Colorado spent 9 years on crime prevention grants and still can’t say if they worked 

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

State reviewers set out this year to answer a question they say the General Assembly raised back in 2021. Had the Justice Reinvestment Crime Prevention Initiative worked?

The answer came back Oct. 15. Nobody can tell.

The sunset review from the Colorado Office of Policy, Research and Regulatory Reform runs 59 pages. Its central finding sits on page 35.

Nine years after the program was created, “it is not clear whether the Initiative has been successful in increasing public safety.”

The recommendation that follows is to continue it five more years, until 2032, so there may be enough data by then to answer.

What the money buys

The initiative was created in 2017 under HB17-1326 and started in North Aurora and Southeast Colorado Springs. HB21-1215 added Grand Junction and Trinidad four years later.

It has two halves. One hands out grants to nonprofits, schools and local governments. The other makes small business loans, capped at $50,000 under state law.

The Department of Local Affairs does not run either one directly. It contracts administration to The Denver Foundation, the Latino Coalition for Community Leadership and the Trinidad Community Foundation, plus three community development lenders.

Approval stays with the state. DOLA signs off on the loans, and grant awards need the Office of State Planning and Budgeting too.

Appropriations have run between $2 million and $4 million a year. In FY24-25 the General Assembly put in $3 million.

DOLA’s own cost to oversee all of it that year was $37,371 and 0.30 of a full-time position.

The grant administrators recovered $429,454 in administrative costs the same year, and $547,277 the year before. Statute caps those at 8 percent of the appropriation for a community foundation and 15 percent for a third-party administrator.

The review notes the costs themselves are not defined anywhere in the law.

The crime numbers

Reported violent crime fell in two of the four target regions between 2021 and 2025. It rose in the other two.

Aurora shows the clearest decline, from 4,434 reported violent crimes to 3,354.

Grand Junction shows the other decrease. It went from 429 to 427.

Colorado Springs went the other direction, from 3,284 to 3,821.

Trinidad rose from 36 to 48.

Statewide, violent crime dropped from 31,408 to 28,219.

The Aurora and Colorado Springs figures cover entire cities. The report states that for both. Of Aurora it adds, “It is not clear the effect in North Aurora.”

Aurora’s decline works out to roughly 24 percent against roughly 10 percent statewide, the most favorable crime comparison in the review.

COPRRR does not credit the initiative for it. The drop is citywide, there are no figures for North Aurora alone, and violent crime fell across the state over the same five years. The review concludes the declines “cannot be directly attributed to the Initiative.”

Nothing in the review measures crime at the level the program operates.

What the reporting captures

Six priority areas exist to measure whether the grants work. Whether crime was prevented. Whether recidivism dropped. Whether school suspensions and law enforcement referrals went down.

The grant administrators pick which of those areas to report on each year and send the results to DOLA.

From there the data is used for DOLA’s annual report to the legislature “and nothing else,” according to the review. It does not feed an evaluation of whether the program works.

Those six areas cover the grant side only. State law requires the lenders to report as well, but only about the lending itself. Loans made, capital disbursed, rates and terms, jobs created, repayments, delinquencies.

Nothing about crime.

Administrative Recommendation 3 asks DOLA to start collecting enough information to tell whether public safety improved. That recommendation is being made in 2026.

The lending half has no money

The General Assembly has not appropriated a dollar to the small business lending program since FY19-20, when it put in $1 million. Every loan since has come from existing or reverted balances held by the lenders.

Grand Junction has never had a lender. DOLA opened an application in 2021, tried again in 2023 and came up empty both times.

Five years after Grand Junction was added, half the program has never operated there. The review recommends DOLA try again.

Southeast Colorado Springs took $942,755 in grants in FY24-25 and received no loan dollars at all that year.

Planning teams that stopped meeting

The initiative’s community input piece is the local crime prevention planning team, which sets local priorities and draws the boundary lines that determine who qualifies.

North Aurora and Southeast Colorado Springs have not convened one since 2017. Grand Junction and Trinidad have not since 2021.

In North Aurora and Southeast Colorado Springs, the lenders still use the boundaries those 2017 teams drew. They told reviewers they have trouble lending to businesses that fall outside the lines while serving, or being owned by, people inside them.

The lenders were never on the teams that drew the lines.

COPRRR’s second statutory recommendation is to define “local planning team” in the law, which does not set out the teams’ authority, their duties or when they are used.

The report’s own numbers don’t match

Three different FY24-25 grant totals appear in one document. They are not components of one another, and the report does not explain how they reconcile.

Page 32 says $2,483,973 went to 25 grantees. Table 7 says 26 recipients and $2,574,918. The four regional figures in Table 8 add up to $2,550,539, and the gap traces to Trinidad, listed at $205,878 in Table 8 and $230,257 in Appendix A.

The lending figures split the same way. Table 11 shows 23 loans totaling $287,371 for the 24-25 lending period. The fact sheet says 28 entities and $375,009, which matches the Appendix B total.

The fact sheet summarizing all of this calls the program a “dual-pronged investment strategy.”

What supporters told reviewers

Grant administrators submitted 56 letters of support during the review. Eight came from law enforcement, including all four police departments and a district attorney. Five came from judges and probation. Fourteen came from schools and districts.

The letters said the initiative has produced noticeable improvements in the four regions and needs continued support.

Grant administrators also told reviewers they have been using their own organizations’ money to keep the grant programs running as appropriations shrank.

Funding reached $4,023,228 in FY21-22 and FY22-23, then settled back at $3 million. That is what the program got when it ran in two regions. It now covers four.

The initiative repeals Sept. 1, 2027 unless lawmakers act. COPRRR’s report will be the basis for its testimony before a legislative committee of reference in the 2027 session.

Whether five more years produces an answer depends on whether DOLA starts collecting and using the data that would settle what the last nine could not.