Everything in Jeffco costs more than it should, and the rules are a big part of why. Housing is the center of gravity: when it climbs, everything climbs with it. But your energy bill and your medical bill run on the same broken logic, with costs added by people who never have to answer for them. I read the fine print for a living. Here's what it says.
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Here's where I stand, and it isn't complicated. I'm for housing. I'm for people doing more with their own property: a unit on your own lot is your right. What I'm against is fine print written over residents' heads, navigable only by whoever can afford the land-use attorneys, and a statehouse that overrides local voters instead of listening to them. Housing gets built, and stays affordable, when the rules are simple enough for regular people to use and legitimate enough that neighbors don't spend a year fighting them.
Xcel is asking for another rate increase right now. And the biggest cost pressure coming down the line isn't your air conditioner. It's enormous new industrial demand, data centers among the largest, whose grid buildout gets financed through everyone's rates unless the rules say otherwise.
I'm for the growth. Build here, hire here, pay taxes here. What I oppose is the cost-shifting: giant new loads should pay their own way under binding rate structures, they shouldn't get special tax carve-outs the legislature tried to hand them, and no retiree on a fixed income in Wheat Ridge should be quietly subsidizing the most profitable companies on earth. The Public Utilities Commission is already writing rules on this. I'd put those protections into statute so they don't evaporate with the next administration.
Ask any doctor's office what a procedure costs and watch what happens. They often can't tell you, because the price depends on which insurer, which network, which billing code survives the back-office fight. Then offer to pay cash, and suddenly there's a number, and it's lower. Sit with that. When removing your insurance makes care cheaper, the layer in the middle isn't adding value. It's adding cost: an enormous administrative apparatus, much of it created and protected by government, sitting between you and the people who actually treat you. Every form adds a salary, and every salary gets billed to you.
A state legislator can't fix American healthcare. Here's what one can do: enforce price transparency until "what does this cost" gets a straight answer before treatment, not a surprise after. Protect direct-pay and direct primary care arrangements from being regulated like insurance; they're the escape valve that keeps honest prices alive. Make cash payments count toward your deductible, so choosing the cheaper price doesn't punish you. And refuse to pile on new mandates and paperwork that fatten the middle layer while calling it consumer protection. I won't promise you cheap healthcare. I'll promise to stop making it more expensive.
One standard, three fights: your money, your property, your privacy. The government keeps its word and follows its own rules, or it doesn't get the power.
When Coloradans pay a vehicle registration fee or a transportation tax, that money should pay for roads and bridges. It often doesn't. Revenue meant for road maintenance gets diverted into other line items every year. Then we're told we need a new tax to fix the potholes. That's not a budgeting problem. It's a trust problem.
I'll support Initiative 175, which amends the state constitution to require transportation tax revenue to be spent on roads and bridges as advertised. And I'll push to apply the same principle to every tax and fee on the books: if a bill says the money is for X, it should go to X. Not "X-ish." Not "X-adjacent." X. That's the simplest possible standard for a legislature to meet, and right now we're not meeting it. This is the accountability pillar in its plainest form: the government keeps its word about money.
Civil asset forfeiture lets police seize your car, your home, or your savings without ever charging you with a crime. The state then makes you go to court to prove your property is innocent, on your dime, often with a deadline you can't meet. That's not how a justice system is supposed to work in either party's tradition.
I'll vote for civil asset forfeiture reform every time it comes up. The state already has a tool for taking property from people convicted of crimes: it's called criminal forfeiture, and I'd keep it. What I oppose is the parallel system that takes from people who never get charged. There's bipartisan movement on this at the legislature already. The job is to push it across the finish line.
Automated license plate readers are quietly building a record of where ordinary people drive: school, church, the doctor, a protest. Whatever you think of any one camera, a permanent, searchable map of everyone's movements is a power no government should hold without rules. I support hard guardrails: warrants for tracking individuals, strict retention limits, audit logs someone actually reads, and a flat prohibition on bulk-sharing Coloradans' location data with outside agencies. Cameras without those rules shouldn't run at all.
And this isn't abstract. The dominant vendor in this industry now sells drones that its own executives describe as flying license plate readers, deployable to camera alerts. Its cameras have been the subject of more than fifty documented security vulnerabilities; in December, journalists confirmed dozens of its cameras sitting on the open internet with no password at all: live feeds anyone could watch, footage anyone could pull. One of the exposed feeds showed a playground. One was in Douglas County, Colorado. Customer logins have turned up for sale on criminal forums, and two members of Congress have asked the FTC to investigate. The company's response has been to narrow its definitions and question its critics' motives.
So the guardrails have to include real security (encryption, mandatory multi-factor authentication, independent audits, breach disclosure) as a condition of any surveillance contract in this state. I've filed open records requests with our own police departments and the county sheriff to find out exactly what's deployed here, under what contracts, with what sharing settings. Because "trust us" is not a security policy, and I don't guess. I read the contracts.
This isn't anti-technology and it isn't anti-police. Officers' own investigative data sits in those insecure systems too. It's the same principle as everything else on this page: everyone gets a say in how we're governed, and nobody gets a vote on your rights. The government asks first: a judge, a hearing, a ballot. Or it doesn't get the power.
Stewardship means taking care of what we already have: the people who serve us, the place we live, and the neighborhoods we live in. None of it is glamorous. It's maintenance, and maintenance is the job.
The Colorado National Guard has been deployed into active combat overseas, repeatedly, for decades, without Congress ever declaring war. The Constitution puts that decision with Congress for a reason: it's the only check on a president sending other people's children to fight. Skipping the vote isn't a small procedural shortcut. It's the entire problem.
I'll support Defend the Guard, which prohibits Colorado Guard members from being deployed into active combat outside the United States unless Congress has formally declared war. This is a bill anti-war Democrats wanted under Bush. It's a bill anti-Obama-war Republicans wanted under Obama. It's a bill veterans and Guard families want now. It is one of the few issues in modern American politics where the principled answer and the popular answer line up, and the legislature should act on it.
Colorado's outdoors aren't an ideology. They're the reason most of us are here. And the test of whether government actually cares for them is the same test as everything else on this page: where does the money go, and who bears the costs of the decisions?
Start with maintenance. Our parks, trails, and forests, including the Clear Creek corridor that runs right through this district, need sustained, unglamorous care: fuel reduction and wildfire mitigation in a county where neighborhoods meet the foothills, trail and watershed upkeep, funding for the wildlife agency that hunters and anglers have quietly financed for generations. Maintenance doesn't get ribbon-cuttings. It's still the job.
Then follow the money. In 2021 the legislature layered new fees on deliveries and rides, collected from everyone who uses our roads, and routed much of the money into programs like EV charging networks through structures specifically designed not to require your vote. Whatever you think of any one program, that's the pattern this whole platform exists to challenge: revenue collected under one banner, spent under another, approved by no one.
And learn from what we've watched. In 2020, most of us on the Front Range, Jefferson County included, voted in good faith to bring wolves back. Then we watched what it means to write wildlife policy at the ballot box and hand the costs to communities hundreds of miles away. By 2024, when the next ballot-box wildlife measure came around, Jeffco voted no. That's not hypocrisy. That's learning. Conservation decisions belong with the biologists and the people who live with the consequences. I'll treat that as a principle, not a slogan.