By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Tom Harrington manages a 500-cow operation on the Crystal River Ranch, two miles from the town of Carbondale on a mesa west of town.
He grew up in Ridgway.
A friend sent him some papers from the North Park area of Walden showing the school news, a note from the old folks’ home and local ads. “I looked through these papers and I thought, man, this is like the 70s in Ridgway,” he said. Those things have disappeared from the Carbondale he lives in now. “They’ve certainly left here.”
He has also watched the valley floor transform in his 18 years on the ranch, hayfields replaced by a shopping complex and apartment buildings, the quiet gone with it. “Once things are paved over,” he said, “they never come back.”
What has also changed, for Harrington and for Mesa County Board Chairman JJ Fletcher, is who makes the decisions that shape their lives. In their experience, it is rarely anyone who has read a paper like that one from Walden, lost a calf to wolves or waited for a sheriff’s deputy on a dark ranch road.
The vote that doesn’t count
Forty-one of Colorado’s 64 counties have more registered Republicans than Democrats, voter registration data shows.
Colorado Politics found, under the maps that took effect in 2022, that rural lawmakers hold just 17 of the legislature’s 100 seats. Democrats hold 66. The seven-county Denver metro — Denver, Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Douglas, and Jefferson — holds 55.7 percent of the state’s population and produces a 271,430-voter Democrat edge that by itself erases the 173,269-voter Republican advantage across the other 57 counties.
What that means in practice is that rural Colorado has two avenues when the legislature does not represent it: ballot initiatives and the congressional seat. Both are now under pressure from the same demographic weight.
In Colorado, the ballot initiative runs on the same math. Rural and rural resort counties hold 13.7 percent of the state’s active voters. The 28 urban-only Senate districts contain enough registered voters to provide the required 124,238 signatures to qualify any statutory ballot initiative without a single signature from rural Colorado.
The geographic protection built into the process is not a protection. For constitutional amendments, a 2 percent per-district rule exists, but the minimum is low enough for a well-funded campaign to clear in every district.
There are zero purely rural Senate districts in Colorado. Every rural area is packaged into a larger mixed district.
What the ballot decides
Proposition 114 is one example of how rural Colorado gets outvoted. Voters approved wolf reintroduction 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent in 2020.
The margin was 56,986 votes.
Denver County voted 66 percent in favor. Boulder County voted 68 percent in favor. Only five of the 22 counties west of the Continental Divide supported it. Thirty-nine of the state’s 64 counties had passed formal resolutions opposing the measure before the election.
The fiscal note estimated ongoing program costs at approximately $800,000 per year. The program cost $3.5 million in fiscal year 2024-25, the most recent year reported.
CPW’s 2025-2026 annual report confirmed 43 livestock depredations during the most recent biological year: 19 cattle, 23 sheep, one working dog. CPW paid $43,275 in direct loss compensation. It approved $709,629 in compensation for indirect losses including missing livestock, reduced pregnancy rates and lower weaning weights.
Wolves were placed on state and private land, not federal land, because of the time and cost of federal environmental review.
Harrington’s Crystal River Ranch sits roughly 15 miles from where the Copper Creek wolves were released near Snowmass. On Memorial Day, a yearling from the Copper Creek Pack crossed onto the ranch and killed a calf, injuring another. CPW confirmed the kill.
Looking at statewide claims history, he said, indirect losses outweigh what CPW pays for confirmed kills. “The indirect losses of pregnancy loss, setback of pregnancies, weaning weight reductions,” he said, “those are considerably larger than the direct losses of animals that were confirmed as a wolf kill.”
He was asked whether anyone in Denver had been thinking about what the vote would mean for a rancher like him. “Not in the least,” he said. “Not even remotely.”
What the legislature passes
In April 2025, Gov. Jared Polis signed SB25-003, which requires Colorado residents to complete a sheriff-administered eligibility process and between four and 12 hours of firearms safety training before purchasing certain semiautomatic firearms. The bill passed the Senate 19-15 and the House 36-28. Every Republican present voted no.
Harrington said most young people raised in rural Colorado already handle firearms safely. He stated that hunter education covers it before high school. “And then it puts a lot of more weight on the CPW,” he said. “They have enough on their plate right now.”
Mesa County Sheriff Todd Rowell testified in committee carrying the opposition of the County Sheriffs of Colorado. “We’re a county of over 3,300 square miles,” he said. “Law enforcement response can take up to an hour in some locations. I don’t expect my community members to wait for law enforcement to arrive should they need to protect themselves.”
He also flagged an unfunded mandate. Sheriff’s offices must conduct background checks and verify every instructor in their county, at an estimated cost of more than $350,000 the first year.
Mesa County has documented more than $8 million in annual unfunded state mandates on its Fix It or Fund It page, costs the legislature imposes on counties without providing money to cover them. The page lists mandates department by department, from the District Attorney’s office to the Sheriff.
In 2019, the legislature passed HB19-1261, setting statewide greenhouse gas reduction targets of 26 percent by 2025, 50 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050.
Craig Station Unit 1 in Moffat County was set to close December 31, 2025.
On December 30, the U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order keeping it open under the Federal Power Act, citing an energy shortage in the regional grid.
The replacement generation was not in place. Fletcher stated, “We don’t have any generation stations in Mesa County, Montrose Delta, like we used to. So if something were to happen and we’re relying on power from the front range or west of us, we have a lot of uncertainty of how we’re going to have energy reliability within our communities.”
Fletcher said the Palisade area had seen rolling brownouts the past two years.
In August 2024, a power outage struck Palisade during the annual Peach Festival. More than 2,000 residents lost power. Charlie Talbott, a partner at Talbott Farms, the largest peach producer in the state, said the farm was exposed. “If we have a loss of refrigeration for any length of time, now we stand the chance to have a dire economic impact and loss of marketable fruit,” Talbott said.
Then there is what Harrington named without being asked — the issues that never arrive at the Capitol at all.
Water rights. Private property access. Corner crossing. Stream access. “There’s so many things out there that, legislatively, I think most of the people in Carbondale wouldn’t have a clue,” he said. “There’s a lot of traffic, a lot of people that have no clue which end of a cow gets up first. And yet they’re making decisions about things that affect us in our daily lives.”
The last seat
CD-3, the Western Slope’s congressional seat, is the region’s federal vote on grazing permits, water compacts, public lands, and oil and gas regulation.
A ballot initiative backed by Coloradans for a Level Playing Field — an out-of-state-funded committee launched the same month Hakeem Jeffries publicly named Colorado as a redistricting target — sought to redraw it for 2028 and 2030.
The Colorado Sun reported the northwest corner of the district, including Moffat and Rio Blanco counties, would have shifted into Rep. Joe Neguse’s Front Range district, with the rest of CD-3 redrawn into a competitive-to-Democrat seat.
The Colorado Supreme Court struck down the effort on June 29, ruling unanimously that Initiatives 241, 242, and 328 each violated the state’s single subject requirement by making their effectiveness contingent on each other’s passage.
The court’s ruling ends this attempt. It does not end the dynamic that produced it.
An out-of-state-funded committee was prepared to put the Western Slope’s only congressional seat before a metro-majority electorate, and the only thing that stopped it was a technical defect in how the measures were drafted — not a recognition that rural Colorado might lose its sole federal vote on grazing permits, water compacts, and public lands.
Fletcher had already considered what losing that seat would mean for Mesa County. “It becomes a pretty difficult situation as far as not having that representative within Mesa County,” he said. “I guess we’d have to depend on lobbying efforts and more voice from our county commissioners.”
Asked what he’d worry about losing without it, Harrington said, “Things that just matter to us. I think they’re going to get lost.”
The legislature does not have to consider them. The ballot initiative does not require their signatures. And now even a seat the Constitution gives them was just one redrafted petition away from a statewide vote they could not have won.