The City of Denver auditor released a report that found employees at Caring for Denver – a foundation voters created in 2018 – had spent $28,000 on meals and drinks over three years and $3,000 on expensive alcohol including high-end $20 cocktails.

Denver voters should start the difficult process to sunset the .25% sales tax we authorized for mental health care for the homeless and suicide.

Oversight of the foundation has been difficult. The group has a dedicated revenue stream of tax dollars but operates outside the regulation or oversight of the City of Denver. It was always going to be a recipe for disaster.

And this is not the first negative audit or report.

Caring for Denver, we are sure, has accomplished good during the past eight years, doling out grants to nonprofits already working to care for Denver’s mental health. But because the foundation is simply a pass-through of taxpayer dollars to entities that are actually doing the hard work of caring for Denverites, we think it will be simple to unwind.

When your only job is to make sure money goes to others who are doing hard work, fiscal accountability and being good stewards of taxpayer dollars is the only job qualification. This audit, in addition to other reports, indicates that the employees at Caring for Denver have failed.

“These expenses show a disregard for fiscal accountability,” Denver Auditor Tim O’Brien said in a news release. “I question whether it is best practice for taxpayers to foot the bill for alcohol and meals in the amount and frequency we discovered.”

Lorez Meinhold, executive director of the foundation, defended the spending by saying a large part of her and her staff’s jobs were to “meet grantees where they are and what they’re comfortable with.”

Meinhold herself spent $3,130 on alcohol over the three-year period audited. That included 70 drinks that cost more than $20 each at the glitzy cocktail lounge Death & Co. So we are supposed to believe that many of the nonprofit leaders who Meinhold was trying to encourage to apply for grants all suggested one of Denver’s more expensive bars as the place they should meet to discuss mental health grant applications.

Does Meinhold think we are stupid?

To give some credit where credit is due, this is better than the alternative, which would be Meinhold getting wined and dined by grant applicants hoping to tilt the scales in their favor so millions could flow to their nonprofit.

That form of corruption would be worse than living large on the taxpayer dollars when many Denverites have had to forego eating out entirely to try and remain in the city and under budget.

Denver relies on sales tax for almost all of its operations – including police, fire, roads, bridges and snow removal. Tacking on an extra .25% sales tax onto every sale in the city is a big deal. This is money that could give struggling small businesses a boost, or help residents save money, or that the City of Denver could tap into during an economic recession if sales tax receipts plummet and voters approve an increase.

The path forward to revoke the sales tax revenue from Caring for Denver is complicated. Either motivated citizens will have to collect signatures and get the repeal on the ballot or Denver City Council will have to refer the measure to voters. But hopefully outrage over years of mismanagement culminating with gross disregard for taxpayers will help motivate the effort.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, Rep. Joe Neguse and Rep. Jason Crow fought back against corruption, overreach and abuse of power.

For Boebert, Neguse and Crow, the fight is against a U.S. Department of Justice that has gone rogue under Attorney General Pam Bondi and U.S. attorneys across the nation who are not ashamed to do President Donald Trump’s political bidding with the justice system.

During these trying times, Colorado needs bipartisan agreement that abuse of power in a nation that stands for “justice for all”  will not be tolerated.

Rep. Jason Crow

Nothing from this administration has disturbed us more than Trump’s assertion that members of Congress, including Colorado’s Jason Crow, should be tried for treason – noting that it was “punishable by death” — because they urged members of the U.S. military not to obey illegal orders.

But the fact that Trump found a U.S. attorney willing to do his bidding and seat a grand jury to pursue those charges is baffling. Fortunately, the jurors saw through the U.S. government’s efforts to railroad six American patriots, all of whom first served in the military before becoming politicians. A grand jury refused to indict Crow and the other five Democrats who participated in the video.

Crow has not been silent despite the threats from the president of the United States, saying emphatically that he and others are standing up to a corrupt Justice Department.

“But that is the moment that we are in,” Crow told The Denver Post. “And I think every American is starting to see that, and the tide is turning.”

The tide is indeed turning.

Rep. Lauren Boebert

Boebert was one of four Republicans who signed a discharge petition in the U.S. House to force a vote on legislation requiring the Justice Department to release a trove of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein child sex abuse.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by the U.S. House and Senate and signed into law by Trump specifically prohibited redacting the documents to protect people “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary.”

This week, after viewing unredacted versions of the Epstein files, Boebert doubled down on her criticism of those in positions of power who are covering up for those suspected of abuse. In a brief video interview immediately after viewing the documents, she said there were names redacted who were discussing rape who were clearly not victims. If that is true, then the U.S. Justice Department has failed to comply with the clear language of the transparency act. Making matters worse, the Justice Department failed to protect victims, some of whom were named or pictured in the files, missing key redactions that would protect survivors of prostitution, sexual abuse and rape.

Boebert simply told Newsweek that she didn’t think “everyone there that was talking about underage girls being trafficked are victims.”

Who is the DOJ protecting?

Rep. Joe Neguse

Neguse also went after the Justice Department last week, helping a bipartisan group of lawmakers highlight the agency’s corruption during a five-hour hearing with Bondi.

Lawmakers mostly focused on the botched release of the Epstein files and the failure of the Justice Department over decades and multiple administrations to bring criminal charges in the case. If it were not for the work of a Miami Herald reporter exposing sweetheart deals in a series called “Perversion of Justice,” Epstein would have gotten away with his crimes. Now Americans are demanding that those who joined Epstein in raping children and abusing women must face justice.

Neguse took a different tack, highlighting other ways the Bondi has spurned justice.

First, he quoted Bondi, “If you come for law enforcement, the Trump administration will come for you.”

Then he played a video clip of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A man in the video can clearly be heard yelling at Capitol police and accusing them of selling out for a pension, and calling them the Nazi and the Gestapo. Then the man then yells “(Expletive) them. Kill them!”

“Attorney General Bondi, that man works for you now, right?” Neguse asks, running through the criminal charges the man faced stemming from his involvement in the Jan. 6 effort to prevent Biden from being seated as president.

“He does work for me,” Bondi said. “I believe he was pardoned by President Donald Trump.”

Then Neguse asked Bondi about the gutting of the Public Integrity Section within the Department of Justice, an agency tasked with the “investigation and prosecution of all federal crimes affecting government integrity, including bribery of public officials, election crimes, and other related offenses.”

Neguse said the agency went from 35 employees to two under Bondi. Bondi fired back that prior administrations had weaponized the agency, but Neguse cut her off, instead turning to her gutting of the Justice Department’s unit tasked with investigating cryptocurrency.

“She eliminated the team. Why? Because her boss, the president of the United States, is making money hand over fist. $1.4 billion over the last year through cryptocurrency holdings. I think what is happening at the Department of Justice is a disgrace.”

It is a disgrace.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Colorado must act swiftly to triple-check that the federal dollars going out the door for programs like childcare, food pantries and cash assistance are reaching their intended targets and not subject to abuse.

However, we disagree vehemently with President Donald Trump’s attempt to freeze federal funding for Colorado and a handful of other states with zero evidence of the type of fraud we are seeing in Minnesota and Mississippi.

For years, the media has reported on fraud cases prosecuted in Minnesota by federal investigators who began their probes under President Joe Biden’s administration. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis first charged 47 defendants with stealing money from the child nutrition program. From there, the scheme began to unravel and prosecutors discovered a network of fraud.

“From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” Joseph Thompson, then acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said at the time, according to The Wall Street Journal’s excellent account. “Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.”

The scale of the fraud in Minnesota dwarfs the roughly $100 million welfare scandal that rocked Mississippi from 2016 to 2019, embroiling former NFL quarterback Brett Favre in a civil lawsuit and sullying the state’s reputation for oversight.

If such abuses are also taking place in Colorado, then our elected officials, prosecutors and law enforcement must root them out swiftly. Every dollar stolen from these programs is a dollar snatched from the hands of those truly in need. And in an increasingly expensive America, we know that these federal programs can be the difference between homelessness and stability for women and children.

On Jan. 6, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would freeze $10 billion of funding headed to Colorado, Minnesota, New York, California and Illinois for the Child Care and Development Fund, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the Social Services Block Grant. Oddly absent from the list was Mississippi.

In Colorado, TANF provides financial support to 47,000 children living in poverty, while the Child Care and Development funding keeps 27,600 kids in child care for working families, according to The Denver Post’s Meg Wingerter. Cutting off those programs would harm Coloradans from inner cities to rural counties. Whether it’s farmers down on their luck waiting for tariff pressures to ease on our Eastern Plains or service workers in the mountains struggling to get by during a historically dry winter with low tourism, these dollars keep families in their homes and kids in quality care.

Fortunately, Attorney General Phil Weiser was able to join with other states to block the Trump administration’s actions. U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian of the Southern District of New York granted a temporary restraining order against the administration’s actions.

Colorado must be proactive, however, and provide taxpayers with evidence of oversight that would prevent fraud like that which has occurred in other states.

We know that Colorado is not immune.

In September of 2024, a federal grand jury indicted seven people for conspiring to defraud Medicare and Colorado Medicaid through a series of kickbacks and bribes to get referrals that could have led to more than $40 million in false claims. The outcome of the criminal case is still pending.

Coloradans can help by reporting suspected fraud to the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing. If you see something — outrageous prices billed to insurance, referrals for unnecessary services, etc — say something.

America’s safety net systems are too critical to shutter overnight, and too critical to allow waste, fraud and abuse to siphon assistance away from those in need.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Fees increase for many reasons, but according to recent reporting by The Denver Post’s Aldo Svaldi, some of the biggest increases are a result spikes in property insurance premiums.

So profound is the problem in Colorado that in 2024, lawmakers gave the Colorado insurance commissioner two years and $329,863 to study the issue and report on their findings this January.

Now is the time for Colorado lawmakers to step up and help keep existing multi-unit housing affordable. Insurance releif will also assist single-family homes in subdivisions where HOAs have a hard time insuring community buildings and recreation centers.

We fear that since 2024, matters have only gotten worse for Coloradans living in multi-family units that share insurance coverage using an HOA. The extreme example is Broomfield, where condominium owners are now paying a premium for their property insurance because of the threat of wildfire — made apparent by the 2021 Marshall Fire fire that tore through Boulder County. The Denver Post’s Aldo Svaldi found some communities where HOA fees have doubled — or more — in response. And condominium housing values have plummetted 12% in a single year.

When the report is released this month, Colorado’s leaders need to take a long, hard look at how we can protect people from skyrocketing insurance costs and the subsequent increase in HOA fees. In theory, living in a condominium should protect people from skyrocketing insurance costs. If 50 people live under the same roof, sharing that cost burden of insuring that roof should be a fraction of the impact to individual homeowners. But because of complexities in the market, that is not the case.

“What we are seeing in the market over the past 12 months is that the premium increases seem to be stabilizing, but they are stabilizing at a place that’s really high,” said Michael Conway, Colorado’s insurance commissioner. “It is imperative to try to find ways to bring more affordability into the market. There isn’t an easy button. It’s going to take a lot of work.”

Conway said that the single biggest driver of homeowner’s insurance premium increases is hail damage claims. If you have ever seen roofers going door to door after a minor hail storm in Colorado, you might have an idea what is driving the claims and the costs.

In addition to the excess and sometimes dubious roof claims in Colorado, the condominiums are uniquely burdened by a shortage of companies offering insurance policies to multi-unit dwellings, especially in large complexes that require multi-million dollar policies with complex terms.

These units are insured through the surplus lines market — an insurance marketplace that exists largely unregulated for unique or high-risk properties. The nature of the market means that policies are not reviewed or approved by the Department of Insurance. The lack of standard language and other regulation also makes it more likely that HOAs will suffer surprises about what is and is not covered by these complex agreements. Instead the system relies on licensed agents to broker the deals and take a commission.

Colorado lawmakers need to take a long, hard look at the market for insurance for complex and hard-to-insure units. We are not suggesting that Colorado establish a state-owned insurance company for such units or even that it step up regulation. That ship has sailed.

But Colorado could play the role of a broker, providing free services to residents who live in HOA communities to help them navigate these systems, shop for options and perhaps qualify for Colorado’s new insurance of last resort.

That is just one of many ideas that lawmakers should investigate after the report is released this month.

Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie, who was an author on the legislation requiring the study, said she is open to any and all suggestions.

“I’m eager to get my hands on the report in the next week or two and see what direction it might take us,” McCluskie told The Denver Post. “We should open every door and explore every option.”

McCluskie said residents in her mountain town communities are suffering from the insurance prices and are struggling to keep units insured and affordable.

Colorado lawmakers have a responsibility in 2026 to make this a top priority. The report will guide the way, but not if it sits on a shelf after it is released. There are ways to help HOAs navigate these systems and to create a fair field of competition for insurers, if only we can find the political will to make it happen.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

In an interview with the L.A. Times, the negotiator for California accused the upper basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico of clinging to “their most aggressive and rigid dreamland legal positions.”

In an op-ed for The Denver Post, Arizona’s negotiator suggested failing to come to the table with cuts could “let slip the dogs of war.”

This over-the-top hyperbole from both men illustrates just how poorly conversations to save the Colorado River are going behind closed doors. The federal government has given the seven states that rely on the Colorado River a deadline of Nov. 11 to commit to a general compromise on water use. Obviously, a consensus agreement would be far better than the Trump administration’s Department of Natural Resources implementing its own plan.

But when it comes to protecting Colorado’s interests, we will fire back with our own hyperbole — almost everyone is hurting from water restrictions during what has been deemed a “mega drought.” California and Arizona are overdue to share in that pain.

“When you see years that are like 2020 to 2021 where (Colorado) took an over 1 million acre foot reduction, that’s not a compensated reduction. No one delivered a check and kudos,” Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado River Commissioner and our state’s negotiator, told The Denver Post editorial board in an interview this week. “We did them because Mother Nature demanded them … Part of the issue is that no shortages were taken in the lower basin until 2022; meanwhile, during the period of these guidelines, we take shortages all the time.”

Some things are non-negotiable as the states work to divvy up the water that flows down the Colorado River every year. For example, Native American tribes should face smaller cuts than other users. The U.S. government forced indigenous peoples onto often inhospitable tracts of land, and now we must make good on promised water rights and water delivery. Tribal nations must be protected. In Arizona, almost half of the water flowing through the Central Arizona Project canal goes to Native American Tribes, meaning that Phoenix and its suburbs are going to face the lion’s share of the state’s cuts.

The other non-negotiable is that Colorado will not further curtail its use of the Colorado River without major concessions from California and Arizona.

Colorado’s water use is based on a prior appropriations system, which means that every year, some junior water rights holders do not get their full allotment because there isn’t enough snowpack. Lower basin states, meanwhile, have failed to adjust their use to compensate for the drought, draining the reserves in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The upper basin states use less water than what is allotted to them in the compact, while the lower basin states use more.

We fear that for too long, water managers up and down the river have been reluctant to implement the extreme measures needed. Because the harsh truth is that municipalities can only do so much. The vast majority of the water drawn from the Colorado River goes to agriculture and commercial interests, especially golf courses, industrial and data centers, oil and gas operations, and the Imperial Valley in California. These users are the ones who will be hit the hardest by coming reductions.

Denver Water users (who get most of their drinking water from snow melt that otherwise would flow into the Colorado River) have curtailed our use by 36% since 2000 despite a boom in population growth. Today, Denver Water users consume an average of 119 gallons per capita per day. Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District customers, which serves Los Angeles, use an average of 114 gallons per capita per day.

In Phoenix, residential users consume about 92 gallons per capita per day. In Las Vegas, the water use is 89 gallons per person per day, and a substantial amount of the city’s water is recycled, meaning it doesn’t come from the Colorado River.

While LA and Denver receive similar amounts of rainfall every year, Phoenix and Las Vegas are two of the driest cities in the country. If they can reduce their use so low, so can every other city in this nation.

Deserts like Phoenix and St. George, where less than an inch of rain falls every year and the high temperatures in summer often top 110 degrees, may have to follow Las Vegas and put a moratorium on golf courses unless they find a sustainable water alternative. And no, groundwater is not sustainable.

Farmers in the Imperial Valley, who faced cuts beginning in 2020 that led to some fields being left fallow, will have to reconsider their crops, invest in water-saving irrigation systems, and possibly reduce their yield. Everyone will pay for these changes at the grocery store, whether it is the increased price of meat as the price of alfalfa hay skyrockets, or the increased price of water-hungry produce like almonds and pistachios.

A compromise between states rather than a unilateral decision by the Department of the Interior, followed by a protracted legal battle, will reduce how drastic cuts are. Using less water today could start the recharge of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both of which are nearing dead pool status and are around 30% full.

Coloradans have always been ready to do our part to save the river, but we will not further cut our use to support reckless downstream users.

Everyone can pull together — municipalities preventing unsustainable growth and development, aesthetic or non-functional turf grass must be strictly limited and our agricultural communities must be supported as they transition to water efficient irrigation systems and less water-intensive crops.

This is an emergency, and Colorado’s water negotiators are right to stand firm defending Colorado.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Not all of the responsibility for this failed system falls on hospitals, but Colorado’s non-profit health care providers are uniquely positioned to be able to help during this difficult time if they embrace the charitable nature of their business.

According to The Denver Post’s award-winning health reporter Meg Wingerter, most Colorado hospitals saw a profit in 2024. But the most profitable hospitals tried to argue that their profits were untouchable because the money came not from patient care but from returns on investments — we assume that means the trusts and foundations that help support the hospital saw impressive investment gains that were reinvested into the market rather than realized and withdrawn.

UCHealth — a network of non-profit hospitals and clinics across the state affiliated with the University of Colorado — reported a $1.2 billion profit. HCA Health One, the state’s only for-profit hospital network, reported $616.8 million in profit, and CommonSpirit Health reported $22.2 million.

A spokesman for UCHealth said most of the profit came from returns on investments in the stock market, rather than from the 4% return on investment it makes from patient care and hospital operations. However, given that UCHealth is a tax-exempt system required to spend money on charitable activities, we do not think it’s unreasonable for the system to be expected to return some of that profit to its patients in the form of out-of-pocket discounts before deductibles are met.

Most hospitals already write off a huge amount of uncompensated care, and that charitable gift to the poor who are truly unable to pay and have no insurance counts toward their required charitable activities.

But we also know that hospitals like UCHealth are not spending as much of their revenue proportionally on charity care as other organizations. UCHealth does deserve credit for serving the most number of Medicaid patients and having the highest uncompensated care. But when compared to the system’s size of operations, the distinction for taking on “the largest proportion of charity care costs within the state” rests with Denver Health. Colorado’s annual report on charitable care notes that Denver Health “has the largest value for charity care costs with $88.1 million. This is three-fold more than the next largest figure of UC Health University of Colorado Hospital’s of $24 million.”

Meanwhile, Allan Baumgarten, a researcher who compiles data annually about health care in a handful of states, reported that HMOs in Colorado reported a combined net profit of $89.1 million. Yes, that seems paltry compared to the hospital profits, but remember that health insurance doesn’t actually produce anything; it is a middleman, pass-through business operation designed solely to reduce the risk of those it insures.

Ironically, HMOs are covering less and less risk. The high deductible plan ensures that unless an illness or injury requires thousands of dollars in care during a single calendar year, the insurer won’t have to cover any of the costs. And, the deductible resets Jan. 1 every year, meaning that patients can nearly meet their deductible — of say $5,000 — only to have it reset in the new year. A patient could spend $10,000 before their insurance company picks up a dime of the cost for their care.

Meanwhile, non-profit organizations are clearly misunderstanding their mission.

Obviously, we want UCHealth’s investments to grow, and not all of the gains should be realized in a single year. The hospital system is also aggressively growing and purchasing other clinics and hospitals around the state. Given the quality of care we know UCHealth provides, that is great news.

But hospitals need to be much more transparent about how much of their profits are being poured into growth and increased profitability, and how much is going to actual charitable work, like reductions in costs for low-income and middle-class patients who face crippling deductibles.

Yes, USHealth is a teaching hospital, and we know that much of its charitable work goes toward preparing the next generation of doctors and nurses. There is a shortage of health care providers in America, so we are not suggesting this work stop.

But a balance is needed when the hospital system reports $1.2 billion in profit in a single year.

Greater transparency from the state-affiliated system, and from all the nonprofit hospitals enjoying tax-exempt status, would go a long way to alleviate the bad taste patients have in their mouth when their care is completed and the bill arrives.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

We are concerned.

Two reporters with the non-profit, online news agency Denverite interviewed 18 people close to the Chamber about the exodus and found a troubling and recurring complaint about a “toxic culture” fostered by the Chamber’s CEO and president J.J. Ament.

That is not five people raising concerns, or even 10, but out of 25 people successfully contacted by the reporters at Denverite, 18 expressed concern. The other seven individuals described their time at the Chamber as positive or neutral. Several people were so adamant about their experiences that they bravely used their names to back stories about the bad behavior of one of the most powerful men in Denver’s business community.

And on top of that, Ament’s control at the chamber is so poor that changes to the renowned training program – Leadership Denver – led to three of 50 members of the foundation resigning in protest to what Paul Lhevine described in a letter to the Chamber as changes that do not “honor the mission we have been fulfilling for decades.” Lhevine was not one of the individuals interviewed for the Denverite story.

Finally, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade cut ties with the Chamber over what China Califf, the leader of the Small Business Development Center, described as concerns over the negative culture at the Chamber. Shortly after Califf resigned, the Small Business Development Center was moved from the Chamber to Red Rocks Community College.

That is a lot of smoke coming from the Chamber at a time when this city needs steady leadership that inspires confidence, not controversy.

The chair of the Chamber’s board says he is happy with Ament’s tenure. Mowa Haile told Denverite that the problem is a controversial but necessary restructuring of the organization, not Ament’s leadership or demeanor. Ament began requiring a 5-day in-person work week, and the Chamber’s vice-president for customer experience, Cayti Stein, said that change is what drove off a number of employees.

“The Board has confidence that the direction charted by J.J. and the leadership team best serves our members and the entire Metro Denver business community, as evidenced by the significant growth in membership over the past four years,” Haile wrote in response to questions from Denverite.

We can certainly imagine employees being disappointed about a return-to-office policy, but half of the Chamber’s staff left in the course of 15 months, Denverite found. Many Americans would be skeptical that, in this economy, so many people would be willing to leave a stable job over having to return to the office, no matter how difficult the commute or their personal circumstances.

More credible are employee stories about Ament’s abrasive leadership style, stories that Ament denies, calling himself a collaborative leader. The stories included allegations of: telling an employee who was later demoted and fired for insubordination that he didn’t care for her at a holiday party, threatening to fire employees in front of their peers, and an employee who said the organization failed to adequately address an incident where she was exposed to a nude photograph of a male colleague.

The city’s Chamber of Commerce is far more than just a marketing tool for local businesses, and now more than ever, Colorado needs the heart of downtown to thrive. The Chamber owns and rents the building it occupies. Like other landlords in downtown, it is struggling to break even despite growth in membership, relying on its foundation and other external organizations to balance the books.

While membership is certainly an important measure of the Chamber’s success – after all, those members pay the dues that keep the Chamber running – we are confident that the Chamber can find a leader who will support businesses and drive investment in the Chamber without driving off half of the staff.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

After such effusive declarations of financial stability, leave it to RTD to be in complete crisis barely a year later. 

Despite a record high budget of $1.5 billion, RTD is facing a mind-boggling deficit somewhere between $100 million and $400 million, and is considering dreaded service cuts. 

Such a sudden and staggering deficit might leave you wondering, how could a public agency stumble from the picture of financial health to sounding the klaxon and planning to cut service? Apparently, higher-than-anticipated maintenance and repair costs and falling sales tax revenues (which fund 70% of RTD’s spending). 

RTD director and general manager Debra Johnson compared the agency’s apparently unexpected infrastructure maintenance needs to that of an old house. 

“This is par for the course. If you lived in a home for 30 years, do you think you wouldn’t have to make some repairs?” Johnson told The Denver Post. 

But as any homeowner knows — and as lawmakers rightfully pointed out — you don’t just sit idly by and watch your house deteriorate for 30 years, then suddenly start rushing around trying to fix everything. Upkeep is an ongoing process that you budget for each and every year. 

A year ago, when the agency was not-so-humbly proclaiming itself a good steward of taxpayer dollars, was there really no forward thinking? No anticipation of hard times? It’s not like sales tax revenues were soaring last year — they were, in fact, declining, following a trend that has continued since 2022. 

Sadly, it seems apparent that we shouldn’t expect common sense to reign at RTD. After all, it’s been more than 20 years since Boulder County citizens voted for FasTracks — and we’re still waiting on our train. 

Which brings us to the crux of this issue. RTD has always been something of a shambolic agency, so their new budget woes aren’t really surprising. But a few line items in the budget have raised some serious questions.

For starters, while RTD is in a budget crunch, the agency is still sitting on about $1 billion in reserves. And a year ago, it had $1.12 billion in reserves. Reserves are important — especially now as the agency faces a deficit. But for an agency with a $1.5 billion budget, $1 billion in reserves feels like a lot of money to just be sitting on — especially for a taxpayer-funded agency responsible for providing services to the citizens of the Front Range. 

For context, the City of Denver, which has a slightly larger budget of $1.66 billion, only has $180 million in reserves. The state of Colorado, with a budget of $47.9 billion, has just $2.1 billion in reserves. So while the state of Colorado sits on 4% in reserves, RTD has 66% squirreled away. 

And here’s the rub, RTD estimates that the cost of completing the construction of Northwest Rail Peak Service — which would provide train service from Denver to Boulder and on to Longmont — would be approximately $650 million. Even adding on finishing the North Metro corridor, which would run from Denver to Thornton, would push the total cost to around $1 billion. 

Of course, even though RTD has an excessively high ratio of reserves compared to its budget, we don’t want to imply that the agency should spend every last penny on finishing the northern portion of FasTracks. That would be irresponsible. (And impossible, as some of the reserve funds are dedicated to other expenditures.)

But the implication here should be clear. From the outside, it sure looks like RTD should have been able to make a lot more progress on the promises it made to Boulder County voters. 

Especially once we add on the fact that RTD is planning to borrow $539 million to buy new diesel buses, a move that totally throws the agency’s supposed commitment to Colorado’s climate goals out the window. 

Sure, sales tax revenue is falling and ridership has never really recovered to pre-pandemic levels. But an agency with $1 billion in reserves shouldn’t be considering cutting services a year after being in complete financial health — unless something is seriously wrong in management. 

If RTD does start cutting services, things are likely to only get worse for the agency. While primarily funded through sales tax, if ridership declines due to cuts and people can no longer rely on buses and trains, that will not only hit the agency’s bottom line, it will also harm support for the agency when it comes to other sources of funding. 

If people can’t ride public transit, why would they vote to fund it? 

In the past, we have advocated on behalf of fully funding RTD because we believe in the mission of the agency. And it is true that we must do our part to ensure RTD is financially situated to meet our needs. But it is getting harder and harder to trust an agency that keeps failing to live up to its promises. 

This is all the more frustrating when you consider how imperative RTD is to our efforts to lower emissions and meet Colorado’s aspirational climate goals. As we negotiate our way toward a future of limited carbon emissions, RTD must be a daily commuting option for as many people as possible. This means we need increased ridership, expanded services and investments in new technologies. 

Instead, we have half a billion spent on new diesel buses, reneging on promises of train services and potential cuts to services. 

Next year, six seats on RTD’s board, including those representing Boulder and Longmont, will be up for election. And as it looks now, that board is in dire need of a shake-up to reinvigorate leadership and actually see to it that our transit agency meets the needs of our communities. 

We do not want service cuts. We do not need diesel buses. We want the Northwest Rail Service FasTracks promised. And we need fully funded, fully functioning mass transit for all — and we need it today. We can’t afford to wait. 

—Gary Garrison for the Camera Editorial Board

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

The examples in Newman’s excellent investigation, however, only drive home for us the importance of another prohibition in Colorado high school sports — the ban on recruiting athletes.

Eaglecrest basketball coach Jarris Krapcha highlighted the problem for Newman, speaking out against the proposal that the Colorado High School Athletics Association (CHSAA) adopt a one-time free transfer for student athletes:

“The recruiting piece — the pre-enrollment contact piece — is something that CHSAA cannot police simply because they don’t have the manpower, and it’s already happening rampantly,” Krapcha said. “If you allow a one-time free transfer, it’s going to be open season on recruiting other players from other schools.”

In other words, recruiting is already happening. Coaches are — against clear policies spelled out in the bylaws of CHSAA — talking to students and their parents about enrolling with their school.

Student transfers would not be a problem if coaches were not recruiting. We want Colorado students to have choice when it comes to their education, and thankfully, our public schools no longer confine students to schools based on their zip codes. Yes, a student or his parents could be motivated to transfer or move based on athletic success of a school or promises from an athletic director, but there are a whole host of good reasons a student could transfer: to escape bullying, to access advanced coursework, or for a shorter commute.

The thought of varsity athletes who chose for healthy reasons to switch schools (absent unhealthy recruitment) being punished by a half-year loss of playing time is unpleasant to say the least.

But we know that coaches are recruiting. The top athletes in the state are not hopping from power-house program to power-house program without assurances of playing time and position, or at the very least, conversations about coaching style and practice schedules.

“I can say that violations do occur, they have always occurred, and they continue to occur today. We have unfortunately had violations this fall that have been addressed and penalized,” wrote CHSAA’s Mike Krueger in response to questions from The Denver Post editorial board about student transfers and recruitment.

“Hundreds of thousands of students, families and coaches in Colorado participate the right way, for the right reasons,” he concluded. “Our responsibility is to protect the fairness and integrity of the experience for them. It takes all of us to act with integrity, and that responsibility will not only continue, but in this day and age it will be more pronounced.”

Keeping high school athletics focused on what is most important for students — growth and development — rather than what is most important for coaches and athletic directors — winning at all costs — is critical at this moment. Many college sports, especially football and basketball, feel more like professional sports every day, and the term “student-athlete” is becoming an oxymoron even for sports that once avoided the corruption of professionalization.

So what is the solution to this intractable problem?

We urge CHSAA’s Legislative Council, a body with representatives from every league across the state, to consider shifting the focus of enforcement from the actions of students’ parents and the punishment of students to scrutiny of the behavior of coaches, athletic directors, school administrators and team boosters. Until coaches are suspended for an entire season for recruiting a student to transfer from another school, the bad behavior will continue. Until athletic directors face consequences for conversations that are clearly prohibited by CHSAA, players will continue to get recruited.

Krueger points out, correctly, that recruitment is hard to police, and he notes that CHSAA has and does impose penalties when coaches are caught cheating.

But policing recruiting can’t be any more difficult than trying to determine if a child switched schools because of his or her parents’ divorce or because he or she really wants to play for a team likely to compete in the state championship.

CHSAA’s bylaws currently emphasize analysis of the behavior of parents and de-emphasize the behavior of coaches. For example, the bylines define “broken-home” but do not actually define “recruiting.” Coaches are encouraged to forward email inquiries about their sports program to the school’s administration, but are not required to do so. Likewise, parents who don’t have the money to make a bona fide move and, say, buy a house right next door to Cherry Creek High School are asked to instead demonstrate a hardship that forced their child to switch schools so that the student can play varsity sports uninterrupted. But coaches aren’t told in the bylaws what they risk when promising an athlete that they can start at quarterback if they move schools.

The focus in the bylaws feels all wrong.

CHSAA should keep its prohibition on sports-motivated transfers, but refocus its enforcement on coaches rather than parents and students.

That could look like requiring a coach to sign a legally-binding affidavit swearing that no one associated with the team engaged in the recruitment of a newly transferred student in order for that student to play without a waiting period. Then, when text messages about playing time and access to college recruiters emerge, there will be no crocodile tears when the coach gets banned from coaching for CHSAA schools.

We all want Colorado’s high school students to get the education they deserve at the school of their choice. And we all want to protect high school athletics from the corrupting influences of recruitment.

The road forward is for CHSAA to stick to its guns on student transfers, but to switch the focus from students to coaches.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

The teen first warned his fellow students at Evergreen High School that there was a shooter on campus, then he confronted the shooter on the street outside the high school. Silverstone was shot twice.

He spent a month in a Lakewood hospital fighting for his life and then recovering from the wounds that almost killed him. He was released from the hospital Tuesday in what his family called a miracle, and we call a blessing.

“Matthew has never given up. He can now speak. In fact, he is happy to tell you, ‘I’m still alive!’ He can walk with assistance,” his family said in a news release. “His friends will tell you his sense of humor is back. He has exceeded everyone’s expectations in his recovery.”

Silverstone was both brave and selfless on Sept. 10, and it sounds like he continues to shine through his recovery, giving everyone hope in these dark times.

Silverstone is not alone in his distinction as a true Colorado hero.

Another student who was shot at Evergreen High School last month confronted the shooter. At the age of 14, the victim’s family has understandably chosen to remain anonymous and keep out of the public eye. We wish to respect their privacy while also highlighting the incredible act.

Both students remind us of Kendrick Castillo, who was killed defending his classmates inside a Highlands Ranch school in 2019. Castillo was joined by other classmates — Brendan Bialy and Joshua Jones — as they lunged at a shooter, saving others. Bialy was not hurt, but Jones was shot twice.

We are torn between celebrating these incredible acts and crying for the state of our country. Mass shootings have been occurring in Colorado schools since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. How is it that students are still the ones confronting these assailants and not our trained adult professionals in law enforcement? Every school in this state needs an armed officer on campus at all times.

We should not be asking our kids to save themselves. More must be done to protect students who attend school hoping to grow and learn, and far too often in the past decade have found themselves trying to survive the horrors of mass shootings and the trauma that follows.

Nine minutes passed between when the shooting began inside Evergreen High School and when Silverstone was shot at the corner of Buffalo Park Road and Olive Road at the far end of the high school’s campus. Having an officer on the campus could have resulted in a different outcome.

Expressing gratitude to these kids for their acts of heroism is not enough. We can name a street for Silverstone (and should, just as we created Castillo Way). We can cry for their pain and suffering, and rejoice at their perseverance and determination.

But adults in Colorado must now act to ensure that no other child in this state is forced to fight an armed assailant for their lives and the lives of their friends and teachers.

Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

Updated 2:10 p.m. Oct. 17, 2025: Due to an editor’s error, this article previously misreported details about the shooting of Matthew Silverstone.