Tamara Chuang

Business/Technology Reporter

Quick links: What happens to complaints | July unemployment rate | Take the poll | Denver inflation | Horizon Organic adds B Corp | 100 Comcast RISE winners

Before Rohit Chopra stepped foot into the city of Westminster, the director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said he did some research about local businesses.

He noticed that in the city, much like other cities across America, there were a lot of banks, grocery stores, pharmacies and other businesses linked to large corporate chains.

“Even here in Westminster,” Chopra said Thursday during an event hosted by the city, “it’s more and more banks that aren’t locally owned. And so the net result is that sometimes you go into a branch and there’s really no one who can actually help talk you through anything. You’re siphoned over to a 1-800 number or the person tells you to go online. And what happens is that everything is becoming a little bit more less-human.”

Chopra is trying to humanize our daily lives again by reducing the corporate callousness that can emerge with modern technology, like chatbots. As companies have grown larger through mergers and acquisitions, the effort to cut costs and increase profits has taken a toll on consumers and customer service. He’s especially interested in how banks and financial companies are treating people. As an independent agency inside the Federal Reserve, CFPB was a response to financial fraud that led to the Great Recession. Essentially, it enforces federal consumer protection law and keeps an eye out for financial mayhem that could hurt consumers.

During his stop in Colorado, Chopra talked a lot about junk fees and trying to rid the world of systems that might trick consumers into agreeing to them. He was joined by U.S. Reps. Brittany Pettersen and Yadira Caraveo and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who are in the same pursuit.

Chopra’s experience of contesting an issue with an airline ticket led him down an “endless loop” first with a chatbot and then through the airline’s phone system that transferred him from person to person.

“I think they want you to hang up,” he said to the audience. “They don’t want you to contest the fee or contest the problem. And I just think this is fundamentally wrong. There’s nothing more dehumanizing than being charged fees for fake or worthless services.”

The agency does get pushback. An effort to ban credit card late fees over $8 is now on hold after the U.S. banking industry opposed it. Prohibiting firms from charging new “convenience fees” to consumers paying off loans online or by phone, doesn’t mean companies abide by the law, causing CFPB to file an Amicus brief in support in such legal cases. Companies also don’t like that consumer complaints are published online and unvetted.

Got a problem? CFPB wants to know

But when consumers feel helpless, sometimes they don’t speak up. And now, there’s a federal agency that, he said, listens. On the online complaint page, CFPB says it sends companies about 25,000 complaints about financial products each week.

“When we get complaints at ConsumerFinance.gov, it doesn’t go into a black hole. We order the bank to reply to you and then we look into it,” Chopra said. “We also prioritize issues that we think could become a problem later. For example, we mentioned voice cloning, generative AI-related scams. … We’ll get six or seven complaints that sound exactly the same. And it turns out that 60,000 or 70,000 people have that problem.”

His other consumer tip? “If you’re in a dispute with a bank or a company, one of the things that often will get their attention is if you say to them or write to them, if you don’t solve this, I’m filing a complaint with the state AG or the CFPB,” he added. “Trust me, they will respond.”

In Colorado, Weiser said consumers can report scams, shady practices and other complaints at StopFraudColorado.gov. His team of lawyers and investigators don’t turn every complaint into a full-on court case but they look for trends. And sometimes, they’ll just send a letter to the accused company.

“We tend to look at either particularly egregious situations or patterns and sometimes we’re able to ask a few questions,” Weiser said. “And that actually does the trick.”

Resources:

➔ File a complaint about a financial product. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau takes complaints online or by phone on any consumer-financial problem, including credit cards, debt collection, mortgages, loans and credit reports. The federal agency says that each week, it sends 25,000 complaints to companies for a response and most companies respond within 15 days. >> consumerfinance.gov/complaint or 855-411-2372

➔ File a complaint with Colorado AG. The state’s highest-ranked law enforcement officer is the AG and he works with local and federal agencies to investigate violations of consumer protection laws, antitrust and other legal issues. >> coag.gov/file-complaint (also in Spanish)

➔ More places to get problems resolved. Another official resource is via USA.Gov, which is part of the U.S. General Services Administration. This page has links to where consumers can complain about online purchases, company products or services, text scams and robocalls, car-related issues and more. >> usa.gov/consumer-complaints

July unemployment rate up a bit to 3.9%

In July, Colorado’s unemployment rate reached its highest level since January 2022. At 3.9%, it was up one-tenth of a percentage point from June. But even though this means more Coloradans were unemployed last month (up 1,844 to 126,270 who were looking for a job), the state’s labor force grew, too.

According to preliminary data, the state’s labor force is the largest it’s ever been, with 3,242,918 employed or looking for work. The changes in July, though, are pretty slight and are in line or better than how the nation is doing, said Tim Wonhof, an economist at the state Department of Labor and Employment

“Our population in Colorado has been growing consistently over time and our labor force has been growing consistently,” Wonhof said. “We, on the whole, are still at very low unemployment rates. Do we have a high number of discouraged workers? We have 126,000 people who are out of work and about a fifth of those, I believe, would fall into that category. But do we have more than usual now? I wouldn’t say we do.”

Wonhof pointed to a state labor department chart (below) that shows Coloradans between the working ages of 25 to 54 years old are part of the workforce more so than they’ve ever been in the past two decades.

The state also continues to add more jobs each month, adding 4,800 in July, he said. Nearly half were government jobs. For private industries, manufacturing lost 1,000 jobs, while trade, transportation and utility industries gained 4,100.

“Normally, our four-month average in Colorado would be a gain of 3,300 jobs. Well, we gained 4,800 (in July) so we’re ahead. At the national level, the four-month average is 154,000 and this month, they’re 114,000, so they’re a little bit down. But last month, it was the other way around,” Wonhof said. “I don’t read too much into the monthly numbers.”

Compared with the rest of the nation, Colorado was in the bottom half for unemployment rates, and ranked 31st. The U.S. unemployment rate for July was 4.3%.

>> See the data: Colorado’s July jobs report

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Denver led the way to lower inflation in July. Did you notice? Take the reader poll to help us report on Colorado’s economy: cosun.co/WWCOeconomy2024

Updates on big Colorado economy news

We reported on these stories earlier this week but there have been some updates. Keep reading.

➔ Denver-area inflation rate down to 1.9% in July. Prices are still rising, but inflation fell to its lowest 12-month increase in three years in Denver. That drop to a 1.9% inflation rate surprised a few local economists, especially since the U.S. rate is still at 2.9%, which was also the lowest in three years. So what’s causing the decline in Denver’s Consumer Price Index?

Prices here have fallen for some items, like gas, apparel and new and used cars. Grocery prices didn’t change at all. But other items continued to increase, including dining out, up 5.7%. Shelter was up 2.1%, and that’s a huge chunk of a consumer’s budget. Keep in mind, the official rate considers just the one-year change, not how much groceries cost today compared to five years ago. But yes, prices are much higher than five years ago.

Denver’s rate was also the lowest nationwide. But the Denver data appeared to be missing some key data points, like the change to costs of electricity and natural gas. I reached out to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to ask why and, essentially, they said they didn’t get enough responses. When there’s not enough, they don’t release the data, as in the case of the Denver energy index.

“The missing items will still impact the aggregate indexes they belong to,” said Justin Copple, a BLS spokesman. “The prices that were successfully collected are used to calculate an unpublishable CPI which is used to aggregate up to the larger expenditure categories all the way through to all items less food and energy and all items.”

Other items, like automobile insurance, have been removed entirely from Denver’s data. Auto insurance in Denver hasn’t been tracked since 2021. BLS officials said that, too, could be linked to low responses. In those cases, Denver’s auto insurance calculation would default to the national urban CPI, which was 18.6% higher in July.

>> Earlier: Denver inflation slowed faster than the national rate to 1.9%. Does it feel like it?

➔ New business filings dropped 21.7%. During her quarterly update on how many businesses there are in Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the rate of new filings dropped 21.7% in the second quarter, compared with a year earlier. Griswold attributed the decline to the end of a big discount around June 2023 that dropped filing fees to $1.

But there were other concerns about the data, including the growing number of delinquent filers. As reported earlier, delinquencies grew 91,000 in the quarter and now number more than 934,000. The Secretary of State’s Office said that the list includes years of businesses that never officially dissolved and it also includes owners who may be just a few weeks late in renewing their paperwork. I wondered how late? Here’s additional information, which I’ll track in future new business updates.

Of those 934,437 delinquent filings in the second quarter, here’s how late they were as of Aug. 14, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

• Less than 30 days: 14,034
• 30 to 59 days: 10,717
• 60 to 89 days: 14,591
• 90 days or more: 903,971

>> Earlier: Number of new Colorado businesses drops 21.7% nearly a year after filing-fee discount ends

Sun economy stories you may have missed

➔ Colorado food banks may soon run out of the federal funds they use to buy local produce. Colorado received close to $10 million in pandemic-era funding to help food banks buy local produce, but the money is running low with no replacement in sight >> Read story

➔ Colorado governor calls special session on property taxes to avoid ballot measure fight in November. The special session will allow lawmakers to advance a deal under which the conservative supporters of Initiatives 50 and 108 will pull their measures from the ballot >> Read story

➔ With rising rents, theater companies are renting a Denver office space to rehearse. The new Three Leaches Theatre on Colfax will house two theater companies and a gallery, and hopes to lessen the burden on the few affordable rehearsal spaces left in Denver >> Read story

➔ The economics of eating out have some of Denver’s top chefs dismayed, discouraged and looking elsewhere. Some of the city’s award-winning chefs get specific about their love/hate relationship of being part of Colorado’s largest dining scene >> Read story

➔ Geothermal developers to get $1M from Icelandic investors, energy office to tap resource deep under Chaffee County. Investors will match a $500,000 grant from the Colorado Energy Office, which Mt. Princeton Geothermal will put toward testing its well site near Buena Vista >> Read story

Other working bits

➔ Horizon Organic becomes a B Corp (again). The Broomfield dairy brand has provided organic milk since 1991. But only last month did it receive B Corp Certification, a designation that the for-profit company has met stringent tests and is deemed beneficial to all stakeholders, which includes employees, suppliers and the community. That’s the same with sister company Wallaby, which makes Greek yogurt. So, why only now? It had to reapply after its former parent, Danone sold the brands to Platinum Equity in April. Danone is one of the world’s largest B Corps.

“Following the acquisition,” said Tyler Holm, CEO of the two brands, in an email, “it was important to pursue independent B Corp certification to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to redefining success in business as a force for good. As a result, all Horizon Organic and Wallaby products will continue to carry the B Corp seal.”

Certified by the B Lab organization, companies must pass tests that score what their value and benefits are as a business, to the environment and the community. >> Horizon’s B Corp score

➔ Cost of health insurance is top challenge for small businesses. This shouldn’t be a surprise for members of the National Federation of Independent Business, which advocates for small business owners. Health insurance has been the top issue since 1986, according to the organization, which published its 2024 report called “Small Business Programs & Priorities.” Top Colorado-specific issues weren’t available, said state director Tony Gagliardi but “the threat of a massive federal tax hike in 2025 exacerbates the uncertainty Main Street Coloradans are feeling,” he said in a news release. He’s pushing for Congress to make the 20% Small Business Deduction permanent. >> Read report

➔ Comcast awards 100 southern Colorado companies a 30-second commercial and $5,000. The state’s dominant cable TV provider unveiled winners of its RISE awards, which isn’t an acronym but a program that launched in 2020 to support minority-owned small businesses impacted by the pandemic. The 100 winners in Colorado are all in the southern half of the state and include RAD Hostel in Colorado Springs, The Walter Brewing Company in Pueblo and Armadillo Ranch in Manitou Springs.

Comcast focused on southern Colorado because of the growth in small businesses which “account for over 90% of total employment,” said Wendy Artman, a Comcast spokesperson. “This is an area where this program can make a big difference.”

Recipients receive $5,000, a tech makeover and a fully produced TV commercial (from Comcast’s advertising sales division Effectv) that will air on local cable channels. >> The winners

Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww

Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. Remember to check out The Sun’s daily coverage online. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara

Miss a column? Catch up:

• Market recovers but here’s why Colorado job growth is slowing
• As food-insecurity funds end, Colorado farmers focus on food hub
• Colorado top-paying and lowest-paying jobs
• Repurposing old stuff in Colorado can be profitable
• Despite setbacks, a Durango builder is framing affordable houses in under a month
• What consumers and businesses need to know about Colorado’s “Do not sell my data” law
• Colorado employers may finally have found enough workers
• How a Denver company is fighting the problem of underemployment

What’s Working is a Colorado Sun column about surviving in today’s economy. Email tamara@coloradosun.com with stories, tips or questions. Read the archive, ask a question at cosun.co/heyww and don’t miss the next one by signing up at coloradosun.com/getww.

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AURORA — On Wednesday evenings at the edge of a wide parking lot in Aurora, there is a forest green pop-up tent with five large, scraped-up coolers stacked nearby. The coolers hold 27 bags of fresh produce, harvested that morning at Switch Gears Farm in Longmont. 

The arugula gets picked first, Vanita Patel, co-founder and co-owner of Switch Gears explained. The farmers chop the spicy leaves down early in the morning while the air is still cool, soak them in cold water for an hour then spin them dry, rinse again and bag it all up. The potatoes and shallots are pulled straight out of the ground and thrown into the bags — the dirt on their skin helps them keep fresh longer. There are heirloom tomatoes and two shades of beets. There are also a couple of plump, round Baingan eggplants that Patel is especially proud of. It took her four years to find the seeds, she said.

“We take our varietals very seriously,” she told a group of stakeholders and policymakers who were circled up next to the tent Wednesday, including state Sen. Rhonda Fields and a district leader from U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office.

The bags of produce were to be handed out during a two-hour window to people enrolled in the Women, Infants and Children federal food assistance program. That produce is paid for by Nourish Colorado, a food equity and advocacy group, using funds from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, known as the LFPA. 

These funds have bolstered local agriculture and supported low-cost food distribution for the past three years, but they’re about to run out with no replacement in sight. And that’s why the government workers were gathered in the Aurora parking lot, to hear from Nourish and the farmers about what comes next. 

What is the LFPA?

The LFPA is a pandemic-era relief program overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nationally, the program has issued more than $900 million to state governments, tribes and territories for food banks, pantries and distribution sites to buy produce from local farmers.

Colorado was one of the first states to receive funding, and over the past three years has received and distributed close to $10 million in LFPA funds. The state has passed the money on to 35 grantees in the food supply chain.

Two things set the LFPA apart from other food security programs. First, its direct support of local agriculture. Grantees are required to purchase food from producers within 400 miles of the distribution site. 

Second, the funds are intended to support “socially disadvantaged producers,” which, according to the USDA, includes veterans, women, people of color and people with disabilities, among other groups.

According to the Colorado Department of Human Services, of the 220 producers who sold to LFPA grantees, 147 of them, or 67%, are considered “socially disadvantaged.”

The middle section

That 67% includes Patel, the Switch Gears farmer. Or, in her words, “I check a lot of the boxes, in terms of diversity.” 

One thing that Patel thinks needs to be reconciled between the LFPA grantees, like food banks, and the small, “socially disadvantaged” farmers is that these farms don’t always have the resources to provide cheap food to a large community in need.

“I can’t sell these boxes for $10 or $15. There is already so little profit being made,” she said. “But when food banks get these grants, there’s this comparison to big farms. They can give much more produce, and it’s like, ‘yes, because they’ve been in Colorado for 100 years, and they own their land, and they own their water rights.’”

The ability to scale doesn’t just require more land, it also requires equipment and infrastructure. Things like cold storage, packaging facilities and delivery vans.

“I don’t need my own delivery van,” Patel clarified. She thinks there’s a way for organizations and small farmers to collaborate when it comes to these improvements.

“Up in Boulder County, we’ll literally text each other, ‘storm’s coming your way,’ because we can see each others’ properties,” she said. “If I had access to a delivery van, or cold storage I could share it with other farmers. That would be so much better.”

This sentiment was echoed by Maggie Kinneberg, a researcher for the Donnell-Kay Foundation, a nonprofit that supports funding for food systems work. An area that is overlooked — in food systems in general, not limited to LFPA recipients — is what she calls the “middle” segment of a farm-to-fork journey.

“I think there’s a friction point not just for new farms, but also for those that are established and looking to scale, that they don’t have access to infrastructure,”  Kinneberg said. “And when I say infrastructure, I mean buildings and equipment, but I also mean some of the technical systems like inventory management, accounting, HR, some of those basic things that you need to run a functioning business.”

Two different models

Although the reporting process is standardized by the USDA — that is, reporting who and what the funds are spent on — pretty much everything else is up to the states and their grantees.

Colorado decided to use an open application system, inviting food producers and distributors to apply for the nearly $10 million to spend directly on food during three rounds of funding.

Nourish Colorado worked with their partner distributors, places like the East Denver Food Hub, to apply for separate grants, stretching the money further and using the established sites.

Another recipient, Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado, created an entirely new system to distribute nearly $1.8 million in LFPA funds.

Now in its 50th year, Care and Share has the traditional food bank model down pat. They buy in bulk from larger farms, like Yoder Family Farms in Trinidad, truck the food to one of three distribution sites, sort it, then ship it out to 293 food bank partners.

But with the LFPA’s emphasis on small, socially disadvantaged farms, Care and Share needed a way to buy food in smaller quantities from the often isolated farms around southern Colorado.

So they took the distribution centers out of the equation. Instead, they gave local food bank partners a budget to spend at the selected farms. 

For example, if Care and Share had $50,000 in LFPA funds for “Farm A” and there are five local food bank partners in that area, then each food bank will have $10,000 to spend on food at that specific farm, Nate Springer, president and CEO of Care and Share, explained. 

Not only does this cut down on infrastructure and transportation needs, but it also gives the food banks autonomy to decide which foods are culturally relevant to their communities.

“We work from Monument to New Mexico, and from Utah to Kansas. There is a lot of diversity in that area,” Springer said. “So when we find these farmers, I don’t want it to be up to Care and Share to figure out what our partners (the food banks) need. They know better than we do.”

What happens next

When and whether the LFPA funds continue depends on how the election shakes out in November, and what the House and Senate Agriculture committees look like (Colorado Rep. Yadira Caraveo serves on the House committee, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet serves on the Senate committee), and who the Secretary of Agriculture is in January, said Wendy Moschetti, executive director of Nourish Colorado. “There’s lots of different depends in there,” she said. 

The biggest “depend” of all is whether Congress is able to pass the updated farm bill, a bill that sets agriculture and food policy for five-year periods, and is currently in limbo at the Capitol. 

Meanwhile, grant recipients in Colorado have spent almost 70% of the LFPA funds, and with one more major harvest season in the fall, the state suspects the money will be gone by the end of the year. 

“Long story short is we need continuation of the current LFPA right now, that will last us until we have a permanent program,” Moschetti said. That’s why she invited the political group to hang out in an Aurora parking lot, watching mothers grab bags full of fresh greens and purple potatoes and tiny tomatoes, while their kids snacked on free peaches that a local farmer dropped off.

Springer, of Care and Share, is also eyeing the end of the funding, and has raised about $100,000 in order to continue Care and Share’s new partnerships. He would not name specific foundations that made donations.

Moschetti said that Nourish Colorado’s backup plan is similar to Springer’s: Look to philanthropy.

“I don’t think it’s philanthropy’s job to deal with things the federal government and the state government should be doing, but when there are gaps in government funding, that is exactly when philanthropy needs to step in,” Moschetti said. “And we’re facing a really big cliff right now.”

A pair of geothermal energy developers are getting some much-needed funding to advance their quest to access the hot-water resource deep underground in Chaffee County. The money is coming from the state energy office and investors including one who “grew up around the benefits of geothermal” in Iceland. 

Hank Held and Fred Henderson, the pair behind Mt. Princeton Geothermal, have joined forces with Western Geothermal and Reykjavik Geothermal for exploration and development of the water that boils thousands of feet beneath the Earth’s surface along the Rio Grande Rift, which stretches from New Mexico into southern Colorado.

According to Held, Western Geothermal agreed to match a $500,000 grant Mt. Princeton Geothermal applied for from the Colorado Energy Office, which this year has awarded $7.7 million through the Geothermal Energy Grant Program to advance the use of geothermal technology in the state.  

With the combined $1 million, Mt. Princeton Geothermal can move in the direction of drilling two exploratory wells they hope will tap a reservoir of water believed to sit at a depth of between 4,500 and 6,000 feet. 

Held said the money will be “insufficient for our complete drill plan, so we are in consultation with additional prospective investors.”

But if the wells in question prove that a reservoir of hot water capable of generating 10 megawatts of energy lies beneath the land in Chaffee County, he said the partnership could yield a “potentially massive investment,” on the order of $40 million to $43 million.

Geothermal’s new rules  

The Mt. Princeton merger preceded the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission’s announcement Monday that it has adopted its first set of rules for deep geothermal operations. Those rules follow the expansion of the commission’s focus on energy and carbon management projects outside of oil and gas which went into effect last summer.

Held, Mt. Princeton’s CEO, said Tuesday he hadn’t had enough time to digest the new standards, but after “glancing over them” saw, “generally speaking,” they include revisions the men had the opportunity to comment on this spring.

In an interview earlier this summer, Held described some of the hoops he and Henderson have had to jump through since the ECMC took over. 

“According to the previous procedure, we would make our geothermal drilling application to the Department of Water Resources,” he said. “Then, because our prospective well meets two criteria — it’s probably over 212 degrees and deeper than 4,000 feet — our application would be referred to the Oil and Gas Commission for their approval.”

The Oil and Gas Commission approved those types of wells in the past, but the issuing authority before the ECMC took over jurisdiction continued to be with the Department of Water Resources, he added. “Now, under ECMC, all of the regulations have changed, and they’re trying to separate our type of geothermal — hydrothermal — from enhanced geothermal, which involves fracking. With hydrothermal, we’re simply going down to what we believe to be a known hot water source to bump it up, extract the heat and put the water back in the ground.”

Henderson, Mt. Princeton’s chief scientist, has in the past said Colorado’s green energy regulations are some of the strictest in the country, making it hard for developers to attract investors. 

But Gudmundur Heidarsson, one of Western Geothermal’s investors, said, “having lived in at least three European countries and three U.S. states, I can’t think of a government that’s more helpful than the Colorado government. 

“I mean of course we’re doing something that hasn’t really been done in the state, so there’s a lot of learning,” he added. “There’s a lot of change in legislation and processes that needs to take place. But I’ve found officials to be easy to get hold of, to be helpful, and also, which I actually appreciate, a little bit careful in terms of making sure nobody’s coming in and doing something that is hard to reverse.” 

Local resistance persists 

For years, Henderson and Held have faced substantial pushback from residents of the Lost Creek Ranch subdivision, which lies about a mile from the proposed drill site. Opponents say 900 private wells could be impacted by a “geothermal project of this magnitude” and that their homes are built on the same fault line as the drill site, which they worry could “increase the potential for earthquakes.” They also fear noise pollution and odor a proposed plant could create. 

But in closed-loop systems, which is likely what Henderson and Held would build, gases removed from the well are not exposed to the atmosphere and are injected back into the ground after giving up their heat. So air emissions are minimal, and Heidarsson says, “we have buildings all over the place, so that’s not going to be any different than any other industry, in a sense.” 

Mt. Princeton Geothermal, Western Geothermal and Reykjavik Geothermal announced their merger June 19 at a community meeting in Buena Vista. Representatives from the Icelandic Ministry of Energy, Business Iceland, Green by Iceland and Chaffee County also attended.

Heidarsson said the meeting went well, which pleased him, because “you want to make sure you have a good communication with everybody around and you’re doing things in a sustainable way. As an entrepreneur in this area, I appreciate that, because it builds trust in the community and a path to continuing projects down the line.” 

The Colorado Sun reached out to Tom McCracken, a vocal opponent of the plan, who declined to comment while he runs for Chaffee County commissioner, he said. Blane Clark, who McCracken suggested may speak with The Sun, didn’t return emails Thursday.

With new investors, new potential 

Heidarsson said he and his partners discovered Henderson and Held after searching for a geothermal source in the Leadville area and failing to find one suitable for development. 

“So, we kind of started to look down the (Rio Grande) Rift, if you will, and essentially came across what Hank and Fred had been doing for the last 12 or 13 years,” he added. “And since they had done some of the initial water testing and had some seismic data that they’d run in the site, we found that interesting and went to see if they were willing to work with us.” 

They were, so Heidarsson brought some of his partners from Iceland as well as some research companies and the University of Reykjavik in to see where they could connect the dots on the project. 

He said it’s a little late for them to start drilling this fall but he’s optimistic they can get the licensing, internal contracting and financing needed to have the preliminary drilling in place by early spring.

“But geothermal is one of those industries that just takes a bit of time to get everything right,” he added. “It’s not just turning on a spigot.”

When Denver’s Gates Corp. in 2008 debuted a belt-drive system to replace century-old chains on bikes, the company promised a “game changer” for the cycling industry. 

But the chainless revolution —  which the company helped launch for motorcycles in the 1980s — needed big help from bike-makers. While traditional bike chains can easily separate to slide into a bike frame, the belt-drive system needed a frame that could separate to accommodate the carbon belt. 

One of the first bike companies to step up with a new frame to accommodate the Gates belts was the family-owned Spot Brand in Golden. The company designed a frame with what it called “Drop-Out” technology that fit the Gates “Carbon Drive” belt system. 

In 2008, Spot Brands and Gates Corp. inked a licensing and royalty agreement that gave half of the Drop-Out invention to Gates so it could license the technology to other bike manufacturers. Gates said it would protect the patent on the design and pay Spot 8% of its net sales of any products sold by bike companies who licensed the Drop-Out design.

A couple weeks ago Spot sued Gates Corp., saying the Denver-based company has not paid any royalties while the company has expanded its belt technology into more than 1,000 bike models. The lawsuit says Spot is owed “millions of dollars in unpaid royalties.”

“Gates’s benefit was achieved at Spot’s expense because Gates deprived Spot of the economic benefits of the Drop-Out while keeping for Gates alone the economic benefits of the growth of the belt-drive bicycle market,” reads the lawsuit filed in Denver District Court, which claims Gates owes Spot millions in unpaid royalties. 

By 2011, Gates had 54 bike brands using the belt drive on 92 models and the company said the number of Gates belt-driven bikes was growing by 50% a year. The Gates Carbon Drive is now available on 135 brands of bikes offering 1,000 models. The belt-drive system has proven very popular among e-bike brands. 

Bike industry veteran Frank Scurlock in 2009 sold Spot Brand bikes to its current owner — Andrew Lumpkin, whose family founded the Avid bike brake brand in the early 1990s. Scurlock then joined Gates as business development manager for the company’s nascent belt-drive system. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office lists Scurlock as the inventor of the Drop-Out design and Gates Corp. is assigned the patent.

In its lawsuit, Spot says it has identified 30 bike brands building more than 100 models of bikes that use the Drop-Out invention. Gates has made “substantial revenues” selling its belt-drive system to bike brands that use the Drop-Out technology, reads the lawsuit. And those manufacturers “generated even greater revenues than Gates” on bikes with the Drop-Out “all while Spot lost its competitive advantage in the belt drive-bicycle market due to its competitors using its invention for free,” the lawsuit reads.

Gates has not responded to the lawsuit and a spokesperson for the company did not return emails. Spot’s attorneys say the bike-maker tried to contact Gates for records on any companies that have licensed the Drop-Out design, but Gates said it has no records and has not sublicensed the design to any other bike companies, according to the lawsuit. 

“Simply put, Gates did not sublicense the Drop-Out Patent and therefore does not owe Spot Brand any royalty payments,” reads a letter from Gates Corp. attorneys sent to Spot in November last year. The Gates attorneys said the separable frame designs on other bikes  “employ a different approach than that covered by the … patent and simply do not infringe the same.”

Over the course of several letters sent back and forth beginning last fall, Gates’ lawyers said other designs are different from Spot’s Drop-Out while Spot attorneys argue the other bike-makers are using patented technology. In a May 2024 letter, Spot lawyers said if Gates paid Spot $25 million, the bike company would drop the matter and not file a lawsuit. Gates declined the settlement offer and told Spot to not contact the other bike-makers with warnings they were in violation of a licensing agreement with Gates. 

“Gates wanted a piece of Spot’s Drop-Out invention because it was the best solution available to accommodate the Gates Carbon Drive while maintaining frame strength and rigidity. Spot was the first to innovate this module in the market, and along with Gates obtained broad patent rights to protect it,” said Andrew Unthank, the attorney representing Spot Brands in the lawsuit. 

Unthank said Spot has been focused on building bikes since the 2008 agreement and “trusting Gates would live up to its obligation.” When the bike company began to notice more bikes with its Drop-Out design in 2023, Spot called on Gates to enforce the patent and pay royalties.

“Gates offered an ever-changing list of reasons why it is not obligated to pay royalties,” said Unthank, who argues Gates encouraged other bike-makers to use the Drop-Out invention. “Instead of supporting Spot as its joint owner of the patented Drop-Out, Gates dodged and deflected, forcing Spot to investigate further on its own and ultimately into this litigation.”

Purina opened a livestock feed plant in Denver in 1930. In 1972, the plant switched to producing pet food. 

Located just south of Interstate 70 in eastern Denver, the towering 500,000-square-foot plant has long been a local landmark by sight — if not by smell. The plant employs more than 350 people and produces more than 260,000 tons of Dog Chow, Cat Chow and other Purina products annually.

In May 2024, two nearby homeowners filed a class action lawsuit alleging the plant “continues to release noxious odors that invade plaintiffs’ property, causing property damage through nuisance and negligence.” 

“The foul odors emitted from the Facility are offensive, would be offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary health and sensibilities, and have caused property damage,” the lawsuit said.

Nestle Purina PetCare Co. responded in a filing, saying its practices “meet or exceed” industry standards for controlling “odorous emissions.”

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

See full source list below.

Facing millions of dollars in fines, dozens of violations, legions of complaints from homeowners as well as local governments, oil and gas operator Prospect Energy on Wednesday had its right to do business in Colorado canceled.

The Energy and Carbon Management Commission endorsed a settlement agreement between the commission staff and the Highlands Ranch-based company. Prospect Energy also has an agreement with Larimer County and Fort Collins to clean up sites.

As part of the agreement, $1.7 million in ECMC fines will be waived, with what funds the company has going toward securing and cleaning up its sites. Prospect Energy was fined for illegal flaring, spills and failing to do well-integrity tests.

Prospect Energy’s 59 wells will end up in the ECMC Orphan Well program and will eventually be plugged and abandoned by the state.

Under the agreement, Prospect Energy’s owner, Ward Giltner, must obtain commission approval before owning or operating any future oil and gas properties in Colorado. Giltner did not reply to email and telephone requests for comments.

The company, however, still faces $337,000 in fines from the state Air Pollution Control Division for air emission violations. In 2022, the division ordered one of Prospect Energy’s sites closed until dangerous emissions could be curbed.

“This is an exceptional and rare course of action,” APCD director Michael Ogletree said at the time. “This is a unique situation that calls for extraordinary measures to ensure we are protecting public welfare.”

Division inspectors found emissions of volatile organic chemicals and hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs, on repeated visits to the company’s Krause facility tank battery.

“These issues have been going on for more than four years,” said Matt Lafferty, Larimer County principal planner. “The county and the city filed a formal complaint to push the ECMC.”

Prospect Energy operates mainly low-producing wells — 49 in Larimer County and 10 in Fort Collins — and several tank batteries for collecting produced water and oil. The wells date as far back as 1928.

“We have an old, outdated oil field that has seen the end of its life, and I am sure it is hard for owners to let go because they still make a little money,” Lafferty said.

Still, the passage in 2019 of Senate Bill 181, which made protection of public health, safety and welfare as well as the environment the priority in regulating oil and gas operations, has put pressure on small operators and low-producing fields, Lafferty said.

For example, Lafferty said, in 2020 the state adopted rules severely limiting flaring, the practice of burning off gas from oil and gas wells, and it created another violation for Prospect Energy.

“Once that ball started rolling on Prospect Energy, it was clear it didn’t have the resources,” Lafferty said. “Everyone is starting to take action. The snowball got pretty big.”

“This isn’t an oil and gas thing,” Lafferty said “It is a health and safety issue.”

Andrew Klooster, the Colorado field advocate for the environmental group Earthworks, first documented emissions from Prospect Energy, using an infrared FLIR camera, in 2021. Klooster said exasperated residents had contacted his group.

“People were complaining of odors, headaches, nausea,” Klooster said. “Krause tanks had holes in them because they were so old and decrepit,” he said, adding that even when they were replaced, emissions from hatches continued.

“An operator that was not interested in complying”

Klooster said over the years he has made 29 visits to Prospect Energy facilities finding repeated violations, with a big point of concern the Fort Collins Meyer tank battery, where in recent years the Hearthfire development — with homes going for $1 million or more — has been built.

“The refrain the county has been hearing from us and the community is that this was an operator that was not interested in complying with the air quality regulations,” Klooster said.

Meanwhile, ECMC inspectors were also logging a string of problems and began issuing violation notices in 2020. The company racked up 14 penalties adding up to $1.7 million.

Prospect Energy provided the ECMC staff with financial documents showing that it could not pay the fines, Caitlin Stafford, a senior assistant attorney general representing ECMC staff, told the commission.

Commissioner Trisha Oeth said she was “unhappy” with the company completely avoiding paying a fine. Stafford said it is the “hope the operator puts whatever remaining money they have to put the last bit of compliance.”

“It’s not the best outcome,” ECMC Chairman Jeff Robbins said, “but the only likely outcome.”

Prospect Energy still faces the air pollution fines. Under an agreement with the state air pollution division, the company was going to pay in installments, but failed to pay starting in March, according to Zachary Aedo, an agency spokesperson.

“On Tuesday, Aug. 13, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit on behalf of the division seeking compliance from Prospect Energy and its manager Ward Giltner with the terms of the enforcement agreement,” Aedo said in an email.

Under the terms of a separate agreement reached with Larimer County and Fort Collins, Prospect Energy will shut in all its wells and then hire an independent inspector, approved by the local governments, to check that none are leaking.

Any leaking wells will be repaired within 21 days. In addition, the company will remediate a flowline spill in the Country Club Reserve neighborhood east of the Fort Collins Meyer tank battery, and remove the surface equipment there and from the Krause facility to the north within 90 days.

Lafferty said that Prospect Energy hopes to recoup some money by selling off the equipment. He also said that the county’s inspector will participate in the third-party inspection of the shut-in wells.

“It has been a saga,” Klooster said. “Prospect gets out of paying some fines, but for the residents it is worth it for the peace of mind it will bring.”

If food, gas and used car prices in the Denver area seem like they’ve finally stabilized or dropped, the latest economic data backs that up. The Denver-area inflation rate rose to 1.9% in July from a year ago, continuing its decline since September, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

That’s a whole percentage point lower than the national annual inflation rate of 2.9%. And compared with other cities, the prices of certain items are much friendlier to local wallets. 

“I paid just under $3/gallon at Costco here,” Steve Cohn, a Denver resident said in an email. “Last week in Chicago it was nearly a dollar more.”

In the past year, overall gasoline prices dropped double digits. Used-car prices are down 9.7%. The cost of food at grocery stores did not change. 

The 1.9% drop seemed surprising to area economists, who had expected national price growth to slow, in anticipation of the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates which will make loans for cars and houses more attractive to consumers. Denver had already fallen below the national rate earlier this year.

Denver’s dip in July is largely due to falling home-price growth, which dropped at a faster rate than the U.S, said Rich Wobbekind, an economist at University of Colorado. And housing costs take up a larger portion of a consumer’s monthly expenses so even a small decline can have a big impact.

“Yesterday, the NAR (National Association of Realtors) housing report came out and in the 10 cities I believe we were the only one negative year over year minus 0.7%,” Wobbekind said.

The slowing inflation, however, won’t reverse the rapid increase the area’s Consumer Price Index has experienced since 2021. Since local consumers felt the impact of higher prices before the rest of the U.S. — Denver had a 9.1% inflation rate in March 2022, with the U.S. following a few months later — overall prices have increased 10%. And prices for other items aren’t going down. They’re just going up more slowly and that’s impacting how people spend on the extras.  

“Our house payment has gone up $200 a month due to increases in our insurance and taxes,” said Linda Fahrenbruch, a Broomfield resident, who happened to be camping Tuesday in Pagosa Springs. “We have pretty much given up eating out and other entertainment with very few exceptions.”

Calling from her campsite where the Wi-Fi was very good, the retired Fahrenbruch said she and her husband are on their second local camping trip of the year. Usually, they travel for longer or farther. They cut back this year.

“It seemed like back in 2022, we still felt pretty comfortable and we weren’t as concerned with the high cost of everything as we are now,” she said. “I think it was 2022 when we went through Wyoming and into Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon and all the way down the coast to California. We just don’t feel like we can do anything like that now. … We’re hoping that prices are going to start coming down.”

New and used car prices are down 1.6%, though most of the decline is in the used-car market, which fell 9.7%. That doesn’t necessarily mean car prices are cheaper. But there has been a slowdown, said Matthew Groves, CEO of the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association.

“Our industry is largely recovering from the supply chain issues that ravaged us coming out of the pandemic. At times, spare parts can still be an issue, but largely the manufacture of new cars is stabilizing,” he said in an email. 

Incentives, especially for electric vehicles, may be keeping costs down, he added. “I’m sure you’ve seen some other stories that qualified buyers are taking leases on new EVs for less than $100 a month. Those heavy incentives push people towards new — in large part because it’s a hedge against the expensive repair bills of used.  Some of those purchase incentives do not extend to used vehicles.”

The cost of eating out continued to increase, up 5.7% locally. The restaurant industry was one of the hardest hit during the pandemic and the recovery as restaurant owners raised menu prices and some added service charges to offset the higher costs of food, labor, rent, utilities, taxes and more. Since July 2020, the cost of dining out is up 30%. But the cost of eating has slowed this year, though that’s been too late for some restaurants and owners as the number of customers dwindled.  

But there could be a number of reasons why Denver is leading the way on slower inflation, said Gary Horvath, an economist in Broomfield.

Denver’s data does have some holes, he pointed out. The July report for the Denver region doesn’t include electricity and natural gas costs and he’s not sure why. Since the end of 2021, the every-other-month report also has excluded changes to the cost of automobile insurance, which increased 18.6% nationwide in July. 

BLS officials did not have an immediate explanation for the exclusions but said they would look into it.

“I’m assuming it’s part of the overall calculation. Maybe it didn’t get done for some reason? But if you look into the May data, those areas were very high and when I say very high, it was 4% to 6% higher and that to me is very high,” Horvath said. “My sense is that electricity is still a high number.”

The economists at the Common Sense Institute, a conservative economic think tank in Greenwood Village, pointed out that Denver’s rate did increase faster than the U.S., at 0.6% compared with 0.2% in the past two months. They attributed the faster rise to “medical care (1.3%), transportation (1%), food (0.7%), and housing (0.4%).”

Brian Lewandowski, executive director at the University of Colorado business school’s Business Research Division, said that while Denver’s faster decline in inflation was a surprise, how it will fare in the future will be what he’s watching.

“While this is an improvement both nationally and locally, I look forward to watching this over the next few months to see if these rates can be sustained and with low volatility,” he said.

After years of harsh critiques from environmental groups and departing co-op members over its slow pace of change, Tri-State Generation is now winning praise for plugging in and planning a host of solar and wind farms to replace dirty coal. 

The Westminster-based utility serving a million consumers through co-ops in four Western states will link to hundreds of megawatts of new solar power by the end of 2025. Its newest five-year building plan was unopposed when filed with state regulators, and wins praise from environmentalists for a wide array of new wind farms and innovative battery storage solutions. 

The big utility, meanwhile, is making it easier for disgruntled member co-ops to accelerate renewable projects they build for themselves outside the Tri-State grid, in one effort to head off more defections like those that turned United Power and Delta-Montrose Electric Association into independents. 

Tri-State is even throwing a technically advanced green wild card into its future studies, saying it will consider an innovative geothermal electricity project in Colorado while seeking “dispatchable” or always-on backup power sources. Before now, most such “dispatch” power fill-ins by other utilities included new natural gas turbines, which emit less greenhouse gas than coal but are still controversial among renewable energy advocates. 

The utility has its eye on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, and if it succeeds, will be well on its way to achieving an 89% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, ahead of state targets. The utility is also getting credit for recent agreements to spend big in supporting economic development in Western Slope communities where it is closing coal plants, which are large employers and vital money engines in small towns. 

“Tri-State should be commended for aggressively pursuing federal funding to support its plan to retire existing coal units and acquire new renewable generation and storage resources,” Clare Valentine, senior policy advisor at the renewable resources nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, said, “all in a way that maintains reliability and delivers climate and economic benefits to member cooperatives and communities.” 

Tri-State’s resource plan for how it will generate power from 2026 to 2031 was filed as an unopposed “settlement” with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, giving it every chance at approval. Now Tri-State will start seeking bids on the projects in its resource plan, and see which ones make economic sense after lucrative federal subsidies are factored in. 

As a nonprofit co-op utility, Tri-State did not qualify for federal tax credits that can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars until a recent rule change. With the change, and the continuing drop in long-term costs to build solar and wind generation, Tri-State can build renewable replacements without blowing up prices for its co-op members, vice president of communications Lee Boughey said. 

Tri-State’s five-year resource plan filed with the PUC starts with construction of a large lithium-ion battery array in New Mexico in 2026, along with a smaller iron-air battery test in eastern Colorado. The advantage of iron-air batteries is they can hold up to 100 hours of backup power, while current battery arrays hold about four hours. Powdered iron rust is charged with generated electricity, turning it back into metallic iron. Exposed to oxygen, the iron rusts again, releasing a steady electrical current that can be sent out on the grid, all employing cheap, environmentally friendly materials. 

The five-year plan also includes a new 140 megawatt solar farm in western Colorado in 2026, and another in New Mexico in 2029. Much of the rest is wind, with five new wind farms proposed to go online between 2026 and 2031 in Wyoming and western Nebraska, eastern Colorado and New Mexico. 

Those are in addition to large solar hookups that are part of Tri-State’s current five-year plan, including 595MW of solar already online in 2024 and finishing up by late 2025. Symbolic of Tri-State’s rapid transition, Boughey said, is the new solar farm that surrounds a closed Tri-State coal-fired plant in New Mexico. 

The schedule for bringing renewable energy online will allow Tri-State to stick to its current schedule of closing coal-fired Craig Unit 1 by the end of 2025, which it co-owns with other utilities; Unit 2 in late 2028; and solely owned Unit 3 on Jan. 1, 2028. Tri-State also plans to close the large 458MW Springerville, Arizona, Unit 3 in 2031. 

The change in the mix would mean that by 2030, 70% of the co-op members’ energy mix will be from clean sources, Tri-State said. In that same year, Tri-State would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from electrical generation by 89% from the state’s 2005 baseline, the association said. 

A 21.7% dip in folks filing to start a business in Colorado during the second quarter was largely attributed to the end of a program more than a year ago that reduced filing fees to $1, according to the latest quarterly data from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.

“It was the sharpest decrease year-over-year in the state (that) we’ve been tracking since 2005. That’s both in percentage terms and absolute numbers,” said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of University of Colorado’s Business Research Division, which analyzed the data for the Secretary of State’s Office. 

New business filings reached a second-quarter high last year at 54,940. The fee returned to $50 in June 2023 and now, one year later, filings dropped to 43,029 for the quarter. That’s still above prior years, including years before the pandemic. 

Lewandowski called it “a normalization of activity because of that somewhat anomalous growth we experienced with that fee reduction a year ago,” he said during a news conference Monday.

The new-business decline, however, coincided with a higher number of companies delinquent in renewals or filing proper documents. The number of delinquencies is up by almost 91,000 from a year ago. Overall though, the state has more companies in good standing to 963,373, up 17,500 from a year ago.

“Colorado businesses are staying in business,” Secretary of State Jena Griswold said. But, she added, “The cost of renewing a business just went up and that is because the state legislature two years ago passed increased reimbursements for county elections without funding it from the general fund.” 

That means her office has to come up with extra funding, so it’s tapping business registration fees to support the reimbursements, the office said. Filing fees for a company’s periodic reports are $25. It’d been at $10 since 2006.

The quarterly report also pointed to positive data in a weaker economy. While Colorado’s job growth has slowed from last year, the number of new jobs added is up 1.4% through June and ranked near the middle of all U.S. states for job growth. 

The number of job openings for every unemployed Coloradan is no longer two per unemployed worker, but dropped to 1.4. However, that’s better than the national ratio of 1.2 openings per unemployed worker. Colorado’s GDP also improved 2.3% between fourth quarter 2023 to first quarter this year, ranking the state 18th nationwide. 

But some other financial data is concerning, said Richard Wobbekind, faculty director of CU’s Leeds School of Business who works with Lewandowski.  It’s about consumer spending slowing and their rising debt.

“We are seeing increased delinquencies on auto loans and credit cards at this particular point in time,” he said. “There seems to be a slowing of use of credit cards even by the higher income folks who still have excess savings and the wherewithal.”

Interest rates are still high and there’s still inflation. But ultimately, the two economists are not translating the indicators as signs that the economy is receding. 

“Our office does not believe the U.S. is currently in a recession. We also don’t believe that one is imminent,” Lewandowski said. “Seeing GDP growth, seeing continued employment growth, albeit slow, seeing growth in income, seeing the labor force growth, seeing the inflation really moderate — all of this we think is good news and it doesn’t really signal that we’re on the precipice of a sharp downturn in economic activity.”  

PUEBLO — Urban farmer Perdita Butler was ready to harvest her bok choy and fresh, crunchy kohlrabi outside her 1940s stucco home in Pueblo. It was early spring, and the nymph grasshoppers were already munching her crops, forcing her to cover her beds with protective gauze nets. She carefully peeled back the nets to reveal blue potatoes, golden beets, dinosaur kale and other vegetables erupting from the soil.

“What I love about farming is there’s always something new to learn,” Butler said, looking at the snap peas taking off on one side of the garden.

Later this summer, she’ll sell these vegetables and others she’s growing at a new farmers market on Pueblo’s East Side neighborhood—a community without a grocery store since the Safeway in the area closed seven years ago. Butler hopes to build community and improve nutrition in the neighborhood by selling fresh, affordable produce grown five miles away on her microfarm Quarter Acre and a Mule.

Federal, state and local programs that incentivize buying produce at farmers markets, including those in Pueblo, make them affordable to some low-income families and older adults in Colorado. In addition to increasing participants’ access to fresh fruit and vegetables, these programs support small farmers like Butler and boost local economies, especially during the summer and fall harvest cycles.

Three programs specifically help low-income older adults and women and their children in Colorado: Colorado Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, Boulder County WIC Farmers Market Program, and the Colorado Nutrition Incentive Program.

“It’s a win-win. You’re feeding people. You’re supporting farmers,” said Daysi Sweaney, director of healthy food incentives at Nourish, a nonprofit that helps implement and run some of these programs.

Consumers and growers have participated in farmers market programs in Colorado over the past five years, but barriers such as funding cuts and limited time, transportation and money remain challenges.

Farmers market programs

According to the nonprofit Feeding America, Pueblo is among 10 counties with the highest rates of food insecurity in the state. Still, efforts to help families afford local produce are growing in the area. At the other Pueblo Farmers Market location, in downtown Mineral Palace Park, redemption of incentives for fruit and vegetables by low-income families increased significantly from $9,000 in 2020 when it began accepting them to $25,000 last year.

Growth of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Double Up Food Bucks—a grant-funded program available in some states like Colorado that gives SNAP participants double the amount to spend on fruit and vegetables—and the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program has contributed to the increased use, said Marci Cochran, market director for the Pueblo Farmers Market.

“The WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program is explosive in Pueblo,” Cochran said of the program.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment program gives $30 annually in coupons for each participating family member to spend at 22 participating farmers markets (down from 24 last year) statewide before Oct. 31. For example, a pregnant or new mom and her two children over six months of age would have $90 to spend during the season, an increase of roughly 8% from their annual WIC budget of approximately $1,092 for fruit and vegetables.

Angelika Sunie, 25, of Pueblo, who has two children ages 1 and 4, has used the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program for the past two seasons.

“It really helped stretch my benefits,” said Sunie, who also uses SNAP and Double Up Food Bucks.

Sunie bought green beans, Pueblo chiles and Palisade peaches at the farmers market. She made a peach crisp and a simple syrup out of peaches for tea.

She said it helped her bring healthier foods into her home during the summer. Sunie added that she would have spent twice the amount allocated if it had been available.

When she was pregnant with her son in 2022, Sunie said eating more nutritious foods from the farmers market helped her pregnancy. However, she does not qualify for the program now that she has started a new job at UCHealth.

Sweaney said WIC families’ spending at farmers markets is highest along the Front Range corridor stretching from Pueblo to Greeley, but the redemption rate statewide is relatively low.

According to CDPHE data, the use of the coupons has risen from 17% in 2021 to 23% in 2023. (The program was first piloted in 2020.) Emily Bash, a nutrition and physical activity specialist at CDPHE, said she hopes to increase the rate this year by mailing coupons earlier, using text reminders and offering handouts in multiple languages.

Bash and her colleagues also received a $350,000 USDA grant to move from paper coupons to a digital system. It’s easy to lose paper coupons or forget to bring them to a farmers market, Bash said, and buyers can’t get change if their purchase is less than the coupon amount. She said these digital systems are already successful in Nebraska, New Mexico and Washington.

Nourish’s budget to help run programs like these was drastically cut this year by federal WIC funding. Sweaney said there is always fear that money for extra initiatives like these will dry up.

Sweaney and Bash noted that transportation is also a barrier for program participants. According to 2023 CDPHE data, families who live farther away from a farmers market were less likely to use coupons than those who lived in the same zip code as a farmers market.

Cochran said that proximity is why the Pueblo Eastside Farmers Market could be a game changer for residents. “We have a Dollar General and a Dollar Tree and a convenience store, but there is no real food access.”

Local solutions

Meanwhile, county governments like Boulder have created their own solutions. Making local produce affordable and accessible is the focus of a 7-year-old program that provides a punch card worth $80 for Boulder County WIC families and $160 for City of Boulder WIC families per month to spend at farmers markets, helping to supplement the federal money they receive.

Zhuldyz Tokbulatova, 32, a stay-at-home mom, bikes with her 3-year-old son in a bike trailer to the Boulder Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays to participate in the program. On one Saturday in June, she bought fava beans, tomatoes and cucumbers. Cherries were in season, along with her son’s favorite fruit, aprium, a mix between an apricot and plum.

“He’s a picky eater. He doesn’t eat everything. But he likes to come with me to the farmers market, and he likes to shop there,” Tokbulatova said. “He talks to the vendors and helps pick out vegetables.” His first solid food as an infant was squash from the market.

Tokbulatova, who has participated in the program for four years, said she would not be able to afford to shop at the farmers market without the program. The family’s income is low, and they are careful about their spending.

“It’s very important for me to be able to provide local, fresh produce,” she said. Tokbulatova did not grow up eating many vegetables in her native Kazakhstan, but the program allows her to make more salads or add extra vegetables to staples like beef stew. “It fulfills me as a mother.”

More than 1,000 Boulder County families bought $296,000 worth of farmers market produce from April to November last year—more than double the $116,000 spent by WIC families statewide. It is entirely locally funded by the county’s sustainability tax, the City of Boulder’s Health Equity Fund and the City of Longmont’s Human Services Fund. To overcome transportation challenges, volunteers deliver farmers market produce to families’ homes.

In Garfield County, the local WIC agency used extra funds at the end of the 2023 season to purchase produce from Early Morning Orchard in Palisade, then gave it away for free to 130 families who came in for height and weight measurements as part of WIC wellness checks in Rifle and Glenwood Springs. The hope is for this to become an annual tradition in Garfield County, said Christine Dolan, nutrition programs manager for Garfield County Public Health.

Community-supported agriculture

The Colorado Nutrition Incentive Program connects some of these families directly to produce from local growers — no farmers market required. Community-supported agriculture, or CSA, shares — which run through the summer months — provide weekly boxes of freshly harvested fruit and vegetables to Colorado WIC families and older adults.

For the past three years, Highwater Farm in Silt has provided CSA shares to WIC families in Garfield County. Families visit the 3-acre farm weekly to select harvested produce, with an option to walk into the fields and pick things like cherry tomatoes, snap peas, herbs and flowers. Alternatively, Highwater Farm delivers shares to pickup spots in Glenwood Springs and Carbondale, where families receive a curated share of produce.

Highwater Farm Manager Rebecca Gourlay said CSAs are a relatively new concept for some families along Colorado’s Western Slope. She includes familiar vegetables like lettuce, onions, garlic, beans and peppers in the boxes.

But it’s also an opportunity to introduce families to new vegetables like arugula or mustard greens. These are explained in a weekly newsletter in English and Spanish that includes new recipes. The farm has a part-time bilingual outreach coordinator who talks to families during pickups.

“She helps us connect with our Latino community in a more meaningful way,” Gourlay said.

Without subsidies, it’s difficult for low-income families to afford CSAs, Gourley said, because a person has to pay upfront in the winter for produce provided throughout the summer and fall seasons.

Despite successful partnerships like those at Highwater, overall funding for the CSA program in Colorado dipped to $320,000 in 2024, down from $1.2 million in 2023. Since the program’s inception in 2019, it has relied on state, federal and philanthropic funding. This year, its grant did not allow Nourish to pay farmers 100% upfront for the summer’s produce, and some small farmers, already operating on thin margins, could no longer afford to participate, Sweaney said. Fewer than 30 farmers signed up this year, compared with 115 last year.

Becca Jablonski, co-director of the Food Systems Institute at Colorado State University, worries about farmers relying on subsidies and venues that may not exist in the future. While more data points are needed to fully understand how nutrition incentive programs benefit farmers’ overall bottom lines compared to alternatives, Jablonski said the programs could make rural farmers markets more attractive to farmers if they significantly increase the overall amount of money spent. (Cochran, with the Pueblo Farmers Market, said that nutrition incentive programs kept the market afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Jablonski’s research has shown that incentive programs benefit local economies in states like California and Colorado.

“For every $1 invested in a healthy food incentive program, we can expect to see up to $3 in economic activity generated,” she and her co-authors wrote. In Colorado, conservative estimates for scaling these programs statewide would create 92 jobs, $4.3 million in labor income, and an economic contribution of $19.8 million, based on data from 2018 and 2019.

At the state level, there is some stability for these programs next year. In June, the Colorado legislature created the Healthy Food Incentives Program—a bill allocating $500,0000 for fiscal year 2024-25 to support Nourish’s work, including CSA produce boxes for low-income families.

But Sweaney said the appropriation is insufficient to meet the box demand. Nourish plans to work with the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee to secure more state funds and advocate for more federal funding for local food systems and food access in the upcoming U.S. Farm Bill.

Building community through food

On a Saturday morning in May, farmer Brett Mills of Sweet Valley Farm drove 45 minutes to sell plant starters for heirloom tomatoes as part of an early-season pop-up event at the Pueblo Farmers Market. Whatever he didn’t sell, he planned to donate to community gardens.

“We want to be helpful to people growing their own food in the community,” Mills said.

Community is something that advocates like Butler and Cochran say nutrition incentive programs can help build as part of broader efforts to create local food systems for families and growers. Eastside Farmers Market is the next step of a community redevelopment project in Pueblo that will eventually include a grocery store at the site of the former, now-abandoned Spann Elementary School.

Bringing fresh, local produce to Pueblo’s East Side at a farmers market is a first, said Monique Marez, a food systems practitioner who grew up in Pueblo and ran the Pueblo Food Project for three years. However, other treasures exist at the farmers market besides fruit and vegetables.

“The goal is to open up a conversation about how the community is doing,” Marez said.

The market is also an opportunity for families and children to connect with farmers and learn how food grows. “You never know when you might meet the next generation of farmers,” Cochran said.

Back at her urban farm, with railroad tracks several feet away and the Wet Mountains in view, Butler talked with reverence about a sweet pepper variety that she couldn’t wait to taste. She was eager to sell basil, beans, cilantro, tomatoes and 20 other types of fruit and vegetables at Eastside Farmers Market.

Butler said she fully supports nutrition incentive programs, but the idea is more significant than improving access to local produce. It encompasses nutrition, empowerment and agency, community and relationship building.

“The farmers market is the hub—the start, the seed,” Butler said.

Freelance reporter Kate Ruder wrote this story for The Colorado Trust, a philanthropic foundation that works on health equity issues statewide and also funds a reporting position at The Colorado Sun. It appeared at coloradotrust.org on July, 29, 2024, and can be read in Spanish at collective.coloradotrust.org/es.