On Tuesday, the Thornton Democrat announced her candidacy for the 8th Congressional District race in 2026. She’s seeking a return to the post she held for the first two years of the district’s existence, from 2023 until her loss by a whisker to Republican U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans in November.

Caraveo spoke to The Denver Post ahead of her announcement, the culmination of a decision she has been mulling for several weeks.

“I think that the district is always going to be incredibly competitive, right?” Caraveo said. “So I know this is going to be a tough race. But I think that that very narrow margin of loss is a testament to the fact that people saw that I was taking a moderate and middle-of-the-road path, really keeping in mind what the district wanted me to do.”

The 44-year-old pediatrician and daughter of Mexican immigrants acknowledged that her loss last year came in what “was not an ideal year for Democrats.” She’s staking hope on the likelihood that the political dynamic will be significantly different next year during midterm elections that historically have favored the party out of power.

Her main focus is on potential cuts to Medicaid that could come as part of a budget that President Donald Trump has made clear he wants to see slimmed down. At her former Thornton medical practice, 65% of her patients relied on the program.

“I know that those difficult conversations are taking place and that Gabe Evans doesn’t seem to have an interest in how deeply this is going to affect families,” Caraveo said.

But Caraveo won’t just have Evans to worry about next year.

She will first have to defeat at least one fellow Democrat, state Rep. Manny Rutinel, of Commerce City, in the primary election in June 2026. Rutinel, who launched his campaign in January, announced last week that he had raised more than $1 million since the beginning of the year.

Evans’ campaign responded to Caraveo’s announcement Tuesday morning by pointing to the contested primary.

“Democrats officially have a base problem and are in an all-out primary battle to the left,” spokeswoman Delanie Bomar said. “Meanwhile, Congressman Gabe Evans hit the ground running as he’s working to fix Colorado’s crime, immigration, and energy crises that Manny, Yadira, and their liberal friends created.”

The district has the heaviest concentration of Latinos among Colorado’s eight congressional districts. On immigration — where Caraveo’s position evolved from being heavily critical of federal immigration agencies when she was a state lawmaker to, last summer, lambasting the Biden administration for mismanaging the border — she says the Trump administration’s approach to the issue is wrong.

“They are not focusing on comprehensive reform,” she said. “They are looking at fear mongering and mass deportations, including of people who are here legally.”

During her 100 days out of office, Caraveo traveled to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. She also grappled with how mental health challenges might play among voters in a new bid for Congress.

Those challenges led to several dark episodes last year in which Caraveo almost took her life with a near-overdose of sleeping pills and pain medication. She spoke publicly about her struggles last summer in an attempt to destigmatize the issue of mental health, but she has provided more details in recent interviews.

After a stint at Walter Reed Army Medical Center early last year to get treatment, Caraveo said she is feeling much better and on track to devote herself to public service again.

“Now that I’m getting that proper treatment and that I’m on the right medications — that I’ve really taken care of issues that I had been ignoring for a long time because I was putting other people ahead of myself — I’m in an even better position to represent this district,” she said.

She also said: “As long as you seek help, you can get better — you can still do hard things. It shouldn’t be held against you that you have these struggles.”

The 8th District, which stretches from Denver’s northern suburbs to Berthoud and Greeley in the north, was drawn by the state’s redistricting commission after the 2020 census to be the most politically competitive in Colorado. In 2022, Caraveo barely edged out Republican state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer by fewer than 2,000 votes out of more than 236,000 cast.

Fast-forward two years, and Evans took the contest against Caraveo by fewer than 2,500 votes out of more than 333,000 cast.

The Cook Political Report once again positions the 8th District race as a toss-up in 2026 — one of only 18 races nationwide with such a ranking — while the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia includes the race among 19 with toss-up status in its rankings.

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About halfway through his search, he said, he thought he had landed a place near downtown. At the last minute, an out-of-state buyer came in with fistfuls of cash and dropped $50,000 above his offer. His dream home — so tantalizingly within reach — now belonged to someone else.

“I almost moved out of Littleton,” said the Greeley native, who went back to renting in the city.

Hanks, 32, and his wife did finally buy a house in Littleton a year ago, landing a mortgage — albeit one that’s “definitely a stretch” — to cover the $600,000 price tag of the modest 1,700-square-foot home near Sterne Park. But he knows of so many other young families in his generation who feel “fatalistic” about breaking into the metro Denver housing market.

Colorado’s housing challenge is clearly not a Littleton-only problem. But in recent months, the city of 45,000 has become a reluctant microcosm of the larger battle playing out, in which a shortage of 70,000 houses, apartments and condos in metro Denver has kept home prices high.

The situation has prompted state lawmakers in recent years to pass legislation aimed at boosting density in cities across the state. That, in turn, has led some municipalities to resist such efforts as an infringement of their local control over land-use decisions. Pressure has also come from below, as in Englewood — where an attempt to encourage more density in the city abutting Denver prompted recall elections in 2023.

In Littleton, things came to a boil in January. City leaders, after facing significant resistance, tabled a proposed zoning ordinance dubbed the Neighborhood Housing Opportunities initiative. It would have permitted denser types of housing throughout the city, like duplexes, triplexes and attached townhomes.

Many homeowners saw the measure as an assault on the character of their suburban haven, which is largely made up of tidy single-family homes tucked into leafy neighborhoods.

But the building of more detached homes likely won’t lead Colorado out of its housing woes, advocates of greater density argue. In metro Denver, the median sales price of a home last month was $599,000 — just 3.9% below the April 2022 price peak.

“They feel they’re never going to own,” Hanks said of friends struggling to afford a place of their own.

Shortly after the showdown at city hall, a newly constituted citizen advocacy group that preaches caution on densification sprung up, called Rooted in Littleton (formerly known as Save Old Littleton). The group commissioned a survey from Magellan Strategies, a polling form that last month asked nearly 1,200 residents questions about Littleton’s residential portfolio.

The survey, the results of which were released in late March, found a strong lean toward supporting less housing density in Littleton. One notable result from the survey was a strong preference (among more than 3 in 4 respondents) for a direct voter voice in any future major zoning decisions in the city, rather than leaving it up to the City Council.

That sentiment alone told Joe Whitney, a nearly 30-year resident of the city who helped start Rooted in Littleton, that his fellow denizens felt they weren’t being listened to enough.

“Blanket zoning and blanket density is not the answer,” said Whitney, 64. “It’s like setting a wildfire to do a controlled burn.”

Resistance to state laws

Littleton isn’t just seeing recalcitrance on changes to its land-use code from its residents. Like the rest of Colorado’s municipalities, it is also negotiating directives on housing policy coming down from the state — some of which have triggered a forceful local-control defense instinct.

Littleton’s council recently passed two resolutions staking out positions on housing bills moving through the state legislature this session. It urged a “no” vote on House Bill 1169, the so-called YIGBY — or “Yes in God’s Backyard” — bill that would generally allow religious groups and educational institutions to build housing on their properties, regardless of how the land is zoned.

The Colorado Municipal League has called the bill an “unconstitutional” assault on cities’ and towns’ home-rule authority — and a measure that rejects “sound long-range community planning.”

Conversely, the Littleton council urged a yes vote by the legislature on a construction-defects reform bill that lawmakers are pitching as a way to encourage more condominium construction in a state that has seen little of it in the last few decades.

On April 24, the city will host an open house to discuss how it should comply with upcoming state mandates on housing and related matters that passed in the 2024 session, affecting Front Range communities. Those include laws dealing with allowing accessory dwelling units — including garage and backyard units — as well as parking requirements in neighborhoods near transit stops and residential occupancy limits.

Final votes by the Littleton council on implementing those mandates are expected in June.

At the height of the debate over the city’s proposed zoning measure in January, Councilwoman Pam Grove — who’s co-hosting the upcoming open house — said that during her half-dozen years in office, “never has an issue hit such a hot button.”

“We’re getting pressure from the state, and we have citizens in our city that feel strongly one way or another,” she said. “We can only do so much to fix this.”

A housing study commissioned by Littleton in 2017 projected 15,000 more people would move to the city over the next two decades. That would translate into 6,500 more housing units needed in the city by the 2040s.

So far, Littleton hasn’t joined the growing list of cities that have pledged to push back on state housing laws they see as overreaching. Westminster, Arvada and Northglenn are three metro cities that have indicated they may not fully comply with the laws, Colorado Public Radio reported in February.

The resistance goes beyond metro Denver. Colorado Springs officials said recently that they would take a stand against the accessory dwelling unit mandate passed by state lawmakers last year. Last month, the Lafayette City Council mulled taking legal action against the state over House Bill 24-1313, a law that required cities to allow denser developments around transit stations.

The Colorado Municipal League has mounted challenges against a number of housing bills over the last few years. Kevin Bommer, the organization’s executive director, said some of his member cities haven’t always felt included in the process of crafting those laws.

“When you have a bunch of people sitting in the room thinking about what local communities should do — but when you don’t have feedback or input from local governments — the outcomes aren’t necessarily things local governments can live with,” he said.

And cities, Bommer said, don’t build — “cities plan.”

“That’s what Littleton is doing. That’s what Arvada is doing, and Westminster,” he said. “What they need is the state to be a partner, instead of telling them what to do.”

What do Littleton’s residents think?

At the same time, Littleton’s city officials are facing pushback from residents exercised about potential changes to their neighborhoods. The Magellan survey, which was sent to 1,197 registered voters by text March 6-11, showed a strong lean among respondents toward prohibiting — or tightly controlling — density in the city.

The survey, conducted by a well-regarded Colorado polling firm, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.79 percentage points.

A majority of respondents felt that denser housing in Littleton would not lower home prices, would not alleviate traffic congestion, would not reduce wildfire risk and would not reduce homelessness. When asked if they supported or opposed policies that would increase the housing density of some city neighborhoods, 54% came out in opposition, versus 44% in favor.

But there was a notable difference between age groups. Among respondents 18 to 44, support for more density outpaced the opposition, 53% to 45%. In the 45 to 64 cohort, however, increased density in the city lost by a wider 61%-to-34% margin.

And renters, who tend to skew younger, urged more density in Littleton by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, according to the poll.

Councilman Stephen Barr said he’s not surprised by the numbers, especially when it comes to the age breakdown. Barr, 38, moved to Littleton in 2018 and rented before buying a unit in a quadplex three years ago — the very kind of “missing middle” housing that Littleton’s 2017 housing survey said was needed to absorb the city’s projected population increase.

Having lived in a 400-square-foot accessory dwelling unit over a detached garage in California before moving to Colorado, Barr was the only person on the council in favor of adopting the Neighborhood Housing Opportunities initiative. He called the measure a “reasonably equitable step in starting to tackle this question.”

“If you’ve had economic security for 30 or 40 years, then we’re coming from different places,” said Barr, who graduated college just as the economy was cratering in 2009 amid the Great Recession. “As a renter, as someone who has lived in an ADU, as someone who lives in a quadplex — it’s hard to hear that the ways in which I’ve lived are unwanted.”

Whitney, with the Rooted in Littleton group, conceded that the high barrier to entry for younger people looking for a starter home in the metro area is something to pay attention to.

“It’s a valid claim,” he said.

But when it comes to making sometimes-drastic changes to someone’s neighborhood, most people see the largest investment they will ever make — their home — as sacrosanct, he said. It becomes “such an emotionally charged issue for people” — and one that is much bigger than one city alone.

“It’s a nationwide problem we have in terms of affordability,” Whitney said. “I don’t think it’s Littleton’s job to solve it for America or for Colorado.”

“It was a good policy,” mayor says

Littleton Mayor Kyle Schlachter has reservations about how the Magellan survey was conducted and how the questions were worded. He took the survey and determined that the results should be “taken with a grain of salt.”

He feels there is more sympathy for the city’s efforts than the survey results revealed, he said.

“I think it was a good policy. It was a good ordinance,” Schlachter said of the Neighborhood Housing Opportunities initiative. “But there were threats of lawsuits, threats of referenda and threats of recalls.”

Approving it, he said, would have been “one step forward and two steps backward” in the effort to make Littleton more affordable. City officials need look no further than next door to Englewood, where two years ago a similar focus on density led to recall efforts and lots of consternation in the community.

Four of seven council positions were subject to a recall election in the fall of 2023, an effort that ultimately failed.

While Littleton has tabled its rezoning ordinance indefinitely, that doesn’t mean residents are a hard no for any type of effort to bolster density in the city. Where that type of housing is located seems to matter a great deal.

A question on the survey that asked respondents whether they supported increased housing density within two blocks of busy Santa Fe Drive, Broadway, Mineral Avenue or Littleton Boulevard lost 52% to 44%. But when that distance was reduced to one block, respondents came down 48% to 47% in favor of higher density — though that’s within the margin of error.

South Metro Housing Options, Littleton’s housing authority, has been busy building several projects geared toward offering more affordable options in recent years. In 2024, a project called Overlook at Powers Park opened with 51 income-qualified apartment homes for seniors 62 and older.

And this summer, groundbreaking is expected on the 50-unit Montview Flats project near downtown Littleton.

Another crack at a citywide zoning ordinance is not expected again this year, said Littleton deputy city manager Kathleen Osher.

Hanks, the 32-year-old new Littleton homeowner, said curtailing and limiting efforts to improve the chances of securing affordable housing in the city could mean it never happens.

“My fear is that the scope would be so narrow that it would be easy to shrink it to where it is ineffective,” he said. “At some point, you’re going to have to pass that torch.”

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“We’re not waiting to make our case,” U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank said in an early morning video call with reporters. “We’re making our case and we’re doing it right now. We’re going to continue to fight — it makes sense that it be in Colorado. It’s already in Colorado.”

Crank is a freshman who represents the 5th Congressional District where Peterson Space Force Base, home to Space Command, sits. He was joined by Reps. Lauren Boebert, Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, who spoke from an office at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Members of Alabama’s congressional delegation have been spinning a different story this week, with U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers saying on a podcast that contractors are “ready to turn dirt” on a future Space Command headquarters at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told Auburn University’s “Cyber Focus” podcast Tuesday that he expected a final decision from the Trump administration this month.

“We do expect it to be announced right after the Air Force secretary is named,” he said.

President Donald Trump in January nominated former air crewman and space expert Troy Meink to lead the Air Force. He hasn’t been confirmed to the post yet.

But Colorado’s Republicans were hopeful that no move would happen.

“I’ve asked many of our senior military leaders: What is the military value of moving Space Command out of Colorado Springs?” Crank said Thursday. “And, point blank, they say there isn’t any.”

Evans, who represents Colorado’s 8th Congressional District and is an Army veteran, said he was encouraged by the fact that Trump didn’t immediately move Space Command upon taking office nearly three months ago — as was predicted by Rogers shortly after the November election.

“There were a lot of rumors swirling that this was going to be one of those first executive orders dropped on Jan. 20,” Evans said. “As we all know, there was no executive order on Day 1 talking about Space Command.”

Space Command, which is responsible for the nation’s military operations in outer space, was revived in 2019 under Trump’s first administration. Located first in Colorado Springs, it was set to move to Alabama after Trump announced that state as his selection for a permanent headquarters in the waning days of his first administration in early 2021.

But former President Joe Biden later reversed that decision and the command remained in Colorado. The Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce estimates it supports nearly 1,400 jobs and has a $1 billion impact on the local economy.

Huntsville, home to some of the earliest missiles used in the nation’s space programs, scored higher than Colorado Springs in a Government Accountability Office assessment of potential locations for the command. That same office, however, gave the selection process low marks for documentation, credibility and impartiality and said that senior U.S. officials who were interviewed conveyed that remaining in Colorado Springs “would allow U.S. Space Command to reach full operational capability as quickly as possible.”

With rising military threats from Russia and China, Boebert said Thursday that it was “even more critical for Space Command to avoid being moved across the country.”

The minimum $2 billion price tag to relocate the command would undermine the priorities the administration has set with its budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency office.

“It really flies in the face of the DOGE operations that are taking place,” the congresswoman said on the call.

The Republican delegation on Monday sent a letter to the White House outlining Colorado’s position on the issue. They wrote that a move to Alabama “would introduce unnecessary risks, disrupt established operations and waste valuable resources.”

The state’s Democratic members of Congress, along with both of the state’s Democratic U.S. senators, have also been vocal about keeping the Space Command in Colorado.

On Thursday’s call, Crank said that with the president’s announcement during his first week back in office of the creation of the Golden Dome missile defense system — a futuristic network of U.S. weapons in space designed to destroy ground-based missiles within seconds of launch — it’s all the more critical to keep Space Command in Colorado.

“We have to have this seamless coordination between (Colorado Springs-based) Northern Command and Space Command, especially if we’re going to be successful implementing Golden Dome,” he said. “They literally share the same parking lot at Peterson Space Force Base, so I believe there would be a great loss in capability there.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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But since 10-week-old Sam’s birth in January, she has also missed around 50 votes while staying home in Lakewood to care for him. That was all the more reason for Pettersen’s disappointment this week after a resolution she had co-authored — to give new parents in Congress the power to vote by proxy for 12 weeks as they care for their newborns — fizzled over the weekend.

“If you gave birth, it is a very intense few weeks in a recovery period, post birth,” Pettersen, a Democrat, said in a phone interview from Washington on Tuesday. “So this is not like you’re hanging out on vacation at home. These are very real medical circumstances that prevent you from being able to travel across the country to be there in person.”

Even though she was joined by Republican U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, plus nearly a dozen other GOP members of Congress, the push for the proxy vote ran into strong resistance from House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The Republican speaker has vigorously opposed the effort, calling it an affront to the Constitution that would open “Pandora’s box.”

On Sunday, Luna, also a young mother, announced that she had reached a compromise with the speaker. Rather than allow proxy voting, the agreement would formalize a “pairing” system long used in Congress, in which one member who is physically present in the House cancels out the vote of someone who is absent.

Pettersen, 43, on Monday took to X to thank Luna for her efforts on the issue but wrote that “this outcome does not address the barriers we’ve fought so hard to overcome.”

In her interview with The Post, she said that in the face of Johnson’s resistance, the push for a proxy vote “became insurmountable.”

“It makes no sense that in the 21st century, we are unable to accommodate for a vote being counted — just because we aren’t physically present when we’re unable to do so,” she said. “We’re so far behind the times in Congress (with) the way that we do things, you know, the focus and priorities. And that’s because we need to change the faces and voices and life experiences represented here — and I’m hopeful that we have young parents who have joined together to try to shake things up.”

Proxy voting had been put into effect under a Democratic-controlled Congress for around two years during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it didn’t last.

Last week, Johnson endured a decisive defeat after he staged an aggressive effort to squash the Luna-Pettersen proposal. Nine of his own Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting his plan.

And just days after that vote, Pettersen’s resolution appeared to get an additional shot of life when President Donald Trump expressed support for it. Though the Republican president said he would defer to Johnson on the operations of the House, he also said: “I don’t know why it’s controversial.”

Pettersen said she was “very surprised” by the president’s position on the issue.

“You know, this is something that we agree on,” she said over the phone as Sam could be heard cooing in the background. “But this shouldn’t be controversial, and the rest of America agrees on that.”

As for the future of proxy voting for new parents in Congress, Pettersen said she was ready to continue to do battle. She said she wanted to start by forming a bipartisan parents caucus “so that we can have power in numbers when it comes to the schedule.”

“Obviously, we faced some setbacks, but the fight is far from over — and I know that we’re going to continue to work to get this done,” Pettersen said. “This issue is not going away.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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Deputy Nicholas Moore’s use of deadly force was necessary to defend himself and others in the fatal shooting of Jalin Seabron on Feb. 8 outside the Main Event, according to a decision letter from 23rd Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler.

Moore was responding to reports of an active shooting at the Highlands Ranch arcade and entertainment center just before midnight. He rolled up to the scene with lights flashing but no siren on, Brauchler said at a news conference Monday afternoon.

That’s when he saw Seabron in the parking lot holding a gun. He exited his vehicle with a rifle and told Seabron three times to drop his gun, but never identified himself as a police officer. When Seabron didn’t drop his gun, Moore fired nine rounds at him — seven of which entered Seabron’s body.

“One of the questions that’s asked by the law is, why not less lethal?” Brauchler said at the conference. “There’s gotta be a reason why. And the reason deputy Moore says he did not consider less lethal in the situation was because it was an active shooter situation. He engaged a suspect that was holding a firearm, and he was the only law enforcement officer at the time in the area.”

Brauchler showed several still images from different angles of Seabron with a gun in his hand in front of the Main Event. Law enforcement authorities have said that when Seabron turned his head toward Moore, not raising his weapon from his side, the deputy fired at him.

He said Moore claims he made eye contact with Seabron before the final fatal moment.

“I find that the shooting, as tragic as it was — and I know everyone out there thinks to themselves there are a million different decisions made by multiple people that could have avoided this — that it was a justified use of deadly lethal force under Colorado law,” Brauchler said.

Brauchler aknowledged that Moore never identified himself as an officer of the law to Seabron — “he surely did not do that.” But he said state law allows a police officer to forgo that announcement if they believe doing so “would unduly place peace officers at risk or would create a risk of death or injury to other persons.”

“And Deputy Moore says at that moment, ‘I felt like I had to act quickly to try to stop the threat,’ ” Brauchler said.

But the family of Seabron, who was at the arcade with his pregnant girlfriend and his two sisters to celebrate his birthday, said they weren’t satisfied with the district attorney’s conclusion. His mother, Veronica Seabron, told reporters outside the Douglas County Justice Center in Castle Rock there is “no justification for why I should be standing here without my 23-year-old son.”

“There is no justification for as many shots fired. There is no justification for criminalizing him before anything was ever released,” she said. “So to say that this is a justified shooting seems one-sided. This will never be justified to me.”

Jalin’s father, Dennis Crowley, said his son, a Black man, “deserved much better.”

“He was gunned down like a dog and no humanity was shown in Officer Nick Moore’s heart,” he said. “Nick Moore, if you’re afraid of my community, resign. Don’t become a police officer.”

Attorney Tyrone Glover, who is representing the Seabron family, told reporters Monday that Jalin Seabron, was just trying to protect his girlfriend and sisters from someone inside the venue, where some sort of disagreement had erupted. He was focused on a person with a gun emerging from the Main Event, Glover said, and not on the deputy who was coming up behind him.

“He didn’t fire a shot, didn’t point the gun, didn’t even raise his weapon at the officer,” he said. “(Moore) gave no time for Jalin to comply. By the time Jalin even realizes what is going on, if he ever truly did, he’s getting shot. That’s not justified.”

Body camera footage shows that when the deputy arrived at the scene, he immediately exited his vehicle and ran toward Seabron with a gun he had assembled and prepared while driving to the arcade.

“Hey!” the officer is heard shouting in the video. “Drop the gun! Drop the gun! Now! Drop it!”

Glover said the family will continue to pursue justice through “other pathways and avenues of justice.”

Douglas County sheriff’s officials have said the Saturday night shooting inside the Highlands Ranch arcade started as a fight in the bathroom between Seabron’s stepsister, 23-year-old Nevaeha Crowley-Sanders, and a friend she had known since high school. Authorities said Crowley-Sanders pulled out a semi-automatic handgun and shot at the 22-year-old victim, her friend, eight times.

Crowley-Sanders faces 104 charges in the shooting, including five counts of felony attempted murder. Six other people were arrested on suspicion of being accessories to the shooting as well as multiple assault, weapons and drug charges.

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An instant phone poll, taken during the hour-long virtual meeting with the freshman Republican congressman, highlighted concerns over the potential inflationary effects of sweeping tariffs announced by President Trump earlier in the day, especially on farmers and ranchers in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District trying to sell their products overseas.

“What are you doing to do to help us save money?” asked one constituent from Greeley.

Evans, a military veteran and 10-year police officer with the Arvada Police Department, said it comes down to all countries acting fairly in global commerce. He said he’s heard from ranchers and farmers — including those growing sugar beets and onions — in his district who bemoan the tariffs long charged by other countries that make it harder for them to compete in those markets.

“They are being taken advantage of (internationally),” Evans said. “Free trade has to be fair trade as well.”

He compared the current upheaval in the global trade markets to breaking a rack of pool balls in billiards, where the balls initially scatter chaotically across the table until the players can impose order on the game.

In Colorado’s most heavily Latino congressional district, immigration was raised during the call. One caller asked how Evans planned to help Latinos living in the district, which stretches from the suburbs north of Denver to the oil and gas fields surrounding Greeley.

Invoking his immigrant grandfather from Mexico, Evans said it’s critical to ensure that applications for “permanency” are considered first for those making the effort to follow the nation’s immigration laws.

“We have to make sure we are rewarding the people who are doing it the right way,” he said, criticizing the record-high number of illegal crossings under former President Joe Biden over the past four years.

Another caller from Thornton asked Evans why he didn’t advocate more forcefully for Ukraine in its three-year war with Russia, especially because the West had promised security guarantees 30 years ago in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons stockpile.

Evans called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “violent and brutal dictator” who must not be appeased in “any way, shape or form,” but that it was also critical to consider the impact billions of dollars in aid sent to Ukraine is having on the nation’s fiscal health.

Until Wednesday, Evans had yet to hold a town hall meeting since his swearing-in three months ago. That didn’t stop the state Democratic Party from taunting the freshman congressman with a news release hours before the event that asked why Evans wouldn’t conduct the town hall in person.

“Why exactly is Gabe Evans so afraid of talking to his own constituents?” the Colorado Democratic Party asked in an email.

The liberal advoacy group ProgressNow Colorado last month organized a town hall in Northglenn titled “Where’s Gabe?” Evans was not in attendance.

Members of Colorado’s Republican congressional contingent have avoided live large-scale constituent events, given the pushback and dissent other GOP officeholders have faced at similar get-togethers across the country.

This year national Republican campaign leaders urged members to host virtual town halls instead of in-person gatherings. They’ve accused Democrats of organizing protests and paying “troublemakers” to attend although they haven’t presented evidence of such.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert held a virtual town hall meeting last week, her first since winning a seat in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District in November. She answered questions, which were read live by audience members and also taken in written form, from Washington, D.C. Her office said approximately 7,700 listened to the meeting.

Evans won a very close election in November against Democrat Yadira Caraveo, who was the first member of Congress to represent the newly established district starting in 2023. After having been ousted after serving a single term, Caraveo told Colorado Public Radio last week that she is considering making another run for her old seat next year.

So far Evans has an officially declared Democratic challenger in 2026 — state Rep. Manny Rutinel has launched a campaign to take back the seat for the Democrats. The race for the 8th District is expected once again to be one of the most competitive House races in the country.

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All of those dynamics came together over a conference room table in Aurora city hall this week as its leaders rebuffed a plea from Arapahoe County officials to delay for another year — to July 1, 2026 — the filing of the city’s domestic violence cases in county court.

Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky was adamant that it was time to shift the city’s approximately 1,200 annual domestic violence cases in Arapahoe County from municipal court to the 18th Judicial District, which adjudicates crime in the county, starting this July.

“They have been given ample notice on this, ample time,” she said during a study session this week, noting that the city had already granted Arapahoe County a six-month extension. “There is zero wiggle room from me.”

That’s not what Amy Padden, the district attorney for the newly reconfigured 18th Judicial District, wanted to hear. It’s one of three districts set to take on Aurora’s cases in the counties that take in parts of the city.

She projects a doubling of the number of misdemeanor domestic violence cases the district will have to handle annually once it has Aurora’s share on its docket — an influx that will result in a 17% increase in its overall caseload.

To make matters worse, lawmakers on the Colorado legislature’s Joint Budget Committee recently told county officials that there would be no additional money in the coming year to pay for the district’s public defenders or probation department, which is at less than 80% strength, staff-wise.

The 18th Judicial District is also down a county judge — another position that won’t see funding — as the legislature has tried to cobble together a budget and close a projected $1.2 billion deficit in the next fiscal year.

“It’s going to be a bit of a struggle for a while,” Padden said.

Assessment of the situation was bleaker in a memo Arapahoe County officials sent to the Aurora council as part of their effort to win more time from the city. It describes domestic violence cases as “emotionally complex and layered with significant impacts to families, particularly when children are involved, or the defendant has been the primary economic provider.”

“We anticipate case resolution times could be extended by as much as three to four months, with some cases even being dismissed outright if speedy trial deadlines cannot be met in light of the lack of judicial resources,” the memo reads.

Councilwoman Crystal Murillo backed the granting of another year so Arapahoe County could prepare for Aurora’s domestic violence caseload.

“They do not have the additional resources they were counting on, so we are abdicating our responsibility on domestic violence and leaving it up to another jurisdiction to handle our cases,” she told The Denver Post. “I think it’s going to be harmful to our residents.”

With their unique complexities, City Attorney Pete Schulte said, domestic violence cases take four times as long to adjudicate than other misdemeanor violations. In the meantime, Aurora is facing its own fiscal challenges — to the tune of a projected $11.5 million general fund deficit in 2026.

“Welcome to our world — that’s what we’re having to pay for,” Schulte said.

State laws weigh on Aurora

Denver, Westminster and Lakewood are the only other Colorado cities that still prosecute misdemeanor domestic violence cases in municipal court. All felony cases involving domestic violence in Colorado are handled by the state’s district court system.

Aurora has been overseeing its own misdemeanor domestic violence caseload for about 30 years, Schulte said, at a cost of $2 million to $3 million annually. In total, the city deals without around 1,800 domestic violence cases a year.

While the bulk of those occur in Arapahoe County, another 600 come out of Adams and Douglas counties.

The City Council began to reexamine the situation, Schulte said, following passage last year of House Bill 1437. That law, which takes effect on July 1, will halt lower-cost fixed or flat-fee payments to attorneys representing indigent clients by municipalities that prosecute these types of cases.

Cities must, according to the law, “use the same payment structure and rates that are paid by the state of Colorado.” The rationale was to ensure that lawyers are not disincentivized to work on a client’s case because a flat fee, rather than an hourly one, might not adequately compensate them for their time.

That law, in tandem with another bill moving through the Democratic-dominated legislature this spring, put the situation in a new prism for Aurora’s elected leaders, Schulte said. The pending bill would stop local governments from imposing a harsher sentence or a larger fine than would be imposed by district or county judges for a comparable crime.

“At some point, when it becomes too expensive because of what the legislature is doing, the council has to make a decision about what is in the best interests of the citizens of Aurora,” he said. “We don’t have any obligation to be an extension of county court.”

Aurora Councilwoman Francoise Bergan, who voted to deny Arapahoe County an extension, said state government ultimately “holds the responsibility to address and fund the essential needs of its residents, particularly in areas concerning public safety and justice.”

“Domestic violence cases are critical and should never be dismissed due to a lack of resources,” she said. “It is imperative that the necessary funding and support systems be prioritized to ensure these cases are properly adjudicated.”

Jurinsky said at Monday’s study session that Arapahoe County should be able to cover the costs of Aurora’s domestic violence cases now that its voters have lifted revenue collection limitations under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

“They are going to be flush with cash,” she said.

Passage of Question 1A on Nov. 5 allows the county to keep and spend tax revenue beyond what TABOR normally permits. But Commissioner Jessica Campbell says it’s not that simple.

“We made a commitment to our voters where these 1A dollars would go to,” she said. “And this transfer (of domestic violence cases) was not part of that.”

The extra money is dedicated to road improvement, public safety, housing and mental health programs. Arapahoe County, Campbell said, is facing a backlog of unaddressed infrastructure and maintenance needs that add up to more than $300 million.

But the county, she said, will “muscle through” the challenge of managing the additional cases that will come from Aurora.

“Our primary concern is being able to provide justice to the victims of domestic violence,” Campbell said. “We will do our best, but not pushing back the deadline will make it harder.”

Adams County is ready, DA says

Padden, the district attorney, said she didn’t anticipate domestic violence cases being dismissed outright in Arapahoe County once Aurora’s caseload comes over. For one, she said, the city is only filing new cases in county court as of July 1 — all existing cases before then will continue to be adjudicated in Aurora’s court.

“We will have some time to ramp up,” she said.

But the challenges with constrained resources are very real, she said.

“If a public defender is overworked, it may take them longer to bring their cases to trial,” Padden said. “Yet a crowded docket is not an excuse to not have a speedy trial.”

For almost the other third of Aurora’s domestic violence cases, Adams County District Attorney Brian Mason said his office of 90 prosecutors is ready. (Douglas County accounts for a tiny proportion of Aurora’s cases.)

“The city of Aurora gave us notice, and we’ve been preparing ever since,” said Mason, who is in charge of prosecutions in Colorado’s 17th Judicial District. “We are committed to taking care of every domestic violence victim and handling these cases in a responsible way.”

While domestic violence deaths in Colorado dropped significantly in 2023 after back-to-back years of record-high fatalities during the pandemic — 58 deaths in 2023, compared to 94 in 2022 — partner-on-partner abuse continues to be a serious problem, according to a Colorado Domestic Violence Fatality Review Board report issued last fall.

“Though this drop is very encouraging, it does not suggest,” the report stated, that domestic violence or related fatalities are less of an problem in Colorado.

One only needs to look next door at Denver. While homicides and non-fatal shootings dropped last year from the year before, domestic violence assaults surged 44% in 2024 compared to 2023, police data shows.

As to whether the bad behavior that leads to domestic violence incidents in the first place will ever subside enough to give judicial systems in Colorado a chance to breathe, Mason was not sanguine.

“Unfortunately, domestic violence will always be a problem,” he said. “The human condition is that some people don’t have the skill set to resolve their disputes without turning to violence.”

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In recent years, the county south of Denver has engaged in a series of legal battles with the state over property tax valuations, state immigration laws and the validity of public health orders, like mask mandates during the coronavirus pandemic. The county has filed lawsuits and issued declarations of dissent against Colorado’s Democratic leadership.

Now its leaders will ask voters to beef up its standing.

Establishing home-rule authority “will allow us to keep what we have and allow us to push back on the state on things we really care about in this county,” Commissioner George Teal told The Denver Post. “We like to talk about local control in this state, and yet the mechanism for local control is home rule. Let’s put our money where our mouth is.”

The board of commissioners adopted a resolution Tuesday that will kickstart Douglas County’s transition from a statutory form of government to home-rule status. That authority imbues local governments in Colorado — typically cities and towns — with specific powers to run their own affairs and exempting them from certain state laws.

The effort, the first of its kind in nearly 50 years, will include the establishment of a 21-member charter commission — which requires the approval of voters at a June 24 special election — to draw up the county’s home-rule charter. Voters will then be asked to approve the charter this November.

If the measure passes, home-rule authority will take effect on Jan. 1.

Douglas County would become just the third of the state’s 64 counties to possess home-rule authority as a standalone county. The other two are Weld and Pitkin counties. Denver and Broomfield, which operate as dual city-and-county governments, have home-rule powers by virtue of their status as municipalities.

The state maintains preeminence over matters of statewide concern, county attorney Jeff Garcia said Tuesday, but home-rule power gives local governments a better chance of asserting local control over issues like taxation, land use, zoning and governance structure.

“Home rule gives you enhanced standing to challenge the state,” Garcia said.

Legal challenges of state

Last year alone, Douglas County sued the state Board of Equalization over the board’s decision to overrule the county’s attempt to provide $4 billion in property tax relief to its residents, while months later filing suit against the state over two immigration laws. Those laws limit the level of aid local law enforcement agencies can render to federal immigration authorities when it comes to the arrest and detention of migrants.

Earlier this year, just before President Donald Trump returned to office, Douglas County’s commissioners adopted a resolution backing his plans to deport immigrants living illegally in the country.

The county’s legal volleys haven’t found much success in the courts. A Denver judge dismissed much of Douglas County’s challenge on the property tax matter, while a different Denver judge struck down the county’s immigration lawsuit in December, ruling that the county didn’t have standing to bring the action against the state.

Home-rule authority, Garcia said, would give the county a better chance of prevailing in court because legal standing wouldn’t pose the same impediment as it does under statutory rule, where counties must follow state law to a tee.

“We’d be more than happy to have that argument in court,” he said.

During a press conference shortly after the commissioners’ approval of the home-rule charter resolution, District Attorney George Brauchler said he saw an increase in local control as a way of shoring up public safety. Brauchler, elected last fall to lead the newly formed 23rd Judicial District, accused Democratic leadership at the State Capitol of being soft on crime and said it was critical to have more autonomy to go after criminals in Douglas County.

“Government is best that is closest to the people, and that’s what this represents,” he said.

County leaders even envision home-rule authority allowing them to set aside the state’s 10-cent grocery bag fee, which lawmakers mandated in a bill passed four years ago. Teal said he could see home-rule power being used to shore up local land-use policies in Douglas County to counter state mandates and challenge gun-control laws being considered in the Capitol.

“When we get gun-control laws that come down, we’re going to have latitude,” the commissioner said. “When you talk about gun control, that’s a big issue for folks in Douglas County.”

How much power would county gain?

Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver, isn’t so sure that Douglas County will be able to use its hoped-for newfound powers to meaningfully bend policy in the face of state law. He characterized the county’s move Tuesday as the “politics of defiance.”

Home-rule authority, he said, typically applies to more pedestrian matters, like tweaking the organization and structure of county government.

“There’s a history of precedence of states being able to preempt local decisions on important policy issues,” Teske said. “This move seems to mainly be a political statement asserting some independence from a state legislature that has gone further left in recent sessions.”

State Rep. Bob Marshall, who represents a swath of Highlands Ranch in northern Douglas County, wondered why the issue was going to voters in an off-year election, “which will ensure ultra-low turnout (that’s) likely not representative of the will of the people.”

“They could have easily done this in 2024 — or wait until 2026 to ensure a more representative decision from Douglas County’s citizens …” Marshall, a Democrat, told The Post.

Weld County was the first Colorado county to go through the process of establishing home-rule authority, which took effect there on the first day of 1976. According to the county’s website, some of the benefits of the new status included upping the number of commissioners from three to five, abolishing the position of county surveyor and hiring a full-time county attorney, rather than paying one by the hour.

Pitkin County followed Weld’s lead two years later.

Douglas County’s June special election for the charter commission is projected to cost the county about $500,000 to conduct. If voters sign off on the charter process, the second vote in November won’t incur additional costs for the county because a coordinated election is already scheduled then.

Asked if the cost of the special election in a fiscally conservative county bothers him, Teal was adamant that it doesn’t.

“It’s money well spent,” he said.

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For Bob Bamber, the connection goes back to his great-great-grandfather, who homesteaded north of Pritchett, a tiny Baca County town of barely 100 people not far from the Oklahoma state line.

So the 44-year-old rancher took notice when he found out that a portion of the 10,000 acres of ranchland he and his father own and lease in neighboring Prowers County had been placed in a zone designated by the U.S. Department of Energy as a potential high-voltage electric transmission corridor.

And he got agitated.

“It’s an emotional reaction because of that family connection,” said Bamber, bouncing in his truck along dirt roads that slice through prairie dotted with cedar trees, yucca and prickly pear cactus. “It sounds cliche, but you are part of the land out here.”

His worry echoes that of his over-the-fence neighbor. Val Emick fears that a transmission corridor, with towering pylons marching from New Mexico into three rural Colorado counties — Baca, Prowers and Kiowa — could disturb a fragile short-grass prairie landscape in the state’s far-southeast corner, lowering land values and disrupting ranching and farming operations that span generations.

“You go out seven days a week, and you build it and want to pass it down to your kids and your grandkids — it seems unfair,” said Emick, who has lived in the same house south of Lamar for 35 years and runs a cow-calf operation on some 5,000 acres. “And they come in with that threat.”

That threat is eminent domain — the power the government has to condemn and take land for public uses, like the construction of highways and other infrastructure. It must pay fair market value to the property owner for the land.

No determination has been made about the use of eminent domain to accommodate electric transmission lines as part of the Energy Department’s National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors initiative, or NIETC. But people in this part of the state have fresh and raw memories of the specter of condemnation that hung over the U.S. Army’s plan to expand its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, northeast of Trinidad, nearly 20 years ago.

After both of Colorado’s U.S. senators expressed opposition to involuntary land sales for the expansion, the idea was scuttled in 2013.

“The biggest concern we have is eminent domain,” Prowers County Commissioner Ron Cook recently told The Denver Post inside the county courthouse in Lamar. “We’ve got third- and fourth-generation farmers and ranchers running these properties, and we sure don’t want them run off their land.”

The concern over the NIETC proposal brought a crowd out to the same courthouse last month. Some in the room, including Cook, said they had only recently learned of the project. They were frustrated by a lack of communication from the federal government.

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert joined the meeting via video link and told the attendees she would push back hard on the corridor designation.

In an email to the Post this month, the Republican congresswoman said she reached out to newly confirmed Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fellow Coloradan, and got the public input period for the project extended from mid-February to April 15. In a Feb. 10 letter to Wright, Boebert said what was started under the Biden administration should be looked at again, with an option for the agency under President Donald Trump’s new administration to “shut this project down.”

“We can all agree that access to reliable energy is important for the health and prosperity of rural Coloradans, but that doesn’t mean we need to be forced into a one-size-fits-all approach dictated by D.C. bureaucrats who have failed to include community leaders in this process,” she said.

“Very important corridor” for grid

The NIETC program, which Congress authorized in 2005, tasks the Department of Energy with identifying areas of the country where transmission is lacking. It’s charged with determining where infrastructure is “urgently needed to advance important national interests, such as increased electric reliability and reduced consumer costs,” according to the program’s website.

Impacts from a compromised electric grid include more frequent and longer power outages and higher prices for energy due to a lack of capacity to move lower-cost electricity from where it is produced to where it is needed, the website says.

So far, no NIETC corridors have been established in the United States.

The Post asked the Department of Energy for comment via multiple phone and email requests but received no response. The department’s latest designation effort began last May with the release of a list of 10 possible transmission corridors, based on a National Transmission Needs Study that was completed in 2023.

That list was winnowed in December to three corridors, including what is known as the Southwestern Grid Connector — which would run up the eastern edge of New Mexico, scrape the western edge of the Oklahoma panhandle and pierce the southeast corner of Colorado.

The other two NIETC corridors being considered are in the Lake Erie portion of Pennsylvania and across parts of the Dakotas and Nebraska.

The Department of Energy says the Southwest Grid Connector could be anywhere from three miles to 15 miles wide, though the ultimate transmission line built would cover far less land. The corridor, the government says, is designed to follow existing transmission line rights-of-way for parts of its path.

“It’s a very important corridor,” said Adam Kurland, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in federal energy policy. “It’s probably the one that adds the most value to the grid.”

The Southwestern Grid Connector would help link the nation’s eastern and western interconnections, Kurland said, and would provide the ability “to exchange more power and serve a national grid.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the eastern interconnection operates in states east of the Rocky Mountains while the western interconnection covers states west of the Rockies.

“There’s very limited transfer between these two interconnects,” Kurland said. “There’s a lot of value for doing that, for reliability of the grid and for resilience against weather systems. You could more easily move power and supply power where it’s needed.”

More data centers, fewer coal plants

Grid Strategies, a consultant for the power sector, said in a December report that demand for electricity nationwide is forecast to rise by nearly 16% by 2029. Among the main drivers, according to the company, are power-hungry data centers and manufacturing facilities.

A study that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden participated in last fall concluded that the U.S. transmission system — consisting of a half-million miles of power lines — will need to at least double in size by 2050 to remain reliable at the lowest cost to ratepayers.

And a 2024 report by the nonprofit North American Electric Corp. determined that about half the continent was at elevated or high risk of energy shortfalls over the next five to 10 years. That risk comes as power plants are retired and the pressure for more electricity increases.

In Colorado, coal plants across the state have been shut down in recent years as worries about their climate-warming emissions escalate. All are expected to close by the end of 2030.

“The more transmission we build, the more flexibility and resilience we create,” said Mark Gabriel, the president and CEO of the Brighton-based electric cooperative United Power.

For eight years, Gabriel headed the Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells and conveys electricity across 17,000 miles of transmission lines to 15 western and central states.

“As coal goes away, we still need to move electrons,” he said. “How do we meet a growing demand at the same time we’re closing down generator resources?”

The state’s future demands on electric power are ambitious. While campaigning for his first term in office, Gov. Jared Polis said he wanted all of the power on Colorado’s electric grid to come from renewable energy sources by 2040. Rules adopted by Denver and the state aim to eventually make buildings all-electric.

And Colorado, with its goal of getting nearly 1 million electric vehicles on the roads by 2030, recently moved ahead of California for the nation’s top spot in market share of electric vehicles sold.

“You want to have a diverse portfolio of generation resources, and that portfolio is helped by more transmission,” Gabriel said. “And we can’t (achieve that) unless we have projects like this, and others, constructed.”

Farmers lament lack of “bargaining power”

But it’s how projects are constructed that matters to Steve Shelton, a sixth-generation farmer and rancher who lives about 10 miles south of Lamar. He grows wheat, corn and sorghum on 20,000 acres.

Shelton, 69, was on the other side of the transmission debate about 15 years ago, when he joined neighboring ranchers in exploring deals with a wind farm near Kit Carson to string electric wires across land in the state’s southeast corner.

“We had some farmers who said ‘No,’ and we’d have to find another path or sweeten the pot,” he said of the effort, which eventually fizzled out.

With the shadow of eminent domain in the mix this time, Shelton said, “you have no bargaining power.”

“They would get the development rights or the easement, and the farmer and rancher would have no income off of that,” he said.

The county’s fiscal health would also be impacted by a condemnation action by the government, said Prowers County Commissioner Roger Stagner, who served as mayor of Lamar for a decade. Taking land off the tax rolls would not only hit the county’s $41 million annual budget but would also have a ripple effect on the local economy, he said.

Boebert, in her Feb. 10 letter to the energy secretary, said the contemplated Southwestern Grid Connector would “affect approximately 325,000 acres of private land in Baca, Prowers and Kiowa counties in Colorado.” There are fewer than 20,000 residents combined in the three counties.

“Everything revolves around agriculture. If you’re going to take out that much land, it can affect the entire county,” Stagner said. “If there’s no alfalfa grown on that ground, that farmer doesn’t spend as much in town. That’s a big concern for us.”

Bamber, the Prowers County rancher, says he has no issue with the deployment of energy infrastructure across his property, so long as it’s done with full disclosure and landowner input. In fact, he and Emick, his neighbor, host dozens of wind turbines on their acreage that power the Twin Buttes wind farm.

“We’ve been able to live with the wind farm because they’ve compensated us,” Bamber said. “We’ve made the tradeoff for the money.”

Lease agreements they hammered out with the wind energy company to use their land made the deal palatable, Emick said.

“There was no hiding anything,” she said.

Broken trust, uncertain future

With the NIETC process already in the third of four phases, Cook is frustrated and befuddled that he and his fellow commissioners didn’t catch wind of the project before late January. That uncertainty has been a driving force behind much of the resistance to it among his constituents.

“That is what we’re struggling with — we have no idea how this is going to end up and what they’re going to do with it,” he said.

The Department of Energy describes the third phase of the designation process as the “public and governmental engagement phase.” During this period, the agency will decide the level of environmental review that applies to each NIETC project. It will conduct any required reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.

The agency conducted a webinar on the latest developments with the Southwestern Grid Connector in mid-January. And it issued a news release about the latest phase in December. But many in southeast Colorado think the federal government could have done a better job of outreach to local officials and property owners.

Some take hope in the success of opponents in Kansas last year who eliminated the Midwest-Plains and Plains-Southwest NIETC corridors that were part of the original 10 first proposed in the spring. U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann, who represents that state’s 1st Congressional District, issued a statement in December after the Kansas transmission corridors were dropped.

“Kansans made it clear from the very beginning that we were not interested in the federal government seizing our private land,” Mann said, adding: “I’m glad our voices were heard in stopping this federal overreach.”

Boebert, in her letter to the energy secretary last month, cited Kansas’ resistance and urged the agency to “reconsider and halt further actions on current NIETC designations in Colorado initiated by the previous administration.”

That’s the right call, Bamber said.

“I’d like to see it just stopped — the trust is broken,” he said. “We’re an afterthought and we should have been partners in this.”

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This week, the first of three “continuous-flow intersections” opens for business on a nearly three-mile stretch of U.S. 85 that’s notorious for aggravating traffic backups — made worse when crews started work on expanding the roadway, better known as Santa Fe Drive, more than two years ago.

The initial continuous-flow intersection, also known as a displaced left-turn intersection, was set to go live at Highlands Ranch Parkway on Thursday, while the second will open at Town Center Drive next week. The third — a more burly version of the configuration that’s designed to smoothly move drivers onto westbound C-470 from northbound Santa Fe Drive — opens in April.

They’re all part of a $130 million effort to expand Santa Fe from four lanes to six lanes, from Highlands Ranch Parkway to just north of County Line Road. The project, which has turned this stretch of road into a maddening maze of orange barrels and construction equipment since its debut in October 2022, is expected to fully wrap by late July.

“Hopefully, it helps move traffic faster,” said Ben Rabinoff, a bartender at Living the Dream Brewing, a watering hole located right in the middle of the construction zone. “Hopefully, it will reduce accidents.”

On both counts, traffic engineers say the continuous-flow design will help by reducing conflict points between left-turning vehicles and oncoming traffic. It guides left-turning drivers to the other side of the road and into a dedicated “left-turn bay,” where they drive on offset pavement well before arriving at the intersection.

The maneuver eliminates vehicles stacking up in the middle of the main road at the intersection itself, which can often result in turning vehicles sitting through more than one light cycle and spilling over into the through lanes, gumming up the entire roadway. Instead, left-turn drivers queued off to the side can turn while through traffic zips across the main intersection.

“A CFI typically provides anywhere from 30% to 70% more capacity,” said David Millar, traffic engineering program manager for the engineering firm HDR Inc., referring to the acronym for the design. “I’m confident it will be able to handle traffic on Santa Fe for the next 20 years — and well beyond.”

Millar heads up the design efforts on the U.S. 85 project, which is being funded with federal, state and Douglas County money. The developers behind Sterling Ranch and the Solstice communities are reimbursing the county for some of the project’s cost.

The highway segment sees average daily traffic volumes ranging from 48,000 vehicles at its north end, near C-470, to 30,000 around Highlands Ranch Parkway, according to state traffic data.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, delays at a partial continuous-flow intersection drop between 30% and 40% compared to a conventional configuration, while delays go down between 50% and 80% at intersections that get full treatment.

At a continuous-flow intersection in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the FHWA found that crashes overall dropped 24%, while fatal and injury crashes went down 19% in the two years after the redesign was completed.

Increasing adoption of design

Continuous-flow intersections are not new to Colorado, but they aren’t common, either.

The first was built in Loveland in 2010 at Madison Avenue and East Eisenhower Boulevard. They can now be found in Colorado Springs and Durango, with two new ones coming soon to Wheat Ridge — at west 44th and 38th avenues — as part of a yearslong effort to improve Wadsworth Boulevard.

Metro Denver drivers faced the fastest-increasing traffic delays in the nation over the past year, according to a recent analysis by the global transportation data firm INRIX. Drivers on metro roads last year lost an average of 44 hours to traffic jams, up from 37 hours in 2023.

By comparison, residents lost an average of 102 hours in traffic in New York City and Chicago. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, they lost 88 hours.

The stretch of Santa Fe south of C-470 is a critical corridor to improve, said Art Griffith, Douglas County’s transportation capital improvements project manager. The other major north-south highway in Douglas County is Interstate 25, nine miles to the east.

“It’s not like there’s a grid here that would allow alternate routes to spread things out,” Griffith said.

On a breezy morning this week, Millar and Griffith toured a reporter through the yet-to-open redesigned intersections on Santa Fe. The two at Highlands Ranch Parkway and Town Center Drive are partial CFIs, meaning they are designed to provide left-turn relief only to drivers turning east into Highlands Ranch.

On the west side of Santa Fe Drive is a largely industrial and commercial slice of land, bounded by Chatfield Reservoir, that doesn’t see large volumes of traffic and doesn’t need the alteration, Griffith said.

Hundreds of feet ahead of the intersection of southbound Santa Fe with Highlands Ranch Parkway, a sign directs drivers into two left-turn lanes controlled by an overhead signal. When the light turns green, drivers cross in front of oncoming vehicles that have been stopped by their own signal. They enter a dedicated left-turn bay and proceed to the intersection on what feels like the wrong side of the road, until they hit another signal — where they take their turn.

“The first time you drive through it, it feels odd — then it was no problem,” Millar said. “You drive it again and it’s absolutely no problem.”

Millar said the signals will be carefully timed to avoid having turning vehicles sit through more than one light cycle.

“That’s generally considered failing if you have to wait through more than one cycle of lights,” he said.

Data show improvement in Durango

A decade ago, the intersection of U.S. 550 and U.S. 160 in Durango, in southwestern Colorado, was starting to see “long traffic-flow delays, backups and congestion,” said Lisa Ann Schwantes, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation’s southwestern Region 5.

A continuous-flow intersection was seen as a solution to the growing problem at the major regional crossing.

“The Durango CFI project was constructed out of necessity to keep the intersection operating at an acceptable level of service,” she said.

And data from before the 2014 rebuild of the intersection to the years since show a left-turn crash reduction of almost 50% at the intersection, Schwantes said. Mike McVaugh, who helped oversee the project in Durango when he headed CDOT’s Region 5, said he recently heard from the city’s police department, which said the intersection “went from one of their higher-crash locations to one that has a low-crash frequency now.”

“We had a lot of skeptics who did not believe this would work,” McVaugh, now with HDR, told The Denver Post. “Many of those same people today tell me it works and they would not go back to the old intersection.”

Millar is determined to keep everyone using the road happy with the changes, along with the shops, restaurants and businesses that have been trying to operate in a corridor beset by construction challenges.

“If you can get 30%, 40% or 70% more capacity in the same footprint, absolutely — that’s something you want,” he said.

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