350 Colorado, an environmental group that advocates for the elimination of fossil fuels, says in its recently released report that it reviewed Suncor’s self-reported documents connected to the shutdown and determined there was a notable increase in the frequency of permit violations while the refinery was offline.

During that time, the plant released excessive amounts of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter such as soot, according to the report titled “Suncor’s Commerce City Refinery: Looking Back to Plan Ahead.”

The report counted each hour during which at least one of those regulated toxics was emitted. So if all four were released during the same hour, 350 Colorado counted that as four hours’ worth of permit violations.

At the time, people who live in neighborhoods surrounding the refinery hoped that the shutdown would result in cleaner air, but no one had looked into the data, said Heidi Leath, a climate policy analyst with 350 Colorado.

“They just thought they were going to get a break from the pollution,” she said. “We were really curious to see if the air quality would improve.”

The 350 Colorado report also looked at the three-month closure’s impact on gas prices and determined that although gas prices spiked at the time, the refinery does not help Colorado maintain lower gas prices.

Efforts to reach Suncor officials for this story were unsuccessful.

On Dec. 21, 2022, the Suncor refinery’s hydrogen plant malfunctioned during an extreme deep freeze, during which the temperature in Denver dropped 37 degrees in an hour, eventually plunging to -24 degrees. When the hydrogen plant tripped, it caused a cascade of problems for Suncor’s machinery, leading the company to shut down operations for three months to make repairs.

Suncor refines about 98,000 barrels of crude oil per day during normal operations and supplies about 40% of the gasoline used in Colorado. The state’s only refinery also produces diesel, jet fuel and liquid asphalt.

As for the pollution during the shutdown, refineries often release more chemicals during a malfunction as they race to stop production without creating a safety hazard, such as an explosion from accumulating fumes. They also tend to release more toxics when they restart production and calibrate their instruments.

But excessive emissions from those situations often are exempt from regulation, Leath said.

“They basically give a free pass and they allow emissions to go up during these periods and put people’s health at risk,” she said of state regulators.

That hasn’t stopped the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment from opening an investigation into potential violations during the 2022-2023 shutdown.

In January, the agency sent Suncor a compliance advisory, which is the first step in an investigation into permit violations, said Kate Malloy, a spokeswoman for the department’s Air Pollution Control Division.

That compliance advisory covers alleged violations that occurred between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, including the shutdown and restart period from the deep freeze.

The agency will be looking into Suncor for exceeding its emissions limits for air pollutants, failing to meet required operating parameters and failing to follow required procedures for operating and maintaining equipment, according to the 57-page advisory.

In July, the state health department and the Environmental Protection Agency served a notice of violation to the refinery, the first step in an enforcement action after both agencies discovered violations during inspections between 2020 and 2023. That notice is still pending.

Government investigations into environmental violations can take years, and they also allow companies to negotiate penalties.

In February 2024, the state hit Suncor with a $10.5 million penalty, the largest in Colorado history for air permit violations. That fine was for excessive pollution between July 2019 and June 2021.

A $9 million fine announced in 2020 covered multiple air pollution violations since 2017.

As for gas prices and their connection to Suncor’s operation in Commerce City, they rose dramatically during the shutdown — 51% in Colorado. Drivers paid as much as $4.10 per gallon during the winter months following the malfunction. Winter gasoline prices are typically cheaper because of lower demand.

But 350 Colorado argues in its report that Suncor’s presence does not benefit Colorado drivers overall when it comes to the price they pay at the pump. The study found that over the past five years, Colorado has seen higher gas prices than 85% of the states without refineries and higher prices than 79% of the states with them.

“Everybody said gas prices would rise, and they did in the short term,” Leath said. “But would it really be true that we would have higher gas prices in Colorado if we didn’t have the Suncor refinery? To our surprise, honestly, most of the states that don’t have refineries have lower gas prices.”

Grier Bailey, executive director of the Colorado Wyoming Petroleum Marketers Association, which represents gas retailers, was highly critical of the 350 Colorado report.

“In summary, it seems clear the entire ‘report’ relative to gas prices is a hit piece designed to assuage a policy audience that there won’t be any impact on fuel prices if far-left fringe groups like 350 get their way,” Bailey said. “That is simply not something that is responsible to assert.”

Bailey said the comparison between average gas prices in Colorado and other states did not take into account things such as taxes and other fees that Colorado places on suppliers and distributors, which eventually end up in the prices consumers pay. Those additional taxes and fees amount to about 30 cents per gallon and are slated to rise in the coming years.

He warned that it would be a mistake to close the Suncor refinery because people would still need all the products it supplies, meaning fuel would be delivered via pipeline, rail or trucks, which would increase emissions from pipeline terminals, place more trucks on the roads and put an additional cost burden on consumers to pay for the transportation to get fuel delivered.

Finally, it was unfair for the report to fail to acknowledge the extraordinary steps the oil and gas industry, Gov. Jared Polis and others took to keep the state supplied with fuel during the shutdown, Bailey said. He accused 350 Colorado of omitting key points to bolster its position that Suncor should be permanently closed.

“Trying to dress up a policy position paper as a ‘study’ doesn’t impress serious people who are trying to keep Colorado’s economy moving,” he said.

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That’s because the legislation would cut off millions of dollars of funding for clean energy projects, including taxpayer credits for installing solar panels on houses. And that would almost sink Namaste’s business in Denver and Boulder.

“They don’t want any residential solar after December of this year,” Jason Sharpe, Namaste’s chief executive officer, said of the bill, which is supported by President Donald Trump. “Sixty-five percent of the jobs in the solar industry come from the residential market, and so what we’re looking at is the lack of a residential market of any kind, leasing or direct-to-consumer, and that means significant layoffs for our business.”

While the Republican budget bill, which narrowly passed the House of Representatives on May 22, has received much attention for drastic cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits that would fund tax breaks, it also rolls back tax credits and low-interest loans for a wide variety of clean energy projects.

The bill’s budget cuts would repeal or quickly phase out whole categories of tax credits and loans for things such as home improvements for consumers, electric vehicles, wind and solar energy production, hydrogen energy, nuclear energy and carbon capture.

Executives who lead Colorado energy companies, both big and small, said eliminating tax credits will decimate the progress made in recent years in the United States as the country seeks as many sources of energy as possible to supply growing demand. It could also lead to higher electricity bills for consumers and eliminate jobs, sending more jobs to China and other Asian markets where production is cheaper and more advanced.

“I don’t look at what we do as green or blue or red,” said Jon Chase, vice president of government relations for Vestas, a company that makes turbines and other parts for windmills in Windsor and Brighton. “An electron doesn’t have a color. We need all of it to meet the demand that we have.”

Environmentalists are also warning that the cuts would be detrimental to Colorado’s goals of eliminating 100% of greenhouse gas emissions in the state by 2050 because it would increase a reliance on fossil fuels to power the grid and fuel all the cars and trucks on the road. They also warn that the cuts would threaten Colorado’s waterways because of the toxic chemicals that are released by burning them.

“It’s leading to dirtier air and dirtier water — things no one voted for,” said Patrick Drupp, the Sierra Club‘s director of climate policy.

The budget bill eliminates nearly $1 billion in clean energy and transportation investments approved by Congress in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

In the almost three years since the act was passed, 3,800 new jobs have been announced in Colorado, along with nearly $362 million in investments from federal grants and loans. Seventy-four new clean energy and transportation facilities have begun development, and 43 have begun manufacturing American-made products, according to an analysis by Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, a non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank.

Battle brewing over bill

Colorado’s House delegation voted along party lines. Now it goes to the Senate, where the Republican majority leadership hopes to hold a final vote before July 4.

A political battle is expected, and Colorado’s representatives and senators spent the last week meeting with constituents to make their pitch on whether or not it should be approved.

Rep. Gabe Evans, a Republican representing the 8th Congressional District, held a news conference at the state Capitol to praise the bill he voted for, saying it “delivers the resources to protect our country, to protect our border, to get violent criminals out of our community.”

But U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, warned that “the stakes are really, really high for Colorado.”

Bennet met last week with executives from 10 Colorado companies to discuss the budget cuts. The tax credits were “doing the job that they were supposed to do and doing that, I think, very, very well in Colorado. Now we’re at risk of them being basically completely ripped away and dismantled.”

Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, which promotes clean energy programs in the state, said the bill would drive up the cost of electricity in Colorado, force people to pay more for cars and trucks, and reduce the amount of money people can receive through tax credits to improve the energy efficiency of their homes.

Colorado started its path toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions during the first Trump administration, and then the Biden-era plans for boosting alternative energies gave the state more momentum, Toor said. He said the state can still reach its climate goals, but it will have to work harder to do so.

“The federal government is trying to make the transition to clean energy harder and slower,” he said.

Uncertainty cripples planning

Robert Kenney, president of Xcel Energy’s Colorado operations, said the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act would not stop his company from moving away from coal. But Xcel would be forced to push the expense of moving to renewable sources onto customers as the company tries to keep up with a growing demand for electricity.

“These projects are made, I won’t say made possible, but they’re made more affordable for our customers by virtue of production and investment tax credits,” Kenney said. “And I like to emphasize the fact that what this means is that our customers are able to achieve our collective climate goals at the lowest possible cost, and the loss of production and investment tax credits would increase the cost of these projects for our customers.”

He also said the budget bill is injecting instability and uncertainty into the construction industry, and Xcel plans its major construction projects as far out as 10 years.

“That makes it impossible to be able to plan in any kind of meaningful way,” he said.

Peak Energy, a sodium-ion battery systems manufacturer, runs a research and development center in Broomfield where scientists and engineers are working to develop technology that can be built and used in the United States. The batteries, which are bigger than an SUV, are used to store the electricity generated by solar or wind so that there is a power supply when the sun sets or the wind stills.

The budget bill, as written, jeopardizes that work in multiple ways, said Cameron Dales, Peak Energy’s co-founder.

Twenty years ago, no large-scale batteries were made in the U.S. Now, a handful of companies are building them here, but they are foreign-owned, Dale said.

“Our mission is to be the first American-owned, American-made battery company in the United States,” Dales said. “And the IRA started that process and has been incredibly successful in actually catalyzing investments in those factories.”

Peak Energy is planning to build a $1.5 billion, 1,500-employee factory to build the batteries in the U.S., with four Wall Street investment firms reviewing the proposal even as the budget bill winds its way through Congress, he said. The bill would penalize companies for buying those Chinese-made parts, which would lead them to keep their manufacturing facilities offshore to avoid those extra financial costs.

“I can tell you, if it passes the way it is today, I will cancel the project,” Dales said.

‘Kneecap our progress’

As for Colorado’s plans to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, the tax bill would “kneecap our progress,” said Katie Belgard, a Conservation Colorado vice president.

All of the renewable energy plans help Colorado reduce the amount of greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other chemicals — that trap heat in the atmosphere. That increased heat raises global temperatures and creates climate change, which leads to more drought, more intense wildfires and extreme weather.

Increasing the supply of renewable energy also helps reduce ozone pollution — a problem that plagues the Front Range during the summer when nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds bake in the sun and create a brown smog.

“It is the most anti-environmental bill we’ve seen in the history of the country,” she said. “This has been a giveaway for polluters and the fossil fuel industry here in Colorado.”

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“We feel validated that their findings were what we’ve been telling them, that this particular corridor was more adversely affected than other surrounding areas,” said Caitlin Braun, a business person in the West Washington Park neighborhood.

But Braun said random power outages are continuing in a multi-block stretch of 178 businesses and households bordered by South Broadway, Lincoln Street, West Third and West Bayaud avenues. Restaurants and bars are still losing business and food when the electricity goes off with no word of when it will come back on.

And Braun said the people affected don’t know if they can recoup losses caused by the outages and aren’t sure how the situation will be improved.

“Thanks for confirming. It’s good to have that information from a third party,” Braun said. “But it’s like, OK, what do we do?”

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission seemed to be wrestling with the same questions last week when the staff presented one report showing a dramatic jump in the time Xcel customers didn’t have power and another highlighting problems with the utility’s quality of customer service.

The PUC opened an investigation last year into the power outages after getting numerous complaints from the Front Range to the Western Slope. The PUC staff began looking into Xcel Energy’s customer service when the agency’s consumer affairs department reported getting a number of complaints.

The staff reported that in 2024, the average customer experienced 350 minutes, or nearly six hours, without electricity compared to the trend of 166 minutes from 2015 to 2023. Outage minutes per customer in 2024 were above the historical trend in six of Xcel’s nine regions.

The length of power outages has trended up from 2015 through 2023.

The staff’s investigation found that customers on the 15 worst performing feeders, which distribute power from a substation, experienced 18% of the outage minutes in 2024. The 15 feeders make up 2% of the total.

Seven of the worst feeders were in Boulder; two were in the San Luis Valley; three were in metro Denver; and three were in other spots along the Front Range.

Staffers recommended requiring Xcel Energy to provide more detailed locations of outages and more information in its logs of outages.

Erin O’Neill, deputy director of fixed utilities, said Xcel’s customer support staffing levels dropped roughly 20% from 2022 to 2024. The customer contact center’s budget was 5% lower in 2024 than in 2020.

Over the same time period, Xcel Energy’s electric rates rose 30%, according to the report. The rate of complaints surged 100% from 2022 to 2024.

Acting in the public interest?

Commission members reacted with exasperation after hearing key points from the reports.

“This is a regulated monopoly operating in a legally defined service territory where competition is prohibited. In return for that privilege of operating as a monopoly, they shouldn’t be driving profit increases at the expense of customers,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank said. “Aren’t they obligated to act in the public interest and answer the phone, and bill customers, and avoid and respond to outages?”

The PUC staff said there was a 58% increase in customers not receiving their bills in 2024 compared with 2023 and a 240% jump from 2020 to 2024. Overall customer satisfaction with calls to Xcel declined 17% from 2020 to 2024, the staff found.

Xcel Energy, which files quality of service plans with the PUC, was assessed $6.5 million in penalties based on its performance.

Blank said the PUC needs to hear from Xcel, the various parties involved and the public and asked the staff “to get this dialogue moving.” The staff recommended considering rules to further define expectations for customer service.

Xcel Energy said in a statement that it works to provide customers “reliable, affordable, sustainable, and safe electric service, every day,” but recognizes it doesn’t always deliver to the level it has set for itself.

However, using several different metrics, including the length of outages and the average frequency of interruptions systemwide, Xcel said customers received reliable electric service 99.9% of the time. The utility added that 2024 was a challenging year “due to several extreme weather events.”

Roughly 55,000 customers along the Front Range lost power in April 2024 when fierce winds battered the area, knocking out power and leading Xcel to cut power to reduce the risk of wind-whipped electrical equipment sparking wildfires.

The company said other outages reported last year in metro Denver and beyond were caused by several factors: a fault in a cable; blown fuses; a line damaged by construction; bad weather; problems with conductors; repair and replacement of equipment; and troublesome squirrels. Some causes were unknown.

Xcel said over the past several months, it has been testing the performance of feeders, replacing cables and assessing substations. Customers who’ve experienced frequent outages will automatically receive a bill credit in July, the company said.

Steps to improve customer service include increasing the number of agents handling calls from 250 in March 2022 to the current 300. Xcel said it has boosted the 2025 budget for customer service support.

Xcel spokesman Tyler Bryant said in an email that the company has stopped the practice of automatically disconnecting calls to its service center. The PUC staff report said about 100,000 calls in 2024 were automatically cut off by the company.

Bryant said during times of high-call volumes, Xcel had prioritized callers with emergencies or life-threatening situations. People were encouraged to call back later. About 2% of last year’s approximately 5 million calls were disconnected, Bryant said.

A fix in the works

Blake Davis, who lives in the outage-prone area along South Broadway and Lincoln Street, has no big complaints about how his calls to the customer service center have been handled. But he has been frustrated that despite his letters and calls, he had not heard from Xcel.

Until Tuesday. That’s when Davis received a letter from an Xcel consumer advocate analyst saying a plan is in the works to rebuild some of the infrastructure in his neighborhood with an emphasis on making it squirrel-proof. The work is expected to be completed in a month.

“We’ve heard rumors they were planning to do something, but we never had communication,” Davis said. “It would be good if they let the rest of the 178 customers know as well.”

Davis, who lives in a condominium building on Lincoln, was among the hundreds of people who wrote letters and made calls to Xcel, the PUC and others. Denver City Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez, whose district includes the area, spoke out for the neighborhood.

The PUC staff report included a case study of the South Broadway-Lincoln Street area. The report said although the feeder serving the neighborhood wasn’t one of the 15 worst, customers experienced comparable outage times.

The area had 13 outages in 2024, the staff report said. Braun, a member of the Lincoln/Broadway neighborhood organization and employee of Players Pub, said at least five more occurred after the PUC gathered the information.

So far this year, at least seven have been logged. Braun said it’s tough for businesses because they don’t know when or if the lights will come back on so many times they have to close.

Braun said Players Pub was forced to close a couple of times this year on a Saturday night. “It’s typically our busiest night of the week. We have to shut down and we lose out on all that money.”

Some key points of state reports:

• The time that customers on Xcel Energy’s system lost power doubled in 2024 compared to historic trends.
• Fifteen of Xcel’s more than 800 feeders distributing electricity accounted for 18% of the outage minutes.
• Customer complaints rose 100% from 2022 to 2024.
• Overall satisfaction with Xcel’s customer support dropped 17% from 2020 to 2024

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The company said in a letter to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment that the job cuts would be permanent and that the employees aren’t members of a union.

The announcement comes as oil prices hit a four-year low, hovering at around $60 a barrel Tuesday.

“Chevron will try to redeploy employees to other Chevron locations, which may reduce the number of layoffs at this location,” the company said in the notice, required under the Colorado Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

Most of the Colorado workforce that manages day-to-day operations and regulatory compliance should be largely unchanged, Trudi Lewis Boyd, Chevron’s corporate affairs manager, said in an email. A number of Denver positions will move to the company’s headquarters in Houston as part of the reorganization

Employees laid off will be offered severance as well as supplemental assistance for medical continuation coverage, Chevron said.

“Of course, any workforce reduction is a difficult decision, and we do not make it lightly,” Boyd said.

Earlier this year, Chevron said it planned to reduce its overall workforce up to 20% and to slash costs up to $3 billion by the end of 2026. The Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 8,000 employees could be affected.

Chevron said in February that it is changing its organizational structure to rely more on global centers around the world. The company had approximately 45,300 employees at the end of 2024.

In Colorado, Chevron’s operations are centered in the Denver-Julesburg formation in the northeastern part of the state. Chevron has access to roughly 600,000 acres in the basin, according to its website.

In 2023, Chevron acquired PDC Energy in a $7.6 billion deal that made it the largest oil and gas company in Colorado.

One said the planned drilling would be “an unconscionable act,” allowing the operator “to exploit fossil fuels at the expense of our community’s health.” Another commenter wrote that the plan “endangers the health of Colorado’s youngest residents,” while a third urged regulators to vote no on fracking “too close to homes and schools!!”

More than 600 online comments and 1,300 emails have poured in over recent weeks, excoriating Crestone Peak Resources’ plan to drill up to 166 wells on 32,000 acres in Arapahoe County, just southeast of Aurora’s suburban Southshore neighborhood.

If the project sounds familiar, it’s because just last summer regulators with the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission — the state body charged with issuing drilling permits to oil and gas operators — approved a comprehensive plan for drilling by Crestone on what is known as Lowry Ranch.

But it wasn’t until last week that the individual well pads — there are eight proposed across Lowry Ranch — began their journey through the approvals process at both the state and county levels. It’s the latest face-off between energy developers and nearby neighbors in Colorado, and it comes six years after state legislators passed a landmark reform law.

The law was designed to give homeowners and communities a greater say in the location and intensity of oil and gas operations. At the time, Gov. Jared Polis said it should end Colorado’s “oil and gas wars.”

But if the ongoing concerns about safety and environmental impacts from energy extraction are any indication of the current state of play, the issue is still far from being resolved. At the Lowry Ranch site, first up for state approval was Crestone’s 17-well State La Plata pad, which won a unanimous thumbs-up vote from the ECMC on Wednesday.

“Many people have arrived at the foregone conclusion that if an operator wants to drill, there’s not much they can do about it,” said Jason Ephraim, a three-year resident of Southshore, sitting in his living room last week. “But we have to do something — we have to fight this project.”

For this stage of the battle, Ephraim, a volunteer with the neighborhood group Save the Aurora Reservoir, comes armed with a new study from the Colorado School of Public Health, released in late March, that draws links between childhood leukemia and proximity to oil and gas wells.

Add to that, last month a Chevron well northeast of Greeley released oil and gas into the air in what was called a “well control” incident. The release injured one person and resulted in the evacuation of nearby homes and an extended closure of Galeton Elementary School.

That April 6 incident in Weld County was a “stark warning” for Sakhawat Hussain, a retired gastroenterologist who has lived in Southshore with his wife for two years. His backyard is a half-mile or so from a proposed 32-well Crestone pad.

“These facilities are inherently dangerous, and accidents are inevitable — it’s not a question of if, but when,” he said. “Imagine trying to evacuate thousands of residents, many of them children and elderly, in such an event. The risk is simply too great.”

Denver-based Civitas Resources, the parent company of Crestone, says its operations adhere to some of the toughest regulations in the country in Colorado. Civitas spokesman Rich Coolidge didn’t directly respond to a series of questions The Denver Post sent the company but did provide a statement via email.

“The best management practices, including an electrified production site, high-line power drilling rig, pipeline takeaway, sound walls and many others, showcase the latest technologies and innovation driving our operations today,” he said.

A combustible atmosphere

The U.S. Energy Information Administration ranks Colorado fourth in the nation in oil production. Data from the agency show the state produced 172 million barrels last year — down from its peak of 192 million barrels in 2019.

All that oil and a growing population has made for an increasingly combustible atmosphere in Colorado. That’s particularly true in newer Front Range neighborhoods built on the edges of vast fields of underground mineral deposits.

The dynamic was thrown into sharp relief in the spring of 2017, when a severed, uncapped flow line that was attached to a well leaked odorless methane and propane into a house in Firestone, causing an explosion that killed two men.

The following year, voters were asked at the ballot box to dramatically boost the setback for new oil and gas development from homes to 2,500 feet. While the measure went down in defeat after the industry spent millions of dollars against it, the sentiment was there for state lawmakers to clamp down on the industry in one way or another.

In 2019, Polis signed Senate Bill 181. The law directed state energy regulators to prioritize protecting public health and safety and the environment over fostering development of the industry, as had been the case for years.

Environmental attorney Mike Foote, a fomer Democratic state representative who helped craft that law, said it was helping keep things in check.

“It’s changed permitting,” said Foote, who represented the Save the Aurora Reservoir group during the Lowry Ranch comprehensive plan hearings last summer. “Prior to SB-181, these new locations were going up right next to neighborhoods frequently. It’s also made it so that the (ECMC regulators) put more conditions on the permits they do approve.”

As a condition of the green light Crestone received last year from the state, the company pledged to use quieter and cleaner electric-powered rigs and equipment at all pad sites on Lowry Ranch. It also agreed to erect sound walls to dampen noise.

But for those worried about living in the shadow of extensive oil and gas operations, caution is the watch word. Hussain, the retired doctor, said his neighbors are particularly concerned about Crestone’s proposed 32-well pad called State Sunlight-Long. It would be closest to the neighborhood and the reservoir — Aurora’s main source of drinking water.

Crestone is seeking an exemption to Arapahoe County’s one-mile setback of wells from reservoirs. It says the Sunlight-Long pad is “at lower elevation or downgradient” from the reservoir and “isolated by intervening topography,” thereby minimizing the risk that drilling and extraction activity could contaminate the water body.

But Hussain said he has measured the topography and determined the Sunlight-Long drilling site is nearly 100 feet higher than the Aurora Reservoir.

“Despite this, the county is allowing the pad to be placed just 3,200 feet from the reservoir,” he said. “This undermines the purpose of the setback and exposes the residents and reservoir to unnecessary risk.”

Can safety be assured?

Jill McGranahan, a spokeswoman for Arapahoe County, said no approvals for Lowry Ranch pads have yet been issued by the public works and development department. Arapahoe County’s oil and gas rules, she said, are “some of the strictest in the state,” given updates the county made to its rules in recent years.

“Commissioners and staff are committed to balancing quality of life, health and safety issues with responsible energy development and will evaluate all applications through this lens in accordance with established regulations,” she said.

Of the State La Plata pad that was approved by the ECMC on Wednesday, Coolidge said it “represents Civitas’ best-in-class operations.”

Ephraim, the Southshore neighbor, said his objections are not just about human health. He testified virtually during the State La Plata hearing about potential impacts from oil and gas drilling to wildlife on Lowry Ranch.

“This is a high-priority habitat for pronghorn and mule deer,” he said in an interview afterward.

With a 6-year-old daughter, Ephraim says he finds the new health study from the Colorado School of Public Health “immensely scary.” Between 2002 and 2019, the study looked at 451 children ages 2 to 9 who were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. They were 1.4 to 2.64 times more likely to live within eight miles or so of a well site than those without cancer.

While the study’s authors stopped short of saying exposure to chemical pollutants from oil and gas sites was the cause of the children’s cancer, they urged state officials to revisit Colorado’s setback requirements for oil and gas development.

“It made everything a lot more real,” Ephraim, 40, said of the study.

In light of that new science and the well release in Weld County last month, he said it’s time to slow down rather than push forward.

Lessons from Erie

A sign of just how intense the resistance to new oil drilling has become is that in southeast Aurora, state regulators have promised Rule 511 hearings — an opportunity for public participation and comment — for all the proposed pads on Lowry Ranch as they roll out over the coming months. Ordinarily, ECMC spokeswoman Kristin Kemp said, a 511 hearing is only held upon the request of a community.

A preview of what’s ahead for Southshore residents may come from Erie, some 40 miles to the north. There, a fierce community battle exploded last year over Civitas’ plans to drill 26 wells in the vicinity of a planned residential neighborhood in the fast-growing town.

State regulators asked Civitas subsidiary Extraction Oil and Gas to try to find an alternate location for its wells, known as the Draco pad. When the company said a different site was infeasible, however, the ECMC approved the project in late March.

Weld County, where the company plans to actually sink its wells, has topped Colorado’s counties for population growth in recent years and is expected to continue doing so. Foote, the environmental lawyer, said it’s more than likely there will be fights like the ones in Erie and Aurora as neighborhoods at the edge of Colorado’s mineral wealth deposits continue to take root.

“Each new well pad adds to the cumulative impacts of the drilling,” he said. “It reinforces the argument that people have been making for years — that you shouldn’t be putting these things close to homes, or close to each other.”

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The Colorado Public Utilities Commission is holding meetings virtually and in communities that will be affected by Xcel Energy’s plan to shut all its coal plants in the state by the end of 2030. The PUC traveled to Pueblo last week, listened to comments Monday during a Zoom session and will visit Hayden on Thursday.

The PUC is expected to open a hearing on Xcel’s plan in June.

What Xcel Energy calls its just transition plan for communities includes replacing coal plants with wind and solar power, battery storage and natural gas facilities. Xcel, Colorado’s largest electric utility, plans to end its use of the coal plant in Hayden in 2028 and the last of three units at the Comanche Generating Station near Pueblo by 2031.

Colorado power companies as well as communities across the state have cut back the use of coal and other fossil fuels to strive to meet goals for curtailing greenhouse gas emissions.

Xcel’s plan has been praised for what would be a significant expansion of renewable energy in the utility’s portfolio. And it’s been panned for proposing new gas generation.

An advisory committee organized by Xcel has recommended that the coal units at the Comanche site be replaced with modular nuclear units or a gas plant that would capture the carbon dioxide emissions.

Another proposal that has gained recent support is one by Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based energy and climate think tank. The organization looked at Pueblo as a case study and recommended an “energy park” in the area that would combine solar and wind power and battery storage, including thermal batteries that can convert electricity to heat for direct use in industrial processes.

Pueblo County Commissioner Miles Lucero told the PUC during the hearing in Pueblo that he has heard from many residents that they want a clean energy future. “In that spirit, I believe the Pueblo Renewable Energy Park represents a practical near-term step for addressing our generation needs.”

Michelle Solomon, co-author of Energy Innovation’s study, said Pueblo seemed like a good fit for the park concept. “We’ve been exploring the idea of combining industry and energy generation in a single location to take advantage of way industry can use excess renewable energy to balance out production.”

Energy Innovation believes the concept has the potential to generate jobs and tax revenue from developing an energy/industrial site, said Solomon, who is based in Gunnison.

Pueblo residents, government and business leaders warn that the closure of the last unit at the Comanche coal plant will be a major blow to the area’s economy. A report by the Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee, which recommended replacing the coal plant with modular nuclear reactors, said Xcel pays more than $25 million a year to Pueblo County. Most of the revenue comes from Comanche Station.

A report by Michael Wakefield, a professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo, said the coal facility generates roughly $196 million in economic benefits annually.

“Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” the advisory committee’s report said.

However, critics of building nuclear reactors have concerns about the waste and the consequences if the reactors fail. Others say the smaller reactors, billed as more advanced than older, larger plants, aren’t ready for commercial use.

“At scale of any sort, it’s going to be 2035 before we have any kind of small modular reactor fleet,” said Dennis Wamsted, an analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

One company has been licensed to produce modular reactors in the U.S., but none are operating. Wamsted co-wrote an analysis that said reactors built or under construction in other countries have run 300% to 600% over budget.

Energy Innovation said its modeling shows that a renewable energy park could produce more than $40 million in annual property taxes for Pueblo County and create more than 350 permanent jobs. Solomon said the study used the Colorado state assessed renewable tax factor template for the renewable projects.

For estimating the number of jobs, the organization reviewed reports by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Rhodium Group, a research organization. The study on the energy park recommends including electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen to produce ammonia for fertilizer and aviation fuel.

It’s the fact that the health system’s buildings are of different ages and sizes, and one of them — Saint Joseph Hospital — is open 24 hours a day. It’s a facility where lights and room temperature can be a life-and-death matter for some people.

“As you can imagine, a lot of these buildings are really big and there’s multiple meters and they get their energy from multiple providers,” said Natan Simhai, Intermountain Health’s senior energy engineer.

When Denver and then Colorado mandated that commercial buildings in the city and across the state reduce their carbon emissions, the health system tried to figure out how to comply.

It’s one thing to turn off lights and turn down the heat at night in an office building. It’s another to adjust the energy demands of a hospital, where operating rooms have specific ventilation and temperature requirements, and expensive medical equipment runs night and day.

“This is a working hospital and it’s not like an office building,” Simhai said of Saint Joseph. “We can’t just go turn things off at night. We have to be careful about even making small changes.”

Complaints from multiple business sectors led Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency to redo the rules for its Energize Denver building performance policy — commonly referred to as green building rules. Those changes, announced earlier this month, give businesses more time to perform energy audits and develop a plan of action. They also lower fines for companies that fail to comply in time.

The city’s green building rules are not alone in being challenged by businesses.

Last year, four trade associations that represent large building owners sued the state over its policy, adopted in early 2024 by the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission three years after the state legislature mandated it. That case is pending in the U.S. District Court of Colorado, but its fate may hinge on a bill making its way through the state legislature.

The Colorado General Assembly is considering a bill that would bring changes to those green building rules after building owners across the state raised concerns.

House Bill 1269 proposes to create an enterprise board that would collect fees from large building owners and then provide technical assistance to help them comply with green building rules. It also would reset deadlines for building owners to meet goals, adjust penalties for those who fail and allow buildings in Denver that comply with the city’s rules to also be considered in compliance with state regulations.

The clock is ticking on the 2025 legislative session, which ends May 7, but the bill’s backers believe it will pass.

A judge ruled in March that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit did not present a strong enough case for it to move forward, but she gave them 21 days to file a new complaint. The judge since then has extended the deadline until after the legislative session to see how the proposed bill might impact the lawsuit.

While the city and state policies are not exactly in line with each other, they strive toward the same goal — reducing the amount of carbon emissions produced by large buildings. Both governments were early adopters of building performance standards across the United States.

Denver’s rules required buildings collectively to cut 30% of their emissions by 2030. The amount each building must cut is based on its size and purpose.

Colorado’s green building regulation requires buildings that are 50,000 square feet or larger to reduce carbon emissions by 6% by 2026 and by 20% by 2030. The rules affect about 8,000 buildings in Colorado. That regulation is being challenged by the lawsuit from four trade groups that represent building owners.

Conflict comes down to money

The conflict between building owners and those who want to reduce Colorado’s carbon emissions to improve air quality and public health comes down to money.

Businesses argue that forcing them to comply will be detrimental to their bottom lines and the state’s economy. They also have said the green building rules don’t gel with the ways businesses plan for capital expenditures.

City and state regulators said they are trying to accommodate building owners’ financial concerns in an uncertain economy while still reaching their goals to reduce carbon emissions.

But some environmentalists who are critical of the recent changes say the planet is in crisis and governments must do everything within their power to stop the pollution that is causing global warming and harming public health — even if it means businesses have to pay for it.

“I’m disappointed in both Denver and the state for wanting to slow down this transition that we desperately need,” said Ean Tafoya, vice president of state programs for GreenLatinos. “A lot of people are just being noncompliant, and now we have to shift the goal posts so people aren’t fined. This kind of environmental goal-shifting happens in a lot of spaces, not just in buildings.”

Buildings contribute carbon pollution through massive energy consumption for heating and cooling, and for powering lights and electronics. In Denver, the approximately 17,000 commercial and multi-family buildings pump out nearly 50% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Those fossil fuels trap heat in the air, which causes Earth’s temperatures to rise. The rising temperatures are causing more severe weather and wildfires.

The air pollution also makes people sick, causing heart and respiratory illnesses and cardiovascular disease. On Wednesday, the American Lung Association ranked the Denver-Aurora-Greeley metropolitan area as the sixth-worst city for ozone pollution in the nation.

To improve air quality and limit the state’s impact on climate change, Colorado has set an overall goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and by 100% by 2050. Denver’s goal is to eliminate emissions within the city by 2040. Regulating buildings’ energy consumption is just one step the city and state are taking to get there.

‘You also need flexibility’

When the Denver City Council approved the city’s green buildings policy in 2021, the complaints rolled in.

The city decided the point of the program should be to help businesses comply rather than levy fines on those that don’t, said Elizabeth Babcock, executive director of the Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency.

After collecting feedback from 2,000 building owners and businesses, the city made changes to recognize the broader economic factors that are impacting real estate, she said.

Denver was one of the first cities in the country to establish such a policy for reducing energy consumption in buildings, and it has been recognized nationally for its work.

“When you have ambition, you also need flexibility,” Babcock said.

The changes, announced in early April, extend the deadlines for compliance. Deadlines for interim compliance are now extended to 2028 from 2025 with final compliance deadlines moved to 2032 from 2030. Building owners may also apply for extensions beyond 2032.

City officials realized some buildings would need more time to comply because of tenant vacancies and financial distress, said Sharon Jaye, the building performance policy manager. Homeowners associations that manage townhomes and condominiums also were asking for more time so their volunteer boards can save money to pay for energy efficiency projects.

The city also cut in half the penalties, which were based on energy consumption, for those that fail to meet the benchmarks for reducing energy usage, Jaye said. Thus far, no one has been fined because the deadline to improve efficiency has been extended.

Size of fines ‘big and scary’

Stephen Shepard, executive vice president of the Denver Metro Building Owners and Managers Association, said the city’s timelines were too tight and the fines too heavy. His association did not join the lawsuit, allowing him and other representatives to continue talking to the city about reform because they weren’t hindered by legal proceedings.

“The buildings in compliance had started working on their energy reduction and were way on their way before Energize Denver was a thing,” Shepard said. “The fines were really, really big and scary to the industry. It was enough to hinder investment.”

Shepard said he knew of at least one deal on a retail center’s sale fell through because the potential buyers were spooked by the city’s green building requirements.

“In Colorado, the whole state was beginning to lose investment in commercial real estate,” he said.

Those making the rules need to be mindful that buildings have a big economic impact when they consider the amount of taxes paid and all the people employed to provide maintenance, security, janitorial services and all the other jobs needed to keep them open and in good shape, Shepard said.

And as the city and state continue to recover from the pandemic, too many building owners are in financial distress because of lower vacancy rates, he noted. When a building’s occupancy rate is low, its owners will not be able to secure the loans needed to finance big projects.

“They’ve got to tread lightly and be careful of the cost of the achievement because it’s just going to wreck the economy,” Shepard said.

For some buildings, the only way owners will be able to comply is to convert the entire structure to electrical power. But that puts more demands on Xcel Energy to power the downtown grid, Shepard said. That’s another piece of the puzzle that needs improvement.

“It’s all of those kinds of things playing into it. There’s groups with their hearts in the right place, but they don’t understand the reality in place,” he said. “It truly is a property-by-property thing. It’s a big lift and expensive even for consultants to do all the reports to tell you what you need to do.”

‘Being a good business leader’

At Intermountain Health, building engineers found an easy solution for one medical office building. It’s only open during regular business hours and medical procedures are not performed there, Simhai said.

Before the rules were enacted, the building’s lights and its heating and cooling system ran all the time. After talking to staff and patients, the health system decided that was not necessary. Staff reprogrammed the computers that run those systems so the lights and HVAC system shut off when people go home in the evening and then turn back on before they arrive in the morning.

The changes also save money on utility bills because energy usage was reduced by 30%.

“It’s probably ahead of the curve for a lot of buildings in the city and a lot of our other buildings, to be honest,” he said.

Saint Joseph’s Hospital and another medical office building are not as simple, but Simhai said the city’s new rules are more flexible and give Intermountain Health more time to comply.  Some upgrades to equipment will be expensive and will need to be a part of a long-term capital improvement plan.

Still, some businesses are complying out of a sense of environmental responsibility.

Traci Lounsbury, chief executive officer of Elements of Place, a workplace design store in RiNo, said she switched her 32,000-square-foot building’s lights to LEDs from fluorescent bulbs and installed giant fans to circulate air in the remodeled warehouse to help control the temperature. Skylights add more brightness and reduce the reliance on lightbulbs.

But the changes were not cheap and it can be difficult for a small business to spend money on a building when property taxes are so high, Lounsberry said.

“We care about sustainability. It’s part of being a good business leader and a good person,” she said. “I also believe we have to do the right thing for a sustainable future for our world. It’s got to start somewhere sometime.”

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Senate Bill 280 would create a certification system that would grant tax incentives to data center builders if they meet certain benchmarks for investment and water and energy efficiency.

The Data Center Development and Grid Modernization Program would both draw lucrative development to the state and ensure that the additional energy use wouldn’t affect other electric customers, its sponsors said last week during the bill’s first committee hearing. They also noted that it would establish guardrails to minimize environmental impacts.

“Welcome to the future,” sponsor Sen. Paul Lundeen, an El Paso County Republican, said during the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee meeting on Wednesday. “The future that is unfolding all around us — and I mean all around us. It’s happening in pretty much every state except Colorado right now and we’d like to change that.”

Critics worry that if the bill passes, the state will lose out on millions of dollars in tax revenue from an industry that could come to Colorado with or without the new incentives. The large quantities of power and water that data centers require could strain already limited supplies and further derail the state from meeting its clean energy goals, they say. And they view the energy and water efficiency rules in the bill as essentially meaningless.

“As we work to meet our growing energy demand and the federal government continues to roll back climate progress — putting communities in harm’s way while the climate crisis worsens — Colorado must lead the charge to defend our transition to clean energy,” said Paul Sherman, the climate campaign manager for Conservation Colorado. “This legislation threatens to trample our progress toward reaching our ambitious climate goals and lacks sufficient guardrails for communities.”

The bill passed out of the committee on a 6-3 vote and will be heard next by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Data centers provide the infrastructure needed for the internet, cloud storage, streaming, businesses’ computing needs and the growing use of artificial intelligence. Construction of such centers has boomed across the country, but the facilities use large quantities of power and water, which is needed for cooling.

As an example, one medium-sized center proposed in Denver, at max capacity, could use the same amount of water in a day as 16,100 Denverites and as much power as 82,500 homes.

How the incentive would work

To obtain certification under the bill’s proposed program, a data center operator must commit to spending $250 million in capital investment and creating 25 well-paying, full-time jobs; meet certain energy and water efficiency standards; and consult with the state Department of Natural Resources on wildlife and water impacts.

The data center company must also prove that the addition of the center will not “result in unreasonable cost impacts” to other electric utility users’ rates.

In return, the company would be exempt from sales and use taxes for 20 years. Companies could also apply for a 10-year extension when the first 20 years lapse if they met certain additional requirements.

The Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade would oversee the certification system. The state would be required to revoke the center’s certification if it no longer met its obligations under the program, and the company would have to repay the state for the tax benefits it received.

If lawmakers pass the bill, Colorado would join 31 other states that offer tax incentives for data centers, according to the bill’s fiscal note. State lawmakers in 2023 and 2024 considered, but did not pass, bills that would have granted data center companies millions in tax breaks on the purchase of construction materials and equipment.

Data center companies are seeking out the states with competitive tax incentives, company representatives testified last week. The centers create hundreds of construction jobs and fuel local economies, they said.

“Unfortunately, Colorado is missing out on all of that,” said Greg Mikulecky, the vice president of development at Stack Infrastructure. The company is headquartered in Denver and builds data centers across the globe but has no data centers in Colorado.

Lundeen, one of the bill sponsors, said Colorado is receiving only 2% of national data center investments. But that’s proportional, given the 50 states in the nation, pointed out Leslie Hylton-Hinga, the special projects director at the Colorado Office of Economic Development.

“Really unique opportunity”

Colorado is home to 56 data centers, including several new facilities under construction like a hyperscale facility being built in Aurora. A Denver company planning to build a new data center in the city last year decided to forgo a city tax break after facing pushback from the City Council based on the facility’s likely energy and water use, but it will continue with construction.

The tax incentives could help lure data center companies to communities looking for economic replacements for coal, oil and gas development, said Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, a Pueblo Democrat and sponsor. Communities like Pueblo need alternative industries for jobs and to support the local tax base, he said.

“We’re heading toward this cliff and we have some significant challenges — but with data centers, we have a really, really unique opportunity,” he said.

Nothing in the bill directs or incentivizes companies to build in rural or transitioning communities, however. All of Colorado’s data centers are in the Front Range — primarily the Denver metro — and the bill won’t shift that trend, said Caroline Nutter of the  Colorado Fiscal Institute, which opposes the bill.

“Incentivizing development outside of the Front Range could be an efficient way to spend tax dollars, but this bill, as amended, does not do that,” she said.

It’s difficult to estimate exactly how the program might impact state tax revenues because “there is significant uncertainty regarding the number of data centers that will apply,” according to the fiscal note attached to the bill that was written by nonpartisan legislative staff.

“To the extent that actual investments vary from the assumptions in this analysis, state impacts may increase or decrease proportionally,” the fiscal note states.

Those concerned about the bill — including the head of the state’s utility regulatory body — said it must ensure that meeting the large power needs of new data centers does not increase rates for other customers.

“The stakes of getting this right are enormous, especially for ratepayers,” said Rebecca White, the director of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, which regulates utilities.

If it passes, the bill mandates a review of the effectiveness of the program in 2031.

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President Donald Trump’s actions so far have spooked global financial markets and sparked street protests. For U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans, who represents Colorado’s newest congressional district north of Denver, and Rep. Jeff Hurd, the congressman for a sprawling 27-county Western Slope-anchored district, the president’s aggressive tariff and immigration policies have put pressure on sectors of the economy — agriculture, ranching and manufacturing — that play outsized roles in their districts.

In March, both legislators were put “on notice” by Emily’s List as “top targets for defeat in the 2026 midterm elections.” The political advocacy group supports Democratic women candidates who favor abortion rights in their bids for office across the country.

The hazards for Evans, a freshman representative from Fort Lupton, are greater than for Hurd because his 8th Congressional District was created four years ago to be Colorado’s most politically competitive — a promise it’s lived up to in two election cycles.

“Hurd has a bit more wiggle room than Evans does,” said Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders, who has been closely watching both districts.

Evans, who narrowly beat incumbent Rep. Yadira Caraveo in the November election, was the only Republican House member in Colorado to make this month’s Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of “districts in play.” That means his eventual Democratic opponent will be getting a targeted splash of national money in next year’s election.

“There is a long way to go yet,” Saunders said, “but Evans will have to be very careful with how he plays his cards over the next year-plus — both in how closely he stands with Trump as well as with any votes that can be used against him in the 2026 campaign.”

While both congressmen have largely toed Trump’s line at the start of the Republican’s second administration, there are signs they are willing to push back — albeit cautiously.

In early March, they were among 21 Republicans who signed a letter to Rep. Jason Smith, the GOP chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. They urged their party to keep clean energy tax credits from the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act climate law that fund development of “traditional and renewable energy sources alike.”

The appeal came in the face of efforts by Trump to make it easier for companies to produce oil and gas and to empower public officials to halt already approved clean-energy projects.

Meanwhile, Hurd this month took a public swipe at the president by introducing a bipartisan bill that would require that unilateral tariffs proposed by the executive branch undergo congressional review, and be limited in duration.

“I think it’s pretty clear under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution that Congress has authority with respect to tariffs,” Hurd, a Grand Junction attorney, told The Denver Post in an interview. “I thought it was an important thing for me to be part of the legislation that would reassert Congress’ authority.”

Former Colorado Republican Party chair Dick Wadhams said both Hurd and Evans “have done really well” in their first 100 days pledging fealty to Trump’s agenda. They’ve done so without attaching themselves too closely to some of its harder edges, he said — like supporting false claims of a stolen 2020 election.

“Gabe is first and foremost a congressman for the 8th District,” Wadhams said. “And I think Jeff Hurd is in the tradition of what 3rd District voters are looking for. They’ve set themselves up as strong incumbents.”

“Tying them to Trump”

But the 2026 election is still more than 18 months away. A lot can happen between now and then, Saunders said.

Trump’s polling numbers have fallen since he took office on Jan. 20, according to a CBS News-YouGov survey taken a week ago. His approval rating has flipped from 53% in favor of his overall performance in February to 53% disapproval now.

Similar declines were recorded in the poll on Trump’s handling of the economy.

“What we can say is that President Trump’s honeymoon is very likely over,” Saunders said. “Does that mean that his favorability will decline further from here? What we do know is that economic uncertainty, rising prices and other fundamentals do not usually help the sitting president — we saw that as recently as President Biden’s struggles with inflation in 2023 and 2024.”

The danger of an unpopular president is that unaffiliated voters may break towards Democrats next year, Saunders said. In Evans’ case, his prospects are complicated by the fact that the 8th District, which covers portions of Weld, Adams and Larimer counties, has an 8,000-voter registration advantage for Democrats, he said.

“In a district where Evans only won by approximately 2,400 votes, those factors alone could easily turn the tide the other way,” Saunders said.

Hal Bidlack, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who unsuccessfully ran in Colorado’s 5th Congressional District nearly 20 years ago, advises the Democrats running in the 3rd and 8th districts in 2026 to burden their opponents with Trump — and the task of trying to explain Trump. He also taught political science at the Air Force Academy for nearly 20 years.

“I would have the attitude of tying them to Trump as tightly as I can,” the Democrat said. “I would make them defend Trump and Trumpism completely.”

Hurd, who beat Democratic challenger Adam Frisch by 5 percentage points last year, hasn’t drawn a Democratic challenger yet. But Evans has two of note already.

Caraveo, who on Tuesday announced a bid to retake the seat she lost nearly six months ago, told The Post that Evans is “falling in line completely with Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”

“He’s not really taking into account that this is a very middle-of-the-road district that doesn’t fit into the right MAGA extremism that he’s voting for, and I haven’t seen him veer at all from the path that Donald Trump wants him to be on,” she said in an interview.

Her Democratic primary opponent, state Rep. Manny Rutinel, voiced a similar criticism of Evans. He announced his candidacy less than a month after Evans took office Jan. 3.

“Even though Congressman Evans was elected to represent the people of CD-8, his only focus has been representing the interests of the ultrawealthy and defending President Trump’s disastrous policies against working people,” Rutinel wrote in an email to The Post.

Evans, a U.S. Army veteran and former Arvada cop, dismisses the criticism.

“I’ve done over 40 in-person meetings, roundtables, town halls — things of that nature,” he said. “My staff has done over 300 other meetings, and so we’re 100% committed to being out, active and engaged in the district.”

While Evans strongly backs the administration’s efforts to secure the border and deport criminals and gang members who are in the country illegally, he often tells the story of his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico “the right way.”

The 8th District is Colorado’s most heavily Latino district.

“We have to recognize their key contributions,” he said of immigrants, “and we have to make sure that we are moving the ball forward to get some sort of meaningful immigration reform — so that the people who are trying to do it the right way and are bringing so many positive contributions to our communities don’t get left behind.”

Tariffs and farming

In the meantime, the political winds have already started blowing ahead of 2026.

Earlier this week, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, met with about 30 northern Colorado manufacturers in Loveland — right on the doorstep of Evans’ district. The discussion focused on the “devastating impacts of Trump’s tariff taxes on the industry and economy,” according to a news release from the governor’s office.

But manufacturers are hardly the only sector impacted by tariffs. Trade duties are especially challenging for farmers and ranchers in Colorado. They need to remain competitive on price to sell their products overseas and need the costs of imported equipment and parts to remain reasonable.

Chad Franke, the president of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, said many farmers in Colorado desire a more level playing field in global trade but would rather not incur financial damage trying to get there.

“The broad-ranging tariffs are going to be harmful to family farmers and ranchers because of reciprocal tariffs, which will be levied (by foreign countries) against commodities,” he said. “We’re hopeful they can put pressure on Washington, D.C., to lessen the impact of broad tariffs on the ag economy.”

Hurd’s bill calling for congressional review of tariffs could be an effective check on their impacts, Franke said.

But any effects from Trump’s trade policies on Colorado farmers, Franke said, won’t come into view until closer to harvest season — “If there is going to be a problem, we’ll hear about it through the summer and into the fall” — when it’s that much closer to the November 2026 election.

Evans acknowledges that tariffs aren’t popular among producers in his district. But he says farmers and ranchers are also tired of being taken advantage of by other countries.

“Nobody loves the chaos, but they’re actually pretty excited about the potential for the playing field to be level,” he said.

Evans, who as a state lawmaker represented some of the same area north of Denver that’s now in his congressional district, said farmers tell him they want nothing more than to crack markets like Spain, Italy, Thailand and Vietnam.

“They’ve had willing buyers. We’ve had willing producers here, but they couldn’t get through with the lack of trade deals in the last five years,” he said. “And so I think what we’re seeing with this administration is (that) through tariffs, they’re using that as a mechanism to get those trade deals done.”

Hurd sees tariffs as a “tool in the toolbox” to creating a fairer global trading system. But they must be administered judiciously, with an eye toward limiting their “breadth and scope.”

“I do believe that tariffs can have a strategic role when it comes to approaching these issues, but I just think we need to be thoughtful in how we approach it,” Hurd said. He added that “broad-based tariffs cause me more concern than tariffs that are targeted towards a specific end.

Despite his support for Trump’s goals of bringing manufacturing back to the United States, Hurd said it can’t be done at the expense of Congress’ power. Thus, the bill he introduced earlier this month.

“We just need to make sure that we do that the right way and that we comport with the requirements under the Constitution,” he said.

Trump’s checkered Colorado history

Bidlack, the retired lieutenant colonel and political scientist, lauded Hurd for signing on to the bill despite its dim prospects for passage in a Republican-majority Congress with deep allegiances to Trump.

“It is remarkable to me that a freshman Republican would thumb his nose at Trump so dramatically in what is a doomed effort,” Bidlack said of Hurd, who has never publicly revealed whether he has voted for the president. “But it’s smart to distance himself from Trump.”

That’s especially true in Colorado, where Trump was beaten by Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden four years ago and Kamala Harris last year, Wadhams said.

Hurd has taken a principled stand guarding the separation of powers at the top of American government, Wadhams said — a position that should help him in a district that nearly ousted Republican Lauren Boebert in 2022 over concerns about her behavior and gravitas.

“He’s a truly constitutional conservative,” Wadhams said.

Despite the strong Republican lean of the 3rd Congressional District, which hugs the borders of Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico and swoops from Rangely to Pueblo, it was less than 20 years ago that Democrat U.S. Rep. John Salazar held the seat. If public opinion goes into a tailspin under the second Trump administration and Democrats find the right contender next year, Wadhams said, the district has a chance of going blue again.

“A Trump presidency is a surprise every day,” he said.

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President Donald Trump signed executive orders Tuesday to “reinvigorate” what he called America’s “beautiful, clean coal.” Another order targets “state overreach,” or state laws and policies he sees as hampering coal mining.

Colorado has set goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and addressing the impacts of climate change. Closing coal plants is considered crucial to meeting those goals because coal emits more carbon dioxide, the primary gas contributing to climate change, than other energy sources

Burning coal also emits mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which pose human health and environmental risks.

The state has been moving toward expanding renewable energy use since 2004 when Colorado voters became the first in the nation to require investor-owned utilities to get a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources. The momentum has picked up as the costs of wind and solar power and battery storage have decreased.

“We are committed to delivering less expensive, reliable electricity and protecting Colorado’s air, water and cherished landscapes, and supercharging our energy mix to meet our 100% clean energy goal – a goal we are on a path to reach by 2040 without this overreach of the federal government,” Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said the legal basis for the executive orders on bolstering the coal industry “is a mystery to me.”

State Rep. Ty Winter, a Republican from Las Animas County, believes the orders are a “much-needed step toward restoring balance, bringing energy independence home and recognizing the value of Colorado’s coal communities.”

The executive orders refer to removing barriers to coal production on federal lands, including a moratorium on new leasing from the Obama administration that’s been entangled in legal disputes. An order directs the U.S. Attorney General to identify state laws on climate change, environmental justice, carbon or greenhouse gas emissions and carbon penalties or taxes and take appropriate action to stop enforcement of laws deemed to be illegal.

Weiser questioned the legality of those provisions. Under the U.S. Constitution, he said, states have full authority to protect public health, safety and welfare and to protect air and water quality.

“And the federal government doesn’t have a constitutional basis to stand on to tell us what to do when it comes to protecting the people of Colorado,” Weiser said. “And I don’t understand for the life of me what, if any, federal basis there could be to try to tell us how to manage our energy mix.”

Weiser is one of several Democratic state attorneys general who have sued over the Trump administration’s freeze on certain federal monies and other executive orders.

One of Trump’s first executive orders after taking office in January was “Unleashing American Energy,” which he said was necessary to counter the Biden administration’s focus on renewable energy. He derided the former president’s approach as pursuing “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply.”

Coal, on the other hand, “is abundant and cost effective” and will be critical to meeting the country’s rising demand for electricity as manufacturing and construction of energy-intensive data processing centers increase, an executive order said. Another directive called for a two-year pause on more stringent limits on mercury and toxic emissions from coal plants to support the industry.

Adam Eckman, CEO and president of the Colorado Mining Association, said the effects of Trump’s executive orders on the coal industry will likely differ depending on the region.

“Colorado’s coal market has contracted significantly in recent years primarily as a result of state legislation,” Eckman said. “That’s a state-based effort less than federally driven, so that probably blunts the potential effect of the executive orders than it would in other states.”

Winter, whose House district has a long history of coal mining, would like to see state officials reconsider state carbon-emission goals to help reverse the decline of the coal industry at a time when China and India are bringing “coal-fired plants online at a rapid pace.”

In Colorado, utilities have closed coal plants earlier than planned to meet state requirements and their own goals. Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest electric utility, plans to close the last unit of the Comanche power plant near Pueblo by the end of 2030, shuttering its last coal facility in the state. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Colorado’s second-largest electric utility, has retired coal facilities ahead of schedule and will shut more by 2031.

Xcel and Tri-State said in statements Wednesday that they’re reviewing the executive orders and remain focused on providing reliable energy to their customers.

Coal provides about 16% of the nation’s energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2010, coal’s share of the energy mix was 45%.

“Coal has been on the decline for decades, not because of federal policies, but because it’s dirty and it’s increasingly unreliable as our coal fleet ages. And it can’t compete on a level playing field with renewable energy sources,” said Jenny Harbine, managing attorney for the Northern Rockies office of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm.

The cost of renewable energy sources continues to decrease and combined with battery storage, are more cost-effective than coal, Harbine said.