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
Colorado neighbors lament likely closure of Roxborough library; $22 million regional library breaks ground nearby
For 22 years, the Roxborough library in Roxborough Village has served the entire Roxborough Park community. But that chapter might be coming to a close, as Douglas County Libraries prepares to break ground on a near-$22 million library in a growing master-planned Colorado community nearby.
A new regional library will be built near the intersection of West Titan Road and Taylor River Circle across from the incoming Douglas County School District elementary school in Sterling Ranch. It will also serve communities such as Louviers, Chatfield, Solstice and the greater Roxborough Park community.
“It’s an opportunity for this whole development to centralize a little bit,” said Alex Taylor, president for Sterling Ranch Community Board District No. 2
Taylor was among the first 100 residents to live in Sterling Ranch, and he can’t wait to take his two sons to the library when it opens near their home.
“Having an additional space for the kids to go and find the new set of books,” Taylor said. “Creating a centralized space for everybody in all of the various communities in this region to be able to congregate.”
The 18,000-square-foot library will break ground in Sterling Ranch this summer. But this developing situation does not satisfy everyone in the community.
“Don’t take ours to give them theirs,” community member Denise Martinez said.
Seven minutes away at the Roxborough library, some neighbors don’t want to say goodbye to their longstanding community hub. But the library board has set the lease to terminate next year.
“It would be devastating to this community on so many different levels,” Martinez said.
Martinez says the smaller Roxborough library is one of the only shared amenities in the community and is walkable for many.
“I truly believe that this is the hub of the community,” Martinez said. “This is the gathering spot.”
“Our community has been here for over 40 years, and people have paid into the library system for that amount of time,” said Ephram Glass, president of Roxborough Village Metropolitan District. They’ve been paying their property taxes. The library has been accumulating all this funding, so that they could build a new facility for Roxborough, and now for that money to then go to a brand new community that hasn’t been paying in for decades, I think a lot of people will be very pissed off.”
Glass and Martinez both enjoy taking their children to the library. They say it’s a close walk or bike ride from Roxborough Primary and Intermediate School and worry about children losing accessibility to the library.
“It would take an hour and 16 minutes walking to the new facility from this one, or a 25-minute bike ride. There’s really no shoulder,” Martinez said. “This doesn’t give our kids access at all. I mean, they will ultimately not be able to go to the library unless they have a ride.”
“I imagine some kids will take the e-bikes over. Many will just not go,” Glass said.
Glass is a member of the Roxborough Village HOA, which he says offered to donate a parcel of land near the existing Roxborough library with no strings attached.
“The board chose the Sterling Ranch site as the best site,” said Bob Pasicznyuk, executive director at Douglas County Libraries.
Pasicznyuk says there have long been plans to open a larger library in the area. He says DCL chose the other site, which was donated by the Sterling Ranch developer, partially because it was centrally located in northwest Douglas County.
“Ultimately around 35,000 people will live just in Sterling Ranch alone. The audience base would then go up to say (50,000) or 60,000. Right now it’s about half that many,” Pasicznyuk said.
Pasicznyuk says the all-in cost of the library in Sterling Ranch will be $21.6 million. That includes $250,000 for an outdoor porch, $200,000 for an outdoor children’s play area and $450,000 for other outdoor improvements, including a seating area, trellis and event and trail space.
Martinez is upset those outdoor amenities will come at the cost of the library and not the Sterling Ranch developer.
“I just think that it’s ridiculous to build a park and a veranda and even insist upon those things,” Martinez said. “I just do not understand what that really has to do with literacy or books or the library. I was kind of shocked by that actually.”
Despite terminating the lease, Pasicznyuk says the library board has not voted to close the Roxborough library just yet, but admits they have always consolidated smaller libraries when larger ones open.
“We’ve been 22 years in the second-floor strip mall rental, and while we’ve been glad for the opportunity, it’s going to be an amazing opportunity to move into a freestanding library with all the amenities that we have,” Pasicznyuk said.
“It isn’t good for this community. If you’re here to serve the community, why would you shut this down?” Martinez said.
Martinez started a Change.org petition to “Save Our Roxborough Library.” She now has more than 1,400 signatures.
“We need this. This is vital for our community,” Martinez said. “We just feel like we’re being absorbed.”
“It’s a prized amenity, so it makes sense that they want to keep it,” Pasicznyuk said. “I’ve never seen a reaction other than people love their library. So, even though you’re opening a new library, and I can describe 10 things about it that might be improvements over what we have today, people are going to, because they love their library, wish to keep what they have.”
Meanwhile, Taylor is excited for the library to open in Sterling Ranch next year.
“I’m absolutely empathetic to the fact that somebody might be disappointed that a library would move a few miles away from them versus where it’s historically been,” Taylor said. “The library will be something that everyone can enjoy. It’s going to be a library in Sterling Ranch, but not just for Sterling Ranch.”
Taylor says he’s been working with Sterling Ranch’s developers and the library on a partnership with the nearby Lamb Spring Archaeological Preserve. They are hoping to bring some artifacts or replicas into the library and use a mammoth hunter-gatherer theme for the children’s areas.
“It is a major archeological site in this region that there is evidence of mammoth activity and human activity going back possibly as far as 9,000 years ago,” Taylor said.
Roxborough-area residents say they plan to attend the next library board meeting on June 24 to make their voices heard.
(COLORADO SPRINGS) — Organizers for the Pikes Peak or Bust Parade announced on Friday, June 19, that due to a lack of resources, the parade has been canceled.
Originally scheduled for July 11 in Downtown Colorado Springs, parade organizers said they could not secure the resources needed to produce the event at the level the community deserves.
“We know many of you were looking forward to the parade, and we’re incredibly grateful to everyone who offered their time, support, sponsorship, and enthusiasm,” said organizers.
While the parade will no longer be taking place on July 11, organizers said the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo will return on July 14 through July 18, and tickets remain on sale.
Organizers hope to see the Colorado Springs community at the rodeo, and they remain hopeful that the beloved tradition can return in the future.
Denver Post writers have explored Colorado’s many corners and offer ways to find fun, relaxation or something new for summer. Take a look at how you can expand your possibilities this season if you’re keeping travel close to home this year.
In the mountains
Colorado’s 10 most popular hikes, according to AllTrails
Colorado waterfall hike: Copeland Falls best this time of year in early morning
This hiking trail near Red Rocks will help you get in shape for 14er season
Gorgeous Colorado hike reopens this summer with new rules for hiking, camping, human waste
An Estes Park getaway can be about more than just the outdoors
Camping
Gorgeous Colorado hike reopens this summer with new rules for hiking, camping, human waste
Forest service now charging $20 for dispersed camping in Homestake Valley
Within driving distance
These adult summer retreats can help Coloradans escape burnout
Big balloons will rise above Colorado’s heat this summer; watch ’em soar or take a ride
Looking for beach vibes? Here’s where to find them in landlocked Colorado
Movie-theater hotel adds vintage Airstreams, Quonset huts in San Luis Valley
Sleep in a treehouse, hike with llamas, stargaze and more summer whimsy
Pick your own flowers at these farms and garden centers in Colorado
Is city fishing safe? Yes, experts say, but there are updated guidelines to follow.
Big balloons will rise above Colorado’s heat this summer; watch ’em soar or take a ride
Here’s where to fish with kids near Denver
Summer fun
Biodegradable pickleballs, size-inclusive skorts made in Colorado and other sports gear we love
More women are playing padel than ever — and for good reason
Meet the Boulder dogs cast in this summer’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival
Gravel biking events are a hot commodity in Colorado this summer
Want to get off your phone? Learn blacksmithing or floral design at these Colorado classes and makerspaces.
Beyond Colorado
10 tree-house hotels in the U.S. for you to commune with nature in comfort
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