Colorado
How the Marshall Fire sparked a political transformation in Colorado
This story is part of State of Emergency, a Grist series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics, and is published with support from the CO2 Foundation.
As the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Marshall Fire approached, Kyle Brown was serving as a city councilman in Louisville, Colorado, a suburb of Boulder that had been devastated by the blaze. Brown’s own home had escaped damage, but hundreds of his neighbors had lost everything to the costliest and deadliest fire in the state’s history, which caused more than $2 billion in damages and destroyed more than a thousand structures.
Despite Brown’s efforts to help the victims, the fire recovery was stalling out. Displaced residents were struggling to secure insurance payouts and scrape together cash to rebuild their homes, and most couldn’t afford the jacked-up rents in the area. The City Council was supposed to be helping these victims, but instead it was locked in a dispute with them over whether they should have to pay local taxes on building materials.
Brown was desperate for a way to do more. When the incumbent state representative in the area resigned after it emerged that she didn’t live in the district, he saw an opportunity and put his name forward as her replacement.
What happened next is one of the rare disaster recovery success stories in recent U.S. history. After securing a seat in the state legislature, Brown, a Democrat, spent the next two years working with a highly organized group of survivors to pass a suite of ambitious bills that have made Colorado a national leader in responding to climate disasters. Many of the same issues crop up across the country after fires and floods, but survivors rarely succeed in getting lawmakers to pay attention to any of them, let alone all of them. Brown, however, was able to gain bipartisan support for bills that give fire survivors leverage against insurers, mortgage companies, homeowners associations, and rental property owners, elevating concerns that have often been ignored in other disaster-prone states.
This legislative success wasn’t thanks to any political horse-trading or inspiring rhetoric on Brown’s part. Rather, it’s the result of a hand-in-glove collaboration with a well-organized and often militant group of fire survivors, drafting bills based on their recommendations and needs, and allowing them to tweak and strengthen legislation where necessary.
“We needed to accelerate the pace of recovery, so I just listened,” said Brown in an interview with Grist. “I took notes on everything they said, and I turned it over, and I turned it into bills.”
This combination of organized advocacy by disaster survivors and ambitious lawmaking by sympathetic politicians could become a model for other disaster-prone places, but it was only possible because many well-heeled Marshall Fire victims had the resources to organize and press for change after the fire, a luxury most disaster-stricken communities don’t have. Lower-income communities around Colorado may benefit from the Marshall legislation, but it may be difficult for survivors in other parts of the country to emulate it.
The Marshall Fire wasn’t like the massive forest fires that have tortured Northern California or the desert blazes that rage across Texas and New Mexico each year. It ripped down from the Front Range in December of 2021 and all but vaporized a fast-growing, gentrified segment of the Denver metroplex, bringing about what climate scientist Daniel Swain calls the “urban firestorm.” High winds whipped the grass fire to full size in a matter of hours, igniting vegetation that had dried out during a severe drought of the kind that global warming is making more common. In contrast to California, where burned communities have often been rural and less well-off, the Boulder suburbs of Louisville and Superior are dense and suburban, filled with well-to-do lawyers and consultants.
For that reason, there were several fire victims who had the time and money to become volunteer recovery advocates. One of those survivors was a patent lawyer named Tawnya Somauroo, who was galvanized to action when she learned that Louisville had not issued an evacuation order for her subdivision, most of which burned in the fire. She spent months bird-dogging the mayor’s office and local law enforcement on her own time to ask about their evacuation procedures, but found herself making little progress.
“I didn’t even know where City Hall was before the fire,” Soumaroo told Grist. “I just started calling city council members and talking to them and getting not a very good reception at first. It just became this narrative of, ‘the survivors versus everyone else.’” In other words, elected officials were weighing the need to finance the rebuilding of public parks and facilities against the need to help the hundreds of displaced homeowners.
As Soumaroo watched local Facebook groups devolve into hubbub and confusion, she turned to a less commonly used app to make order out of the chaos — she downloaded Slack, the messaging platform normally used in white-collar workplaces, and invited hundreds of locals to join her there. The app allowed survivors to create individual message threads to discuss specific insurers, specific permits, and specific federal aid deadlines.
“People would join a certain thread, and then someone would pop up who had the same problem, and then coach them [on] how they solved it,” she said. “And you know, little by little, we started identifying problems that way.”
Meanwhile, a former Boulder resident named Jeri Curry moved back to the area from Virginia to help aid in the long-term recovery. She and a group of fellow volunteers established a long-term recovery center in an office park, opening it up about 10 months after the fire as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of Colorado wound down their recovery operations. In addition to providing free food and computer access, the center provided guidance to survivors navigating the process of filing an insurance claim and applying for FEMA aid.
“The big thing that we believed the community overall needed was a gathering place, a central place where people could get everything that they needed,” she said. “The agencies put their mission first, their service delivery and resource delivery first, and they don’t put the survivor in the middle.” These casework conversations alerted volunteers to the dynamics holding back the recovery — lowball cost estimates from insurers, delays in securing claim payouts, and construction material sales taxes that many residents were struggling to pay.
Frustrated with the response from city officials, the survivors’ group — now incorporated as a nonprofit — decided to team up with their new state legislator, Brown, who was looking for ways to help fire victims. Brown had worked for Colorado’s insurance department while serving on the Louisville city council and had experience dealing with complex policy issues, but property insurance and housing law were new to him. So he relied on Soumaroo’s expertise, letting her and the other survivors guide the bills he wrote and introduced.
This strategy soon produced a number of laws that gave immediate financial relief to fire survivors who had been struggling to rebuild. Brown passed a bill that stopped mortgage servicers from holding back insurance payments from customers who were waiting to rebuild, eliminating a delay that stopped many survivors from rebuilding for months. He passed a bill that required insurers to take into account the state’s own estimates of rebuilding costs, a measure designed to stop them from lowballing homeowners trying to rebuild. Bills that gave survivors grants for rebuilding with fire-safe materials, provided them with rebates on construction material taxes, and plowed resources into studying smoke and ash damage all sailed through the legislature with ease.
“It feels really good to be listened to,” said Soumaroo. “I would just sort of brief him on, like, people with this problem, that problem, that problem, and he would go move the bill forward.”
Beyond assisting Marshall survivors, Brown and the survivors’ groups also took on other institutions that hampered fire recovery in general. Soumaroo had become incensed that homeowners’ associations in Louisville maintained design rules that prohibited residents from replacing the flammable wooden fences that had ferried the fire across the city. Her own subdivision had a decades-old deed covenant that in theory could have allowed any other resident to sue her for rebuilding with a fire-resistant fence. She took her concerns to Brown and he drafted a bill that prohibited HOAs, which represent more than half of Coloradans, from impeding a fire-safe rebuild.
Construction workers on the job in Louisville, Colorado, where the Marshall Fire destroyed hundreds of homes. The neighborhood is now mostly rebuilt with new fire-resistant homes, and just a few empty lots remain. Eli Imadali / Grist
One of Brown’s most difficult fights was against rental property owners, whom he accused of price gouging after the fire. Some renters reported increased rents of 10 to 15 percent, as displaced homeowners competed with existing tenants for a tiny number of available units, mimicking a dynamic that had emerged in California years earlier. In theory, there is a simple legislative solution to this problem — bar apartment owners from raising rents after a fire — but few jurisdictions have enacted it, in part because property owners have lobbied fiercely against such moves. Earlier this year, Brown passed a strong bill that prohibits price gouging after fires, including with some Republican support.
Many of the bills Brown introduced faced initial objections from insurers, banks, and landlords, all of whom had an established presence in the Capitol. In other circumstances, this opposition might have doomed the laws, but the survivors of the Marshall Fire acted as a political lobby; rather than just plead for help, they tweaked bills in response to industry criticism and ensured lawmakers knew they were paying attention to their votes.
Still, not everyone is happy. Betty Knecht, the executive director of the Colorado Mortgage Lenders Association, a trade group representing banks and other lenders, says she worries the legislature veered too far to the left in addressing the fire recovery.
“You had a very unbalanced legislature, which unfortunately allows for a lot more to be passed.” she said, referring to the large Democratic majorities in both chambers. She also pointed out that dozens of representatives in the legislature were appointed to fill vacancies, like Brown, rather than elected.
Knecht argued that Brown’s price-gouging legislation wouldn’t hold down rents and that the new pressure on insurers might make many leave the state, as has happened in Florida. However, she praised him for workshopping his mortgage-servicers bill with her group before it went up for a vote and adjusting the payout requirements. The group didn’t end up endorsing the bill, but it didn’t come out against it, either.
The Marshall Fire victims secured a far bigger legislative response than the victims of past Colorado fires. The district adjacent to Brown’s had suffered a disaster of its own a few years earlier when the East Troublesome Fire roared through the mountain town of Grand Lake, leaving hundreds of underinsured residents without the means to rebuild. That district’s representative, Judy Amabile, had worked for most of 2021 on a bill that would prohibit insurers from haggling over the value of personal contents, but it still hadn’t come together when the Marshall Fire struck that December.
Frustrated with the lack of progress, Amabile used the surge of attention around the Marshall Fire to push through the bill that was designed to help the East Troublesome survivors. The experience of seeing her bill pass with bipartisan support made her realize that the Marshall Fire had opened a window for big-picture lawmaking that no other disaster had.
“If you have more resources, you have more time to invest in the recovery effort,” said Amabile. “There was some pushback, like, ‘all these rich people in Boulder are getting all this stuff.’ But they were a force. They really made stuff happen for themselves.”
Soumaroo and Curry, two of the lead post-fire organizers, acknowledge that the high education and income levels in the cities impacted by the Marshall Fire helped the rebuilding effort move faster. Two and a half years after the fire, almost half of displaced homeowners are back in their homes, which is a higher rate than many other communities have been able to achieve after disasters of comparable magnitude. This is in part because the community had more resources to begin with, but it’s also because survivors had enough political clout to secure financial relief that other survivors have not obtained.
Curry’s disaster casework center also relied on support from well-resourced residents: the organizers behind the center were able to pull in $1 million from wealthy locals and nearby businesses, and recruited locals with spare time to volunteer as caseworkers, allowing them to keep it open until this past June. The Boulder Community Foundation also raised more than $43 million to help victims, much of it from wealthy private donors.
The irony is that while this effort would likely never have happened in a lower-income and less-educated area, it will benefit future fire survivors in worse-off areas of Colorado. The mortgage-servicer delay and rent-gouging laws will only apply to survivors of future fires, which are far more likely to start in the state’s rural mountain communities than in the suburbs of the Front Range. It may have been Democrats who pushed the bills through, but the benefits will reach Republican sections of the state, and Brown and Soumaroo have talked with people in other states about authoring copycat bills.
“There were no lobbyists, there’s no big money running these bills,” said Brown. “We got this done through sheer community advocacy. We talk about policies, and then I run bills, and they show up and testify and make their voices heard.”
Colorado
Opinion: Colorado must invest in evidence-based policies to prevent harm from substances, not costly criminalization
Across the nation, the opioid epidemic has wreaked havoc on the health and lives of far too many, and Colorado is no exception. According to Mental Health America, Colorado ranks fourth and seventh in the country for adults and youth with substance use disorders, respectively. That means thousands of our friends, neighbors and loved ones are living with addiction and can’t get the help they need. Overdose deaths in Colorado have risen sharply since 2019, largely due to the proliferation of fentanyl, with 1,603 deaths in 2024 alone, according to the state.
It’s a public health crisis, and one we’re now at risk of making even worse. Last month, supporters turned in signatures to send Initiative #85 to the 2026 ballot, a measure that would increase criminal penalties for fentanyl crimes. We feel this threatens to drag us backward toward the failed policies and practices of the past rather than working toward a healthier future.
At the same time, state and federal funding for treatment and prevention is drying up. The recently passed federal spending bill HR1 will mean devastating changes to Medicaid, gutting the single most important source of funding for substance use treatment in the country. For the past several years, as more states have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid has emerged as the leading source of coverage for addiction treatment in the nation.
A recent Brookings study found that nearly 90% of treatment for opioid addiction is paid for, at least in part, by Medicaid. These cuts will leave our already strained systems unable to meet the growing demand, particularly for low-income and disabled individuals who will have fewer treatment options and more barriers to care.
Meanwhile, Colorado faced a $1.2 billion budget shortfall this year, and even more deficits are on the horizon for 2026. The state is stuck in a cycle of annual budget shortfalls of roughly $1 billion, making it increasingly difficult to cover existing programs and skyrocketing Medicaid costs. That means fewer resources to fill in federal funding gaps, a fraying behavioral health safety net, and an increasingly stressed population that is highly vulnerable to substance use and harm.
Given this grim picture, it’s never been more critical to prioritize smart, effective policy to combat the overdose crisis. We should be focusing our scarce funding on evidence-based substance use prevention, treatment and recovery support, not costly, ineffective drug war criminalization policies that are historically discriminatory in their implementation and proven to fail.
Mitigating and reversing the drug addiction crisis in Colorado and across the nation is complex and has to involve multiple strategies working in tandem to decrease supply and demand. While increasing criminal penalties related to drug addiction among individuals may seem like a tough-on-crime approach, it has not and will not resolve the drug addiction crisis nor dissolve the supply or the demand for illicit drugs.
Decades of data show that criminalizing substance users doesn’t reduce addiction or overdose. Recently, researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz found the following: “Intensified drug enforcement laws have little deterrent effect on substance use and may worsen health outcomes. Fear of being arrested fosters riskier substance use behaviors and increased overdose risk. Incarceration and the subsequent stigma experienced by people with substance use disorder work in tandem to create barriers for treatment access and worsen mental health, creating a structurally reinforced cycle of isolation.”
The research is clear. Harsh penalties haven’t protected our communities from the dangers of fentanyl. They have only compounded harm and pushed people deeper into the shadows, making it harder to seek help, and saddling individuals with felony records that create lifelong barriers to employment, housing, and recovery.
Policies like the proposed 2026 ballot measure to increase felony charges for drug possession are not just misguided — they cost taxpayer dollars. They further overburden law enforcement agencies, flood jails, courtrooms and prisons that are already beyond their capacity, and ultimately do nothing to address the core of the opioid epidemic.
Instead of doubling down on punishing people who use substances, we need to expand what works: prevention programs in schools and communities, access to harm reduction tools like naloxone, and a robust continuum of care that includes outpatient and residential treatment. We need more support for peer recovery professionals, more public education and more investment in what keeps people healthy, which includes housing, food security and opportunities for connection. We need to act together, with assertive intelligence, to disrupt the black market drug trafficking that is the enemy of the people.
The opioid crisis is a public health crisis and demands a public health response. Colorado has the knowledge, data and tools to build a more effective and compassionate system. But we cannot do it if we are bleeding out resources to punitive policies that fail the people they claim to help.
Let’s not go backward. Let’s invest in health and safety and give Coloradans a real chance at recovery.
Vincent Atchity, of Denver, is the president and CEO of Mental Health Colorado.
José Esquibel, of Jefferson County, is the former vice chair of the Colorado Substance Abuse Trend and Response Task Force.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
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Colorado
Bright Leaf helps grandparents raising grandkids in Colorado as they face holiday hardships
At a kitchen table in Arvada, backpacks and homework papers take over. It’s a common sight for Carla Aguilar, but one she never expected to repeat.
“I thought I was all done raising kids, you know?” Aguilar said.
For more than a decade, Aguilar has been raising her two granddaughters, Ava and Athena. Ava, 12, was too shy to appear on camera, but 8-year-old Athena proudly showed how her grandmother helps her learn.
“She helps me read,” Athena said. “She taught me how to write correctly.”
Aguilar, 55, is disabled and lives on a fixed income. She says every day is a balancing act, and this time of year is challenging.
“Holidays are hard, so we’re kind of dealing with that right now,” she said.
Aguilar’s story is far from unique. According to the latest data from the American Society on Aging and the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 2 million grandparents nationwide are primary caregivers for their grandchildren. In Colorado, more than 36,000 families face the same reality, often with limited financial resources and little support.
“Most of these seniors are on fixed income, social security, disability, and you can’t really stretch that too far in Colorado these days,” said Steve Olguin, executive director of Bright Leaf, a nonprofit that helps older adults across the state.
Bright Leaf started as a small community group and now provides free home repairs, food assistance, and other essentials to seniors statewide. Its newest initiative, GrandCare Alliance, focuses on grandparents raising grandkids — offering help with school costs, activity fees, and holiday wish lists.
“We’re just trying to help out so it’s not as rough for them,” Olguin said.
For Aguilar, that support is a lifeline. She says her granddaughters are her world, and she’ll never stop fighting for them.
“They’re my heart, my soul, everything,” Aguilar said. “I will take care of them until my last breath.”
Bright Leaf is asking for the community’s help in supporting the GrandCare Alliance and its other services. Those who want more information on how to volunteer and donate can visit their website.
- Possible fire danger ahead
- Warm for the week ahead
- Still a bit breezy
MONDAY: Monday will be warmer with 60s returning for many in southern Colorado. Plenty of sunshine is expected with a bit of a breeze too. Spotty fire weather conditions are possible for some too.
MID-WEEK: Humidity levels will likely improve throughout the week with less fire danger expected. However, sunshine and temperatures about 20 degrees above averages continue.
Download the KKTV 11 Alert Weather App here:
CHRISTMAS: Christmas will be warm and dry with highs in the 60s for many with sunshine. The high country through the divide and Wolf Creek Pass may see some snow, but we will be dry in southern Colorado.
Copyright 2025 KKTV. All rights reserved.
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