Letter to the Editor – “Rural Colorado Deserves Better Than Legislative Abandonment”

To The Editor:

Subject: Rural Colorado Deserves Better Than Legislative Abandonment

Colorado’s small towns are facing a crisis that no one in state leadership seems willing to name: our statutory system for municipal governance is failing, and instead of fixing it, the state is preparing to abandon the communities caught in that failure.

Senate Bill 157 is being presented as a solution for towns with struggling water systems. In reality, it creates a brand‑new mechanism to dissolve towns like Hartman without ever addressing why these towns lost capacity in the first place. The bill lowers the threshold for “abandonment,” allows a single resident to trigger the process, and shields counties from responsibility for the very infrastructure they have relied on for decades. It is a policy designed for disposal, not recovery.

A simple and fair first step would have been to let the town hold an election — the most basic tool of self‑governance — instead of creating a new mechanism to declare small towns abandoned. Residents asked for lawful guidance and support for months. Those requests went unanswered. Now, rather than acknowledging the structural failures that left rural towns without training, oversight, or intervention pathways, the state is proposing to write us off.

Colorado cannot claim to value rural communities while simultaneously creating legislation that makes it easier to erase them. If the statutory model is broken, fix the model. Don’t punish the towns that were left to navigate it alone.

Rural Colorado deserves a path to recovery — not a fast‑track to abandonment.

Shawna Casey – Hartman Resident