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Peters Release Day Arrives With Key Details Still Unknown
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The Colorado Sun, Approved, State

Peters Release Day Arrives With Key Details Still Unknown

By Nancy Lofholm | The Colorado Sun Gov. Jared Polis commuted the former Mesa County clerk’s sentence last month, making her eligible for parole and setting off a national firestorm over her role in attempting to interfere with an election. Tina Peters is scheduled to be released from a state prison in Pueblo Monday after Gov. Jared Polis controversially commuted the former Mesa County clerk’s sentence last month, cutting it in half.Peters, 70, has been imprisoned since 2024 for election fraud and official misconduct after she snuck an outside election denier into the off-limits Mesa County Elections Division office so he could copy the hard drive from the county’s voting system. Sentenced to nine years in October 2024, Polis cut her prison time in half on May 15 and made h...
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How SB19-180 opened the tap: The funding stream behind Colorado’s eviction defense network
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

How SB19-180 opened the tap: The funding stream behind Colorado’s eviction defense network

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project SB19-180: Eviction Legal Defense Fund gets the money going This will be the first part of a twofer on state grant money going to defend people against eviction. This first part will cover the legal background. The second will cover how a nonprofit got in on the ground floor of an initial trickle of state money and soaked up what would eventually become a firehosing of federal money into our state. In the process of that ballooning, one of their own got into the Colorado statehouse where he sits now and is running for reelection. About a year or so prior to COVID being a thing, in Spring 2019, lawmakers passed and the governor signed SB19-180 (linked first below). The bill created a grant fund which would ...
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One Colorado built the GSA network. Now it’s backing the campaign against Initiatives 109 and 110.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

One Colorado built the GSA network. Now it’s backing the campaign against Initiatives 109 and 110.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice A political committee called Families Not Politics registered with the state of Colorado on February 10, 2026. It said it existed to protect families. Within three months it had raised nearly $320,000. None of it came from Colorado parents' organizations while calling itself a “grassroots group”.  What it did raise came largely from an abortion rights group, a Planned Parenthood affiliate, a Portland-based PAC that had just abandoned its own ballot campaign in Oregon and the organization behind the Colorado Gender and Sexuality Alliance Network. Together those four sources account for nearly 90% of everything Families Not Politics has taken in. The committee exists to defeat ballot initiatives heading to Colorado ...
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Colorado Regulators Review Utility Rate Hikes and Infrastructure Upgrades
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The Denver Gazette, Approved, State

Colorado Regulators Review Utility Rate Hikes and Infrastructure Upgrades

By: Scott Weiser | The Denver Gazette The Colorado Public Utilities Commission is reviewing proposals to strengthen the state’s 911 emergency communications system while advancing several major utility rate cases that could raise monthly bills for electric and natural gas customers later this year. Lumen Technologies filed its 2026 Basic Emergency Service Improvement Plan on April 3 in Proceeding No. 26A-0140T. The application proposes infrastructure modernizations and adds network redundancy to ensure emergency calls reach dispatchers during outages or natural disasters. The company is seeking commission approval for cost-recovery mechanisms tied to the upgrades. The PUC is conducting a formal review of the plan and associated costs, with 911 system reliability remain...
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Dozens Of Amicus Briefs Challenge Boulder Climate Case Before SCOTUS
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Complete Colorado, Approved, State

Dozens Of Amicus Briefs Challenge Boulder Climate Case Before SCOTUS

By: Kyle Kohli | Complete Colorado As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments in the now 8-year old Boulder climate lawsuit, more than three dozen amicus briefs submitted in the case have made the same essential point: Boulder’s lawsuit against oil and gas companies is an unconstitutional attempt to use state courts to dictate national energy and climate policy, and the high court should put a stop to it.   The briefs represent one of the broadest coalitions to weigh in on climate litigation in years, spanning the U.S. Department of Justice, 78 members of Congress, 27 state attorneys general, energy-producing Colorado counties, former senior national security officials and major business, legal and policy organizations.  Ahead of oral arg...
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Midwives Sue State Alleging Bias Is Hurting Maternity Care Access in Colorado
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The Colorado Sun, Approved, State

Midwives Sue State Alleging Bias Is Hurting Maternity Care Access in Colorado

By: Daliah Singer | The Colorado Sun The reproductive health practitioners allege bias and sex-based discrimination by Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies division. Kalie Caler was 8 years old when she decided that she wanted to deliver babies for a living. Born and raised in Pagosa Springs, she completed midwifery school in Florida before moving home to start Mountain Roots Midwifery in 2019.  As the only midwife in town, she delivered more than a dozen babies during her first year, traveling an hour or more to support clients as far away as Mancos, Durango and Crestone. She also birthed all three of her own children at home.  Then, in February 2022, one of her clients went into labor and the birth didn’t go as expected. The baby boy wasn’t breath...
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Is HB26-1111 a smart ag solution or another TABOR workaround?
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Is HB26-1111 a smart ag solution or another TABOR workaround?

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project HB26-1111: a beneficial enterprise? At my last check, HB26-1111 (linked below) is awaiting either 30-day passage or the Governor’s signature. This is another enterprise-creation bill. It creates an enterprise which charges a fee on pesticide producers and applicators. The fee will, among other things, be used to create a program where pesticide applicators can dispose of leftover pesticide. Per a conversation I had with my State Senator Byron Pelton, as things stand now, prior to this bill, pesticide applicators must pay a disposal company to take leftover chemical, and that price is growing more and more each year. The enterprise created in that bill steps in with a government-run business to take ...
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“Intentional obstruction”: CHEC argues Colorado lawmakers delayed homeschool changes until final days of session
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Christian Home Educators of Colorado, Approved, Commentary, State

“Intentional obstruction”: CHEC argues Colorado lawmakers delayed homeschool changes until final days of session

By Colleen Enos | Commentary, Christian Home Educators of Colorado When tasks are put off to the last minute, we assume that those responsible are procrastinators or that time just got away from them. We don’t typically think that what they did was intentional. Applying this logic to our state’s General Assembly would be wrong. The majority party plans the schedule of when bills will be debated in each chamber, how to introduce them, and enacts a plan of intentional obstruction. This process was taking place during the last three days of the legislative session. Controversial bills were saved for the very last moments. On Monday morning, the State House Appropriations Committee met to discuss the final bills. Committee hearings are a place for the public to offer testimony and make t...
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Colorado Road Funding Initiative Nears November Ballot After 180,000 Signatures Submitted
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The Gazette, Approved, State

Colorado Road Funding Initiative Nears November Ballot After 180,000 Signatures Submitted

By Marissa Ventrelli | The Gazette Organizers of a proposal seeking to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to road construction and maintenance have submitted signatures to state election officials in their campaign to put the initiative on the ballot this November. If officials certified the signatures as sufficiently meeting the threshold — organizers need 124,000 to be valid — the battle shifts to persuading voters to embrace or reject the ballot question. The measure, Initiative No. 175, would require that all transportation-related revenue be used exclusively for building and repairing roads and bridges, improving safety, conducting transportation planning and engineering, and supporting Colorado State Patrol operations. The battle over road funding ha...
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Colorado’s unaffiliated majority is waiting for someone to lead
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

Colorado’s unaffiliated majority is waiting for someone to lead

By Russ Minary | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice "Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody,"  Franklin P. Adams. Sadly, Colorado politics is ruled largely by ideologues with agendas and pet projects who engage in personal attacks. Statesmanship seems to be a lost art.  So, both Republicans and Democrats are losing influence and votes – and the largest and fastest growing voter bloc in the State is ‘Unaffiliated’. This would indicate that both ‘majority parties’ (D and R) are divided and have lost sight of those things that are important to the average CO voter and taxpayer to whom they are responsible. The data speaks plainly for anyone willing to look at it.  Out of 3,996,931 registe...
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