The proposed budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year, which starts in July, cleared the state Senate in perfunctory fashion last week. Now it begins what will likely be a more tense journey through the House. That means there will be few committee meetings on this side of the Capitol as House members spend most of the week debating the budget — known as the “long bill” — and its cluster of 60-some related measures, known as “orbitals.”

The long bill is, well, long, and the orbitals revolve around it. The legislature is a clever place.

If all goes to plan, the budget will be on the House floor Wednesday, Thursday and — if need be — Friday for a parade of amendment proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike. It’ll then likely go to a conference committee of House and Senate legislators to resolve amendments made in each chamber before going to Gov. Jared Polis for passage into law.

The reason the budget’s visit to the House may be more tense is because there are rumors, just as happens every year now, that House Republicans may request that the long bill be read aloud. It’s a constitutionally protected procedural move that would essentially halt all other business while the budget — all of its many, many pages of mumbo-jumbo numbers and line items — is read out in monotone by a computer.

Doing so would take the better part of an entire calendar day.

House Republicans spokeswoman Laurel Boyle said Monday morning that the caucus was still sorting out its budget plans but added that its members would generally advance amendments challenging what Republican lawmakers consider “waste, fraud and abuse” in the budget.

The budget debate comes after a tense few days in the House. On Friday and Sunday, House Democrats limited and, for some measures, completely ended debate on four bills related to abortion and transgender rights. Limiting or ending debate are tools rarely deployed against filibusters or — in this case — heated debates.

We’ll see if that has consequences for the budget in a few days. Speaking of the budget: The school funding bill is also moving this week. After negotiations with nervous school districts, House Speaker Julie McCluskie unveiled her proposal last week, and it will be in the House’s Education Committee on Monday.

Here’s what else is happening in the Capitol this week, with votes subject to change:

Labor bill inches closer to finish line

Senate Bill 5 — Democrats’ and labor unions’ marquee bill of the year — passed a final committee vote last week and is now scheduled for House floor work this week. That might happen Tuesday or Friday.

We say “might” for two reasons: One, the budget is a floor-work blackhole from which no other bills can escape. And two — and more critically — is that negotiations around the bill are ongoing. The bill would eliminate a provision of labor law that requires a second union election before organized workers can fully negotiate a part of their contracts dealing with dues and fees. It’s backed by legislative Democrats and opposed by businesses and Polis, who has gestured at vetoing the bill should it pass without successful negotiations with businesses.

Such a deal hasn’t happened yet, though McCluskie is pushing. But time is running out: The bill now needs two votes in the House before moving to Polis, and there’s just one month left in the session.

Vacancy committee bonanza

Before the budget crunch begins, the House’s State, Civic, Military & Veteran Affairs Committee will hear five — F-I-V-E — bills Monday afternoon dealing with vacancies in elected offices. Typically that means vacancy committees — the process by which a small group of party officials and volunteers select a replacement when an elected official leaves office early.

The process has drawn intense scrutiny in recent years — roughly a third of the legislature earned a vacancy appointment at one point or another, and rumblings about backroom deals marred a recent process late last year and prompted renewed calls for reform.

Two of the bills focus on replacing county commissioners, and three deal broadly with vacancy committees. There’s an intraparty kerfuffle there, too, over competing bills on the latter topic. We’ll have more on that later today.

Housing vote — and a porn bill — in the Senate

Fresh from Budget Crunch: Part I, the Senate will have little time to catch its breath. Of many votes scheduled in that chamber this week, several are for housing bills. That includes House Bill 1169 — the so-called YIGBY bill, for “Yes in God’s Backyard” — which would make it easier for houses of worship and educational institutions to build housing on their land. That’s up for a first floor vote.

House Bill 1240 is also up for a floor vote, possibly as early as Monday. The bill would, among other things, give tenants more time to pay back-rent before their landlords can try to evict them.

House Bill 1108 will get a committee vote Thursday. That bill would block landlords from charging fees when one of their tenants dies in the middle of a lease.

Outside of the housing world, Senate Bill 201 is up for a first floor vote this week, too. That bill, which has bipartisan support, would require pornographic websites to check users’ ages before they’re allowed to access the material within. Similar policies have been adopted in other states.

Brace for more bill signings

On a final note: The tail end of the legislative session means Polis begins signing bills into law in earnest. That’s been happening for a few weeks now, of course, but as heaps of legislation crosses the line, expect to see more stories from us and others about proposals moving into state statute.

On Monday morning, Polis signed a bill eliminating anti-same sex marriage language from state law. Voters eliminated the defunct constitutional ban on same-sex marriages in November, and this bill conforms state law to the constitution — and to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidated our marriage bans.

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Brita Horn, who previously served as the Routt County treasurer, was elected Saturday to a two-year term. She won on the second ballot at the party’s reorganization meeting in Colorado Springs, beating former state Rep. Lori Saine. Horn, who won out over a field of six other candidates vying for the state’s top Republican posting, succeeds former state lawmaker Dave Williams, who did not seek another term as chair.

In an interview Monday, Horn said her top priority was uniting the party to more meaningfully challenge Colorado Democrats’ gains in the Capitol.

“We’re just opening up the tent, bringing out the welcome wagon, rolling out the mat and saying ‘You’re all welcome,’ ” she said of different wings of the Republican Party.

She also said she supported closing Republican primaries — meaning that only registered Republicans would be able to participate. The state opened its partisan primaries in 2016, allowing unaffiliated voters — who make up a plurality of eligible voters — to participate in the primary of their choosing. Williams also had tried to close primaries.

On her website, Horn pledged to unite the party’s different factions, to audit the party’s finances, and to improve its leadership and infrastructure down to the “grassroots” level. Her election prompted celebratory social media posts from several Republican lawmakers and officials, including Williams’ predecessor Kristi Burton Brown, who now serves on the State Board of Education.

Horn said she wants to stand up field offices across the state, which will likely mean closing the party’s longtime office in Greenwood Village. The goal, she said, is to work more closely with local officials and to ensure a Republican candidate runs in every state legislative race.

Horn, who unsuccessfully ran for state treasurer in 2018, inherits a Colorado Republican Party at a key moment. As Colorado has settled into a steady shade of blue, the state GOP took a turn to the right under Williams, releasing anti-LGBTQ+ statements, doubling down on debunked election conspiracies and — most recently — inviting Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump who recently performed a Nazi-like salute, to speak at a party gala Friday night. (Bannon has said he was waving.)

Fundraising slumped under Williams, and the party directed resources to the chairman’s own unsuccessful congressional bid last year. The party also took the controversial step of endorsing candidates in primary contests, including Williams.

Opposition to Williams — including from Horn — prompted an attempt to unseat him, unspooling a messy saga of dueling meetings and legal challenges that ended with a judge siding with Williams.

The Williams-led GOP then sued Horn and others over their efforts to remove the chairman; that case is ongoing.

Horn said Monday that the party would stop endorsing candidates during primary races. She also said she supported efforts to examine unproven “shenanigans” in Colorado elections and lawsuits challenging previous election results. State election officials have derided those lawsuits as a “sham.”

In November, against a national backdrop of Republican gains nearly nationwide, Colorado Republicans flipped three seats in the state House and broke Democrats’ two-thirds supermajority. Republican Gabe Evans beat then-U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo to nudge the state’s U.S. House delegation to a 4-4 Republican-Democratic split.

Still, much of Colorado remained insulated from the broader rightward shift, and the GOP remains just one seat away from superminority status in both the state House and Senate. No Republican has won a statewide election in Colorado in nearly a decade.

Immediately on Horn’s agenda will be preparing for the 2026 elections to try to buck that trend. All four statewide elected offices — held by Democrats since 2018 — will be open. The race for Evans’ 8th Congressional District seat in northern Colorado will again be one of the most contested in the country.

While Williams’ strategy for electoral success had prioritized backing hardline conservatives in a blue state, Horn said she would pursue an approach focused on “opening up that tent and letting all types of Republicans be here.”

“You need a different kind of Republican” for different areas of the state, she said.

As for the party Horn will oppose, Colorado Democrats reelected party chair Shad Murib in mid-March. In a statement after Horn’s victory, Murib criticized Horn as a “perfect fit for the new age of corruption that Trump requires of his puppets.”

While some Colorado Republicans have lamented that Trump’s presence on the ballot hampers their chances here, Horn said the problem rests with the party’s infrastructure — not with the Republican standard-bearer.

“I think what the obstacle (has been) … is we had no foundation, no function,” she said. “We didn’t have any internal processes to go out and get the votes that I think were out there.”

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Senate Bill 5 is now one vote away from the House floor, where it’s expected to pass and then face an uncertain fate on Polis’ desk. The bill would remove a unique piece of Colorado law that requires unions to pass two elections — the second requiring a higher threshold — before workers can negotiate a part of their contracts that govern dues and fees. The measure has been near-universally backed by Democrats, including by state legislators, five former U.S. labor secretaries and two of Colorado’s Democratic congresswomen.

But it’s been opposed by the business community and by Polis, who has privately threatened a veto. In a news conference last week, the governor didn’t directly invoke that specter, though he reiterated his desire for a deal and his support for the state’s labor status quo.

Negotiations aimed at a deal are ongoing, both sides said, and the bill is unlikely to reach the floor in the next week. It first must pass through the House Appropriations Committee after winning an earlier committee vote, but a vote had not been scheduled yet.

The two sides also have entered something of a new phase: As the bill nears the finish line, the AFL-CIO has introduced a ballot measure that, if passed, would require Colorado employers to have “just cause” to fire their workers. Under current law, Colorado — like every state but Montana — is an at-will state, meaning employees can generally be fired for any — or no — reason not related to discrimination or other existing protections.

The initiative was filed with the legislature earlier this month — the first step in a long road to next year’s ballot. But its filing represents a larger goal for unions and a deeper threat to businesses than the union elections bill: While labor advocates argue that the second union election is a needless impediment to union negotiations, the just-cause protections sought by the initiative would place a much firmer restriction on business operations.

“I think you’re going to see more and more emphasis on workers’ rights initiatives on the ballot at the state level, especially with what’s going on at the federal level,” said Dennis Dougherty, the executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, referring to President Donald Trump’s return to office.

He said the just-cause restriction was “a policy we’ve had our eye on for quite some time.”

Loren Furman, the president and CEO of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, said Friday that she interpreted the ballot measure both as a legitimate desire of labor unions and as a negotiating tool to ensure SB-5 is passed into law.

“It was pretty alarming when it was filed,” she said of the ballot proposal. “It would have a very, very significant impact on employers — all private sector employers across the state.”

She said Dougherty pledged to withdraw the ballot measure if an acceptable deal was reached on SB-5. Dougherty confirmed that the proposal would be pulled back “if we can find something that meets the interests of workers.”

But Dougherty said the labor groups also wanted a competing ballot measure — an anti-union proposal to make Colorado a “right-to-work” state, which would bar negotiated requirements that workers pay union dues and fees — to be withdrawn. That proposal is being backed by Jon Caldara, the president of the Independence Institute, a libertarian-conservative think tank in Denver.

If the right-to-work proposal advances, Dougherty said, then the just-cause measure would be “the first of many” from labor unions. Pointing to Caldara’s public statements, Furman said his measure would be taken down, too, if an SB-5 deal was reached. The business community has not introduced any ballot measures of its own.

The ballot-box arms race, then, hinges on the fate of SB-5 — and on Polis’ veto pen.

But it’s unclear if a grand compromise will materialize. The business community has made three offers that have included proposals to expedite union elections and to make it easier for workers to pass the second election, which SB-5 now seeks to eliminate, Furman said.

Dougherty and Rep. Javier Mabrey, one of the bill’s sponsors, both declined to comment this week on the negotiations or what the bill’s supporters may agree to, other than to say conversations were underway and happening in good faith.

“Any deal has to be something that labor and the labor organizations feel like is a meaningful movement of the ball forward,” Mabrey said. Negotiators have also included representatives of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and Colorado Concern, which was also heavily involved in previous ballot-box standoffs related to property taxes.

Supporters are adamant that the bill has the votes to pass, with or without a deal — and say they’re prepared to send the bill unchanged to Polis’ desk. Pressed by reporters last week, the governor wouldn’t say what he would do should that happen.

“As we indicated from the start, I remain open to a solution that brings workers and businesses to the table in a way that’s stable for the state,” he said.

Furman said the negotiations — and the growing threat of renewed ballot wars — put “a lot of pressure on the governor on what to do.”

Democrats have sought to frame the fight as a referendum on the direction of the party. They’ve enlisted outside forces — like the five previous labor secretaries, including Robert Reich from the Clinton administration and Marty Walsh from the Biden administration — to put pressure on the governor. Labor groups plan to rally outside the Capitol on Wednesday and deliver “thousands” of postcards to Polis’ office calling on him to sign the bill into law.

A veto would be “a massive mistake at a time when Democratic Party popularity is at all-time lows and union popularity is near all-time highs,” Mabrey said. “That would be a weird way for the governor to go.”

But should Polis veto SB-5, the lawmaker said, Democrats and unions will just wait him out.

Polis has fewer than two years left in the governor’s office, and so far the only Democrat in the race to succeed him — Attorney General Phil Weiser — was present at SB-5’s unveiling in November. So, too, was another potential candidate: Secretary of State Jena Griswold.

“If the rumors are true and Michael Bennet’s running for governor — Michael Bennet was a vocal supporter of the PRO Act, which goes quite a bit further than what we’re trying to do here,” Mabrey said Tuesday, referring to the U.S. senator’s support of pro-labor congressional legislation. “I’m confident that Michael Bennet would sign it if we’re unable to get it done this year.”

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Duran, a Democrat, is a four-term state legislator who represented northwest Denver. She was House speaker from 2017 to 2019, and she briefly attempted to unseat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in 2019.

She now seeks to succeed outgoing Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat who’s term limited and running for governor in the 2026 election.

“Like many Coloradans, I’m deeply concerned about the future of our country and know that a new path forward is required in times like these, when it can seem as though nothing is sacred,” Duran said in a statement. “As our next attorney general, I will work to protect consumers, increase affordability, combat corruption, and stand up to greed and those who manipulate outcomes at the expense of the people of Colorado.”

A Colorado native, Duran earned her law degree from the University of Colorado and worked for a Colorado Supreme Court justice after graduating. She later worked as the political director for Mark Udall on his successful 2008 U.S. Senate campaign, shortly before she won her first state House race in 2010.

After serving as the House’s majority leader, Duran became the chamber’s first Latina speaker in her final term.

More recently, she worked at a metro Denver law firm and served as an adviser to Let America Vote, a group that advocates for “pro-voter policies.”

Duran’s announcement comes two days after Boulder County District Attorney Michael Daugherty, also a Democrat, became the first candidate to enter the AG’s race. They — and any other Democratic candidates — will face off in a primary in June 2026.

No Republican candidate has filed to enter the race yet.

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Rep. Brianna Titone, who was reelected to her fourth term in the state House in November, unveiled her candidacy in a press release. She is the Colorado legislature’s first openly transgender lawmaker, and — if elected to the treasurer position in 18 months — she said she would also be the first transgender person elected to a statewide executive office in the United States. (A Hawaiian who is transgender was previously elected to that state’s board of education.)

“I’m running for state treasurer to champion fiscal responsibility, protect PERA, invest taxpayer dollars wisely, and make the government more efficient,” Titone said in a statement. PERA is the Public Employees’ Retirement Association, which provides benefits to state workers.

“I’ve spent my career tackling complex financial and policy challenges,” she added, “and I’m ready to bring that experience to the treasurer’s office.”

The current state treasurer, fellow Democrat Dave Young, is term limited and will leave office in early 2027. Two other Democrats — John Mikos and Jerry Ditullio — have already filed paperwork to compete to replace Young. No Republicans have filed yet.

While the state treasurer doesn’t set the state budget or have a direct hand in raising or lowering taxes, he or she does oversee the state’s investments and bank accounts. The treasurer also sits on the board of PERA, which faces uncertainty amid gloomy projections and other budget-tightening proposals.

A New York native, Titone began her career as a geologist. On her website, said she would prioritize continuing Young’s efforts to return unclaimed property to Colorado taxpayers and to shore up PERA, as well as addressing “the shortcomings” of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, by “exploring reforms that allow for necessary investments in public services and infrastructure while maintaining a balanced budget.”

Amid the state’s $1 billion budget crunch, some Democrats — including House Speaker Julie McCluskie — have started to discuss potential reforms to TABOR.

Titone is unlikely to be the last Democrat to jump into the treasurer primary — or to pursue one of the three other statewide offices that will be vacant after 2026.

State Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat, is reportedly mulling a treasurer run. In a text to The Denver Post on Wednesday, he said that he was “focused on how to make Colorado more affordable while still cutting the $1 billion forced on us by TABOR.” Bridges chairs the powerful Joint Budget Committee, which is tasked with setting the budget.

Titone, who has backed a series of “right-to-repair” bills in the state legislature in recent years, has already secured a number of endorsements from other elected Democrats, including 12 state lawmakers and several mayors and county commissioners.

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The premier trade organization for the road race industry recently released its list of the 100 largest road races in the United States for 2024, with the BOLDERBoulder climbing two spots from its position in 2023.

“In 2024, 41,491 finishers crossed the finish line inside Folsom Field on the University of Colorado Boulder campus, marking an 18.3% increase from 2023 and surpassing the number of finishers in 2019, the last year before the COVID pandemic,” a news release from Running USA states. “This 18.3% growth was the largest among the top ten races.”

The BOLDERBoulder ranked behind the TCS New York City Marathon (56,859 participants), the Bank of America Chicago Marathon (52,072 participants), and the AJC Peachtree Road Race (43,345 participants), according to Running USA.

Read the full story at Denver7.com.

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The William Penn apartments at 1644 Pennsylvania St. are controlled by CBZ Management, the owner of several infamous and rundown complexes in Denver and Aurora. Denver officials filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking the closure of the property, which has accrued nearly $280,000 in fines because of its unsafe condition, and the city asked a judge to place the building in the control of a third-party caretaker.

“In general, we’ve seen complete neglect from the landlord in any type of maintenance conditions here,” said Emily Williams, spokeswoman for the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment. The lack of heat and hot water, plus frequent break-ins, prompted the closure, she said.

The city’s previous attempts to bring the property up to code, she said, have “resulted in nothing.”

After the judge granted Denver’s request Thursday night, the city moved roughly 20 tenants out of the property and into hotels. A nonprofit is helping tenants move and store their belongings, Denver spokesman Jon Ewing said, and the city will help the displaced residents find new housing.

The city hasn’t pursued a similar closure and takeover process in at least 15 years, Ewing said. Denver officials also summarily suspended the property’s landlord license, which has never happened before.

“The (tenants) we’re talking about are folks who are going into 9-to-5 jobs, so the issue isn’t an income issue or anything along those lines,” Ewing said. “The issue isn’t anything (tenants) have done. The issue is entirely on the property owner.”

Bud Slatkin, an attorney for CBZ Management and its subsidiary company that formally owns the William Penn building, did not return an email seeking comment. CBZ Management is controlled by New York-based Shmaryahu Baumgarten and Colorado-based Zev Baumgarten.

While CBZ has claimed its failing Aurora properties were overtaken by gangs, it has made no such claims to explain the similarly dilapidated condition of its Denver complexes. The William Penn building has long struggled under the weight of absent management and failing infrastructure. Former tenants previously told The Denver Post that they had no heat and that security was completely absent.

Complaints filed to the city’s Department of Public Health and Environment detail years of neglect by CBZ. One long-running code violation case, which began in November 2023, included blood- and feces-like substances smeared on interior walls.

Those stains went uncleaned for weeks, even after the city flagged them for property managers.

Ewing said that the inside temperature of the property was 49 degrees recently and that the gas lines had been shut off. People had broken into the building and into units that the city had previously ordered closed, Ewing said, and they’d opened gas lines to warm themselves.

People who didn’t live in the building have long broken into the property, former tenants said. When city inspectors toured the apartments in August, they found a person sleeping in the laundry room. One former tenant told The Post that CBZ closed and sealed the garage because non-residents kept breaking into it and the property owners never properly secured it.

The building will now be repaired by a third-party caretaker. Once that’s complete and the property is brought up to code, ownership and control will be transferred back to CBZ.

Denver had sought to avoid closing William Penn or CBZ’s other troubled properties, officials previously told The Post, because they didn’t want to lose housing stock. Ewing said they felt they had no choice to shutter the building now.

“The situation we’re running into now, where there’s natural gas concerns, heat concerns — we’ve been in freezing temperatures now for a full month,” he said. “The elements may have necessitated an intervention.”

In the span of five months, CBZ Management has lost control of most of its properties in Aurora and Denver. Two Aurora properties — including the infamous Edge of Lowry — have been ordered closed because of their conditions and, in the case of the Edge of Lowry, because of the crime that proliferated there. Control of another Aurora property has been seized by a third-party caretaker because the Baumgartens failed to pay their debts.

Its serial code violations, as well as allegations that it misled tenants and engaged in insurance fraud, have sparked a first-of-its-kind investigation by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office into CBZ’s practices and its owners. Officials in both Aurora and Denver have also filed criminal actions against CBZ’s companies and its owners.

The company still controls two other properties in Denver, both of which also have long histories of unsafe conditions, as well as buildings in Pueblo, Edgewater and Colorado Springs. It also owns several properties in New York, though it scrubbed them from its website late last year. The company has since deleted its website entirely.

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The man, who has not been identified, has assaulted women by riding past them on his bike and slapping their buttocks, according to the Lakewood Police Department.

Around 3 p.m. on Jan. 1, a woman was assaulted while running on the Bear Creek Trail in Lakewood, west of South Kipling Parkway and east of the Fox Hollow Golf Course, police said.

A second woman was assaulted around 3:15 p.m. on Jan. 2 near the intersection of South Kipling Parkway and Yale Avenue, just east of where the first incident happened and near the same trail.

Similar incidents have happened in Denver and Sheridan, police said.

The suspect is described as a Hispanic man with a mustache who wore a gray hoodie, tan work jacket and a black backpack with a large, red “Levi’s” patch on the back.

Anyone who has information about the man or who believes they were also a victim should call Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867.

This is a developing story and may be updated. 

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An amended complaint filed Tuesday added six landlords to an antitrust lawsuit levied last summer against RealPage, the software developer whose algorithms have faced scrutiny for their alleged role in fixing rents. The landlords added to the suit are Greystar, LivCor, Camden Property Trust, Cushman & Wakefield, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, all of which own or operate properties in Colorado and are among the largest landlords in the country.

Greystar alone has more than 45,000 units in Colorado, according to Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesman for Attorney General Phil Weiser. Cortland operates at least 15 apartment complexes here, equating to several thousand more units.

In a statement, Weiser’s office accused the companies of participating “in an unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing, harming millions of American renters.” The suit accuses them of feeding their internal data into RealPage’s pricing algorithm, which was then used by the landlords to set and adjust their rental prices.

The suit also alleges that the companies directly communicated about rents and occupancy rates while participating in “user groups” organized by RealPage.

RealPage has denied allegations that it has facilitated price-fixing or otherwise broken the law, and the company is seeking the dismissal of the lawsuit. The Colorado Apartment Association has defended RealPage’s algorithm as a tool used by managers to help lower rents.

In statements to Reuters, Greystar denied the allegations; Cushman defended its subsidiary named in the suit, Pinnacle, as a property manager that couldn’t set prices; and Cortland said it did not rely on “external” data in price setting.

The Justice Department has already reached a settlement with Cortland, though Weiser said in a statement that Colorado was not “in a position to join” that deal, at least for now.

Denver renters have been particularly affected by RealPage’s algorithm and the landlords that use it, according to a recent analysis by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors. The report found that Denver renters in affected properties pay $136 more per month on average because of the algorithms, the second-highest per-month cost among more than 20 metro areas examined.

Weiser’s office joined the Justice Department’s initial suit against RealPage in August, after advocacy groups urged the attorney general to investigate the company. He has pursued similar consumer-protection litigation in other areas, and he’s made that approach a part of his newly launched run for governor.

In May, state lawmakers unsuccessfully sought to ban the use of RealPage’s algorithm in Colorado, though their bill was torpedoed by Senate Republicans and a group of Senate Democrats.

That measure is set for a comeback in the legislative session that begins Wednesday.

On Tuesday, incoming Senate President James Coleman, a Denver Democrat, trumpeted the bill’s imminent arrival and said the increased public focus on RealPage’s practices would likely pave a path for the bill’s passage into law this year.

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Niwot became the first boys team from Colorado to win Nike Cross Nationals, and the Mountain Vista girls claimed a team title of their own.

Junior Hunter Robbie (15 minutes and 52.70 seconds) and senior Keegan Geldean (15:57.80) went sub-16 minutes and Niwot placed four runners inside the top 35 to claim arguably the sport’s most prestigious high school national title.

Robbie finished 21st in the field, Geldean 27th, and they were followed in by teammates Quinn Sullivan (16:00.90), Gabriel Marshall (16:04.70), Gavin Engtrakul (16:24.30), Rocco Culpepper (16:31.40) and Ryder Keaton (16:39.90).

Senior Keeghan Edwards, who’s committed to run for the Florida Gators, paced Mountain Vista with a fourth-place finish (17:15.2) in the girls race — just ahead of last year’s NXN champion, junior Addy Ritzenhein of Niwot, in fifth (17:15.3).

Senior Juliet Frum finished 27th (17:53.9) for Mountain Vista, followed by junior Claire Guiberson (17:57.5) in 32nd and Peyton Adams in 48th (18:24.6). Brenna Jorde (18:58.6), Zoe Brandt (19:04.5) and Gabriela Boeckman (19:39.8) also ran for Vista.

The teams’ historic wins came in the 21st year of NXN, which started in 2004. Niwot’s total score of 70 was 26 points better than second-place American Fork (Utah) and 36 fewer than third-place Herriman (UT). Herriman was the reigning champ and had beaten Niwot at the Nike Southwest Regional on Nov. 23.

Niwot Boys Cross Country Team is the National Champions! @lefthandvc @BoCoPreps @NiwotHS @goSVVSD @NiwotBoosters #StVrainStorm pic.twitter.com/fWhVPrAmF1

— Niwot Athletics (@niwotathletics) December 7, 2024

“After finishing fifth (at nationals) last year, the boys’ goal was to come back and podium, and maybe win if we had a good day,” Niwot coach Kelly Christensen said. “At the Southwest Regional in Arizona, we were very close to Herriman and Herriman won nationals last year. And I think it was at that point the boys realized we can run better, and we won’t have to run a ton better to beat them.”

Niwot’s place atop the podium came a little more than a month since it won the Class 5A boys’ cross country title in Colorado Springs. In both championships, it was the Cougars’ depth that carried them through. In each of their last three meets, in fact — the state meet, regionals and NXN — a different runner led the way for them.

“It makes the group special knowing that on any day any one of them could be our No. 1,” Christensen said.

On the girls side, Mountain Vista’s point total of 75 points put it 32 ahead of second-place finisher Lone Peak out of Utah (107) and 48 points clear of Clovis, Calif., in third (123). The national title followed up a Class 5A championship performance at the state meet for the Golden Eagles in November.

Ritzenhein’s time of 17:15.30 was less than two seconds off second place. Everyone, however, was well behind Timpview’s Jane Hedengren, the Utah runner who won in 16:32.70.

In regards to Ritzenhein’s performance, Christensen said she wanted to do better. He even blamed himself for not making sure she was warm enough at the start of the race. The weather in Portland that day was cold and wet.

But Ritzenhein shook it off quickly, her coach added.

“She’s such an incredible human,” Christensen said. “She carries herself like a professional athlete. She’s kind and humble and just wants to be a kid and teammate.”

The Denver Post contributed to this story.

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