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.
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: two pending cases totaling $546 million as filed, on top of eight increases since September 2023 that have already added roughly 22% to what Coloradans pay. 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. Giant new loads should pay their own way under binding rate structures. No retiree on a fixed income in Wheat Ridge should be quietly subsidizing the most profitable companies on earth, and any tax carve-out the legislature hands out should come with strings, not a blank check.
But the rate fight isn't the only cost, and I'm not convinced every data center proposal is the same deal wearing a different logo. Cooling a large facility can use enormous amounts of water, competing with the same aquifers and reservoirs everyone else depends on. Residents near some large campuses elsewhere have reported real problems with constant low-frequency noise, in some cases serious enough to raise health concerns. My read of what's out there so far is that the risk profile depends heavily on size and design: a smaller facility with modern, efficient cooling is a different animal than a sprawling hyperscale campus, and right now Colorado's rules don't make that distinction. They should.
There's another question Colorado's approval process barely asks: what is the facility actually for? Training and running AI models is a different animal from warehousing data long-term, and the second use matters more than people realize. Is this a facility built to store surveillance data: license plate reads, camera footage, location histories collected by police or private vendors? I've already made the case elsewhere on this page that indefinite retention of that kind of data is a problem no matter where the servers sit. A compute cluster helping keep American AI development competitive is one conversation. A warehouse for records nobody asked to have kept is a different one, and it should be reviewed differently.
So here's my standard: no blanket yes, no blanket no. Every proposal gets reviewed on its own facts: water use, noise, wildlife impact, grid cost, and what the facility is actually built to do. If a company promises jobs and tax revenue to get a permit, that promise belongs in a binding agreement with real consequences if it isn't kept, not a talking point that evaporates after the ribbon cutting. And the community that has to live next to the thing gets the final say, not a developer's projections and not an agency issuing approvals from Denver. If a data center is actually a good deal for a neighborhood, it should be able to make that case to the people who live there and win the argument honestly.
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. The legislature already tested how serious it is about that standard: before a single vote was cast on 175, it passed House Bill 1430, written to take effect only if 175 passes, cutting the same transportation revenue 175 would dedicate and backfilling the difference from the General Fund, so net road funding doesn't actually rise. That's not relief. It's a shell game: shrink the dedicated pot, backfill it with general money, and let the discretionary spending grow instead. 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.
The same principle applies below the headline taxes, too. The retail delivery fee, the ride-share fee, the tangle of state "enterprises" built so a new charge doesn't have to ask voters under TABOR: those are fees in name and taxes in effect, and residents pay them either way. If Colorado wants to raise revenue, the constitution already says how to ask. Not rename the ask.
Property tax bills tell the same story from a different angle. In Wheat Ridge and Lakewood, bills have kept climbing in years when home values held flat, and most homeowners can't tell you why: the formula changed, a credit expired, an assessment shifted, and nobody translated any of it into plain language. That's not really a tax problem. It's a translation problem, and it happens to be the one I've spent my career solving for other kinds of public data. Every dollar tracked, every increase explained, and the ones that aren't paying off, reversed. 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. My rule for every bill that touches a camera, a database, or your data is simple: if there's an opportunity for abuse, expect the abuse. You don't fix a system built for abuse with penalties after the fact: you don't build it that way in the first place.
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 2025, journalists confirmed at least 60 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. Douglas County didn't wait around for a national statistic to make up its mind: in July 2026 it dropped this vendor entirely, a $22.8 million contract switch to a competitor's system that only makes sense if the county's own experience justified it.
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 introduce Defend the Guard legislation in Colorado, modeled on bills passed or introduced in other states, which would prohibit Colorado Guard members from being deployed into active combat outside the United States unless Congress has formally declared war, with the same narrow exceptions the Constitution itself allows for repelling invasion, suppressing insurrection, or executing federal law. 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 Colorado should be among the states that 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 created new fees on deliveries and rides through Senate Bill 21-260, collected from everyone who uses our roads. Look at where those two fees specifically go, not the bill's total price tag: nearly 59% of the delivery fee and the entire ride-share fee are routed into programs like EV charging networks, through "enterprises" structured specifically so the charge doesn't require your vote. Whatever you think of any one program, that's the pattern this whole platform exists to challenge: a fee routed around the ballot box precisely because a tax would have needed one.
And look at what the numbers actually show, because I checked them. In 2020, Jefferson County voted yes on reintroducing wolves, matching the state as a whole. In 2024, when a wildlife measure came back to the ballot, Jeffco voted no, again essentially in step with Colorado: the county's swing between those two elections tracked the state's swing to within about two hundredths of a point. Jeffco isn't a district that changed its mind faster than everyone else. It's Colorado in miniature. What that tells me is that policy decided by a single statewide vote still gets carried out by biologists and lived with by specific communities, sometimes hundreds of miles from where most of the votes were cast. Conservation decisions belong with the biologists and the people who live with the consequences. I'll treat that as a principle, not a slogan.