SPEAKER_01 0:00

The frequency works of the frequency. Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, June 24th. I'm your host, Shay Castle. And this is the Frequency, a weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. This episode is brought to you by Central City Opera. The 94th Central City Opera Festival opens June 27th. Since 1932, Central City Opera has been one of Colorado's favorite arts traditions, bringing world-class talent to a 19th-century opera house in historic Central City. This summer, CCO is celebrating the 70th anniversary of our world premiere of the Ballad of Baby Doe. The show tells the scandalous historical love story of silver baron Horace Tabor, who left his wife Augusta for Baby Doe. The performance rocked Denver society and today remains a staple of Colorado history. You can also catch the marriage of Figaro, Masterclass, and CCO in concert this season, with the cast featuring talent from the Met, San Francisco Opera, and beyond. The festival runs June 27th through August 2nd. Tickets start at $32 and seats are going fast. Visit centralcityopera.org to learn more. Today, we've got a guide to Colorado's primary elections for all you last-minute voters. But first, the headlines. Commissioners have placed a moratorium on data centers in unincorporated Boulder County. During the six-month pause, no applications will be accepted or reviewed by county planning staff. Staff have been tasked with writing new rules related to data centers as well as detention centers. The county joins Longmont in trying to limit or slow the construction of data centers. Earlier this month, Longmont City Council banned data centers that use more than 5% of the region's grid capacity, or 100 megawatts. That is enough to power 10,000 to 30,000 homes during the summer. A July 2nd public hearing is planned for Boulder County's moratorium. The meeting is scheduled to begin at 1.30 p.m. Attend in person on the third floor of the historic Boulder County Courthouse, 1325 Pearl Street in Boulder. Find more information and links in our show notes. A federal civil rights complaint has been filed against Boulder Valley School District for its failure to stop repeated harassment of a Jewish student at Southern Hills Middle School in Boulder. The complaint was filed by the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of the student. It will be reviewed by the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. The school district does not comment on pending legal matters, a spokesperson told Boulder Reporting Lab. This is not the first time BDSD has faced complaints about its handling of alleged bullying and identity-based discrimination. A group of parents formed last year to advocate for outside review of discrimination incidents. The group includes at least two parents who have filed their own official reports with the Office for Civil Rights. Read more from Boulder Reporting Lab at the link in our show notes. Colorado's primary election is Tuesday, June 30th. It's too late to mail your ballot. That ship sailed Monday, but you can still find a 24-hour dropbox at multiple locations around the county. Find a link to those in our show notes or at bouldercounty.gov slash elections. If you're an unaffiliated voter like me, simply pick which one you want to fill out. It's also a good idea to destroy the one you don't fill out. I'm going to help you make sense of those ballots, at least the local races. I'm joined by Tyler Hickman. Let's get to it.

SPEAKER_00 3:51

Shay, are you ready to talk 2026 primary ballots?

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Boy, am I.

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Awesome. I'm gonna start off kind of broad here. What contests coming up in the primary this spring are you paying attention to?

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Well, first off, I guess I would say I'm only paying attention to the Democrats, which is not ideal, but there's a couple of reasons for that. Boulder County, which is my coverage area, is so overwhelmingly Democrat. So I'm only following the Democrats because that's where the real competition happens. Because we know that more than likely whoever wins the general will be a Democrat. This is really where you get a choice, actually, in some of those contests. I do think as a journalist, it is important to cover, like there is also a unity party ballot that you could fill out. And I feel bad that I'm not covering those or the Republicans, because journalism really should do that in an ideal world. That being said, I am doing this on my own and it takes a lot of time that I really don't have. But I will acknowledge like that's a shortfall. But that's something that I've chosen to do given the limited amount of time and resources that I have, is focus on where it makes the most impact.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

It's also worth noting that the Republican primary ballot is pretty empty. We have obviously the three candidates for governor who have been in the news quite a bit recently. And in terms of other races that are contested in the primary county, we don't have any Republicans running in contested races. At the state level, we have the attorney general contest, and then we also have two Republicans running for a nomination for the representative from District 2 to Congress. There's just less to talk about on top of all of the other reasons that you gave as to why we're focusing on the Democratic primary. So with that, I wanted to ask you what races, more specifically in the Democratic primary contests, are you paying attention to?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Well, for Boulder County, there's really three that have impact locally. The District 2 regent for the University of Colorado system, the treasurer for Boulder County, and farther out, away from Boulder, but still in the county, is the state representative for House District 19. Our three contests locally that have challengers, more than one candidate to pick from, and will have a lot of local impact as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Yeah, and I think actually a good place to start since you brought it up is the treasurer race. It's interesting, it's something that I wasn't fully aware of that we get to even vote for the county treasurer. Why are we voting for a treasurer? Why should we care about who our treasurer is? What exactly does that person do?

SPEAKER_01 6:42

The job of the treasurer is to basically handle all the money. And a lot of what the treasurer can do is also determined by state law. So even though they handle the money, they don't really have a lot of leeway in what they can do with it. A couple of things that people will bring up when it comes to big institutional investing is spending locally, like investing your money locally as much as you can, and also divesting from some of these larger corporate banks that invest in really problematic things like warfare and AI and oil and gas. And the current treasurer has done as much of that as possible. He's moved a lot of our money into local institutions as much as he can. But there's a couple limiting factors there. It's number one, these are massive accounts. The county budget is well over, you know, $500 million. You can't just have that money anywhere. I would say there's not room to do much more than what has already been done to try to like live out those local values within the treasurer's office. The other thing the treasurer's office has done since 2019 is be the public trustee. And the public trustee handles real estate matters such as foreclosures and tax liens. So that's when the government gets involved in a real estate issue. But again, it's a really prescribed job. There's not a lot of like political ideology that can be brought to that. So why is it an elected role? Good question. It's probably a holdover from, you know, like why is the coroner an elected role? We need someone who knows how to look at dead bodies for that, not a politician. And the treasurer is the same way. The only reason we're electing a new one is because the old one is term-limited.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

There's two candidates in this race. What do we need to know about these two candidates before we cast our ballots?

SPEAKER_01 8:23

So the two candidates are Rachel Friend and Jen Cowish. They both can do this job, especially given the limited role that there is for politics and ideology in it. They both seem qualified. Jen seems to have a little more direct experience overseeing investment portfolios specifically, which she did for the U.S. Department of State. She's an Army veteran. She is a current member of Superiors Town Board. So again, similar experience to Rachel Friend being on Boulder City Council and overseeing that city's large budget. But Rachel didn't oversee any investment portfolios, which she has admitted that she doesn't have that direct experience. Her answer to that is that the current treasurer didn't either. He owned a small business or managed a bar. And most candidates for this job don't have that experience. So she has convened like an investment advisory panel to give her advice on those matters. Of course, Jen wouldn't need that because she's already done that. Other than that, there wasn't a ton of difference in their, you know, quote unquote platforms. Rachel Friend was a little more like, hey, here's what the current treasurer has done. He's doing a great job. So maybe we can do a little more outreach and things like that. Jen wanted to be a little more proactive. And she wants to use some of the data coming into the treasurer's office. As I mentioned, they handle foreclosures given their role as public trustee. And so she wants to look at that data and see if there are any trends that could be pulled out that we could focus and target preventative measures. Like, are there groups that are being foreclosed on more than other groups? And can we reach out to them and maybe prevent some of those? She also wanted to get out and about in the community more and do more education. And both of them wanted to be more transparent with the information that the treasurer's office is collecting. Those are the only two real differences that I noticed in terms of experience and platform.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Moving on to something that I that kind of stuck out to me on the ballot was that we've got seven seats in state Congress up for re-election this time around, but we only have one contested seat, and that's in District 19, the rep for district 19. What's going on? Why are none of these seats being contested?

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Colorado has become such a strong Democrat state, and that really stifles competition, not only on the Republicans, but among the Democrats as well. Even with this being such a Democratic stronghold and the primary being where the action happens, there were very few contested races on Boulder County ballots, as you will notice. So I really think that's what's going on is when you have that power imbalance, you just don't see the competition.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Yeah, and to take a look at that district a little bit closer, there's actually three candidates on the ballot who are vying for that nomination to run against the Republican Dan Wog. What can we take away from these three candidates' platforms to help us make our vote?

SPEAKER_01 11:23

Yeah, so I watched the League of Women Voters Forum in which they all participated. We've got Anil Pesteramelli. He is a member of Erie's town council. He talked a lot about the need to protect from oil and gas. Also, just recently, he voted against a huge oil and gas deal that would have allowed fracking under townland in Erie. So he's obviously living his values there on that boat. We have Jillaire McMillan. She was the challenger to Dan Wug last time. She got in the race late, and it was another vacancy appointment, which Colorado loves to do. And she only had a, you know, like 90 days or something to campaign. And she lost by a very slim margin, 110 votes. She is running again, you know, she says to flip that district. She also talked a lot about being attractive to swing voters, which again would be important in that district if you hope to flip it. And then we had a very interesting young candidate, Colton John Jack Plan. He was raised on a Buffalo ranch outside of Lions. And he really was positioning himself as like the anti-establishment candidate. He talks several times about the need to not take corporate or PAC money and about his value as an unattached candidate who really wants to change the system. Perhaps the most revealing thing that they were asked at that forum is what bill would you introduce first as a lawmaker? You get five bills, and so what their first one would be really says a lot about their priorities. And I was impressed overall by all three candidates and the specificity with which they proposed legislation, which I know shouldn't be the bar, but it is the bar. Pester O'Melli said he would introduce universal health care for the state of Colorado, which is something that lawmakers have been working on, but haven't quite been able to get across the finish line. McMillan had a specific bill about addressing transfer credits for high school students and community college students. Apparently, those credits are not transferring over as much or as often as would be helpful. And she noted that this was a niche issue, but that it does get to the heart of affordability with university being so expensive. And also could it address some shortages in the labor market here, including for healthcare and education workers. And she said that it's something people in the field have been telling her, which suggests to me that she's listening to very specific problems and coming up with specific solutions. A little small for what people might want to see, but it that's honestly a lot of what lawmaking tends to be. Plon wants to similarly go very specific and create an alms budsman program for Medicaid. That would be someone to help you enroll, someone to make sure you keep enrolled. He mentioned that, you know, millions of people have dropped off of Medicaid in the last couple of years, even before the cuts to the program. So really making sure we're getting the most of the federal dollars here and putting in place something that will make that happen was a priority for him. I would note the difference between those is that universal healthcare and the Omspan program both would take a significant amount of money. Colorado is in a budget shortfall. McMillan made the point that, like, hers doesn't actually cost any money, so it's more likely to get passed in the current political environment.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

It's a nice window into how they think about governing. Next up, we're gonna take a look at the District 2 CU regent race. What should voters be looking for in this race?

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Coobes Lolchendani. He's interesting because he's a technology lawyer and he has specific expertise in AI and he notes how important that's gonna be for the future, you know, of a university that's educating students for the future workforce. He also was critical of CU's deal with OpenAI, which a lot of faculty and staff were as well for a number of reasons. And so I think that's an interesting perspective to bring to the job. We also have Edie Hooten, I would say the least interesting candidate. I don't know if I want to say that or not, but she's just been around for a while. She's held a number of elected positions and appointed positions, and to me, it's just like someone who's still in the game trying to find another seat of power, I guess. Murray Smith is interesting because he's the only one who actually went to CU of these candidates and recently as well. He's fairly young. He's 33. So that's also a little bit of diversity when it comes to the regions who tend to be older. He's also the only candidate who has been endorsed by the labor unions at CU. You know, I personally am always looking for someone who's strong on workers' rights.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

Is there anything else we need to know about the upcoming primary, whether it be dates, how to mail in your ballot, things like that?

SPEAKER_01 16:01

I just always like to say vote. It's so important and it's so easy. Your ballots have already started to be mailed, you might have already gotten yours. You have until June 30th to drop them off. Obviously, I've shared a lot of opinion in here, but I hope there's enough information there that, like, just because I feel this way, I'm not telling you to be that way or feel that way. I hope there's enough information in there for you to make up your own mind based on your own values. I'm pretty progressive and leftist, and so I tend to lean Democrat, but I'm not a fan of an uncompetitive system. So I think it's really important to vote whenever you have a chance and to make your voice heard. And especially in an election like this where you actually have some semblance of a choice, and it's not just the least bad option. So for me personally, it's just a just an opportunity to like have a real choice because they tend to not be candidates on the general ballot who really represent my values and interests. They they tend to be older, they tend to be wealthier. I am a homeowner, but they tend to be owners of very much nicer homes and much more removed from poverty than I am. So I just would say take this opportunity to vote a little closer to your values, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Yeah, for sure. Your vote always matters, but I feel like especially matters during these primary elections. You have quite a bit more of a choice. Stay informed and go out and vote. Thanks, Shay.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Thanks, Tyler. Find our printed vote guide at boulderfrequency.com. Plus bonus content covering state and federal races. We've made that extended vote guide free for all to listen and read. So you don't have to become a paying subscriber to hear it. But I hope you will. There's also a lot of great bonus content on our Patreon from past issues we've covered. Join us Friday when we talk to a lifelong Democrat who has decided to leave the party after 55 years and holding multiple elected and appointed positions. Tune in to hear why he's leaving and what finally forced his hand. That's all for today. As always, thanks for listening.