GRAND JUNCTION — On a sunny late-winter morning, the Las Colonias riverfront development is, surprisingly, bustling. 

City workers wrangle loose tumbleweeds along the development’s winding streets. Walkers and their dogs amble and sniff around a pond shaped like a butterfly. Campers in vintage Airstream trailers on the outskirts of the development pump up bike tires to get ready for a chilly spin on the trail along the Colorado River. Vehicles nose into parking spaces outside a pot shop and a hair salon. 

This is all that city leaders and business visionaries envisioned two decades ago when they began dreaming up the $30 million business-park makeover of this once-blighted and mostly deserted section of riverfront property south of Grand Junction’s downtown. 

Or, nearly all. 

The promise of a city replacing 128 acres of radioactive dumping grounds and a historic migrant farmworker neighborhood with outdoor-related development and recreation has not waned. But it has morphed as visions smacked into a pandemic and new economic realities. Build-out at Las Colonias has gone slower than anticipated. The area is not yet approaching dreams of a Western Slope  LoDo.

Since the city broke ground on the business part of Las Colonias, development of the area slumped and opened to a wider range of commercial enterprises, not only the recreation-oriented. 

“It’s all part of the evolution,” said Sarah Schraeder, who, along with her husband Thaddeus Schraeder, helped to convince the City of Grand Junction its abandoned riverfront should not be wasted. 

Empty building, unused zipline 

Las Colonias officially broke ground on infrastructure in 2018 after the decontaminated land given to the city by the U.S. Department of Energy had sat empty for decades. The next year, RockyMounts, a maker of bike racks, created a stir of optimism when it moved its headquarters to Grand Junction from Boulder.

RockyMounts was heralded as proof that recreation-related enterprises would find the parklike setting a solid draw.

But RockyMounts moved its distribution and warehouse operations to Utah after a year of operation. A lack of container rail shipping to and from Grand Junction proved to be a surprise snag. RockyMounts sold its manufacturing operation to an Australia-based company late in 2024 and left Grand Junction for Aurora. A large “For Sale” sign is now posted outside the empty 20,000-square-foot building.  

Nearby, a much heralded zipline stretches unused over the Colorado River. It was planned to be a eye-catching component of the recreation aspect of Las Colonias. But it closed in 2024 during its first full year of business due to “operational losses” and has now become a sort of Las Colonias albatross because of its high visibility.

When it had opened in the late summer of 2023 after two years of delays, there was no stampede of zipliners. It turned out there wasn’t a big market for a $22 zip from a tower on the north side of the river to a bluff on the south.  

The line was built by Bonsai Designs, the Schraeders’ aerial adventure company, which was the first business to plant a survey flag in the newly graded dirt of Las Colonias. 

Bonsai is still designing ziplines and aerial courses for worldwide markets from its Las  Colonias headquarters, but its closed zipline has generated local grumbling about the wisdom of city handouts. 

The city had handed Bonsai a million dollars to boost the $3.2 million Bonsai spent on its flagship building. In exchange for the financial help, Bonsai agreed to fund, build and operate the zipline. The agreement specified the city could take the line over if Bonsai failed to operate it. 

“We did way more than we were supposed to do, but we lost $100,000 each year of our two years of operation,” Thaddeus Schraeder said.

The city doesn’t appear to be in a rush to own a municipal zipline. City officials say Bonsai is welcome to use the line for training and research. They say Bonsai has met its other obligations, including job creation and maintaining its headquarters at Las Colonias. 

Other businesses are filling extra space

Bonsai was built with extra commercial space that now houses businesses out of the mold of the recreation-related enterprises envisioned in the early days of Las Colonias.  An accounting firm, an engineer, a realty company, and a construction business populate glass-walled offices overlooking the butterfly-shaped pond.  

The Schraeders say the outdoors-oriented aspect of Las Colonias is still a strong draw to the area, even if some of the businesses moving in are not focused on recreation. She said workers value the option of heading directly out to trails or to the city-built boat launch that has attracted a nearby kiosk renting watercraft.

To the west of Bonsai, a “Come See Us, We’re Open” banner flaps outside the shining glass walls of the new 12,000-square-foot OakStar Bank. 

A financial institution looming over the trails, a dog park and a river play area was also not what city leaders envisioned in the early days of Las Colonias. But they now say it fits because a third of its space is open for other commercial tenants such as a restaurant, a coffee shop, a yoga studio, or a winery — all wish-list amenities dating to the beginning of Las Colonias.

Trent Prall, the Grand Junction engineering and transportation director who has been instrumental in the development of Las Colonias since the beginning, said the swerve in some of the focus is not concerning. He said the city is simply broadening its horizons as it shapes a vibrant new area in the Western Slope’s largest city. 

“We have gotten more engagement with the river,” Prall said. “That is what we planned for.” 

Curtis Englehart agrees. Englehart took over as executive director of the Grand Junction Economic Development Partnership in 2022 after Las Colonias had already taken shape and after voters had OK’d the elimination of a stumbling block by extending riverfront land leases to 99 years from 25. 

“The Riverfront at Las Colonias is working really well,” Englehart said. “I think we’re definitely moving in the right direction.” 

Mike Bennett took over as Grand Junction city manager in 2024, and is also an advocate for where Las Colonias is headed. He said inquiries about the seven shovel-ready building sites at Las Colonias have been picking up this year.

“I don’t know who wouldn’t want to be there,” Bennett said. 

City dwellers have demonstrated that has some truth to it. 

More than 150 apartment and condo units have sprung up around the development. Hundreds more are planned or already under construction on what used to be a sawmill property, a sugar beet plant, and a trucking company on the north and east sides of Las Colonias.

Gap between Main Street and the river is narrowing

Edgewater Brewery, the first business to take a public-attracting chance on the riverfront in 2000, sold last year. The new owner, WestCo Brewing, has continued as an eating and drinking establishment within hollering distance of the $3.8 million,5,000-seat (in the grass) Las Colonias amphitheater. Known as the Amp, the venue has grown into a steady attraction where Bob Dylan, Snoop Dogg and Ringo Starr have performed for packed crowds.  

As city officials had hoped, businesses are also creeping from Grand Junction’s popular, art-displaying Main Street toward the riverfront along 7th Street. A martial arts studio, an old grain silo turned bungee thrill attraction, a new restaurant featuring platter-sized fried pork tenderloins, and a gym have sprung up along what was a gritty commercial and industrial area.

The city plans to revamp the corridor’s infrastructure to accommodate more development, Bennett said. He said it will include better transportation options on streets that have the challenge of crossing railroad tracks.

The concept of a “string of pearls” stretching from Las Colonias west towards Fruita is also taking shape with another city park area and a private development. 

The Dos Rios General Development District — 58 acres of mixed-use, residential,  commercial and retail use — has a very visible Starbucks. Nearby, the Confluence Center of Colorado opened its doors with office space for nonprofits, land- and water-related agencies, and a day care and preschool. 

Dos Rios is located on land that was even more blighted than Las Colonias. The riverside was previously a landfill strewn with 8,500 junked vehicles. A layer of radioactive tailings covered much of the junk. The city sold 15 acres of the cleared land to a Washington, D.C-based private developer, MR Properties. That company has built apartments and is offering land for a brewery, a wine bar, a food hall and event spaces.  

The adjacent city land has been used for creative park amenities, including a playground with an eye-catching fish-shaped wooden structure, a bike skills park, a splash pad and a beach.

Competition popped up in Montrose

Besides revamping its original concept for the riverfront, Grand Junction has had to vie for businesses with the Colorado Outdoors development along the Uncompahgre River in the city of Montrose.  

Englehart and Bennett said they would classify it as “complementing rather than  competing.” But the kinds of businesses that Las Colonias set its sights on, including Mayfly Outdoors, chose the Montrose riverfront rather than Grand Junction’s.  

The Montrose riverfront has also attracted a string of smaller businesses, including a distillery, a shop for anglers, a bike store, a yurt maker, a sauna workout studio, restaurants, a hot tub purveyor and a hotel. 

The promoters of Grand Junction’s riverfront say there is no jealousy directed toward Montrose. 

Thaddeus Schraeder said he views the multiple riverside developments in terms of “a rising tide lifting all the boats up.”

“This all shows that this is an up-and-coming part of the world. It lets people know that there is something going on over here,” he said. 

Englehart offered, “what’s good for Montrose is good for Montrose. What’s good for Grand Junction is good for Grand Junction. We have a few similarities but quite a few differences.” 

He said those differences include Grand Junction’s location along Interstate 70 between Denver and Salt Lake City, a growing Colorado Mesa University, and a labor force of 80,000. 

Englehart said he sees strong interest in Las Colonias. Development eyes on the area have picked up after a stall during the COVID pandemic and a stuttering jump in inquiries in recent years. That is changing. He said he is currently talking with five “solid prospects.” He won’t say what they are, but he said they would all complement the new, expanded focus of Las Colonias. 

This story was co-published with Public Domain.

President Donald Trump’s controversial pick to head the Bureau of Land Management, Steve Pearce, offered contradictory explanations about his record of pushing for federal land sell-offs at his nomination hearing Wednesday.

Pearce, a longtime former Republican congressman from New Mexico, has faced broad backlash from environmental, conservation and hunting groups for his record of working to undermine public land protections and pushing land sales as a way to reduce the federal deficit. Faced with a volley of questions from critical senators on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Pearce refused to disavow that record, instead emphasizing that he would have limited power to do so as head of BLM.

“I’m not so sure that I’ve changed,” Pearce said when pressed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) about his public land record.

“I do not believe that we’re going to go out and wholesale land from the federal government,” Pearce added, noting that “federal law says that we can’t do that from the BLM itself.”

Pearce spent the hearing reiterating some variation of that assurance. Asked about national monuments, Pearce said designating them is a job for the White House. Asked whether he supported selling major swaths of federal land, Pearce said that question was better directed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

Several senators noted that they had heard repeatedly from constituents concerned about Pearce’s record of pushing to sell public land — including a widely circulated comment in a letter urging former House Speaker John Boehner to sell public lands to reduce the federal deficit that Pearce co-signed. The letter said that “over 90% of [federal public] land is located in the Western states and most of it we do not even need.”

“Idahoans do not want their public lands sold, period, full stop,” Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) told Pearce.

Selling federal public land remains unpopular in the West, where much of the nation’s holdings are concentrated. Some 76% of respondents opposed selling public land for housing, according to a Colorado College poll of Western state residents released earlier this month, and 74% opposed selling public land for oil, gas or mining development.

The lion’s share of the criticism on Wednesday came from Democratic members of the committee, although it was tempered compared to the backlash from public land advocates in recent weeks.

“[Pearce] called for the selling off of public lands,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) said in his opening statement. “That makes it challenging for me to view his potential tenure at the BLM as one of stewardship.”

“[Pearce] called for the selling off of public lands. That makes it challenging for me to view his potential tenure at the BLM as one of stewardship.”

Pearce faced surprisingly little questioning about anything else. No one pressed him about his ties to the fossil fuel industry or potential conflicts of interest.

As Public Domain previously reported, the former head of the New Mexico State Republican Party built his wealth in the oil-and-gas sector. He owns an oilfield services company called Trinity Industries, which he plans to turn control of over to his wife, as well as an interest in several oil leases in the Permian Basin, and sizable investments in fossil fuel and energy companies. If confirmed, he would have  to divest many of those assets.

Pearce also took in more than $2 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas lobby when running for his congressional seat. As head of BLM, Pearce would oversee the agency’s oil and gas leasing.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Pearce extolled the value of public land access several times, noting that he grew up near chunks of Forest Service land where his family vacationed,and he recalled fond memories of spending time on federal public land outside Tucson, Arizona, with his granddaughter.

“When I got back from Vietnam I experienced the healing serenity of backpacking wilderness areas,” Pearce said.

Sen. Angus King (D-Maine) asked whether Pearce thought Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s directive requiring his personal sign off for renewable energy projects on public lands to move forward stood on firm legal ground, Pearce said he wasn’t familiar enough with the policy to weigh in.

“Based solely on his feigned ignorance of energy policy, Steve Pearce is unqualified to lead the Bureau of Land Management,” Aaron Weiss, the deputy director of the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities wrote in a statement. “His ethics forms are woefully inadequate and leave room for massive conflicts of interest if he is confirmed.”

Decades of public-lands planning, overturned in a day

Pearce was not Trump’s first choice to lead the BLM, a job that is responsible for overseeing nearly 250 million acres of federal land. Kathleen Sgamma, a longtime oil and gas lobbyist, abruptly withdrew her nomination hours before her confirmation hearing in April after a watchdog group surfaced a private memo in which Sgamma condemned Trump’s role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Unlike Sgamma, Pearce has remained a steadfast supporter of Trump and defended him in the wake of Jan. 6 against assertions that he incited violence. In a now-deleted post to Twitter a few days after the rioting, Pearce wrote that Trump “will be our President FOREVER and no one can take that away from us.”

The committee adjourned the hearing without voting on Pearce’s nomination.

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Colorado will try to claw back $600 million in Trump-canceled clean energy grants in a new lawsuit, joining California and other states claiming cancellation of the funds violates both constitutional separation of powers and bans on political retribution. 

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said at a new conference Wednesday that Congress had already appropriated and directed federal agencies to spend the major research grants, including $300 million to Colorado State University to better control oil well methane leaks that contribute to climate change. Other lost Colorado grants include a $32 million carbon capture and sequestration hub project at Pueblo by the Colorado School of Mines, and $8 million in University of Colorado research into more efficient solar energy, Weiser said. 

When CSU representatives asked federal Energy Department officials why the grants were canceled, they were not given a reason, Weiser said. It’s the definition of unlawful “arbitrary and capricious” decisions to keep funding red-state research, yet deny the same funding to blue states just because of how its citizens voted, Weiser said. 

The Trump administration has attacked Biden-era clean energy research and development as “the green scam,” Weiser noted.

“The only scam here is that the administration is acting in such a lawless way,” Weiser said, during an online news conference with California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Colorado, California and Washington are the leading AG offices in the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. They are joined by other blue-voting states that lost energy grants including Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. 

Trump signaled his assault on the “green new scam” immediately on taking office in 2025, Weiser’s office said. That was the beginning of “the administration’s illegal objective of eliminating energy and infrastructure programs created under Congress’s authority in laws such as the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act,” the office said.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought turned up the heat with a message on the social media platform X in September, during the budget shutdown, going after “the Left’s climate agenda,” Weiser’s office said, in a timeline accompanying the lawsuit. “The post listed 16 Democratically led states where projects would be defunded. The department officially announced the cuts the next day,” the timeline said. 

Joining Wednesday’s action was the 54th lawsuit against the Trump administration that Weiser’s office has either led or joined, Weiser said. The “return on investment” from the lawsuits is already astronomical, Weiser and Bonta said. Colorado added $600,000 to the AG’s budget to pursue federal lawsuits to claw back crucial funds, Weiser said, resulting in over $1 billion in restored or protected Colorado funding. 

“This executive branch seems to think they have the power of the purse, that they get to decide what’s funded. That’s not how our constitution works,” Weiser said Wednesday. “This administration might start asking before they take action, is this legal, but if they won’t, we’re going to court, and we’re winning again and again and again.”

Colorado is committed to a clean energy future, Weiser said, and the projects that Trump is trying to defund are exactly “what we need to do,” he said.

It was Jan. 21, 2021, when Mary Jane Loevlie first spoke with Chrisheena McGee. 

Loevlie wanted to know why the closing for her investor group’s $30 million construction loan was delayed. The Mighty Argo investors had already sent McGee and her title company $4.5 million to secure the loan that would launch their gondola project in Idaho Springs. The loan was supposed to have closed the day before.

“The closing was delayed. She was talking about COVID, and the polar vortex and the European slowdown and all these other things,” said Loevlie. “She was telling me we would have to meet at the Sebastian (hotel) in Vail and have a party when it was done. And it was all bullshit.” 

The loan still had not closed a month later and Loevlie and her team of more than two dozen investors began to see just how much fiction McGee was shoveling. As Loevlie’s lawyers and investors continued to call McGee and even demand the return of their $4.5 million in escrow, the woman emailed them a bank statement showing an account with more than $7 million.

“In reality, the bank account had a balance of less than $14,000,” reads the January plea agreement in which McGee admits to using her fake First Title Inc. title company in Virginia to steal nearly $11 million from six different groups, including the Mighty Argo investors. She faces up to five years at a yet-scheduled sentencing in Denver federal court.

The guilty plea by McGee follows a five-year drama that includes a federal grand jury indictment, an FBI investigation and a lawsuit and civil trial where a federal judge awarded $8.7 million to the Argo investors in a case where McGee and her business partner, Sandra Bacon, did not defend themselves.

The plea is the latest chapter in a stranger-than-fiction tale that Loevlie and her investors are ready to end. They scraped up new funding and this spring will open a gondola climbing from the banks of Clear Creek to a mountaintop plaza with eateries and an amphitheater. The $71 million Mighty Argo Cable Car project is expected to transform Idaho Springs, Loevlie’s hometown. 

“A Ponzi-like” scheme

In May 2019, McGee said she and Bacon opened First Title Inc. in Fredericksburg, Virgina, to facilitate large capital loans. The two women collected fees from potential borrowers. By October, no funding had come through for four borrowers who had paid down payments for commercial loans. 

So the two women found new borrowers and used their fees to repay the clients — the legal documents call them victims — whose loans were not funded. From December 2019 through November 2021, McGee and Bacon entered in escrow agreements with six entities who paid $10.7 million in fees, including $4.5 million from the Mighty Argo group in late 2020. The Mighty Argo group is described as “Victim 10” in the plea agreement. 

“To obtain the advance fees, McGee falsely represented to entities seeking loans that she had access to sources of money to fund loans up to $150 million,” reads her “statement of facts” plea agreement. “She falsely represented that she would obtain the capital if victims pay an advance fee — often about 10% of the total loan amount — into an escrow account managed by Bacon.”

The plea says the two women told the borrowers those fees would remain in escrow until the loans were funded, “however those funds were used to repay earlier potential borrowers.”

Whenever anyone asked to use a different escrow agent, McGee said she would only be able to provide funding through Bacon. The two women told borrowers they would invest the advance fees if the loans were not funded by a certain date or simply return the money. They also said the fees could be deducted from the loan amount.

“When upset earlier potential borrowers began to demand return of their advance fees or threaten lawsuits, McGee and Bacon began using advance fees collected from new victims to pay earlier potential borrowers in a Ponzi-like fashion,” the plea agreement reads. 

The two women would delay closing dates. They texted and emailed with borrowers saying the advance fees were being used to secure loans. But the two were directing millions of dollars to themselves and back to previous borrowers. McGee used $198,526 of the fees to buy real estate, $91,000 for a BMW and $30,000 to purchase a used Cadillac.

A federal grand jury in November 2023 indicted Bacon and McGee on 12 counts of wire fraud and aiding and abetting wire fraud. 

McGee’s trial was set to begin Feb. 2. Bacon has not made a plea deal. The latest filings in the case show Bacon, who was 71 when she was indicted in November 2023 and has delayed trial five times citing treatment for a medical condition, tracking toward a 10-day jury trial starting June 1 in Denver’s U.S. District Court. 

Where’s the money?

In addition to a potential prison sentence. McGee faces a fine up to $250,000. She also agreed she could pay restitution up to $7.96 million and she surrendered cash in a bank account as well as a 2021 BMW X6 and a 2016 Cadillac Escalade. Her plea deal also waived a right to appeal or challenge any part of her conviction or sentencing. 

Loevlie said her investors are not optimistic they will see anything. No one seems to know where all the money went, she said. 

“We had our private investigator try to track it down. We have attorneys all over trying to find anything,” Loevlie said. “We are hoping maybe we can get a million or two back for our investors.”

In exchange for McGee’s plea deal, the government dropped other charges in the federal indictment and supported reductions in her sentencing recommendations.

Loevlie said she is planning to read a statement in U.S. District Court in Denver when McGee is sentenced this spring. 

“Really this is something we have put out of our minds because it’s such a negative energy thing,” she said. “We are moving forward and this has only made us stronger and more determined.”

Jake Carter is only 27, yet he already owns a home in Breckenridge, Colorado, where the average listing price is $1.85 million. His two-bedroom condo is surrounded by trees, just half a mile from the ski town’s world-famous slopes. 

But Carter isn’t a millionaire. He works full-time as an emergency medical technician at a local urgent care. 

His condo was priced more than 20% lower than others on the market because it was “deed-restricted,” with stipulations that it could only be occupied by someone who worked at least 30 hours a week in town. In other words: No remote workers or tourists allowed. 

To secure the deal last year, Carter also used a local program called Housing Helps. In exchange for adding another deed restriction — that the condo’s price could only appreciate by 3% annually — Breckenridge gave him 10% of the purchase price to use toward his down payment. 

“I definitely have this program to thank for my permanence here,” Carter said. “Because I don’t feel that there was any world where I was going to be able to sustainably afford rising rent, year over year, for the future.” 

In Breckenridge, home prices have soared more than 80% over the past decade. And what’s happening here echoes what’s happening across the West: A study from Harvard University shows that home prices in the region’s rural vacation areas jumped more than 50% between 2020 and 2023 alone. In towns like Jackson, Wyoming, and Whitefish, Montana, workers are being priced out of housing more than ever before — a problem that affects both the local economy and the fabric of the community. 

Most of Breckenridge’s housing still caters to tourists, with 68% of its units being second homes or vacation rentals. And many residents are struggling: A recent study commissioned by Summit County, where Breckenridge is located, revealed that 60% of all renters, and 86% of Latino renters, spend more than a third of their income on housing. 

Still, about three-quarters of Breckenridge’s full-time residences — meaning dwellings that are not vacation homes or Airbnbs — are set aside for the local workforce. That’s the highest percentage of any Colorado ski town.

And, since Breckenridge passed a $50 million housing plan in 2022, more than 400 new deed-restricted units have been built. In the next four years, the town expects to add 300 more — a substantial increase in housing stock, given that Breckenridge has only about 5,000 full-time residents.

Colorado mountain towns like Breckenridge are “out front” when it comes to housing their locals, said Elizabeth Sodja, program coordinator for the Gateway & Natural Amenity Region Initiative at Utah State University. 

“If you look at the numbers of affordable housing (units) these communities have compared to their population, it’s pretty amazing,” she said. 

How Breckenridge has made it work

During the early days of Breckenridge’s local housing push, the annexation of nearby land was crucial, said Laurie Best, the town’s housing director of nearly 25 years. When private companies were interested in developing land outside the town’s borders, Breckenridge offered a deal: The town would annex the property, making city services available — and thus development more attractive — if the developers kept 80% of the units deed-restricted for locals. 

The town then engaged in land banking, the practice of purchasing land for future development. Since then, Breckenridge has either built housing on those parcels itself or partnered with private companies to do so. 

Preservation came next. In addition to Housing Helps, the program used by Carter for his down payment, the town started an initiative called Buy Downs, through which it purchases units that come on the market, adds deed restrictions and then sells them to locals at a discounted rate. 

Today, about 1,700 of the estimated 2,300 resident-occupied homes in Breckenridge are deed-restricted for the local workforce. 

“If you live here full-time in the community, and you’re working in the community, you are probably living in some type of publicly assisted housing,” Best said. “There are very few local working households that are in market rate units.” 

That even includes high earners. Because a resort town’s workforce is economically diverse, ranging from lift operators in their 20s to doctors with families, Best said, it’s important to acquire and build different types of housing — from one-bedroom rentals to four-bedroom for-sale homes — so that locals can move up the housing ladder as their needs change. 

Lessons and limitations

There’s no “secret sauce” to Breckenridge’s success, according to Margaret Bowes, executive director of the nonprofit Colorado Association of Ski Towns and co-author of a 2023 report on workforce housing. “They have made (workforce housing) a priority, and they put their money where their mouth is,” she said.

It helps that Breckenridge has a good deal of money to spend. It’s one of a dozen communities in Colorado that were grandfathered into having a tax on real estate transactions that is funneled into the town’s general fund. 

And, since 2006, Breckenridge’s voters have passed two sales taxes, and the town has also enacted a short-term rental fee. Altogether, this generates over $13 million annually, all of which goes into a housing fund that supports programs like Housing Helps. A Colorado bill that would tax vacant homes to pay for affordable housing could provide another source of revenue. 

Best has also worked with private developers and large employers, including the ski area and the school district, to “bring money to the table” to help with housing. Overall, she said, collaboration has been crucial to Breckenridge’s housing strategy: She’s spent a lot of time on the phone with Aspen’s housing authority, which runs one of the nation’s original workforce housing programs. 

Another key to Breckenridge’s approach? Preserving current inventory. 

Like many resort towns in the West, Breckenridge is surrounded by mountains and public lands, meaning that only a limited amount of land is suitable for building. So the town has put a priority on stockpiling existing housing through deed restrictions and buydowns. Best would also love to convert more short-term rentals — Breckenridge has more than 4,000 — to long-term housing. While the town has placed a cap on future licenses in certain neighborhoods, a pilot program that paid owners to perform such conversions fizzled out after a few years. 

The town still needs about 1,200 more units to house its workforce, according to a 2023 study. Those needs were made clear last year, when a new apartment complex saw more than 1,000 people apply for 52 lottery spots. 

And even when the town provides housing, the area’s high real estate values and high construction costs mean that the housing doesn’t always seem affordable. The cost of a three-bedroom in the newest development is expected to be $780,000, while some townhomes will be in the $300,000 range. “Affordable’s a funny term, because it’s relative,” said Best, who prefers the term “workforce” housing.

Despite everything it’s done, Breckenridge has yet to reach housing nirvana. But for locals like Carter, the EMT, the town’s efforts have meant the difference between staying and leaving. 

“It’s created this life that I can live sustainably in my dream town and still feel like I’m able to contribute to my community,” Carter said. “It’s actually just incredible.”

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Buena Vista long ago became a second home to Abby Thompson, a mountain refuge her family would return to summer after summer, where the Arkansas River Valley beckoned them to its hills and rapids.

When a position teaching music at Avery-Parsons Elementary School opened up a year and a half ago, Thompson seized the rare opportunity to make her second home a more permanent one. The transition from tourist to resident has been effortless, minus one thing: Overwhelming housing costs have Thompson and her husband constantly wondering whether they’ll be able to root themselves to their newfound community.

“It felt like a dream,” Thompson, 31, said while reflecting on landing a job in a place she deeply loves. “It really felt like a dream. Now the flip side of the coin has revealed itself to, can we even stay?”

That’s the same question gnawing at many educators across Colorado as housing prices remain high above what a teacher’s salary can afford. The problem is well-established: In some Colorado districts, teachers are spending more than 40% of their salaries on housing — exceeding the threshold of affordability, which housing experts define as spending no more than 30% of pretax income on a mortgage or rent. District administrators also report that housing for teachers and school staff is often the factor that makes or breaks a highly qualified candidate’s ability to accept a job offer and stay in their role long term.

Solutions to Colorado’s lack of affordable housing for teachers and other key staff are slowly taking shape, with one new state program designed to offer an estimated 200 low-interest mortgages to rural educators and district staff. Another potential program, part of legislation that Democratic state Sen. Jeff Bridges plans to introduce this week, would allocate funds to districts to build more rental units for their employees. 

The pair of programs won’t entirely solve the deficit of affordable housing, advocates of the programs say, particularly as some parts of Colorado struggle with low housing stock. But they might crack open some new ideas that, if successful, the state could scale up so that teachers don’t have to hunt so hard for a place to live.

“We have incredible teachers who deserve better and, especially when you look at our rural resort communities in places from Steamboat to Keystone to Breckenridge, you have teachers competing with billionaires from around the world who want to have a second home in those areas and it’s just never going to be something that they’ll be able to afford without some kind of support,” said Bridges, who represents Greenwood Village and is also a member of the legislative committee that writes the state budget. “What would make a meaningful difference is housing that teachers can afford so that they can stay in the districts where they work, and you reduce teacher turnover, which improves students outcomes, which is better for everybody.”

State would send money to school districts to build rental housing

Under Bridges’ proposal, the state would create a $1.2 billion program called the Building Excellent Teacher and Employee Residences program, or BETER, that would disperse money to districts in need of rental housing for their teachers and other workers, such as bus drivers, janitors and food services staff. The program is modeled in part after the state’s Building Excellent Schools Today program, or BEST, a matching grant program that helps districts tend to critical construction projects and building renovations.

Districts could use their share of BETER dollars to build rental units on their own land, a huge cost savings for any affordable housing project.

About $40 million for the BETER program would come from interest and investment gains from the state’s permanent fund, also known as the public school fund. That pot of money, now totaling about $1.96 billion, is fed by state land trust revenue that is generated mostly by oil and gas royalties each year. The fund, written into the state constitution, is designed to hold education funds for future generations and the dollars in the fund cannot be taken out.

However, the state can tap into the permanent fund’s interest and apply those dollars toward public education. The BETER program would convert the $40 million from interest and investment returns into $500 million through the sale of certificates of participation to private investors. Districts selected for program funding would also have to contribute matching dollars. Districts would pay their share with the rent income they get from their tenants.

The BETER program, open to all districts in the state, would prioritize projects in communities where rents are significantly out of reach for educators, said Mary Wickersham, principal and cofounder of Denver-based Social Impact Solutions and one of the program’s lead architects.

The program helps chip away at two challenges across the state, said Tony Lewis, executive director of the Donnell-Kay Foundation, a nonprofit Denver foundation that funds initiatives to improve education, affordable housing and access to food. In some places, the soaring costs of housing is the central problem, he said. In other places, particularly rural parts of Colorado, there simply isn’t enough housing.

“For districts as a whole, I think it’s a powerful tool to attract new staff to their district because you’re able to actually say, ‘Come and work for us and we have a place for you to live,’” said Lewis, who has been helping craft the policy as part of a bigger effort to tackle rural housing development. “For an educator, I think it’s such a great benefit and it reduces stress so much to be able to get an offer from a school district for a job and to be able to say, ‘I know where I can live in that community.’ That’s a huge relief.”

A board of experts would devise guidelines for the program and districts would have to apply by breaking down the details of their planned development and demonstrating their urgent housing needs.

Districts would also have the flexibility to collaborate with cities, counties and local housing authorities to construct rental housing for other members of the workforce, including city and county employees, nurses, firefighters and police.

A real path to homeownership in rural Colorado

A separate pilot program, folded into a law passed last year, will invest $50 million from the state public school fund into low-interest mortgages for rural teachers and district employees, helping lower their monthly payments and giving them a real shot at homeownership.

The Rural Education Workforce Low Interest Mortgages program will work like this: The Colorado State Treasurer’s office will give a $50 million loan as an investment to Loveland-based Impact Development Fund, a nonprofit bank that hopes to serve as the lender on the project. Impact Development Fund will provide mortgages to rural educators at an interest rate around 3.5%. Educators will be able to purchase a home either on the market or under construction without a down payment. Impact Development Fund, as teachers begin to make payments on their loans, will pay back the $50 million to the state along with interest from the mortgages.

Megan Ferguson, CEO of Impact Development Fund, called the program “revolutionary,” as it carves out funding for teacher housing in a way that’s never been done before in Colorado.

“Being able to bring those resources right back to the local level rather than investing in traditional investments in Wall Street, we’re bringing it back to the community and not only to the community but to the individual’s level, to the employee level,” Ferguson said. “And that’s really impactful.”

Wickersham, who also helped develop the pilot program, hopes mortgages will be available to teachers this summer. The treasurer’s office must first approve plans for the program. 

By Wickersham’s calculations, an educator turning to the program instead of relying on current mortgage terms and rates could save about $850 per month, more than $10,000 per year and more than $300,000 over a 30-year mortgage.

She describes both housing initiatives as “a unicorn opportunity” that can usher educators into homes without cutting into the state budget or raising taxes and, consequently, stabilize entire communities.

“There’s a lot of studies that show the relationship between a stable education workforce and student success because affordability impacts teacher recruitment, teacher retention and all sorts of things,” Wickersham said. “If those people can’t afford to live where they work and there’s constant turnover, then what happens is the children’s education is impacted and ultimately we hope to be addressing that.”

“Do we really have to sacrifice all of our personal needs to make a life happen here?”

Some Colorado districts, desperate to find teachers and keep them in classrooms, have already taken housing into their own hands. Byers School District 32-J, 50 miles east of Denver, has 10 apartments and two houses for school staff. Mountain town districts like Eagle County School District and Roaring Fork School District have constructed rental units for educators and other staff and also partnered with Habitat for Humanity to open up a new path to homeownership.

Garfield School District Re-2 in Rifle on the Western Slope is tackling its staff housing challenges from another angle, exploring the idea of a housing stipend. Superintendent Kirk Banghart said the district is in the early stages of determining what that housing support would look like. 

Some of his teachers commute at least an hour from spots like Grand Junction where they land affordable housing. Others Banghart hopes to hire end up turning down open positions simply because they can’t find a place they can comfortably live. 

Banghart recently watched a new music teacher he hired walk away from the school before even starting, their search for housing leading only to dead ends. Without a qualified music teacher for middle school students, the district had to quickly figure out a new elective and relied on a current teacher to take on a forensic science class.

“I think it’s hard because we never want to have our students miss out on opportunities just due to the ZIP code that they live (in) and the cost of housing in the community that they live in,” he said.

Banghart said he supports both state programs. Housing is far from his main focus, but it’s also something he can no longer ignore.

“Unfortunately, as Colorado has expanded, it’s become something that has become critical in order for us to meet our primary mission, which is to educate students,” Banghart said.

Not everyone believes sending money to districts for rental units is the right approach.

Buena Vista School District board member Brett Mitchell, also a local real estate agent, sees firsthand the staggering gap between the cost of a house — the average home price in the area is $550,000 — and the realistic amount a teacher could set aside for a home. But even as teachers’ housing options become more limited, Mitchell said it’s unreasonable to throw housing into the mix of responsibilities school districts must carry.

“Teacher housing is a huge deal,” Mitchell said, “but we’re so underfunded in the state for our schools right now that that’s a situation that is almost impossible for me to understand how we can manage that too.”

The district, which spends 80% to 85% of its budget on staff pay and benefits, mostly relies on a word-of-mouth network to help new teachers locate an apartment or house. 

The state’s new low-interest mortgage program is the best solution Mitchell said he has come across, a viable way to unlock new housing opportunities for rural educators.

“Teachers can actually afford to get into a house and do it right away because they don’t have to save for 10 years for the down payment,” he said, calling it “a game changer.”

But Mitchell doesn’t want to see districts turn into landlords, and he argues those dollars instead should go toward more low-interest mortgages that would give teachers “an anchor” to their school and set them up to build equity.

Wickersham counters that teachers and school support staff at different points in their careers and in different parts of the state need a variety of housing options.   

A house might not be the right choice for a brand new teacher not yet ready for a mortgage or for any teacher in Aspen, where the average home price exceeds $4 million, Wickersham said. 

“The mountain communities right now are clamoring for rental housing,” she said. “Not every solution is right for every community and you’ve got to be able to have more than one tool in the toolbox.”

The financing mechanism that the BETER program would use to construct rental units can’t be applied to houses, she added.

Thompson, the elementary school music teacher in Buena Vista, and her husband, Tucker Smelley, are ready to start a family and firmly settle into the town where she said they will “do anything to stay.” The housing search, though, weighs on them at all hours, often the main conversation at the dinner table as they pore over their financial spreadsheet and frantically crunch numbers.

They don’t want anything more than the basics: a single-family home that won’t eat up so much of their income, and a yard for their dog. Together, Thompson and Smelley, a paramedic with Chaffee County, earn about $121,000 a year. They both juggle side jobs to pad their budget.

The couple lucked into a rental house where they pay $900 per month with the understanding that their landlords will come stay four to five days every month.

They keep close watch for new places that pop up on the market, but the options are scarce. One contender is a 700-square-foot house, without a yard, that needs renovations and a lot of upkeep. The home price has fallen to $425,000, which is much less than the $769,000 median home price in the county, but still would take more than 40% of their monthly income to cover the mortgage, Smelley said. Another new house on the market is listed at $525,000. It’s an older home but the kind of place they could grow into with a family — for more than half their monthly pay.

“We’re tied to this community,” Smelley, 33, said. “Do we really have to sacrifice all of our personal needs to make a life happen here? Hopefully not.”    

The low-interest mortgage program could be the answer they’ve been waiting for, the key that finally turns. 

“It’s really stressful to think, am I going to have to put my whole life on hold to build a life here?” Thompson said. “Do I have to press pause to start the rest of my life here? Or the alternative is, do we have to move somewhere else?”