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.”
Leading the Way
Nate the Great
MacKinnon is tied for fifth in the NHL in points (10), while ranking tied for seventh in goals (4) and tied for ninth in assists (6).
All Hail Cale
Cale Makar is tied for first in goals (4) among NHL defensemen,
Toewser Laser
Among NHL blueliners, Devon Toews is tied for third in points (7) while ranking tied for fifth in assists (5) and tied for sixth in goals (2).
Series History
The Avalanche and Wild have met in the playoffs on three previous occasions, all in the Round One, with Minnesota winning in 2003 and 2014 in seven games while Colorado was victorious in six contests in 2008.
Making Plays Against Minnesota
MacKinnon has posted 16 points (4g/12a) in nine playoff games against the Wild, in addition to 70 points (27g/43a) in 55 regular-season contests.
Makar has registered three points (2g/1a) in two playoff contests against Minnesota, along with 26 points (6g/20a) in 29 regular-season games.
Necas has recorded five points (1g/4a) in two playoff games against the Wild, in addition to nine points (5g/4a) in 15 regular-season games.
Scoring in the Twin Cities
Quinn Hughes is tied for the Wild lead in points (11) and assists (8) while ranking tied for second in goals (3).
Kaprizov is tied for first on the Wild in assists (8) and points (11) while ranking tied for second in goals (3).
Matt Boldy leads the Wild in goals (6) while ranking third in points (10) and tied for fourth in assists (4).
A Numbers Game
4.50
Colorado’s 4.50 goals per game on the road in the playoffs are tied for the most in the NHL.
39
MacKinnon’s 39 playoff goals since 2020-21 are the second most in the NHL.
2.17
The Avalanche’s 2.17 goals against per game in the playoffs are the second fewest in the NHL.
Quote That Left a Mark
“It should definitely get you up and excited. It’s gonna be a good test. [It’s a] great building and [it’s] against a desperate team. It’s gonna be great.”
— Gabriel Landeskog on playing in Minnesota
Colorado
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signs state budget, with Medicaid taking brunt of cuts to close $1.5 billion gap
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday, May 8, signed into law a $46.8 billion state budget that cuts healthcare spending but preserves funding for K-12 education.
The budget applies to the 2026-27 fiscal year, which begins on July 1, and caps months of work by lawmakers, who wrestled with how to close a roughly $1.5 billion gap that ultimately forced reductions to Medicaid funding and other programs.
“This year was incredibly difficult and challenged each of us in a myriad of ways that put our values to the test,” said Rep. Emily Sirtota, a Denver Democrat and chair of the bipartisan Joint Budget Committee, which crafts the state’s spending plan before it is voted on by the full legislature. “It’s a zero-sum game. A dollar here means a dollar less over here.”
The state’s spending gap was the result of several factors.
The legislature is limited in how it can spend under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, an amendment to the state constitution approved by voters in 1992 that limits government revenue growth to the rate of population growth plus inflation.
Lawmakers are also dealing with the consequences of increased spending on programs they created or expanded in recent years, some of which have seen their costs balloon beyond their original estimates. Costs for Medicaid services, in particular, have surged, driven by inflation, expanded benefits and greater demand for expensive, long-term care services due to Colorado’s aging population.
Medicaid cuts
Medicaid recently eclipsed K-12 education as the single-largest chunk of the state’s general fund and now accounts for roughly one-third of all spending from that fund.
Lawmakers, who are required by the state constitution to pass a deficit-free budget, said they had no choice but to cut Medicaid funding as a result.
That includes a 2% reduction to the state’s reimbursement rate for most Medicaid providers. The budget also institutes a $3,000 cap on adult dental benefits, limits billable hours for at-home caregivers of family members with severe disabilities to 56 hours per week and phases out, by Jan. 1, automatic enrollment for children with disabilities to receive 24/7 care as adults.
The budget also cuts benefits and places new limits on Cover All Coloradans, a program created by the legislature in 2022 that provides identical coverage as Medicaid to low-income immigrant children and pregnant women, regardless of their immigration status.
That includes an end to long-term care services for new enrollees, a $1,100 limit on dental benefits, and an annual enrollment cap of 25,000 for children 18 or younger. The cuts come as spending on the program has grown more than 600% beyond its original estimate, going from roughly $14.7 million to an estimated $104.5 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.
While the budget still represents an overall increase in Medicaid spending compared to this year, funding is roughly half of what it would have been had lawmakers not made any changes to benefits and provider rates, which total about $270 million in savings for the state.
Healthcare leaders say the cuts will exacerbate an already challenging environment for providers, who are bracing for less federal support after Congress last year passed sweeping Medicaid cuts and declined to renew enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.
For rural hospitals in particular, Medicaid is one of their key funding drivers.
“While a 2% (Medicaid reimbursement rate cut) doesn’t sound like a whole lot, when we already have close to 50% of our rural hospitals statewide operating in the red and 70% with unsustainable margins, facing another 2% (cut) on top of that is just devastating,” said Michelle Mills, CEO for the Colorado Rural Health Center, which represents rural hospitals on the Western Slope and Eastern Plains.
If the state provides less reimbursement for Medicaid services, Mills said it will lead to fewer providers accepting Medicaid plans. That in turn will mean fewer care options for people, particularly in Colorado’s rural counties, where healthcare services are already more limited.
“I feel like all of the decisions and cuts that they’re making are hitting everyone,” she said.
Rep. Rick Taggart, a Grand Junction Republican and budget committee member, said cuts to healthcare led to “a lot of tears.”
“This was a tough budget, and nobody won in this budget, but we did what we had to do by way of the (state) constitution,” he said.
While Medicaid saw some of the biggest cuts, lawmakers also trimmed spending from a suite of other programs, including financial aid for adoptive parents and grants providing mental health support for law enforcement.
Preserving K-12 education
One of the brighter spots for Polis and lawmakers in the budget is K-12 education.
After years of chronically underfunding the state’s schools, lawmakers in 2024 rolled out a revamped funding formula and abolished what was known as the budget stabilization factor, a Great Recession-era mechanism that had allowed the state to skirt its constitutional funding obligation to schools for more than a decade.
The new funding formula went into effect this school year, and the state is set to continue delivering higher levels of K-12 funding in the 2026-27 fiscal year budget. The budget allocates roughly $10.19 billion in K-12 funding, an increase of roughly $194.8 million, though the specifics of that spending are still being worked out in a separate bill, the 2026 School Finance Act, which has yet to pass the legislature.
The finance act guides how state and local funds are allocated to Colorado’s 178 school districts on a per-pupil basis. As it stands now, the bill is on track to increase per-pupil funding by $440 per student for the 2026-27 fiscal year, for a total of $12,314 per student.
“We are not returning to the days of underfunding our schools and a budget stabilization factor,” Polis said.
Still, there are challenges on the horizon for some districts.
Combined with a proposed three-year averaging model for student counts instead of the current four-year averaging, recent dips in student enrollment across the state will weigh more heavily on how much funding is allocated to each district. The shift to three-year averaging advances the state’s plan to gradually phase in the new school finance formula by 2030-31.
With several districts seeing decreased year-over-year enrollment and rising operational expenses like healthcare, some Western Slope school districts are poised to see less funding compared to this year, while others are seeing their increases eaten up by inflation.
A note on wolves
The topic of Colorado’s spending on gray wolf reintroduction hasn’t gone away, and while Medicaid headlined much of the budget discussions, lawmakers also used the spending plan to send a message on the future of the wolf program.
While the budget allocates $2.1 from the general fund to Colorado Parks and Wildlife to spend on wolf reintroduction, it also contains a footnote from lawmakers asking the agency not to use the money to acquire new wolves.
Footnotes are not legally binding, but rather serve as a direction or guidance from lawmakers to agencies on how they want certain funds spent.
Under the footnote, the wildlife agency could still use gifts, grants, donations and non-license revenue from its wildlife cash fund to bring additional wolves to Colorado. Most of the agency’s wolf funding goes toward personnel, followed by operating costs, compensation for ranchers and conflict minimization programs and tools.
Education reporter Andrea Teres-Martinez and wildlife and environmental reporter Ali Longwell contributed to this story.
A widespread cyberattack targeting the learning platform Canvas is disrupting thousands of schools across the country, including in Colorado. It’s hitting students at one of the worst possible times: finals week.
Cybercriminal group ShinyHunters claimed credit for the attack, breaching systems tied to Instructure, the company that runs Canvas. Canvas is used by 41% of higher education institutions across the country to deliver courses. Millions of K-12 students rely on the platform as well.
In Colorado, more than 20 schools, including Colorado School of Mines, Metropolitan State University of Denver, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado State University, and the University of Northern Colorado, have been affected by the cybersecurity attack.
The group is attempting to extort the company, threatening to release massive amounts of student data if demands are not met.
For students like Flannery Headley, a political science major at MSU Denver, the disruption is more than an inconvenience — it’s a major source of stress.
“The moment I tried to click on something, it gave me this maintenance down page,” she said. “I started Googling things, and I saw this whole thing about the hack.”
Headley says she was working on assignments when Canvas suddenly stopped functioning.
MSU sent out guidance telling students not to log into Canvas and to wait for updates from professors.
Like many students, Headley is now left in limbo, unsure how finals will be submitted or graded.
“This final I’ve spent the last week working on might not matter,” she said. “At least one of my grades is hinging on another final, whether I’m going to pass or fail.”
The attackers claim to have stolen large amounts of data, including names, student ID numbers, email addresses, and academic records.
Experts say the real risk may not just be disruption, but what happens next.
“The worst they could do is release it,” said MSU Denver computer science professor Steve Beaty. “There’s been minor leaks and breaches and these sorts of things from time to time, but nothing on the scale of this.”
Beatty says the group claims to have terabytes of student data, which could include personally identifiable information protected under federal privacy laws. If released, that information could be used for scams, identity theft, or further cyberattacks.
Canvas is a cloud-based system used by thousands of institutions, meaning a single attack can have massive ripple effects.
“They took the entire Canvas infrastructure down,” Beatty said. “That affects about 9,000 schools, tens of thousands of people in Colorado alone.”
Right now, schools are scrambling to find workarounds, from email submissions to alternative testing methods.
There is no current timeline for resolution. The hacker group has set a May 12 deadline for the company to respond before potentially releasing the data.
Until then, students like Headley are left waiting, hoping their work doesn’t disappear.
“I’m going to keep working on my finals,” she said, “but I’m not sure what that’s going to look like.”
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