Colorado Parks and Wildlife killed an uncollared wolf on Friday in Routt County. The wolf — which was born to the Copper Creek Pack in spring 2024, but separated from the pack that fall — has been tied to 10 confirmed depredation events involving 22 sheep in both Rio Blanco and Routt counties since 2025. 

Parks and Wildlife has made multiple unsuccessful attempts to kill this wolf after it has repeatedly attacked livestock, including an attempt last August where the wolf was shot. 

In a Saturday news release, the state wildlife agency announced that it killed the wolf and obtained evidence from the scene that it’s the same wolf that was attacking and killing sheep in Rio Blanco County starting in 2025. 

Parks and Wildlife said the wolf was most recently tied to two confirmed attacks on livestock in Routt County on Wednesday and Thursday, each involving one lamb. 

The news release confirmed that both events had “clear and convincing evidence” that a wolf was involved in the attacks and occurred despite “the producer pursuing substantial non-lethal conflict minimization efforts,” including site assessments, deployment of range riders, use of livestock guardian dogs and scare devices, active human presence from sheep herders, and permits to deploy injurious nonlethal hazing techniques.

“The decision to pursue lethal actions is never an easy one, but the circumstances around this wolf’s repeated depredation history made this a difficult but necessary decision,” said Laura Clellan, director of Parks and Wildlife, in a statement. “The producers impacted by these depredations have worked diligently with CPW to identify and deploy all viable and reasonable non-lethal tools and techniques identified through their site assessment and consultation with our field staff.”

Parks and Wildlife consulted with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the decision to kill the wolf. 

Colorado’s wildlife agency is authorized to kill wolves under certain circumstances, including chronic depredation, under its special 10(j) rule from Fish and Wildlife. Under this rule, the agency has 30 days to remove the animal if warranted. In addition to meeting the definition of chronic depredation, the agency will only seek to euthanize a wolf if a variety of nonlethal tools have been used to mitigate conflict, the wolf was not lured or baited and if it is likely attacks will continue unless action is taken. 

The uncollared wolf was first tied to four livestock attacks in the summer of 2025, involving five lambs and one ewe, on July 20, July 22, Aug. 2 and Aug. 16.

As the situation met Parks and Wildlife’s definition of chronic depredation — and there were efforts by the affected producer to deploy nonlethal tools — the agency sought to kill the wolf. In the August search, the wolf was shot, but the body was never located.

In the fall, an uncollared wolf was tied to confirmed depredations on Oct. 9, Oct. 12 and Nov. 4 — each involving one sheep. While the agency never publicly announced it was undergoing a lethal removal effort following these attacks, the Coloradoan obtained records from the agency and reported that Parks and Wildlife attempted an operation to kill the responsible wolf in November, but that the effort was suspended by early December. 

In March, it announced that it was suspending another failed attempt to locate and kill the uncollared wolf killing livestock in Rio Blanco County. 

This is the second wolf that Parks and Wildlife has lethally removed due to conflict with livestock since Colorado’s reintroduction of gray wolves began in December 2023. The agency killed a yearling from the same Copper Creek Pack litter in May 2025 in Pitkin County after the pack was connected to a series of livestock attacks. 

The uncollared wolf killed this Friday has been separated from the Copper Creek Pack since September 2024, when the pack’s breeding adults and four other wolf pups were captured and sent to a wildlife sanctuary, but it remained in the wild uncaptured. The pack was rounded up in Grand County after being tied to repeated livestock attacks near their den site. While the patriarch died in captivity from injuries caused by a gunshot wound before its capture, the surviving matriarch and pups were released back into the wild in January 2025. 

In addition to the two lethal removals, 13 of the 25 wolves reintroduced in Colorado have died. 

Parks and Wildlife’s Saturday news release included a statement from Gov. Jared Polis — the first time the governor has made a statement following a wolf death. 

“This elusive wolf had a number of chances but sadly chose to continue to depredate, which necessitated this challenging management decision,” he said. “Colorado remains committed to recovering and maintaining a viable, self-sustaining wolf population in Colorado, while concurrently working to minimize wolf-related conflicts with domestic animals, with non-lethal means as our priority.”

Parks and Wildlife said it will release a final report on the lethal removal operation once it is complete.

That was the thinking of The Luzzatto Company, which paid $3.2 million for the two skyscrapers at California and 17th streets a year ago in April. Compared with the buildings’ 2008 sale of $112 million, that’s about 3 cents on the dollar. The plan is to turn the nearly 1 million square feet of underused office space into High Fidelity Plaza, a 700-unit apartment complex filled with urban amenities like a bodega, childcare center and bookstore. It’s also next to a light-rail stop. 

The conversion will cost the Los Angeles investors about $315 million. But thanks to a low-interest $63 million loan from Denver’s Downtown Development Authority — “the minimum necessary to make this economically viable,” president Asher Luzzatto said — it’s a bet worth taking.

DDA, a quasi-governmental entity to finance downtown improvements, took the wager. The organization had already approved three multimillion dollar loans to private developers for office-to-housing conversions. And the High Fidelity project seemed vital to infusing vibrancy back into the city’s center. 

Tourists, convention goers and local visitors have returned to downtown, especially along 16th Street, which completed a multiyear makeover last fall. Foot traffic is pretty much back to prepandemic levels, reaching 95% of traffic measured in 2019, according to data market researcher Placer.ai provided to the Downtown Denver Partnership, a separate organization that promotes the city’s economic center. 

But the office market is different. While other major cities are still below their 2019 office occupancy levels, downtown Denver last month had the worst office recovery rate of them all. The city’s reputation as a top place for remote work and downtown’s outdated perception of pandemic insecurity and homeless encampments probably hasn’t helped.

In May, office visits to downtown Denver office buildings were off by 48.4% compared to 2019, according to Placer data, which uses anonymized cellphone data of phones in an office for at least three hours are presumably owned by a worker.  

Funding for all this comes from $570 million in city bonds approved by downtown voters in 2024. And so far, DDA has approved $225 million in loans and grants, mostly to commercial applicants, some small merchants and the city for work to upgrade properties such as the McNichols Building and Civic Center and Skyline parks. Eventually, the loans must be repaid and the DDA must return the money to the city — plus interest.

The way Luzzatto sees it, this isn’t really a risk at all for the city or the future taxpayer dollars funding the loan.

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“These aren’t grant monies. They’re loans. So unless the project or the market completely collapses beyond where it’s already collapsed, they (the city) should be really well positioned to both recover the full amount of their investment plus interest,” said Luzzatto, whose company also acquired the two Denver Energy Center buildings at 16th and Broadway last year for $5 million. 

“You ultimately put the onus on developers in private markets, but you also help. You help make the economics make sense ex-ante by providing these lower-interest loans to get the construction going.”

The public funding is fueling fast decisions. The DDA board has approved at least 16 projects in less than a year. None of the multimillion-dollar loans to commercial developers have been funded, though. That’s largely because projects are still in the planning stage, getting permits and arranging other financing. Downtown’s high office vacancy rates, which include buildings that are no longer actively leasing, continue to rise, according to real estate broker CBRE. The pressure is on.

“We’ve lost, oh, I don’t know, 30, 40% of our employees, particularly in Upper Downtown just through flex work and some companies, many companies downsizing and such,” said Bill Mosher, a consultant to Denver Mayor Mike Johnston who is working with DDA to figure out how to attract more life to Upper Downtown.

Mosher’s done this before. In 2008, he helped create the DDA to pay back a $300 million federal loan to renovate Denver Union Station. DDA used a tool called tax increment financing, or TIF, which let the authority borrow money from future downtown property and sales taxes and pay it back in 30 years. The renovated Union Station opened in 2014 with a hotel, the A line to the airport, shops and restaurants. The loan was paid off in 2024.

“It got paid off early,” Mosher said. 

And the payoff coincided with the mayor’s plan to use TIF again to solve the economic crisis in downtown. In 2024, the city’s downtown office market was more than 30% vacant. But the emptiness was far greater. Many companies still had leases, but their employees worked remotely, turning downtown office towers into zombie buildings with few people showing up in person. As leases came due, many opted for a smaller footprint, if they renewed at all. Vacancy rates kept rising.

Downtown voters overwhelmingly approved the plan in late 2024 and allowed DDA to tap $570 million in future taxes to invest in the city’s center. The TIF was amended to include Upper Downtown.

The DDA’s plan was straightforward. 

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“We’ve made a goal to try and eliminate over the years about 7 million square feet of vacant or obsolete office space. And we want to do that by either filling them with office workers, which is a challenge right now, or converting space to residential,” Mosher said. “And, you know, people always ask about demolition. We say that’s probably a third choice, but we’re not at the point where we want to buy buildings to tear down.”

But that’s the kind of quandary the city faced. Nobody was stepping up. Downtown restaurants, retailers and the office market were not recovering on their own. 

Denver buys a mall and then some

In December, the Denver City Council gave the DDA its blessing to buy the Denver Pavilions, the shopping mall between Welton Street and Tremont Place, for $37 million. That wasn’t in the plans a year earlier. 

“We had no intention of buying it,” Mosher said. “But if you’re going to focus on 16th Street and you’re going to focus on Upper Downtown and you’re sitting there with a potential foreclosure of Pavilions, it’s not a good situation.”

The 354,407-square-foot mall had shed anchor tenants like Uniqlo, Hard Rock Cafe and Banana Republic. “It had been in a precarious position for almost a year,” Mosher said. Financed in 2016 for $140 million, the Pavilions had an $85 million loan that was past due by the time DDA purchased the mall. The bank hadn’t been paid in six months, Mosher said. 

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“Frankly, the feeling we got from the bank, and the word we got from the bank, is they would sit on it for a couple of years and see what happened with Upper Downtown. And we felt this was a situation that we didn’t want to live with,” Mosher said. “We needed to control our own destiny.”

But most of the recent purchases and loans weren’t done by the city. Those are owned or managed by the DDA. In the case of the Pavilions, DDA was actually eyeing the two parking lots on 15th Street behind the mall, which were owned by another company. Without acquiring those, the city’s mall purchase risked another developer coming in with something else in mind instead of one in simpatico. The two parking lots cost DDA another $22.5 million.

The surface parking lots are active and bring in two-thirds of the mall’s parking revenue. Between retail tenants and the parking, the Pavilions is collecting $3.3 million in net revenue a year. The money is being invested back into the property, including setting aside $3.5 million to repair the underground parking garage — work that had been deferred for four years.

“What’s interesting about the Pavilions is that it’s 38% vacant,” Mosher said. “It’s actually 62% occupied. We’ve got some long-term active tenants.”

It’s desperate situations that are getting DDA’s attention. The owners of the Petroleum Building at 16th and Broadway had been trying to convert the 14-story office tower into housing for five years. In November, the DDA approved a $14 million low-interest loan for the office tower, which when it was built in 1957 housed the oil industry’s Petroleum Club, according to the National Register of Historic Places. 

LEFT: The Petroleum Building on the corner of Broadway and the 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun) RIGHT: A rendering of what a studio unit layout that would be part of the Petroleum Building’s conversion. (Handout)

Grants to give downtown a unique, local vibe

The latest iteration of DDA is still relatively new. Its first awards went out less than a year ago. Many recipients are small business owners, some who’ve already moved forward with expanding their business along 16th Street. 

Sundae Artisan Ice Cream, which started in Vail in 2016, received a $750,000 DDA loan to expand in Denver. The new store, at 1600 Glenarm Place, officially opened Saturday. 

Over on 16th Street between Welton and California, Jevon Taylor has already received a half year of rent money from his DDA grant of $4.2 million. Taylor is taking over the ground floor of two buildings for Green Spaces Market, which will include artists and local vendors and food. It’s charging below-market rents. 

“We couldn’t do this without a grant,” said Taylor, who had operated a coworking space and marketplace in Five Points. “We’re also trying to push the needle and provide viable options for these kinds of opportunities to exist. My goal with this is to get beyond the five years we’re guaranteed (rent) and figure out how we can expand this to a larger footprint and longer term lease.”

The market is expected to open in September. As of May, all the spaces have been leased, including a spot to Konjo, which plans to open its third and largest Ethiopian eatery, he said.

“I think Denver is one of the only cities that is doing it on this level,” said Taylor, who’s also known for the False Ego fashion label. “I mean you see things like Kansas City, where the World Cup is coming and they’re giving two months of free rent to businesses. I think that’s absolute BS. I’m glad that Denver is giving us the opportunity to do this for a five-year span and letting us pilot this.”

City’s spending on office conversions so far? “Not much.”

The larger loans for commercial conversions are still waiting for projects to get further along with building permits and additional financing. 

“Not much of it has been spent, frankly,” Mosher said. “Think of us as a bank. The High Fidelity project is a good example. We’re requiring their first lender and the DDA to go in together on the loan. So we won’t spend any money on the High Fidelity project until potentially 2028. It could be under construction and the developer’s equity is being spent before we come in with our money.”

The $570 million TIF doesn’t mean DDA has access to all that money at once. It’s based on collected sales and property tax revenues, so even the authority must consider how much more to loan based on the likelihood of being able to pay it back. 

The DDA has received 100 project proposals. Of those, 67 were ineligible or not selected, seven are on hold or missing information, 16 were awarded grants or loans and 10 are still in review.

“There aren’t many cities that have the resources of the DDA to help their downtown,” Mosher said. “That being said, the overall amount of money is not a lot. I mean, just look at $60 million going to 700 housing units. It’s expensive and so all we’re trying to do is get the market going in the right direction, give a couple of examples of things that can work and then hopefully the private market takes over.” 

Similar efforts are happening in other cities that experienced a mass exodus of office workers in the pandemic. Dallas, which has used TIFs for decades to encourage growth, increased funding to developers in 2022 after watching companies move to its suburbs, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts report. In October, the Dallas City Council agreed to provide $103 million to redevelop the city’s tallest office building into a hotel. 

Why isn’t the downtown office market filling back up? Two words: remote work.

Denver’s low recovery rates has also been attributed to its “remote-friendly labor market,” said market researcher Placer, which ranked the city as having the worst pandemic office-recovery rate. Last month’s office visits were off by 48.4% compared with May 2019. Miami, the closest to a full recovery, was off by 11%.

But the city and state has long had a higher share of remote workers than all other states, according to U.S. Census data. It was that way in 2019, when 8.3% of workers said they worked some or all of their days at home. And it was that way in 2024, when “work at home” jumped to 22.9%.

Washington, D.C., took the lead in 2024, but Colorado was still the top state. 

Pedestrians keep their distance on the nearly deserted 16th Street Mall in March of 2020. (Eric Lubbers, The Colorado Sun)

People share ice cream inside the newly opened Sundae Artisan Ice Cream at 16th and Glenarm streets on June 12. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)