons.

Adrienne Mazzone, a spokeswoman for Peters’ legal team, said Thursday that “no details regarding (Peters’) release timing, location, visibility to the public, or any potential exclusive access are confirmed.”

As of Friday, Peters’ location was still listed as the La Vista prison in Pueblo, according to a Corrections Department database.

She was initially sentenced to a total of nine years in jail and prison after her August 2024 conviction on three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, a count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, and charges of first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state.

Several months after the 2020 election, she directed Mesa County elections staff to turn off security cameras overseeing a secure room. She then gave another person’s access badge to a former professional surfer, who was affiliated with MyPillow CEO and election conspiracist Mike Lindell, so he could pretend to be a county employee and gain access to the equipment.

Three days after her sentence was commuted this month, Peters was “always in a good mood,” one prison staff member wrote in her file, which The Denver Post obtained through a public records request. “She said she was excited, that she will be leaving very soon.”

As Peters prepared for that departure, Ticktin and the rest of her legal team launched another salvo to challenge the trial that saw her convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors.

Though the Colorado Court of Appeals in April ordered her trial judge to resentence Peters, the appellate judges unanimously upheld her underlying convictions. On May 21, after Polis issued the commutation, her legal team renewed the challenge with the state Supreme Court. Ticktin told The Post that Peters had not expressed any contrition for her crimes because she believed she had been targeted by a “globalist judge.”

Peters had not been resentenced before Polis announced his decision to release her. Three legal experts have told The Post that they were not aware of any other case in which a governor had granted clemency to an inmate who was in the middle of similar judicial proceedings.

In the recent petition to the state Supreme Court, Peters’ lawyers argued that her convictions should be tossed for three reasons: her trial judge should’ve held a hearing to see if a juror may have been influenced by the fact that their telephone lines had been severed during the early days of the trial; Peters was immune from prosecution under the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause; and her trial judge should’ve allowed Peters to discuss what she believed to be her duties as an election official.

The appellate court , affirming the trial court’s findings and dismissing as “meritless” Peters’ contention that she should’ve been allowed to tell the jury that she was investigating election fraud.

It will likely be months before the state high court decides whether to take up Peters’ appeal. If the justices do so, many more months will follow before the appeal is heard and adjudicated. Should she fail at the state level, Peters could then petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a new trial.

If one of those high courts throws out her convictions, prosecutors in Mesa County will have to determine if she should be retried.

, Peters’ attorneys wrote that she’d pledged “that she will not, in the future, engage in illegal conduct or commit offenses of the type for which she was convicted.” In a statement attached to the application, Peters said that her “work to ensure honest elections will continue” but that she will “make sure that my actions always follow the law.”

The application also noted she’s unlikely to commit the same offenses again, as she’s no longer a county clerk tasked with overseeing elections.

A prominent ally of President Donald Trump, Peters may also soon qualify for a payout from the nearly . Vice President JD Vance floated Peters as someone who should get compensation under the “anti-weaponization fund,” which was established as part of a settlement with Trump to give money to people who claim they were unjustly targeted by previous administrations.

The Salida man is now among Colorado entrepreneurs navigating the choppy waters of seeking refunds on tariffs declared illegal. He and his two partners in hired a broker to apply for refunds for the tariffs the company paid on surfboards, bodyboards, inflatable stand-up paddleboards and other items manufactured in China.

From Walmart to automakers to Main Street businesses such as the Badfish surf shop, companies across the country started submitting records and invoices when the U.S. Customs and Border Protection claims portal went live April 20.

“It would be nice if we got some money back,” Harvey said. “It would be amazing.”

But he’s skeptical about how much money Badfish will recoup from tariffs the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in February. He said sorting through the different kinds of tariffs and rates the company paid is daunting.

“We’re definitely going to try to figure it out,” he added. “But it����ap just hard for me to imagine that they’re just going to easily offer up refunds for all of us. I don’t place a ton of hope on refunds.”

levied by the Trump administration under a law allowing the president to regulate international commerce in a national emergency. The Supreme Court said the tariffs enforced against numerous countries were unconstitutional.

ordered the Trump administration to set up a process for businesses to recoup an estimated $166 billion in taxes paid under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

Tariffs in Colorado have risen sevenfold, rising from 3% to 21%, the highest level in more than a century, Colorado State Treasurer Dave Young said in April. He said Colorado businesses paid $1.1 billion in tariffs in 2025.

Badfish, which started in 2010, faced higher tariffs during the first Trump administration when levies on imports from China were raised. The Biden administration didn’t lower those.

In 2025, tariffs on China surged as a trade war erupted. A ship carrying Badfish’s products was headed to the U.S. “when Trump did his whole escalation thing with China,” said Harvey, a co-founder of the company.

“We had a container which effectively we didn’t make any money on last year because of the tariffs,” he said.

Harvey said although one of the reasons given for tariffs was to stimulate domestic manufacturing, the cost of producing goods in the U.S. is insurmountable for companies like his. He views tariffs as unfair taxes on small businesses that adapted as manufacturing shifted offshore.

“That global economy enabled two guys who didn’t have very much money to start a business in a garage in Salida and sell products all over the place, out of this little town in Colorado,” Harvey said.

Boulder-based  a high-end women’s outdoor and lifestyle apparel company, plans to apply for a refund. But first, it has to correct how it’s listed in the database.

“We are set up for some reason as an exporter only instead of both an importer and an exporter,” said Gail Ross, Krimson Klover’s chief operating officer.

The company has tried for several weeks to correct the information with no luck. Ross was going to contact Krimson Klover’s attorney for ideas.

The company was paying a 37.5% tariff on its clothes manufactured in China. As with many small businesses, the higher tariffs forced Krimson Klover to put some spending on hold. On-again, off-again tariff increases have made it tough to plan, Ross said.

“It’s crazy-making from a business standpoint,” Ross said.

And even if Krimson Klover receives a refund, Ross doesn’t know what to expect next. Trump imposed a temporary, across-the-board 10% duty that Congress would have to approve after 150 days.

Another avenue for the administration is to that allows tariffs against countries for unreasonable or discriminatory trade practices. The administration has said it’s opening investigations into other countries.

“We believe that the president remains as committed to his tariff strategy today as he was when he entered office, and that small businesses are unlikely to see a significant drop in tariff rates during the Trump Administration without an act of Congress that defies the president����ap wishes,” Ben Johnston, chief operating officer of , a small-business lender and marketplace, said in an email.

While the future of tariffs remains unclear, the prospect of reimbursement for past tariffs is a little more solid for Denver-based , which has produced commercial ice machines for more than 70 years. The company applied for a refund two days after the claims portal opened, said Kevin Walker, Ice-O-Matic’s strategic sourcing manager.

“I was really surprised how well it went because they built that in like 45 days,” Walker said.

Ice-O-Matic uses materials produced in the U.S. and in other countries: China, Canada, India and the Middle East. Walker said the kinds of tariffs levied on the various countries and the rates changed quickly over the last year, making it a challenge to keep up with the latest numbers.

The system to apply for refunds was busy the first two days. After that, Walker said he was able to pull a report he needed, figure out which tariffs were affected by the court ruling and upload the information. The refunds will be transferred electronically to recipients’ bank accounts.

“They gave approval right away that the information was correct and that they did accept it,” Walker said. “I would never say it’s 100%, but it feels at least like we’re at a good point of having the chance to get that money back.”

Walker has heard refunds might start hitting people’s accounts in 60 to 90 days. “But then I’ve heard other estimates where it could be as early as May 11.”

Customs brokers at the Denver office of are working with businesses of all sizes on applying for reimbursement for the IEEPA tariffs that were ruled illegal.

“We’re supporting our clients with multiple, different sources of data, trying to help them consolidate their import data, go through it, see what is eligible, what is not eligible,” said Kate Rayer, vice president of regulatory services at Green Worldwide.

“I think a lot of the smaller companies are the ones who have been needing the most help because they don’t generally have in-house resources,” she said.

So far, Rayer has been impressed with the process set up by Customs and Border Protection, or CBP. “I was very pleasantly surprised at the system they stood up because it does enable this mass processing.”

, according to a filing by the CBP. Roughly 1.7 million were in the refund process.

, a travel-gear company based in Steamboat Springs, has filed for a refund. The company, which largely manufactures its goods in Indonesia, estimates it could be due close to a half million dollars.

“I’m reasonably optimistic that we’re going to see the refunds that we’re owed,” said Travis Campbell, Eagle Creek owner and CEO. “They essentially hit the timelines that they laid out for developing the system and the system appears to be working.”

Campbell said he understands why customers want to be reimbursed for the higher prices passed on by suppliers and importers. Consumers have filed lawsuits seeking refunds.

“As a consumer who’s been obligated to pay higher prices because of these tariffs, I understand the sentiment. As a business person, though, I also understand the complexity,” Campbell said.

Eagle Creek absorbed the tariff-related costs for all of 2025, Campbell said. He believes it would be difficult to draw a direct line from the tariff to the price paid by the consumer.

What’s also difficult for Campbell to calculate is the overall impact of the tariffs on his business. Plans were upended. The company’s profits dropped. Employees were laid off.

“There were so many negative repercussions beyond just the cost of the tariffs,” Campbell said. “It’s going to take us years to come to terms with all of the impacts.”

Polis currently has the sole authority to release the program’s graduates from prison. But the governor has not done so since 2023, unilaterally stalling the program and creating a backlog of about a dozen prisoners who have spent decades behind bars and applied for and completed the three-year program aimed at their rehabilitation and release, but who remain incarcerated, awaiting Polis’ sign-off.

Senate , introduced in early April, would allow the parole board to approve releases if the governor does not act for 60 days on a program graduate’s application for early parole, opening up a new route through which program graduates could be freed.

Any decision Polis made in the 60-day window would be final, according to the bill. If the governor did not act on a prisoner’s application for release, the decision would revert to the parole board.

The bill doesn’t change who is eligible for the program or the requirements to complete it, said Sen. Mike Weissman, an Aurora Democrat sponsoring the legislation. But it does establish a timeline so that prisoners who finish the program won’t wait longer than 60 days to find out whether they’ll be released on early parole.

Gov. Jared Polis stops releasing prisoners who’ve spent decades behind bars for youthful crime

"We do mean there to be a clear, if you will, shot clock, a time parameter, either way," Weissman said, adding that the bill will apply to the backlog of prisoners in the program as well as future graduates.

State the Juveniles and Young Adults Convicted as Adults Program, or JYACAP, in 2016 after the U.S. Supreme Court found that children are constitutionally different from adults and should not be automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Lawmakers that year also changed Colorado law to prohibit such punishment.

Initially limited to juveniles, the program to include prisoners who committed a crime when they were 20 or younger and who have served at least 20 years of their sentence.

The prisoners must also meet a variety of other conditions to enter the three-year program, which focuses on building life skills and preparing for life outside of prison. The bill would expand that curriculum to require prisoners to acknowledge the impact and trauma of their crimes.

After prisoners finish the program and receive a recommendation from the parole board on whether they should be released on early parole, the governor must make the final decision. Polis routinely approved releases from the program between 2020 and 2023, freeing all 17 program graduates in that time frame, but stopped doing so in recent years, expressing "discomfort" with the governor's role in the process.

Polis supports the proposed new process, Eric Maruyama, his press secretary, said Wednesday.

"Governor Polis is focused on making Colorado safer, and an important part of that is ensuring that individuals convicted of crimes from their youth get the support they need before being released back to the community," he said in a statement. "The governor is supportive of the JYACAP program and the bill, which would improve the decision-making process for individuals who have completed the program and provide a clear decision timeline for all parties involved."