By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project
Following up on Community Eviction Defense Project
Update as of 6am on 6/8/26: This post was updated to change the statement that CEDP offered per their request this morning.
After writing a deep dive on the Community Eviction Defense Project (CEDP), see the first link below, I had a reader mention something on Twitter that I thought worthy of a follow-up.
At about the same time, I heard back on an email I’d sent to the Eviction Legal Defense Fund regarding their grants to CEDP (the Fund being a major source of revenue for them).
I’ll cover both in this post, starting with the video from Twitter.
The second link below is to a Twitter account that shared a video of testimony before the Denver City Council.
The woman, whose account is linked third below, is a landlord of the size she characterizes as “mom and pop,” owning a few small apartment buildings.
In her testimony she makes a number of rather serious claims about CEDP, which I will leave it to you to watch and hear. In the interest of fairness, I shared this video with CEDP’s media person and offered them a chance to respond and/or refute.
Their spokesperson provided the following statement:
“CEDP does everything in its power to address health and safety concerns. We escalated Ms. Eisenstein’s documented complaints within hours of receiving them. However, despite repeated requests over several weeks, we did not receive the videos and drug test results needed to escalate the matter to the appropriate state agencies. This was a difficult situation for everyone involved – the residents at 1300 Adams, the landlords, and CEDP – and our team could have moved more quickly to support residents if Ms. Eisenstein had engaged with us in good faith.”
Watch/read both and come to your own conclusions on the allegations.
Outside of allegations made by either party, one thing is clear here. Both seem to confirm it. CEDP not only helps place tenants, they are there to defend them against eviction. This struck me as untoward. They place people, act as a representative, then use taxpayer money to defend them against eviction. Like with much of what I see in the nonprofit sphere, not illegal, but not entirely upright either. Swampy. Liable to abuse.
That brings us to the second update. A natural question about CEDP and others who receive government money is whether or not they’re audited; i.e. how strong is the oversight?
In the earlier newsletter, I mentioned that the data going in the Eviction Legal Defense Fund’s 2024 statutorily-mandated report was self-reported. I reached out to the Fund to ask whether or not any independent checking went on.
Specifically, I asked (quoting from my email):
“In reading the 2024 report, I noticed that much of the reporting by grantees seems to have been self-reports. I didn’t see any mention of audits or oversight in the sense of independent monitoring. Can you double check me on that: What kinds of oversight did grantees get? Was it self-reporting? Were any independent checks done by your division or anyone else?”
The response I got from the Fund was the following (again, quoting from their reply):
“The statute for the Eviction Legal Defense Fund contemplates self-reporting by organizations and does not specify any requirement for audit or verification. That said, we do a baseline comparison of the information from year-to-year, and if significant changes come to our attention, we will outreach the organization in an effort to obtain additional information that may help expand on those changes.”
In other words, no. There is no independent oversight. Nor was any required by the state law that created the Fund in the first place.
That latter has me wondering about state laws and how many other grant programs do not specifically require audits (thus making it unlikely that they’d happen). Something I will start watching for in the wording of laws from now on.
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/from-the-covid-19-eviction-defense
https://twitter.com/i/connect_people?user_id=1988964948949753856
READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
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