Southwest Colorado’s voice has gone unheard in Denver. Naomi Riess is running to change it.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

The men’s room door was locked. The man inside wasn’t responding. Naomi Riess’s daughter-in-law — who works for the sheriff at the jail — had already recognized him when he walked in. She’d been watching. She called 911 and tried to find the key. Nobody knew where it was.

When police arrived, they broke the door down and found him ODing on the floor inside a fentanyl cloud. The first two officers through both had to be Narcanned — one passed out immediately. Her daughter-in-law was third in line. She didn’t need Narcan but went to the hospital for a full body detox of her clothing and her body. She had no voice for four days.

The man was taken to the hospital and released. It was the weekend and police couldn’t reach a judge for a warrant. Monday, they got the warrant, found him and arrested him. Then he was released on a personal recognizance bond.

“I take that really personally,” Riess said. “My future grandchildren are inside her body.”

Riess asked local district attorneys about the bond. Their answer: their hands are tied. Personal recognizance bonds for repeat offenders are a state-level mandate, not a local call.

That’s part of what brought Riess to file as a Republican for Colorado House District 59, currently held by Democrat Katie Stewart, who won it in November 2024 by roughly three points.

Riess believes the current approach addresses symptoms rather than supply and demand. “Tackling the drug supply and the demand both need to happen in a way that is much more aggressive,” she said. 

She wants stronger sentencing for violent offenders and tighter bond standards for repeat criminals. She calls what’s happening now a loophole — one that keeps cycling the same people back to the same streets. Closing it, she says, starts at the state level. 

Who she is before she’s a candidate

Thirty-five years ago Riess came to Southwest Colorado from New England as a young adult. She took a job with a local developer and spent years getting his projects through county permitting, including one of the larger subdivisions in La Plata County history. While still working for him she started taking on her own clients and eventually built a land use consulting business that has guided hundreds of projects through approval at the county, state and federal level. Her approval rate, she says, is 99 percent.

Along the way she owned two small restaurants, learned quickly that it’s a hard way to make a living and kept her focus on land use. When the real estate market collapsed after 2008 she became a certified divorce mediator, specializing in co-parenting plans for families with children. 

She led her neighborhood’s district planning group, spent 15 years on the La Plata County Historic Preservation Review Commission and drove field operations for all three rounds of the 2020 Census across La Plata, Archuleta and parts of Montezuma County — back roads she hadn’t seen before, communities she hadn’t met. She loved it.

She was a registered Democrat for her first 15 years here. She left the party more than 20 years ago.

She calls her campaign platform ‘healthy communities’ — a frame she says ties everything together. In her view, a healthy community starts with a strong local economy, safe streets, attainable housing, accessible healthcare and schools that prepare kids to earn a living without leaving Southwest Colorado to do it. 

It’s also the argument she believes can reach voters who wouldn’t normally consider a Republican.

Unaffiliated voters outnumber both parties combined in La Plata County. As of May 2025 the county had 23,276 registered unaffiliated voters against 10,336 Democrats and 9,782 Republicans. In a district decided by three points, those voters aren’t a demographic. They’re the election.

What the permit actually costs

Clients come to Riess wanting to do something simple — split off a couple of lots, build on a parcel with water, road access and legal frontage. They often don’t know what’s coming. Tens of thousands in fees and delays, a process that can bend a project so far from the original vision that people walk away entirely.

One fix she’s identified involves what she calls remainder lots — parcels under 35 acres created inadvertently between subdivisions, never platted. A 1972 state law left them unbuildable. They remain so today, common across the district and worth nothing on the market.

“If we figured out a way to legalize them easily,” she said, “that would open up all of these extra lots that currently have no value and could become perfectly attainably priced legal lots.”

She’d also push to base zoning compatibility on use and neighborhood benefit rather than parcel size, a metric she argues drives sprawl and inflates costs across rural Colorado.

Where she’d cut — and what she wouldn’t touch

The lawmakers closed a roughly $1.5 billion shortfall this session through Medicaid cuts and one-time cash transfers. Riess thinks they cut too deep in the wrong places.

She’d target the Wolf Reintroduction Program, which cost taxpayers about $3.5 million last year — far above the roughly $800,000 a year state fiscal analysts had projected. She’d eliminate programs like the Colorado Office of Financial Empowerment — new spending without demonstrated outcomes. 

She supports reexamining Medicaid coverage for undocumented adults, with a firm exception: “All children, whether their parents brought them here illegally or not, all children should be educated and should be healthy.”

Her position on Medicaid carries personal weight. When her mother suffered a stroke in 2019 Riess moved her from Massachusetts to Durango. The family spent down her mother’s teacher’s pension on care. Once exhausted, her mother qualified for CDAS — Colorado’s Medicaid-funded home care benefit — which paid for part-time in-home caregivers so Riess could keep working. Her mother stayed home for over four years before her medical needs required skilled care.

“I was very appreciative of that system,” Riess said. “I sure hope that other people who are in that system are also receiving that financial relief.”

She thinks the JBC cut it “a little too heavily” and that it carries real waste. She holds both positions at once — because for her, they’re not contradictory.

What accountability looks like in practice

Durango’s 9R district passed two bond measures. The first, for a new elementary school south of Durango, is proceeding as voters were told. The second, for workforce housing, is where Riess sees a breakdown.

The district moved to purchase an existing apartment complex that already housed families. Moving those families out in a market where rentals under $3,000 a month are nearly impossible to find was not, she argues, what voters understood they were approving. Once the school district takes ownership the property leaves the tax rolls. Services still have to be provided. Remaining units could be rented at market rate. None of that was prohibited in the ballot language.

“You cannot provide affordable housing without any sort of tax revenue coming in without negatively impacting the other taxpayers,” she said.

Beyond housing, Riess sees accountability failures inside classrooms as well. Riess says there is “an epidemic of kids being medicated because they’re not fitting in to the school model instead of their needs being met in a way that doesn’t require medication.” Colorado does not treat dyslexia as its own special education category — it falls under the broader ‘specific learning disability’ label — and Riess argues that as a result, students with dyslexia often get diagnosed with ADHD and steered toward medication instead. 

At the same time broadly written “eligible student” definitions in recent state legislation are, in her view, pulling special education resources toward gender transition support and away from students with physical disabilities who need them.

The math and the ask

Katie Stewart carried La Plata County by nearly 13 points in 2024. Clark Craig, the 2024 Republican nominee who has since endorsed Riess, won Archuleta and Montezuma but couldn’t overcome the deficit. 

Neither faces a primary. It’s Riess and Stewart, head to head, in November.

To reach more voters, Riess has contacted the leader of Durango’s local Indivisible chapter to ask if she can speak to the group. She expects to know at least half the room.

“Maybe I coached your child in soccer,” she said. “Maybe I was your La Leche League leader when you had your first child. Maybe I helped them mediate. I can go on and on.”

She was a Democrat in this community for 15 years, a mediator for families in crisis, a census worker on back roads most candidates have never seen. The healthy communities frame she’s built her campaign around isn’t a slogan — it’s a case that 35 years of showing up translates into results in Denver. 

The unaffiliated voters in La Plata County will decide whether that’s enough to flip a seat that came down to three points last election.

Voters can learn more about Riess’s campaign at riessforcolorado.com.