By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Erik Holt read the opinion the morning it came down on July 7 at 9 a.m. Three federal judges had decided that when the former Florissant fire chief handed election surveillance footage to a criminal investigator examining alleged misconduct in the board’s election, he was doing his job, not speaking as a citizen.
That single finding ended his case. It meant the federal courts would never reach whether the board fired him in retaliation.
He wrote the last chapter of his book that day. He submitted it for publishing the next.
“I used the very First Amendment that the court said I didn’t have to publish a book and tell my story,” Holt said.
RMV has followed Holt’s case since November 2025, in reports on the surveillance footage and dismissed complaint, on the uncertified board transition that preceded his firing, and on his federal appeal this spring.
The Tenth Circuit’s ruling closes the federal chapter of a three-year fight. What it leaves open is a question Holt now wants state lawmakers to answer.
When a local government employee reports what he believes is wrongdoing and gets fired for it, what protects him?
In Colorado, if he works for a special district, very little does.
What the court decided, and what it didn’t
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed summary judgment against Holt on July 7. The decision came from Judges Timothy Tymkovich, Michael Murphy and Robert Bacharach, with Murphy writing.
It is an unpublished order, meaning it sets no binding precedent.
The court ruled on one question and stopped there. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos, a public employee’s speech is protected only if he speaks as a private citizen, not as part of his official duties.
The panel found Holt’s cooperation with the district attorney’s investigator fell within his duties as fire chief. Because that first step went against him, the court never reached the rest, including whether the board’s stated reason for firing him was a pretext.
Murphy, writing the opinion, said Holt’s speech was “an exercise of the very job duties he was hired to perform.” He was referring to Holt meeting with investigator Clint Kramer at the fire house, providing surveillance video only he could access, and answering logistical questions about the building he managed.
Holt disputes that characterization. He says he reviewed more than 40 hours of footage on his own time, off duty, and took what he found to law enforcement on his own initiative.
The panel said those details were not established in the record before it.
It found that Kramer contacted Holt seeking the footage and that Holt managed the station’s surveillance system as fire chief.
At oral argument, the district’s attorney told the judges that Holt’s assertions about acting on his own time and buying the storage device himself appeared for the first time in his appellate briefing, and Holt’s own appellate counsel acknowledged the payment detail was not in the record.
“In the eyes of a court, cooperating with an investigation against your own bosses is an administrative task,” he said. “I mean, what a manipulation that is.”
The panel called the record on the duties question exceedingly thin. It also noted that Holt’s pro se opening brief did not cite the appellate record, though it ultimately weighed the merits using citations he supplied in his reply.
Holt says the framing was unfair, because the reason the record was thin is that his case was thrown out on summary judgment before he could build one.
“They called my record exceedingly thin as some sort of hamstringing that they couldn’t determine the facts,” he said. “Well, that is the very essence of why the Seventh Amendment allows us — jury by trial and developing a record.”
The case his own lawyers cited
Much of Holt’s frustration comes back to a case called Timmins v. Plotkin.
The Tenth Circuit decided Timmins on Nov. 3, 2025, after the briefs in Holt’s appeal were already filed.
In that case, the general counsel of a sanitation district was fired after reporting board misconduct to the press and to private citizens. The district court held she had spoken as part of her job. The Tenth Circuit reversed, finding a jury could see her as a private citizen.
Holt’s attorneys thought it fit his situation almost exactly.
On Nov. 19, 2025, Mountain States Legal Foundation attorney James Kerwin filed a notice of supplemental authority telling the court about Timmins. The filing called the case “essentially controlling” and argued that just as the Timmins plaintiff went outside her chain of command to an external audience, Holt went outside his to report to the district attorney.
At oral argument in March, the district’s attorney was asked about Timmins by the panel. According to the court’s recording of the argument, she told the judges she was not familiar with the case and had not seen it cited.
Then the panel relied on Timmins in its July opinion, in part for the point that Holt carried the burden of proof. The case his side had flagged as its strongest authority became part of why he lost.
“This is where I think the judges lose all credibility,” Holt said. “And that’s very strong wording, and I understand that. However, that is the specific case that if you listen to the oral arguments, the defense attorney says, ‘I can’t even recall what that case is, Your Honors.'”
The record the court would not look at
Before the appeal, Holt asked the court to take judicial notice of the district attorney’s investigation file. The court declined, because the file was not part of the district-court record.
RMV’s earlier reporting laid out what that file contains.
Kramer wrote that the footage showed what he called clear violations of Colorado’s Rule 8 on electioneering near polling places. A second investigator measured distances and enhanced audio.
The Teller County district attorney’s office reviewed the findings and, on Aug. 1, 2023, declined to file charges. A separate election challenge filed by the outgoing board president was dismissed earlier that summer after the required bond went unposted. No one was charged.
Holt argues the file was exactly the kind of record a court should have wanted.
“You can’t call a district attorney’s file something that is subjective,” he said. “It’s objective by fact because it’s a government entity investigating criminal actions, and yet they didn’t see enough value in it to admit even that it existed.”
No path left in federal court
Holt is not appealing further. He says Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represented him at the Tenth Circuit after he initially briefed the appeal pro se, evaluated the ruling and told him it saw no viable route to rehearing or the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a statement the day of the decision, the foundation said it was disappointed and respectfully disagreed, arguing the case was about whether public employees can speak candidly with law enforcement about potential government misconduct without fear of retaliation.
“When I have a constitutional law firm say that they can’t find a path for me as a pro se litigant, I mean, it’s just out of my ability,” he said.
He believes his lack of a lawyer during the briefing hurt him.
“I was penalized by the court panel for being pro se, which is a shame,” he said. “My entire court case became less about the arguments and the facts than who was arguing what.”
One case remains. Holt says he still has a claim in Colorado state court, where he is now up against the Colorado Governmental Immunity Act, a law that shields government entities from many lawsuits.
The gap he wants lawmakers to close
The through-line of everything Holt is doing now, the book, the white paper he has been circulating, the state case, is a gap in Colorado law he did not know existed until he fell into it.
Colorado’s State Employee Protection Act shields state employees who report agency wrongdoing, and a separate statute covers employees of state contractors.
Neither, by its terms, reaches a special district, the kind of local taxing body that runs fire protection, water and sanitation across Colorado.
Colorado has added other whistleblower protections aimed at particular classes of employee, including peace officers in 2025 and jail staff reporting sexual abuse in 2026.
Holt says none of it reaches a special-district fire chief in his situation.
“If you’re a state employee, you have whistleblower protections,” Holt said. “But me as a special district employee, no protections exist.”
He wants that changed, and he is asking lawmakers directly.
“Somebody needs to help me sponsor a bill and get it passed, where if you’re exposing corruption in our local state governments, there’s protections in place for you to be able to do that,” he said. “Because it’s in all of our interests.”
So far his access is limited. He says he spoke with Rep. Scott Bottoms, who is leaving office after this term and offered to pass him along to the Republican candidate running for the seat. In the coming week, Holt says, he plans to send his white paper and his proposal to Republican candidates across the state.
“I’m going to just flood every GOP candidate in the state of Colorado and say, here’s what we need,” he said.
The book
The book is titled Free Speech, Retaliation, and the Cost of Integrity. Holt says he worked on it for about a year and submitted it for publication on July 8, the day after the ruling. It is for sale on Amazon, which lists a July 9 release, and available in signed copies through his website.
He says it is less about the litigation than about the choice underneath it. When the board election happened and the footage came to him, he was a single father raising two daughters.
The book, he said, is about being a person of moral character, unwavering in his commitment to what it means to be an American citizen. He wrote it, he said, as a single father raising two daughters when the firing happened, with “two future citizens of this country watching my every move.”
Three years on, Holt says he has rebuilt. He also says he is not finished.
“The last three years have been rebuilding a life that I should have never lost, but I am blessed,” he said. “But the fight is not over or even close to over until the change that needs to happen is achieved.”
The federal courts are done with Erik Holt.
Whether the Colorado legislature takes up the question the courts left behind is now up to lawmakers, and to a former fire chief with a book, a white paper and a list of candidates to email.