Flags will fly at half-staff this week in Denver in honor of a civil rights leader and two-time presidential candidate who died last week, Mayor Mike Johnston announced Sunday.
“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”
Flags will be lowered in Denver through Saturday to honor Jackson, according to a news release from Johnston’s office.
“Jesse Jackson was a titan of the Civil Rights Movement, a ferocious advocate, and a fearless trailblazer whose ‘Rainbow Coalition’ changed our nation forever,” Johnston said in a statement. “He reminded us that progress is possible when we stand together. Today we stand together in honoring his incredible life and work.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also ordered all flags on public buildings to fly at half-staff from sunrise on March 6 to sunset on March 7 to honor Jackson’s “life and legacy.”
Jackson’s public celebration of life ceremony at the 10,000-seat House of Hope church in Chicago will be held on March 6, followed by a private memorial on March 7.
Jackson had many connections to civil rights leaders in Colorado and Denver, including Wellington and Wilma Webb, Cleo Parker Robinson and Michael Hancock, Polis said.
“Rev. Jesse Jackson changed this state and nation forever,” Polis said in a statement. “His contributions to Civil Rights bettered the lives of millions, inspired a generation of leaders, and moved our nation further towards justice and equality.”
Jennifer Jones was sitting in Montrose Municipal Court in early January when she noticed something that didn’t seem right.
She witnessed a man in his 60s with multiple trespassing and camping charges receive a 10-day jail sentence. This individual, though, did not have an attorney — a right afforded under the Constitution to anyone facing jail time.
If Jones, a volunteer court-watcher, hadn’t been observing proceedings that day, nobody outside of the people involved with the case would have known what happened.
That’s because Montrose Municipal Court is not a “court of record” — meaning it keeps no written, audio or visual recording of court proceedings. The public, civil rights organizations and members of the media cannot watch court hearings virtually, or access video after the fact, and cannot request any transcripts or audio of the day’s docket.
It’s not clear how many municipal courts in Colorado are not courts of record. But court watchers say they believe Montrose to be the only court in the state that sentences people to jail and isn’t a court of record.
It’s examples like these that spurred Colorado lawmakers this month to introduce a bill that would bar municipal courts that are not courts of record from sending people to jail. House Bill 26-1134, titled “Fairness and Transparency in Municipal Court,” also clarifies that municipal court defendants have a right to counsel and that in-custody proceedings must be livestreamed for the public to view.
The legislation marks a second stab at codifying protections for municipal defendants after Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a similar bill last year. The governor, though, took issue with the part of the bill that sought to address sentencing disparities between municipal and state courts. A Colorado Supreme Court ruling settled that issue in December, leading bill sponsors this year to focus on the transparency elements from last year’s legislation.
“Justice dies in the dark,” said Rebecca Wallace, policy director for the Colorado Freedom Fund, an organization that helps people pay bail. “Montrose Municipal Court needs a light on it — this bill provides some of that light.”
If municipal courts have the same power to put people in jail as state courts, they must provide the same due process protections, said Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors.
Access to counsel is already a right for municipal defendants facing jail time — but that doesn’t mean it always happens.
In October 2024, The Denver Post reported that poor and unhoused individuals in custody in Grand Junction Municipal Court were frequently appearing in court without attorneys. This came to light because the Colorado Freedom Fund obtained hours of recordings of court proceedings. If Grand Junction hadn’t been a court of record, that would not have been possible.
Alida Soileau, a defense attorney who practices in Montrose, said she’s never heard the municipal court say that someone’s case qualifies for court-appointed counsel. She said she’s witnessed one occasion in which a defendant facing jail did not have an attorney.
“It’s the wild west,” she said in an interview.
Without recordings or transcripts, Wallace said it’s impossible for watchdog organizations like hers — or members of the media — to confirm such accounts and investigate further.
Chris Dowsey, Montrose’s city attorney, said the municipal court directs people to a written advisement on the right to an attorney when a case involves a possible jail sentence, and follows that up with an oral advisement.
“For each case, the judge confirms that the defendant has received one of those advisements of rights,” he said in a statement. “If they have not received such an advisement, the judge would give another oral advisement to that individual.”
Montrose city officials say they’re working on becoming a court of record.
Municipal Judge Thomas LeClaire told the City Council during a January meeting that he recommended the court make the change. Councilmembers supported the idea, saying the pending state legislation made it a good time to get ahead of the curve. Officials estimated it could happen as soon as this spring.
Montrose Municipal Court needs only minimal investment to make itself a court of record, including some staff time and equipment modifications, Dowsey said in a statement.
As to why the city waited so long to make this happen?
“At the time, there was no business reason to do so, there was no mandate to do so, and there was no push by the state legislature or the courts to do so,” Dowsey said.
The Post, over the past two years, has detailed numerous examples of municipal courts around the state not following the law. The reporting showcased how Colorado’s more than 200 municipal courts operate with little oversight and scrutiny, since they run independently from the state judicial department.
Meanwhile, municipal courts around the state are adjusting to a new normal after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that cities cannot punish lawbreakers beyond what state statute would allow for the same offenses. This decision has led city councils to adopt new ordinances, judges to adjust their advisements for defendants and prosecutors and defense attorneys to negotiate plea deals under new guidelines.
The Friend’s House Is Here was covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
There is a scene about halfway through first-time writer-director Stephanie Ahn’s romantic drama Bedford Park—which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition in last week’s Sundance Film Festival—where the lead characters are stuck in New Jersey traffic, fiddling with the radio. “Keep it here,” says reluctant passenger Eli (South Korean actor Son Suk-ku) when he hears Bill Conti’s Rocky theme Gonna Fly Now. While Eli—whose cauliflower ears speak to his high school wrestling days and whose furtive and combative manner suggests he has never stopped fighting—bobs his head and shakes his fists, Irene (a devastating Moon Choi), an on-leave physical therapist in an emotional free fall, stares ahead, saying nothing, her eyes silently filling with tears.
Sitting in a Press & Industry screening at the Holiday Village Theaters in Park City, so did mine. Of course, it had much to do with the authenticity and masterfully observational patience of Ahn’s film. But the film served as a powerful metaphor for the festival itself, which was also uniting a bunch of broken people around their shared and largely nostalgic love of movies. A dense cloud of wistfulness threatened to overtake the festival every time audiences watched Robert Redford, its late founder and spiritual guide, reflect on the power of storytelling in gauzy footage projected onscreen.
While Bedford Park was my favorite film I saw at the festival, it didn’t pick up one of the big awards. (Beth de Araújo’s Channing Tatum–starring drama about an 8-year-old crime witness Josephine swept both the Jury and Audience awards, while Bedford Park received a Special Jury Award for Debut Feature.)
What Ahn’s film brought home instead was something even more valuable: a distribution deal. Sony Pictures Classics—whose co-presidents and founders Michael Barker and Tom Bernard were battling for good movies and ethical distribution against the indie movie dark lord Harvey Weinstein back in Sundance’s buy-happy ’90s heyday—made the film its second acquisition of the festival behind director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s crowd-pleasing Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! It was an anachronistically bullish stand by the 34-year-old specialty arm in what has been a largely bearish acquisition market.
The relatively quiet marketplace, Redford’s passing and the immutability of 2026 being the end of the festival’s Utah run (Main Street’s iconic Egyptian Theater being unavailable for festival programming felt like a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you statement from both city and state) combined to give this outing a bit of a Dance of Death feeling. Respite from this sense of gloom came from the most unlikely of places: documentaries on seemingly depressing topics.
Joybubbles in his living room. Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Joybubbles, the effervescent directorial debut from longtime archival producer Rachael J. Morrison, tells the story of Joe Engrassia, a man who copes with his blindness and the cruelty he experiences as a result of his visual impairment through his relationship with that great relic of the 20th Century: the telephone. As a child, he found comfort in its steady tone when his parents fought; as a young man, he learned to manipulate its system to make calls across the world with his pitch-perfect whistling; as an adult, he entertains strangers through a prerecorded “fun line,” telling jokes and stories from his life. In one scene, Morrison captures a caller recollecting taking Joe—who late in life legally changed his name to Joybubbles to reflect his commitment to living life as a child—to Penny Marshall’s 1988 movie Big, and describing it to him in the back of the theater; the moment moved me as deeply as the Rocky interlude from Bedford Park.
The setup of Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World seems high concept: a globe-spanning chronicle of the various holders of that dubious Guinness World Record title over the course of a decade. But in the hands of Green, a Sundance vet who has premiered a dozen films at the festival dating back to 1997, what would be rote instead blossoms into a consistently surprising, deeply personal and strangely exhilarating exploration of what it means to be alive.
Ghost in the Machine delivers a thought-provoking takedown of Techno-Fascism. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Ghost in the Machine,Valerie Vatach’s exploration of the eugenicist roots and colonial and anti-environmental reality of the A.I. arms race, had the exact opposite effect. It tells the tale of a society that has lost its moral and humanitarian bearing at the behest of techno-oligarchs, amalgamating our own labor to keep us divided. The film’s denouement—showing ways we as a society can still fight back—was the only unconvincing part of Vatach’s film essay.
Meanwhile, the miles-deep societal pessimism of Ghost in the Machine was being tragically echoed by real events. Indeed, the most shocking and vital clip of the weekend was the footage of the Minneapolis murder of protester and ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents that festivalgoers watched on their phones in stunned silence while waiting in lines. A day earlier, U.S. Congressman Max Frost was physically assaulted at the festival in an attack that was both politically and racially motivated.
It all made for a tense mood for one of the more anxious events of the festival: that Sunday’s premiere of Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, from Alex Gibney, another longtime Sundance veteran. Culled from footage shot by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Rushdie’s wife) of the novelist’s recovery from the 2022 attack on his life and adapted from his memoir of that event, the film was most effective when Gibney recounted the since-rescinded 1989 fatwa against Rushdie, an example of, as the author told the theater audience, “how violence unleashed by an irresponsible leader can spread out of control.” (Security measures for the event included a full pat-down, metal detectors, and bomb-sniffing dogs.)
As trenchant as it felt in that moment, Knife was also an example of a documentary where the subject may have been a bit too in control of the final product; in addition to providing the footage, Griffiths served as executive producer and Gibney was her and Rushdie’s handpicked director.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition and took home the Audience Award, also drifted toward hagiography. But in telling the story of Valdez, the Chicano arts trailblazer who founded El Teatro Campesino to inform and entertain newly unionized farmworkers, the film powerfully demonstrates how politically and socially engaged arts serve both as a morale booster and a clarion call in the fight against oppression.
Nowhere was this idea better expressed than in my second favorite fiction film in the festival: The Friend’s House Is Here. Directed by the New York–based husband and wife team of Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei and covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens, House is at its heart a joyful “hangout” movie about two close but very different friends pushing the limits of their creative expression in current-day Iran. The film—whose cast includes Iranian Instagram star Hana Mana, theater actor Mahshad Bahraminejad, and a troupe of actors from a local improvisational theater company—rightfully took home the Special Jury Award for its ensemble cast.
Maria Petrova in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Aside from The Friend’s House Is Here crew, the best performances in Sundance films were given by children. This includes Maria Petrova as a dour 11-year-old beach rat reconnecting with her estranged conman father in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me, which won the World Cinema-Dramatic Audience Award. Mason Reeves’ complex and nervy turn as an 8-year-old who witnesses a rape in Golden Gate Park during an early morning run with her fitness-obsessed dad (Channing Tatum) is by far the best thing about Josephine, writer-director Beth de Araújo’s multiple award winner; the film’s narrative and emotional force are deeply undercut by the abject cluelessness shown by the child’s parents, played by Channing Tatum and Eternals stunner Gemma Chan.
Not all of the films at this year’s festival were engaged with our fraught political moment. Longtime Sundance mainstay Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (the programmers’ fixation on inviting old hands felt like a combination of sentimentality and branding) was born of the kind of sassy, candy-colored provocations the director helped pioneer in the 90s in its telling of Cooper Hoffman’s art intern embarking on a Dom/Sub relationship with his boss, played with preening relish by Olivia Wilde.
Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Lacey Terrell
Along with her Sex costar Charli XCX, whose premiere of her mockumentary The Moment created the closest thing the 2026 fest had to a media scrum, Wilde became the celebrity face of the festival. The bidding war to acquire The Invite—the middle-age sex comedy she directed and stars in alongside Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz—was eventually won by A24 and provided one of the few pieces of red meat that kept the trade reporters engaged.
Otherwise, the festival overall seemed much more focused on its past than its present or even its future. (That said, Colorado Governor Jared Polis showing up to premieres in his trademark cowboy hat—in anticipation of Sundance’s move next year to Boulder—did feel like the ultimate Rocky Mountain flex.)
In addition to its reliance on programming new films by filmmakers who had movies in previous festivals, this year’s festival also featured special screenings of films from its illustrious past, among them Barbara Kopple’s American Dream,Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, and James Wan’s Saw. Still, the festival’s most potent dose of uncut nostalgia was Tamra Davis’ The Best Summer. A stitched-together chronicle of a 1994 Australian indie rock festival that featured the Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Pavement, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth, Davis’ film felt like the ultimate in Gen X hipster home movies.
But did all of this chronic looking backwards sap the festival of its vitality? Maybe a little. But despite the sentimentality that covered Park City more heartily than the snow, films like The Friend’s House Is Here reminded us how remarkable good films can be at discovering and celebrating humanity, even as Ghost in the Machine showed us that the moment to do something about it may have passed.
The University of Denver is aiming to become a global hub for scholarship on the Holocaust, abuses of power, racism, hatred and antisemitism, with a goal of spurring other universities to do the same.
DU leaders said they’ll announce the school’s first endowed professorship in Holocaust and antisemitism studies at a gathering in the state Capitol with Gov. Jared Polis on Tuesday, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The professorship represents “a permanent commitment not only to remembrance but to making Denver a global hub for thoughtful Holocaust education and applied scholarship that helps future generations foster social change,” DU Provost Elizabeth Loboa said in a statement.
Polis and survivors of the Holocaust — Colorado residents Osi Sladek and Barbara Steinmetz — will commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp.
At the noon event, Sladek is expected to read from his memoir, which recounts his escape from persecution into the Tatra mountains along Slovakia’s border with Poland. He later served in the Israeli Army and became a folk singer in California before settling in Denver. The Denver Young Artists Orchestra and DeVotchKa’sTom Hagerman will perform music by Sladek’s father using his violin.
Steinmetz fled Europe on a boat that carried her to the Dominican Republic, where she found refuge. She’ll share a “Letter to the Future.”
DU officials over the past two years have been working on this project, said Adam Rovner, an English professor who directs DU’s Center for Judaic Studies, within the College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
“We just think it is simply important that we remain vigilant in our society to guard against abuses of power and racism, hatred, and antisemitism,” Rovner said. “We think this position is much-needed at DU and in higher education.”
One purpose of studying manifestations of antisemitism in the 20th century “is so that people can consider the contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, and decide based on scholarly rigor whether there are threats to Jewish people and other groups,” Rovner said.
Over the past three years, he faced students during the war by Israel, a Jewish nation, against people in Gaza amid pro-Palestinian demonstrations at universities around the nation, including encampments at DU and on the Auraria campus.
In DU’s classrooms, he saw “wonderful students” whose “open discussions” continued “through the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 and even through Israel’s retaliation,” Rovner said. “Students come here because they want to learn and understand, not because they have already made up their minds based on a meme on TikTok,” he said.
A visiting professor will launch DU’s ramped-up studies, thanks to an initial donation of around $500,000. DU officials said they’ll be working with additional donors to fully fund the endowment and establish a permanent position.
Gov. Jared Polis unilaterally stalled a specialized prison program aimed at rehabilitating and releasing people who have served decades behind bars for crimes they committed as juveniles and young adults, The Denver Post found.
Polis has not approved any of the program’s graduates for early release since 2023 — an about-face from the prior three years, during which the governor approved releases for all 17 such prisoners, according to records kept by the Colorado Department of Corrections.
The governor’s inaction has created a backlog of 11 prisoners who have completed the three-year program and have gone before the Colorado State Parole Board but are nevertheless still incarcerated, waiting for Polis to sign off on their freedom.
“The uncertainty of the situation is one of the scariest things I have ever gone through, because it pertains to the emotion of hope,” said prisoner Rory Atkins, 55, who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole for a murder he committed in 1988, when he was 18. “Many of us with long sentences in prison kind of accept that hope is painful. You learn to be fearful of having high hopes.”
Colorado lawmakers created 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 was expanded in 2021 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.
After prisoners finish the program, the governor — after receiving a recommendation from the parole board — must give the final approval for them to be released on early parole.
“For whatever reason, there was this dollop of mercy that was required (in the law),” said Ann Roan, a retired attorney who represented a program participant. “And for years it has worked well. … So to have the brakes put on it so suddenly, with no explanation whatsoever, has really upended everyone’s justified expectations.”
Shelby Wieman, a spokeswoman for Polis, said in a statement that the prisoners’ applications are still under review, that the governor “takes these decisions very seriously” and that the serious nature of prisoners’ crimes requires “careful deliberation.”
“The governor’s office has also previously expressed discomfort with the governor’s role in the process, and proposed legislative changes to this program in the past, which the legislature declined to address,” Wieman said, apparently referring to a failed 2024 bill that would have cut the governor out of the process and shifted full authority for early releases to the parole board.
“We look forward to continuing to explore potential improvements with legislators and stakeholders,” Wieman said.
She did not answer questions about what changed from the program’s first few years, when Polis routinely approved graduates’ releases.
“We feel like we are being just dropped,” said Rose Martinez, who is waiting for the release of her cousin, Daniel Reyes, 56. He is serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole for a 1987 homicide he committed during a robbery when he was 18.
Martinez has, over the last decade, watched her cousin yearn for release as his 2027 parole eligibility date has drawn closer.
“I’ll never forget the day he told me, ‘I can’t wait until I can be outside of these walls and I can actually lean up against a tree,’” she said. “That was probably five years ago.”
Reyes has been waiting for the governor’s sign-off since April, he said. Atkins’ wait began in July, when the parole board recommended his release, he said. Others in the program, like Raymond Gone, who killed a Denver police officer in 1995 when he was 16, have been waiting on the governor for more than a year, he said.
“What would I say to the critics who say the crime I was convicted of was so serious that I should finish my entire sentence? Honestly, I would agree with them, if all I knew was that I was convicted of such a horrible crime,” said Gone, now 47. “…I know I am responsible, I am the cause, for an unfathomable amount of trauma in so many people’s lives. There isn’t any amount of time I could spend in this place to make up for what I did.
“But the opportunity I have been given through JYACAP was only made available to me because of a Supreme Court ruling… someone way above me decided that my life was worth saving and should be given a second chance.”
Since 2017, 112 prisoners have applied to participate in the JYACAP program; 44 were accepted, according to the Department of Corrections. Prisoners were denied for poor behavior in prison, the nature of the crimes they committed, and for not meeting the program’s basic eligibility requirements.
Last year, 40-year-old Raul Gomez-Garcia, who killed a Denver police officer in 2005 when he was 19, was denied entry to the program after his application stirred outrage within the slain officer’s family and the police department.
None of the 17 people released after completing the program have had their parole revoked, said Alondra Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections. One participant had “subsequent involvement with the criminal justice system,” she said, but it did not prompt parole revocation. She did not answer follow-up questions about that participant.
“Nobody reoffends, because they’ve grown up,” said Roan, who previously represented Gone. “…Every one of us at some point has been 16, and a lot of us who have children have watched what it is to be 16 from that perspective, and I don’t think anyone would say that is who you are for the rest of your life.”
‘A program that he signed into law’
Phillip “Mike” Montoya went into the JYACAP program after he’d spent 26 years behind bars. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison after he participated in a 1993 gang shooting as a 16-year-old, although he did not actually fire the fatal shot.
He found the program to be too basic at times, with tedious instruction on very basic tasks like how to brush your teeth or how to use a spatula. The curriculum wasn’t tailored to each individual, he noted.
“If you go inside the prison at 16 years old and maybe you never done anything in your life prior, like cook for yourself, do your own laundry, go to a grocery store and buy your own food, then maybe you are going to need a lot more assistance,” he said. “But for someone like me, I pretty much had to raise myself. I had to raise my brother and sisters. So going into prison, even though I went in at such a young age, I had a lot of knowledge of the world.”
Still, he is quick to praise the program’s pathway to release and the second chance it gives people who have been imprisoned since they were teenagers. Montoya has been working as a barber since he got out in August 2023, about three years before his parole eligibility date. He ultimately served 30 years and two days.
He’s tried to advocate for the program’s other participants, he said, seeking out meetings with officials and stakeholders.
“The response has always been the same, that (Polis) doesn’t want to deal with it for political reasons,” he said. “…We’re talking about a program that he signed into law that he doesn’t believe in now.”
Gone, Atkins and Reyes will each become eligible for parole in the coming years, prison records show. Reyes will be eligible in 2027, while Gone and Atkins will be eligible in 2030. Once they hit that mark, the parole board can release them without the governor’s sign-off.
Already, the parole board released two prisoners in 2024 and 2025 who completed the JYACAP program and reached their regular parole eligibility dates while waiting for Polis’ approval for early release, Gonzalez said.
For T’Naus Nieto, whose father is about to finish the program and join the small number of prisoners waiting for Polis’ final approval, the difference between an early release through JYACAP and a regular release when his father reaches parole eligibility in 2032 is significant.
Nieto wants his own children to grow up with their grandfather.
“My youngest is 5 and I have my daughter who is 8,” Nieto said. “So you are talking about a difference of six years. Six years to an 8-year-old. Do the math, and you miss out on their entire childhood. So just the fact that he could be in their lives for just a few short years makes a huge difference for a child.”
During his last year in office, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will make his final decisions on which prisoners in the state he will grant clemency. Among those under consideration is Tina Peters, who was convicted of multiple felonies stemming from unauthorized accessing of voting machines, and who President Trump has repeatedly demanded be set free.
Peters, a former county clerk of Mesa County in western Colorado and former candidate for Colorado secretary of state, was sentenced in October 2024 to nine years in prison after being convicted on seven of 10 state charges, including three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation.
Polis previously refused to move Peters to federal custody, but has also said recently that he would be looking into her case in his final year. Mr. Trump said in December he was granting a pardon to Peters, even though the president’s pardon power is widely understood to only apply to federal crimes, and she was charged in state court.
“You can’t give the president the headspace on this,” Polis told “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil. “You look at every case on clemency on the merits. You have somebody who is nonviolent, a first-time offender, elderly. On the other hand, does she take full accountability for her crime? We don’t look at this in isolation.”
Peters insisted, even during her sentencing, that she did nothing wrong and was trying to prevent and discover voter fraud. There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, contrary to Mr. Trump’s repeated claims.
“I have dozens of these requests that we look at regularly, and I want to make sure that we don’t look at this one in any different way,” Polis said, but noted he has not made a decision.
Polis said he will only make his decision based on the facts of the case, “and there’s some that work in her favor, some that work against her.”
Polis said he has a harder time with cases where people have committed violent crimes.
“To let somebody out at some point — have they made restitution? — is a tough decision, but it’s one that I’m never afraid to shy away from,” he said.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat finishing out his final term who has at times found himself at odds with his party on key national issues, says the best way to understand his politics is that he is “pro-freedom.”
That extends to more benign issues like allowing kids to operate lemonade stands without a permit, to larger concerns like legalizing so-called “magic mushrooms,” which Polis supported, and vaccine mandates, which Polis opposes.
“I’m pro-vax, me and my family are vaxxed,” Polis told “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil. “I don’t think the government should force you to get vaxxed. … So, pro-freedom.”
Asked Monday about the recent changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance on childhood vaccines, recommending fewer immunizations than were previously suggested, Polis said, “Those are recommendations, obviously.”
“We [Colorado] use some of the national recommendations, that, you know, again, it’s up to each parent to make that decision for their kids,” Polis said. “It’s good to put the best possible information in front of people. In most cases, getting vaccinated is the best way to protect your health and your kid’s health.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics has called the CDC’s changes dangerous and said it would continue giving its own guidance.
Asked how Democrats can win back voters who chose to support President Trump because of his campaign promises to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a major role in his administration, Polis told CBS News, “I think Democrats should be the party of health.”
He said a main component of that is making health care more affordable, but he lamented that Democrats have not been as vocal about issues like “the dangers of highly processed foods,” healthy school meals, and insecticides, as some Republicans have been.
“Remember, it’s nobody’s goal to have to have health care. It’s your goal to just stay healthy, and a lot of that comes down to diet, nutrition and exercise,” Polis said. “And it shouldn’t he a partisan message. Colorado has the lowest obesity rate of any state. We’re proud of that. We have a great outdoor lifestyle. That’s something that we should really take across the country.”
Asked how far his “pro-freedom” stance goes, Polis said, “I’m not an anarchist.”
“We have rights. Fundamental rights. … When you’re minding your business and doing your own thing, really, the government shouldn’t interfere,” he said. “When you start interfering with your neighbors and those around you, there’s a very appropriate role of government to step in and say, ‘They deserve their freedom too.’”
Polis’ interview comes amid the Trump administration’s attempts to deny Colorado and some other Democratic-led states billions of dollars in social service funding over allegations of fraud — allegations that have, in part, led to the surge of federal agents in Minneapolis, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good last week.
“We welcome any way to look at fraud and defeat it. I mean, we see the federal government as a partner in that,” Polis said. “Freezing it [the funding] before they found any fraud, that’s really inappropriate.”
“We have one of the lower fraud rates of any state,” Polis said. “Every state’s going to have some misuse of funds. We have one of the lower ones.”
Polis said that, during his time in office, national politics have become “more vitriolic.”
“To step down to the level of personal attacks and undermine the motives of others is really what’s dangerous in today’s society,” he said. “What bothers me the most is the huge gap in perceptions of what Democrats think Republicans believe and what Republicans think Democrats believe. Most Americans are good, honest, hardworking Americans who want to make their country a better place. And we need to celebrate that commonality.”
Polis said he believes the two parties often work better at the state level than at the national level, and noted that about half of all Coloradoans don’t even belong to a political party. He touted the success of direct democracy, such as ballot initiatives that led to the legalization of marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms in the state, as well as measures such as ranked choice voting, which Denver and Boulder both use for their mayoral elections.
“I think a multi-party system would be healthier in many ways,” he said of America’s de facto two-party political system.
In an expanded interview following Monday night’s broadcast of the “CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis discusses how Democrats could better handle health care reform, growing concerns about affordability and more.
A conservative podcaster who’s trumpeted false election conspiracies and called for the execution of political rivals, including Gov. Jared Polis, has formally joined the Republican race to become Colorado’s next governor.
Joe Oltmann, who filed his candidacy paperwork Monday night, now seeks to participate in an electoral system that he has repeatedly tried to undermine.
He is the 22nd Republican actively seeking to earn the party’s nomination in June. It’s the largest gubernatorial primary field for a major party in Colorado this century, surpassing the GOP’s previous records set first in 2018, and then again in 2022 — and it comes as the party hopes to break Democrats’ electoral dominance in the state.
That field will almost certainly narrow in the coming months; four Republicans who’d filed have already dropped out. No more than four are likely to make it onto the ballot — either through the state assembly or by gathering signatures — for the summer primary, said Dick Wadhams, the Colorado GOP’s former chairman.
The size of the primary field doesn’t really matter, he said, because few candidates will actually end up in front of voters. Eighteen candidates filed ahead of the 2022 race, for instance, but just two were on the primary ballot.
On the Democratic side, a smaller field of seven active candidates is headlined by Attorney General Phil Weiser and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. Polis is term-limited from running again.
For 2026, Wadhams counted only a half-dozen or so Republican candidates whom he considered “credible,” a qualifier that Wadhams said he used “very, very loosely”: Oltmann, state Sens. Barbara Kirkmeyer and Mark Baisley, state Rep. Scott Bottoms, ministry leader Victor Marx, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell and former Congressman Greg Lopez.
Wadhams said that other than Kirkmeyer, all of those candidates had either supported election conspiracies or a pardon for Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk now serving a nine-year sentence for convictions related to providing unauthorized access to voting equipment.
Oltmann, of Castle Rock, has repeatedly — and falsely — claimed that the 2020 presidential election was not won by Democrat Joe Biden, while calling for the hanging of political opponents. He previously said he wanted to dismember some opponents to send a message, according to the Washington Post, before adding that he was joking.
In his Dec. 26 announcement video, Oltmann baselessly claimed that Democrats, who have won control of the state amid demographic shifts and anti-Trump sentiment, were in power in Colorado only because of election fraud.
He said Polis and Secretary of State Jena Griswold, along with 9News anchor Kyle Clark, were part of a “synagogue of Satan.” Polis and Griswold are both Jewish.
In his announcement, Oltmann painted an apocalyptic picture of the state and said he hoped that three of its elected leaders — Polis, Griswold and Weiser — would all be imprisoned. He pledged to eliminate property taxes, to focus on the “have-nots” and to pardon Peters, whom President Donald Trump has also sought to release by issuing a federal pardon that legal experts say can’t clear Peters of state convictions.
Oltmann’s decision to join the field is an example of “extreme candidates” from either major party “who file to run but will go nowhere,” predicted Kristi Burton Brown, another former state GOP chair. She now sits on the Colorado State Board of Education.
She said the size of the Republican primary field was a consequence of Republicans’ difficulties winning statewide races in Colorado. Democrats have won all four constitutional elected offices for two straight election cycles.
Burton Brown said it “might be a good idea moving forward” to require candidates to do more than just submit paperwork to run for office. That might include a monetary requirement: She said she didn’t support charging candidates significant sums but thought that “requiring some skin in the game” could prevent “unreasonable primaries.”
The 2026 election comes as state and national Democrats search for a path forward after Trump’s reelection last year.
Approval polling for leading Colorado Democrats has sagged this year, and voters here hold unfavorable views of both the Democratic and Republican parties that are roughly equal, according to a November poll.
Wadhams said that the odds were “very difficult” for any Republican gubernatorial candidate next year. While approval for Polis and other Democrats has declined, support for the Republican standard-bearer — Trump — is far lower in the state. In last year’s election, Colorado was a largely blue island in a broader national red wave.
To have a real shot of winning in 2026, Wadhams argued, the GOP needed to nominate someone for governor who could sidestep anti-Trump sentiment and press on the issues driving voter discontent. Running more divisive candidates in a blue state, he warned, would risk harming Republicans’ chances in down-ballot races the statehouse or in races for Congress.
“There seems to be an opening for Republicans we haven’t seen for a while,” he said. “But that opening will only exist if we have candidates who won’t get pulled into this conspiracy stuff and this Tina Peters stuff. Because those are nonstarters. They’re sure losers.”
I read with great interest that President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is “investigating whether Colorado prisons are violating the constitutional rights of the state’s adult inmates and youth detainees through excessive force, inadequate medical care and nutrition …”
I find it fascinating and ironic that this same DOJ has chronically overlooked similar issues in regard to the handling of the migrants who have been systematically grabbed without warrants, and imprisoned without due process in facilities that have been documented as being overpopulated, unsanitary, and with inadequate nutrition or medical care. I’ve only heard of a few, if any, interventions to undo these chronic civil rights violations.
In the article, President Donald Trump refers to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis as a “sleazebag.” Trump seems to have numerous undesirable traits, but one of his favorites seems to be derogatory name-calling. He seems to have a less-than-complimentary name for anyone who is not loyal to him, anyone he disagrees with, such as journalists, etc. According to artificial intelligence, this form of name-calling is most prevalent among children, which seems to fall in line with his level of maturity, sophistication and intelligence!
Steve Nash, Centennial
The 11-2 Broncos are an underdog?
Further proof that the NFL/Vegas betting has no respect for the Broncos. The Broncos currently own the number one seed in the AFC, have not lost at home this year, and are on a 10-game winning streak. Still, Denver is the underdog in next week’s home game against Green Bay.
Leroy M. Martinez, Denver
Senator’s tragic death reminds us to do good in our lives
Life can change within a second. The entire trajectory of someone’s future can be altered in the blink of an eye. I would’ve never believed that the section of the highway, Interstate 25, I travel on so often, the one that blurs by in a moment, could ever be remembered as something so tragic. That highway is now a distressing symbol of how life is a gift and can be snatched away at any random moment.
Recently, two accidents occurred on the northbound I-25 near Dry Creek. Faith Winter, a Colorado senator, was killed, and three others were injured. However, it is important to remember Sen. Winter not the way she passed but how she lived.
Reporter Katie Langford reminded us about how Sen. Winter fought to make Colorado a better place her entire life. She strongly advocated for and brought paid family leave to the state of Colorado, passed an important transportation bill to improve roads and public transportation, and fought against workplace sexual harassment, making impactful changes wherever she went.
Sen. Winter made history and brought positive changes to many Coloradans and she will be honored and remembered in our hearts for years to come.
Life is so short and unpredictable. Those who realize the importance of living each day like it’s your last and doing good in the world never really pass away. They live in everyone’s hearts, and the memory of them lasts for a lifetime.
State Sen. Faith Winter was a fierce and relentless advocate for Colorado’s families, climate and transportation who forever altered the state’s political landscape by fighting to make it a better place to live, her friends and colleagues said Thursday.
Winter’s death was confirmed late Wednesday by Gov. Jared Polis and legislative leaders, and Polis ordered flags be lowered to half-staff in her honor on the day of her memorial service, which has not been announced.
“Our state is shaken by the loss of Senator Faith Winter, and I send my deepest condolences to her children, loved ones, friends, and colleagues across our state,” Polis said in a statement.
“I have had the honor of working with her on many issues to improve the lives of every person and family in our great state and tackling climate change. I am deeply saddened for her family, her friends and colleagues and her community. Faith’s work and advocacy made Colorado a better state.”
The Arapahoe County coroner’s office on Thursday confirmed Winter was killed in the crash, which also injured three others and closed northbound I-25 for more than five hours Wednesday night.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, and additional information likely will not be released until next week, Arapahoe County sheriff’s Deputy John Bartmann said Thursday. No one has been cited or arrested in connection with the crash.
Winter’s 10-year career in the statehouse exemplified her deep passion for making the lives of everyday Coloradans better as well as her remarkable resilience in the face of adversity, friends and colleagues told The Denver Post.
A Democrat from Broomfield, Winter served in the House from 2015 to 2019, moving over to the Senate after she won a seat in 2018. She also served on the Westminster City Council earlier in her career.
Winter was a driving force behind bringing paid family leave to Colorado; passing a massive 2021 transportation bill to improve the state’s roadways and expand transit options; and strengthening protections against workplace harassment, among many other initiatives.
“Faith was a deeply complex person, and she moved through multiple challenges with grace and remained dedicated to the work she was doing,” state Sen. Lisa Cutter said in an interview Thursday. “She believed in the work she was doing, believed in the power of friendship and connection and will always live on that way and certainly live on in my heart.”
Winter led the way in addressing sexual harassment in Colorado workplaces as well as her own workplace — the halls and chambers of the Capitol.
Her allegations against former state Rep. Steve Lebsock were followed by similar sexual harassment complaints from other women, leading to his expulsion from the House in 2018.
“I was always proud to stand by her side in moments when she was trying to change the culture of the Capitol,” Garnett said. “She was a leader in that space.”
Garnett met Winter as the two ran and won seats in the House of Representatives and described her as a leader among their class of state lawmakers.
“She understood the Capitol better than most,” Garnett said. “When we started, the legislature was very different: We were in split chambers with a small majority, and she knew how to work across the aisle to get some of her stuff through.”
Winter also knew when to take a stand, Garnett said, including running a paid family leave bill she knew would not pass the Republican-controlled state Senate to get legislators, the media and public talking about the issue.
Garnett was so inspired by Winter’s passion for paid family leave that he accidentally announced that his wife, Emily, was pregnant while speaking on the issue from the floor of the House.
“Somebody tweeted it and my wife texted me and asked, ‘Did you just announce I was pregnant on the floor of the House?’” Garnett said, laughing. “I told her I was so moved by Faith, I had to do it.”
Winter also cared deeply for those around her, from her family, including children Sienna and Tobin, to her friends and colleagues at the statehouse. The Capitol could be a lonely place, and Winter was intentional about connecting with people, whether through soup-making parties or field trips to pick sunflowers, Cutter said.
Flowers brought Winter deep joy, and she was known for keeping a tiny vase of flowers on her desk that she would arrange on Monday mornings and leaving single buds or tiny flower arrangements on the desks of her colleagues.
“She had a tremendous heart,” Cutter said. “I don’t know where she found the energy to do all that. I really don’t.”
Winter also faced several personal challenges, including an ethics complaint for appearing intoxicated at a Northglenn community meeting in 2024, which caused her to seek treatment for a substance use disorder.
Winter’s death caused an outpouring of grief from Colorado’s local, state and federal elected officials on Wednesday night and Thursday.
In a statement Wednesday night, Senate President James Coleman and Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez said they were “devastated” by her passing.
“Whether fighting for legislation to support mothers and families, championing groundbreaking transit policy, or simply supporting constituents in moments of need, she brought thoughtfulness, innovation, and humility to every aspect of her work,” they said in a joint statement.
Sen. Cleave Simpson, the Republican caucus leader in the chamber, said in a statement posted to X that Winter’s legacy was “one of courage, kindness and unity.”
“Senator Winter was not only a dedicated public servant but also a bridge builder,” Simpson said. “She worked tirelessly with colleagues across the aisle, forging strong partnerships with her Republican counterparts. Her ability to listen, collaborate and find common ground reflected her deep commitment to the people she served and to the integrity of the legislative process.”
House Speaker Julie McCluskie and Majority Leader Monica Duran, both Democrats, said in a statement that Winter “always fought for Colorado’s most vulnerable. Her bravery brought necessary reforms to the Capitol, and her kindness filled the building. We will all miss her dearly.”
They extended condolences to Winter’s family, including her children, as well as to former state Rep. Matt Gray, a fellow Democrat to whom she was engaged.
In the last budget that Gov. Jared Polis will usher through from conception to enactment, the term-limited Democrat hopes to wrestle down ever-rising Medicaid costs, he said Friday in unveiling his proposal.
It’s a plan that proposes clamping down on dental benefits, requiring prior authorization for more services and making payment changes affecting home health services. Elsewhere, Polis hopes to revive his often-proposed — and never accepted by the legislature — idea of privatizing Pinnacol Assurance, the state’s workers’ compensation insurance program, to generate hundreds of millions of dollars.
Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income Coloradans, has been gobbling an ever-bigger chunk of the overall state budget for years. It’s growing at a rate that’s double the overall spending growth allowed by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR.
If left unchecked, Medicaid costs could end up dwarfing all other spending in the state in the next 15 years, leaving almost no money for any services that aren’t directly related to education or health care, according to the governor’s office.
“This gets worse if we don’t fix it,” Polis said Friday.
The governor’s overall budget proposal for the 2026-27 fiscal year includes a total spending request of more than $50.6 billion, up from $48 billion in the current fiscal year, which goes through June 30. Most of that is already spoken for as pass-through spending or other obligations.
The general fund, which covers most day-to-day spending, would grow from about $18.2 billion to $18.6 billion under Polis’ proposal.
Polis’ announcement of his proposal represents a starting point for the state’s next spending plan, which will cover July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2027. He will unveil an amended proposal in January as the state updates economic projections.
Then the legislature will have its say, starting with the powerful Joint Budget Committee.
Four of the committee’s six members are seeking higher office in the 2026 election, making this budget an even more pitched-than-usual declaration of political values. The legislature will vote on the final budget in the spring.
Early forecasts have the body needing to make up a nearly $1 billion gap — again — between planned spending and what the state is allowed to spend under the growth cap set by TABOR. This tight budget year follows an August special session where lawmakers needed to fill a $783 million hole opened up in the current fiscal year by federal tax changes signed into law by President Donald Trump over the summer.
Trying to rein in Medicaid
Polis said a key hope of his budget proposal is to bring growth in Medicaid spending in line with the overall growth in state spending allowed by TABOR. Over the past decade, the state constitution has limited total state spending to growth by an average 4.4% per year.
Medicaid spending has grown at double that rate, 8.8%. In that period, general fund spending on Medicaid has grown from about $2.4 billion $5.5 billion per year.
In his proposal, Polis would increase state Medicaid spending by about $300 million. That increase alone represents more spending than several executive agencies’ combined budgets — but would still be half as steep as Medicaid’s projected growth without changes to the program.
A Medicaid sign is displayed in the hallway at Clinica Family Health on Thursday, May 2, 2024, in Adams County, Colorado. (Photo by Eli Imadali/Special to The Denver Post)
Polis said he wants to lower overall spending on Medicaid services without touching how much individual providers are paid for services. Proposed changes include annual caps of $3,000 on dental benefits, which Polis noted would be double the cap that existed in 2023; adding prior authorization to some services; and changing how payment is calculated for home health nursing and therapy services.
Several of those proposals are extensions of executive orders he issued to help shore up the most recent budget trouble in August.
“There have been a number of benefits that have been added (to Medicaid) in recent years, and some of those are not sustainable over time,” Polis said.
His administration has also been working with national consultants to examine how Colorado’s Medicaid spending has differed from national trends. That report should be available in the New Year.
Pushing to privatize Pinnacol … again
In another key element of his proposal, Polis is looking to restart a fight from last year over converting the state’s quasi-governmental workers’ compensation insurance program to a fully private enterprise.
Polis’ office predicted the Pinnacol Assurance spin-off, if completed, would generate at least $400 million for the state. About half of that would go to pay for the homestead property tax exemption, while the rest would go to state maintenance and to balance the budget.
Pinnacol acts as an “insurer of last resort” for employers in high-risk industries. The firm is generally not allowed to refuse to insure employers or cancel policies, but it can operate only within Colorado’s borders.
Polis restarted the conversation last year with arguments that Pinnacol was hamstrung from competing in today’s markets, where employers are less bound by state borders than ever. Turning the quasi-state agency into a private firm would also equal a payday for a cash-strapped state.
The effort petered out when the idea didn’t win much traction during the legislative session — though Polis hinted later that he hadn’t given up on the effort.
This year, Polis said the money would help the state keep its property tax break for certain long-term homeowners, known as the homestead exemption. The tax break is usually paid for using the state’s TABOR surplus, but the state won’t have one this year, Polis said.
“Nearly every other state has moved in this direction for reasons that are very important to employees and employers,” Polis said. “For Pinnacol to be able to continue to serve as our insurer of last resort, we have to be able to allow them to write interstate business, to take some of the same steps that can reduce overhead and produce better value to employees that other states have done.”
Opponents to the move worry that taking Pinnacol private would weaken protections for workers and employers in the state. The insurer essentially acts as a social safety net for industries that otherwise couldn’t obtain coverage, they argued last year.
This year, opponents are warning that privatizing the insurer and taking a portion of the money — potentially hundreds of millions of dollars — would be unconstitutional because the money isn’t the state’s to take.
“Pinnacol’s assets were built from employer premiums, not tax dollars,” said Stephanie Tucker, an attorney and president of the Workers’ Compensation Education Association, in a statement. “These funds belong to the employers who paid premiums and (to) injured workers, not the state. Privatization without clear legal authority could result in years of litigation and uncertainty for both Pinnacol and the state of Colorado.”
State officials have a different interpretation. The state “has an obligation” to get value for Pinnacol if it’s spun off, Mark Ferrandino, the head of the Office of State Planning and Budgeting, said.
Polis said he’s been briefed on the legal question and his staff classified it as a “very low litigation risk.”
Pushback and criticism against the federal government continued across Colorado this week after immigration officials arrested a father and two children in Durango, sparking local protests that were met with pepper spray, rubber bullets and physical confrontation by federal agents.
Colorado Bureau of Investigation officials on Thursday announced the agency will investigate a federal agent throwing a protester’s phone and pushing her to the ground outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Durango.
The encounter was caught on video as demonstrators gathered outside the ICE office on Monday to try to prevent a Colombian man and his two children from being separated and moved to different facilities.
Fernando Jaramillo Solano and his 12- and 15-year-old children were arrested Monday morning while heading to school despite the family’s active asylum case, advocates with Compañeros Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center said.
Durango Police Chief Brice Current asked the CBI to investigate in the wake of a widely circulated video which “appears to show a federal agent use force on a woman during the demonstration,” the state agency said Thursday.
Investigators will look into whether any state criminal laws were broken during the incident and send the investigation to the 6th Judicial District; the district attorney’s office will decide whether to file charges.
Gov. Jared Polis on Wednesday said Colorado officials were not informed of the operation or given any information about whether Jaramillo Solano and his children were suspected of any crimes.
“The federal government’s lack of transparency about its immigration actions in Durango and in the free state of Colorado remains extremely maddening,” Polis said on social media.
“The federal government should prioritize apprehending and prosecuting dangerous criminals, no matter where they come from, and keep our communities safe instead of snatching up children and breaking up families,” he continued.
ICE officials did not respond to an email seeking comment about the investigation and arrests.
Dozens of Durango and La Plata County residents packed City Council chambers and overflowed into the hallway during a tense, emotional community meeting Thursday evening.
City officials at times seemed at a loss for how to address the arrests and protests, including ICE officials refusing to let Durango police perform a welfare check on the children.
“People really put their lives on the line for the children and this community, and it was an incredible display of people’s position on this issue. It makes me very proud and sad at the same time,” Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales said.
Community members who attended the protest spoke about being assaulted and seeing others assaulted by ICE agents while state and local police watched and did nothing to intervene.
Sixteen-year-old McKenna Bard described calling 911 five times to beg for medical assistance, but no one came, leaving high school students and residents to try to treat their own injuries for more than two hours.
Bard was one of several speakers who criticized the Durango Police Department for failing to help community members during the protest, even to provide medical aid.
“The people of Durango feel betrayed, lied to and disgusted,” Bard said.
The Rev. Jamie Boyce, a minister with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Durango, said she saw ICE agents stomp on protesters who sat with linked arms, pepper-spray protesters directly in the face and use sound cannons and rubber bullets. One agent put a protester in a chokehold, she said.
“City Council, I want you to hear the haunting cries of people asking, ‘Why won’t you protect us?’ Because that is the question that calls for your moral clarity,” she said. “I beg you, claim your moral ground and strength of character to help heal our hurting city.”
The arrests and protests in Durango are among a wave of violent federal immigration action across the United States, with similar clashes between demonstrators and federal agents happening in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.
Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, last week said any state or local officials who impede federal law enforcement are engaging in illegal activity.
“To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anyone who lays a hand on you or tried to stop you is committing a felony,” Miller said on Fox News.
Gov. Jared Polis is still trying to find a way to comply with a federal immigration subpoena, four months after a Denver judge ruled that doing so would violate Colorado law.
In repeated court filings, including one submitted Friday, Polis’ private attorneys have said they intend to turn over records on 10 businesses that employed several sponsors of unaccompanied children to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
They’ve asked a Denver judge, who previously prohibited some state employees from complying with ICE’s subpoena, to dismiss the case and clear the way for them to turn over a more limited batch of records.
The recent filings represent the second attempt by Polis to comply with the April immigration enforcement subpoena. The governor’s first attempt was blocked by District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones in June, after Jones sided with a senior state employee who’d sued Polis earlier that month to stop the state from fulfilling the subpoena.
The employee, Scott Moss, argued that providing the requested records would violate state laws that limit what information can be shared with federal immigration authorities.
But though Jones preliminarily sided with Moss, his ruling is complicated. He prohibited Polis from directing a specific division of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to comply with the subpoena. But he said he couldn’t prevent Polis from directing others to comply with the subpoena, even though Jones said doing so would still likely violate the law.
The records that Polis now says he intends to turn over to ICE are in the custody of another labor department division not covered in Jones’ order.
In an email Tuesday, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman declined to comment on the case or why Polis is still seeking to provide records to ICE. She pointed to the administration’s recent legal filings.
The administration has previously said it wanted to support ICE’s efforts to check on unaccompanied minors without legal status, though the governor’s office has not provided any evidence that it has sought assurances that ICE wasn’t seeking the information purely for immigration enforcement efforts.
David Seligman, whose law firm has supported the case, criticized the governor’s decision to seek the lawsuit’s dismissal while indicating his intention to turn over records to ICE. While ICE wrote that it wanted detailed employment records so it could check on the well-being of unaccompanied children, Seligman and Moss, the employee who brought the lawsuit, have argued that the agency only wants the information so it can arrest and deport the children’s sponsors.
“It is absolutely absurd that this governor would be going out of his way to comply with and cooperate with ICE in light of everything that we’re seeing right now,” Seligman said.
Moss has since left the department, and Polis’ lawyers now argue that no one associated with the case has a legal standing to challenge compliance with the subpoena. They’ve also argued that they can turn over the records because the employers’ addresses and contact information can be found online.
The records are only part of the broader swath of personal details that ICE initially requested, and they cover only six of the 35 sponsors for which ICE first sought records. The sponsors are typically family members of children without legal status, who care for the minors while their immigration cases proceed.
The administration has similarly told ICE officials that it intends to comply with part of the subpoena once the lawsuit is concluded. In a July 11 email, Joe Barela, the head of the Department of Labor and Employment, wrote to a special agent in ICE’s investigative branch that the agency planned to “provide your office with the names and contact information for those 10 employers.”
Jones must now rule on whether to dismiss the lawsuit or let it proceed. Between June and early September, Recht Kornfeld, the private law firm Polis hired to represent him in the lawsuit, has billed the state for more than $104,000, according to records obtained by The Denver Post through a public records request.
The Colorado Attorney General’s Office has said it was unable to represent Polis because of legal advice it provided to the governor related to complying with the subpoena. The office has declined to characterize the nature of that advice.
The subpoena was sent to the state labor department in April as part of what ICE described as essentially a welfare check of unaccompanied minors in the state. The subpoena sought employment and personal records for the children’s sponsors.
Initially, administration officials decided not to comply with the subpoena because of the state’s laws limiting such contact. But Polis abruptly changed course and decided to turn over the records, prompting Moss to sue.
Polis’ office has claimed that the governor wanted to comply with the subpoena because it was part of a “targeted” criminal investigation into human trafficking. The state’s immigration laws — including one signed by Polis in late May — allow state officials to comply with federal subpoenas if they’re part of criminal probes, rather than immigration enforcement operations.
But the governor’s office has not released any evidence that the criminal investigation actually exists or that it made any effort to ensure that it did.
Jones wrote that “the subpoena — on its face — was not issued as part of a criminal investigation,” and he said that no one in Polis’ office or the labor department, “with the potential exception of the governor himself,” actually believed that the subpoena was part of a criminal investigation.
The subpoena is not signed by a judge, and the federal statute that it cites is related to immigration enforcement.
In her email Tuesday, Wieman, Polis’ spokeswoman, did not address questions about whether the state had pursued or received any additional information confirming the existence of the investigation allegedly underpinning the subpoena. Nor did she address questions about whether Polis had directed any state resources to check on the children.
ENGLEWOOD — Metro Denver budtender Quentin Ferguson needs Regional Transportation District bus and trains to reach work at an Arvada dispensary from his house, a trip that takes 90 minutes each way “on a good day.”
“It is pretty inconvenient,” Ferguson, 22, said on a recent rainy evening, waiting for a nearly empty train that was eight minutes late.
He’s not complaining, however, because his relatively low income and Medicaid status qualify him for a discounted RTD monthly pass. That lets him save money for a car or an electric bicycle, he said, either of them offering a faster commute.
Then he would no longer have to ride RTD.
His plight reflects a core problem of lagging ridership that RTD directors increasingly run up against as they try to position the transit agency as the smartest way to navigate Denver. Most other U.S. public transit agencies, too, are grappling with a version of this problem.
In Colorado, state-government-driven efforts to concentrate the growing population in high-density, transit-oriented development around bus and train stations — a priority for legislators and Gov. Jared Polis — hinge on having a swift public system that residents ride.
But transit ridership has failed to rebound a year after RTD’s havoc in 2024, when operators disrupted service downtown for a $152 million rail reconstruction followed by a systemwide emergency maintenance blitz to smooth deteriorating tracks that led to trains crawling through 10-mph “slow zones.”
The latest ridership numbers show an overall decline this year, by at least 3.9%, with 40 million fewer riders per year compared with six years ago. And RTD executives’ newly proposed, record $1.3 billion budget for 2026 doesn’t include funds for boosting bus and train frequency to win back riders.
Frustrations intensified last week.
“What is the point of transit-oriented development if it is just development?” said state Rep. Meg Froelich, a Democrat representing Englewood who chairs the House Transportation, Housing and Local Government Committee. “We need reliable transit to have transit-oriented development. We have cities that have invested significant resources into their transit-oriented communities. RTD is not holding up its end of the bargain.”
At a retreat this past summer, a majority of the RTD’s 15 elected board members agreed that boosting ridership is their top priority. Some who reviewed the proposed budget last week questioned the lack of spending on service improvements for riders.
“We’re not moving the needle. Ridership is not going up. It should be going up,” director Karen Benker said in an interview.
“Over the past few years, there’s been a tremendous amount of population growth. There are so many apartment complexes, so much new housing put up all over,” Benker said. “Transit has to be relied on. You just cannot keep building more roads. We’re going to have to find ways to get people to ride public transit.”
Commuting trends blamed
RTD Chief Executive and General Manager Debra Johnson, in emailed responses to questions from The Denver Post, emphasized that “RTD is not unique” among U.S. transit agencies struggling to regain ridership lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. Johnson blamed societal shifts.
“Commuting trends have significantly changed over the last five years,” she said. “Return-to-work numbers in the Denver metro area, which accounted for a significant percentage of RTD’s ridership prior to March 2020, remain low as companies and businesses continue to provide flexible in-office schedules for their employees.”
In the future, RTD will be “changing its focus from primarily providing commuter services,” she said, toward “enhancing its bus and services and connections to high-volume events, activity centers, concerts and festivals.”
But agency directors are looking for a more aggressive approach to reversing the decline in ridership. And some are mulling a radical restructuring of routes.
Funded mostly by taxpayers across a 2,345 square-mile area spanning eight counties and 40 municipalities — one of the biggest in the nation — RTD operates 10 rail lines covering 114 miles with 84 stations and 102 bus routes with 9,720 stops.
“We should start from scratch,” said RTD director Chris Nicholson, advocating an overhaul of the “geometry” of all bus routes to align transit better with metro Denver residents’ current mobility patterns.
The key will be increasing frequency.
“We should design the routes how we think would best serve people today, and then we could take that and modify it where absolutely necessary to avoid disruptive differences with our current route map,” he said.
Then, in 2030, directors should appeal to voters for increased funding to improve service — funds that would be substantially controlled by municipalties “to pick where they want the service to go,” he said.
Reversing the RTD ridership decline may take a couple of years, Nicholson said, comparing the decreases this year to customers shunning a restaurant. “If you’re a restaurant and you poison some guests accidentally, you’re gonna lose customers even after you fix the problem.”
The RTD ridership numbers show an overall public transit ridership decrease by 5% when measured over the 12-month period from August 2024 through July 2025, the last month for which staffers have made numbers available, compared with the same period a year ago.
Bus ridership decreased by 2% and light rail by 18% over that period. In a typical month, RTD officials record around 5 million boardings — around 247,000 on weekdays.
The precautionary rail “slow zones” persisted for months as contractors worked on tracks, delaying and diverting trains, leaving transit-dependent workers in a lurch. RTD driver workforce shortages limited deployment of emergency bus shuttles.
This year, RTD ridership systemwide decreased by 3.9% when measured from January through July, compared with that period in 2024. The bus ridership this year has decreased by 2.4%.
On rail lines, the ridership on the relatively popular A Line that runs from Union Station downtown to Denver International Airport was down by 9.7%. The E Line light rail that runs from downtown to the southeastern edge of metro Denver was down by 24%. Rail ridership on the W Line decreased by 18% and on R Line by 15%, agency records show.
The annual RTD ridership has decreased by 38% since 2019, from 105.8 million to 65.2 million in 2024.
A Regional Transportation District light rail train moves through downtown Denver on Friday, June 27, 2025. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
Light rail ‘sickness’ spreading
“The sickness on RTD light rail is spreading to other parts of the RTD system,” said James Flattum, a co-founder of the Greater Denver Transit grassroots rider advocacy group, who also serves on the state’s RTD Accountability Committee. “We’re seeing permanent demand destruction as a consequence of having an unreliable system. This comes from a loss of trust in RTD to get you where you need to go.”
RTD officials have countered critics by pointing out that the light rail’s on-time performance recovered this year to 91% or better. Bus on-time performance still lagged at 83% in July, agency records show.
The officials also pointed to decreased security reports made using an RTD smartphone app after deploying more police officers on buses and trains. The number of reported assaults has decreased — to four in September, compared with 16 in September 2024, records show.
Greater Denver Transit members acknowledged that safety has improved, but question the agency’s assertions based on app usage. “It may be true that the number of security calls went down,” Flattum said, “but maybe the people who otherwise would have made more safety calls are no longer riding RTD.”
RTD staffers developing the 2026 budget have focused on managing debt and maintaining operations spending at current levels. They’ve received forecasts that revenues from taxpayers will increase slightly. It’s unclear whether state and federal funds will be available.
RTD directors and leaders of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, an environmental group, are opposing the rollback of RTD’s planned shift to the cleaner, quieter electric hybrid buses and taking on new debt for that purpose.
Colorado lawmakers will “push on a bunch of different fronts” to prioritize better service to boost ridership, Froelich said.
The legislature in recent years directed funds to help RTD provide free transit for riders under age 20. Buses and trains running at least every 15 minutes would improve both ridership and safety, she said, because more riders would discourage bad behavior and riders wouldn’t have to wait alone at night on often-empty platforms for up to an hour.
“We’re trying to do what we can to get people back onto the transit system,” Froelich said. “They do it in other places, and people here do ride the Bustang (intercity bus system). RTD just seems to lack the nimbleness required to meet the moment.”
Denver Center for the Performing Arts stage hand Chris Grossman walks home after work in downtown Denver on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
Riders switch modes
Meanwhile, riders continue to abandon public transit when it doesn’t meet their needs.
For Denver Center for the Performing Arts theater technician Chris Grossman, 35, ditching RTD led to a better quality of life. He had to move from the Virginia Village neighborhood he loved.
Back in 2016, Grossman sold his ailing blue 2003 VW Golf when he moved there in the belief that “RTD light rail was more or less reliable.” He rode nearly every day between the Colorado Station and downtown.
But trains became erratic as maintenance of walls along tracks caused delays. “It just got so bad. I was burning so much money on rideshares that I probably could have bought a car.” Shortly before RTD announced the “slow zones” last summer, he moved to an apartment closer to downtown on Capitol Hill.
He walks or rides scooters to work, faster than taking the bus, he said.
Similarly, Honor Morgan, 25, who came to Denver from the rural Midwest, “grateful for any public transit,” said she had to move from her place east of downtown to be closer to her workplace due to RTD transit trouble.
Buses were late, and one blew by her as she waited. She had to adjust her attire when riding her Colfax Avenue route to Union Station to manage harassment. She faced regular dramas of riders with substance-use problems erupting.
Morgan moved to an apartment near Union Station in March, allowing her to walk to work.
She still hoped to rely on RTD for concerts and nightlife, and to reach DIA for work-related flights at least once a month. But RTD social media posts have alerted her to enough delays on the A Line that she no longer trusts it, she said. To reduce her “anxiety” and minimize the risk of missing her flights, she shells out for rides — even though these often get stuck in traffic.
She and her boyfriend recently tried RTD again, riding a train to the 38th and Blake Station near the Mission Ballroom. They attended “an amazing concert” there, she said, and felt happy as they walked to the station to catch the train home.
A man on the platform collapsed backward, hitting his head. He was bleeding. She called 911. Her boyfriend and other riders gathered. She ran across the street to an apartment building and grabbed paper towels. RTD isn’t really to blame, but “I just wish they had a station platform attendant, or someone. I do not know head-injury first aid,” Morgan said.
The train they’d been waiting for came and went. An ambulance arrived. They got home late, the evening ruined, she said.
“His head cracked open. He had skin flaps hanging off his head. This was stuck in my head, at least for the rest of the night.”
Colorado has a new law declaring nuclear power a source of clean energy. The Denver airport might explore building a small nuclear reactor to meet the rising demand for electricity. Local business, civic and labor leaders see nuclear energy as the fuel of choice when Xcel Energy stops burning coal at its power plants in Pueblo County,
Is nuclear power becoming cool in Colorado?
The state has had only one nuclear power plant, Fort St. Vrain near Platteville. And it was converted to natural gas in 1989 after 10 years of technical problems. The former Rocky Flats weapons plant, which produced plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs, drew thousands of protesters for years to the site north of Denver, including such prominent activists as Daniel Ellsberg and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
Worry about the demand for electricity outstripping capacity and concerns about progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions led state Rep. Alex Valdez, a Denver Democrat, to back legislation this year that defines nuclear power as “clean.” He sponsored House Bill 25-1040, which added nuclear to the energy sources that utilities can use to meet state clean energy targets.
“As a kid, I grew up in the ’80s when a lot of talk about nuclear was in relation to the weaponry that was pointed at each other between the Soviet Union and the United States,” Valdez said. “I think I just kind of lumped nuclear into the same conversations as most people do: around its negative uses, less desirable uses.”
With some forecasts showing electricity demand rising dramatically, Valdez said the U.S. will have to add “a tremendous amount of energy” to the grid if it’s going to compete in quantum computing and other advanced technology.
A boom in data center construction driven by increasing the use of artificial intelligence is expected to escalate the need for more electricity generation.
Valdez, who spent most of his career in the renewable energy field, said the legislation he sponsored recognizes that the power generated by nuclear energy is carbon-free. “As we move toward our path to zero-carbon (energy), it can be included in the mix to get us there.”
Not ready for prime time
A lot of the current interest in nuclear power revolves around a new technology: small modular nuclear reactors, about one-tenth to one quarter the size of a conventional reactor. They’re billed as potentially less expensive, safer, easier to build and adaptable because modules can be added as more power is needed.
The technology is also still in the development and demonstration stage. Just a few are operating in China and Russia. No small modular reactors –SMRs– are in commercial use in the U.S.
“SMRs aren’t ready for prime time,” said Dennis Wamsted, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “You will hear from developers and others about the advantages. The advantages right now are all on paper.”
The institute focuses on research into the economics of expanding the use of renewable energy.
“We are not fans of nuclear power because it costs too much and that cost has been consistently high over the years. We see no track record of it declining,” Wamsted said. “We certainly don’t see that happening with a new class of reactor that nobody’s built before and nobody’s run before.”
Noah Rott, a spokesman for the western region of the Sierra Club, said the environmental group feels that discussion around nuclear energy “is largely a distraction as utilities work to address electric load growth in the next decade.”
“Cleaner sources like wind, solar, demand response, energy efficiency and storage are the answer here,” Rott said in an email.
The airport put the study on hold after complaints that city officials hadn’t talked to area residents first. The airport determined that a broader scope will best serve its interests and needs and will issue a request for information later this fall on multiple clean energy solutions, including reactors, after first receiving ideas and input from the community, spokeswoman Courtney Law said in an email Wednesday.
Nuclear power generation is the top choice of a local advisory committee for replacing coal at Xcel Energy’s Comanche power plants near Pueblo. Xcel has proposed tapping renewable energy, battery storage and natural gas when it stops burning coal by 2031.
But the Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee, established by Xcel and community members, said renewable energy facilities wouldn’t provide the same number of jobs and tax revenue for local governments that nuclear or gas facilities would. The committee is promoting installing SMRs.
Xcel Energy operates nuclear facilities in Minnesota and has said they’re not off the table for Colorado, but the new type of reactors likely won’t be commercially available when the utility has to replace its coal plants.
The Western Governors Association, WGA, held workshops in September at the Idaho National Laboratory, which focuses largely on nuclear energy.
The workshops were part of an initiative by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called “Energy Superabundance: Unlocking Prosperity in the West.” Cox, the WGA’s chairman this year, said the country is looking to the West for ways to meet the surge in need for more electricity.
Andy Cross, The Denver Post
Some community leaders want to see nuclear power replace coal-fired power when Xcel Energy quits burning coal at the Comanche power plant in Pueblo County. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
Idaho Gov. Brad Little said during a workshop that the U.S. won’t meet its energy needs “with our legacy energy.”
“We’re going to have to have scalable, safe nuclear energy,” Little said.
While it could be five to 10 years before small reactors are up and running in the U.S., Mark Jensen, a chemistry professor at the Colorado School of Mines, said the federal government is more involved in promoting nuclear energy than in the recent past. He noted that the Department of Energy has opened federal sites to allow companies to test prototypes and that could help streamline development.
President Donald Trump has issued executive orders intended to invigorate the nuclear power industry and streamline regulations.
Jensen, director of the nuclear science and engineering program at the School of Mines, said more private money is flowing into nuclear projects than he has seen over the past 35 years.
Wind, solar the ‘workhorses’
Jack Waldorf, WGA executive director, said in an email that advancements in nuclear energy provide the opportunity to expand clean, reliable generation of electricity, but achieving true energy abundance will require a comprehensive approach.
Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement that Colorado has a history as an innovator and nuclear energy should be no different. ” As projects become cost competitive and safer, we should view nuclear energy not as a competing energy source to wind and solar, but as a complementary solution for better overall reliability and lower costs.”
Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, agreed. He said as Colorado moves to more deeply cut emissions, other technologies will be needed and nuclear energy should certainly be in the mix.
“It’s pretty clear that wind and solar will be the workhorses of the grid just looking at the cost modeling,” Toor said. “You can build them relatively quickly and they’re so much cheaper than other resources.”
He expects nuclear power to be in a group of what he calls “clean, firm” energy sources: ones that emit low or no greenhouse gases and provide round-the-clock power. Toor said geothermal energy is likely the furthest along among those sources.
“The challenge with nuclear is really still the same challenge that it has been for utilities, which is the cost, how long it takes to build and the uncertainties of federal permitting,” Toor said.
He added that he would be surprised if Colorado utilities moved ahead with conventional nuclear or “to be first in line for the first-of-its-kind” small modular reactor.
Almost one-third of the budget cuts and sweeps of unused money that Gov. Jared Polis used to close a $249 million budget hole will come from Medicaid, and providers are trying to figure out how much disruption that will cause for them and their patients.
About $79.2 million of the $252 million in cuts came from the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which runs Medicaid in the state. The list includes a mix of reductions in the rates paid to people who provide care, unused funds swept from specific programs and plans to review some care types more strictly before paying.
The largest cut, worth roughly $38.3 million, would roll back most of a 1.6% increase that most providers expected to get this year. Since providers received slightly higher rates in the first months of the fiscal year, it will work out to about a 0.4% increase, which is in line with recent years, the department said.
Denver Health estimated the rollback would cost the city’s safety-net hospital about $5 million. The health system isn’t planning any layoffs or service reductions, but could cut back on nonessential maintenance and technology updates, CEO Donna Lynne said. As it was, the increase only partially offset growth in costs in recent years, she said.
“We were already trying to absorb the difference between medical inflation and the 1.6%,” she said. The American Hospital Association estimated hospital costs rose about 5.1% in 2024.
The Colorado Hospital Association said its members were “disappointed” with the rollback, especially since they expect to lose Medicaid funding under provisions of H.R. 1 in 2027 and beyond. An unknown number of patients will lose Medicaid coverage due to new work requirements, and states won’t be able to draw down as much federal funding for hospitals because of limits on provider taxes.
“We recognize the tough choices required in this budget process, but reductions to provider rates — particularly alongside other health care cuts stemming from H.R. 1 — add to the challenges ahead,” the association said in a statement. “CHA and our members remain committed to working with the governor and legislators to identify solutions that protect health care funding and sustain access to care across Colorado.”
Dentists also will receive less for treating Medicaid patients than they anticipated, with about $2.5 million in reductions to planned increases. The Colorado Dental Association said it was waiting for details about which services would take cuts, and how deep they would go.
Other Medicaid cuts include:
$7 million from reviewing applied behavior analysis claims for improper billing. The therapy attempts to teach daily living skills to people with severe autism.
$6.1 million from requiring prior authorization for more than 24 psychotherapy visits in one year
$5.6 million that Colorado was going to spend to keep children covered by Medicaid until age 3. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revoked permission for the state to do that.
$4.4 million from a fund to raise pay in nursing homes above $15 per hour. The state’s minimum wage will be over $15 next year, making the fund largely irrelevant.
$3 million from reducing the “community connector” benefit to bring kids with disabilities into integrated settings
$3 million from reducing incentives for behavioral health care improvements
$2.7 million from benchmarking the state’s rate for applied behavior analysis for autism to 95% of the rate in comparable states
$1.7 million from requiring prior authorization to administer 17 or more drug tests to the same person in one year
$1.5 million from starting payments to small, rural and pediatric providers in January 2026 instead of July 2025
$1.5 million from reducing the rate paid to family caregivers for people with disabilities
$750,000 from reducing incentives to coordinate primary care
$500,000 in unused funding appropriated for family planning services to undocumented people
$500,000 from training for providers about screening patients for substance misuse and referring them to treatment
$131,000 in funding to advertise Cover All Coloradans, which offers Medicaid-like coverage to undocumented people
Americans are recoiling from the Democratic Party, and even in blue states like Colorado, Democrats are feeling the burn.
With Republicans fielding the best candidate for governor they’ve had in a decade – Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer – liberal politicians would be wise to address the root causes of this dissatisfaction publicly, frequently and head-on. The reality is that Americans are struggling — our politics are becoming more violent, everything is more expensive, and the job market is tightening.
After years of enjoying popularity, Colorado’s top Democrats are now showing a remarkable drop in their approval ratings among voters. President Donald Trump remains deeply unpopular in the state, but Gov. Jared Polis, Sen. Michael Bennet and Sen. John Hickenlooper are failing to break a 50% approval rating, meaning more of those asked than not said they were unhappy with the politicians’ work.
These results from a poll conducted in early August of 1,136 registered Colorado voters by Magellan Strategies mirror what we are seeing across the nation. Americans are dissatisfied.
According to a New York Times analysis of available voter registration numbers, the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters across the board and particularly in swing states. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is gaining voters after years of losses.
Part of the shift is voters simply changing their affiliation to unaffiliated, but the Magellan Poll clearly indicates that there is more afoot than voters just looking to participate in open primaries.
Magellan, a conservative-leaning Colorado firm, found that among voters who supported Kamala Harris in 2024, 47% have unfavorable opinions of the Democratic Party.
To be clear, voters who were polled still said they were more likely to support a Democrat for governor next year. Only 38% of those polled said they would likely support a Republican for governor. Kirkmeyer has an uphill battle to be certain, but her opponents are weakened.
We’d hazard a guess that the non-existent Democratic primary in 2023 to challenge a sitting president who was showing cognitive decline while in office is part of the reason voters are upset. It will take time for voters to forgive – and no one will ever forget – the disastrous presidential debate.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is doing slightly better with 44% of voters reporting disapproval of him, and U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper was at 49%.
Bennet is going to face Attorney General Phil Weiser in the Democratic Primary for governor. Weiser wasn’t included in the poll and neither were any of the Republican candidates.
The bottom line is that Democrats cannot spend this election talking about Donald Trump, and pretending that voters don’t have real concerns about the governance of both political parties. Voters may still put many or even most Democrats into office, but if the party wants to recover, its top leaders must start this election cycle with something more than fear and loathing.
Coloradans are concerned. The Magellan poll found that 54% of voters anticipate the economy will decline in the next 12 months (with more Democrats expressing this fear than Republicans), a pessimistic view that requires our politicians to articulate a plan for the worst-case scenario.
Similarly, 54% think Colorado is headed in the wrong direction (with more Republicans unhappy than Democrats), and the high cost of living, public safety, and homelessness were mentioned frequently by voters as top concerns, according to Magellan. These issues will only be harder to address given the decline in federal, state and local revenue sources. Our next governor will articulate a feasible plan.
Finally, Democrats will win safe seats in 2026 with their heads in the sand, but if the party wants to gain ground in swing districts, its politicians are going to have to step up to the challenge at hand – restoring faith in and favorability of the party. Can that be done without rehashing the many missteps of the past four years? We would like to see elected officials be accountable and transparent.
But Colorado must move forward, as must the nation.
If Democrats want to stop losing ground, they’ve got to appeal to voters as far more than an alternative to Trump.
And that of the Broncos’ last 15 postseason games in Denver, eight of them — per Pro-Football-Reference.com — were played in temperatures 37 degrees or warmer? The last five Empower Field playoff temps: 43, 46, 40, 41, 63.
Snow down, Broncomaniacs.
Denver won’t just be playing in Super Bowls over the next decade.
We’ll be hosting them.
“The Broncos have been, since Day 1 of the franchise, an important fabric and part of the community in Denver,” Broncos CEO Greg Penner told The Denver Post’s Parker Gabriel in an exclusive interview. “Finding a site of that size that we could weave into the downtown area and all that just was incredibly unique, combined with the historic nature of the site. …
“We have the bones of the old railyard and a couple of buildings and a unique site that we think enables us to create something unique and special, both with the stadium and the mixed-use development around it.”
The Walton-Penner Group just raised the roof without raising taxes. Despite overtures from Lone Tree and Aurora, they’re keeping the Broncos in Denver. Where they belong.
In other words, Penner and his wife Carrie Walton-Penner read the room the way Peyton Manning read defenses at the line of scrimmage.
“We’re really thrilled that they came with that partnership mentality and not, like we’ve seen in other cities, ‘You give us a bunch of money or we’ll leave,’” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis told The Post. “I think the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group is deeply committed to Denver and deeply committed to the community.”
Not anymore. You want a venue with 60,000-plus seats that can host Taylor Swift in March or April? Check. You want a venue where football fans can still feel the elements on an autumn gameday? Got that, too. Open that bad boy up and let the Colorado sunshine in.
We don’t need the cool kids on the coasts to tell us Denver is the best darn sports city in America. But building a multi-purpose stadium at Burnham Yard gives the Front Range many more chances to prove it — and on the largest stages imaginable.
New Orleans officials recently estimated that Super Bowl LIX was worth more than $1.25 billion in economic impact to the Crescent City. San Antonio boasted an economic bump of $440 million from hosting the Men’s Basketball Final Four this past April.
You wouldn’t want a piece of that?
The Penners do. And thank goodness.
“The goal is to create something that is active on gameday,” Penner stressed to The Post, “but also (for) the rest of the year.”
There’s nothing wrong with Empower Field, which opened in 2001. There’s nothing all that right about it, either, at least from a real estate purview. Even the best ideas, like the best concrete, get weathered by time.
Pro sports owners are playing a different level of Monopoly than they were three decades ago. It’s not just about owning Tennessee Avenue anymore. It’s about gobbling up St. James Place and New York Avenue next door, then making sure a row of strip malls, restaurants and hotels get built on top of them. Collect the rent, funnel some of that money to Bo Nix and Nik Bonitto, pass GO, collect $200. Rinse. Repeat.
Stadiums are so expensive to build that a single-use facility, especially one available for 12-20 dates a year instead of 50-60, isn’t cost-effective. The land around Empower Field is owned by the Metropolitan Football Stadium District. Whatever’s built at Burnham Yard will be owned by the Walton-Penner Group and designed with a neighborhood in mind, not just the stadium itself.
Oh, there will be bumps. That’s inevitable. The city’s slated to foot the bill for public improvements related to connectivity to the stadium — exit ramps, roads, RTD, etc. And Tuesday’s announcements didn’t mention Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs) — a one-time fee paid by fans for the “right” to buy a seat.
If there’s a cloud rolling in behind all those rainbows, it’s that. PSLs seem inevitable here, too — a survey the Broncos sent to fans in 2023 included that very subject.
Would a Super Bowl be worth that? Everyone who let hosting a World Cup slip away from soccer-mad Denver in 2026 should land a red card for life. With this new district, hopefully, it won’t happen again.
Five years down the line, who knows? In 2020, as a franchise, the Broncos looked listless and lost — a sleeping giant resting on the laurels of orange-and-blue bloods everywhere.
The Walton-Penner ownership group woke everybody up. The beast is taking names now. It’s buying up land. It’s drawing castles in the sky.
For what it’s worth, Penner sounds as if he wants to keep the lid off as much as possible. And for as many Broncos games as feasible. He gets it. All of it.
“We wanted something that is true to our roots here and looked at domed stadiums,” Penner told The Post. “But (we) just thought that wouldn’t enable us to take advantage of Colorado sunsets and Mile High views and playing in the elements if we choose to.”
Give the Penners an inch, they’ll take a Yard. All the way to the bank.
More than $250 million down, another $530 million to go.
That’s how much of a projected $783 million state budget hole the Colorado legislature filled by the time a special session called to address the impact of the federal tax bill ended Tuesday afternoon — and the larger amount that still remains. Erasing the rest of the red ink will fall to Gov. Jared Polis, who plans to rebalance this year’s budget in the coming days through a mix of cuts to state funding and a big dip into the rainy-day fund.
Over six days, the legislature’s majority Democrats fulfilled their part of a plan worked out with the governor’s office: to pass legislation that is expected to generate enough revenue to close about a third of the shortfall projected for the state’s budget in the current fiscal year, which began July 1. They ended tax breaks and found other ways to offset declining state income tax revenue, while leaving spending cuts largely for Polis to decide.
“What we did here in this special session is soften the blow,” said Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat who chairs the legislature’s budget committee. “But when the federal government cuts $1.2 billion in revenue from the state with a stroke of a pen, after we’ve already cut $1.2 billion (from the budget) in the regular session, that’s a tough deficit to come back from in a way that doesn’t impact the people of Colorado.”
The special session ended with 11 bills going to Polis for final approval. Five sought to fill the budget gap, largely by ending tax incentives for businesses and high-income earners.
The single largest revenue-raising measure, House Bill 1004, will auction off tax credits that can be claimed in future tax years for a discount. Backers expected that bill to bring in an additional $100 million to state coffers this year, at the expense of about $125 million in future years.
Together, those measures add up to $253 million in revenue to reduce the projected deficit — money that Democrats say represents averted cuts to Medicaid, schools and hospitals.
“Colorado legislators stepped up and helped protect children’s food access and minimized the devastating cost increases to health insurance premiums across the state, to the best of our ability,” Polis, who signed two of the new bills earlier Tuesday, said in a statement.
The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee expects to meet Thursday to hear Polis’ plan to address the remaining $500 million or so, including mid-year spending cuts.
As part of his call for a special session on Aug. 6, Polis announced a statewide hiring freeze. He said in an interview before the session started that he hoped to avoid cuts to K-12 education, but he has left all other options on the table, including Medicaid program spending.
The plan also factors in a significant use of reserves to offset some of the remaining gap.
Partisan debates
Over the past week, Republicans fought the Democrats’ bills, but strong Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers all but preordained the outcome.
“Not only did we increase taxes, we’re balancing the budget on the back of small businesses,” said Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican on the budget committee.
One of the bills heading to Polis would erase a fee paid by the state to businesses for collecting sales taxes — an outdated subsidy, according to Democrats, and an unnecessary new burden now put on businesses, according to Republicans.
Republicans said before the session that they’d likely challenge several bills in court over allegations that they violate provisions in the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights that require voter approval for tax increases. Kirkmeyer and Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican who’s also on the budget committee, said bills going to the governor that would eliminate some tax credits and allow the sale of tax credits against future collections seemed particularly vulnerable to a challenge under TABOR.
Debate throughout the special session took a distinctly partisan edge. Democrats laid the cuts on congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump and called the federal tax bill a de facto theft of benefits from the poorest Coloradans to benefit the wealthiest.
Republicans countered that the federal bill delivered much-needed tax cuts, and they said Democrats sought to yank those away instead of cutting partisan priorities.
Legislators begin to gather in the Senate Chambers before the start of another day of the special legislative session at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver on Aug. 26, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
Bills on wolves, artificial intelligence
Other bills passed sought to respond to different aspects of the federal bill, formerly known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” as well as other priorities.
Lawmakers stripped general fund money away from the voter-approved program to reintroduce wolves in the state, though releases are expected to continue this winter. They tweaked ballot language for a measure about taxes for universal school meals to allow that money to go to general food assistance, as well, if voters approve it in November.
The legislature also approved a bill allowing state Medicaid program to pay Planned Parenthood for services provided, after the federal government specifically barred federal money from going to the organization.
Polis included in his call of the session that lawmakers address concerns swirling around the state’s first-in-the-nation regulations of artificial intelligence after a similar effort in the spring blew up. The rules now in law go into effect in February.
After days of bruising negotiations, lawmakers punted on any new changes and delayed the existing rules from going into effect until the end of June — giving them time to resume the debate during the next regular legislative session in January.
