Way of the World

by Bob Grand

Another two weeks have passed, and I am still proud to be an American, a third generation American. I remind you all there are no native Americans if you go back far enough. I am proud of our Constitution, our military veterans, our current servicemen, and all of the folks that protect our rights and safety. Why are there so many, on both extremes of the left and right, who seem to not be proud of anything. Where is the concept to respect the rights of others and their right to be proud of what they want to believe in? Things our constitution is based on. I do not understand the current State of Colorado Chair of the State Republican Party Dave Williams’s ongoing effort to what appears to be alienating as many people as possible while appealing to his ever increasingly smaller core base. A base that is not sufficient to win any statewide offices. Many Republicans have shared with me the lack of enthusiasm about Dave Williams’s approach on how to win elections. Yet how many are willing to publicly express their views? The answer is not many.

I understand that in Russia, the latest victim of falling out of her 11th story apartment window was a 28-year-old bank vice president who had the audacity to question the actions of the Russian government. It is kind of like the rash of careless fires that seem to be appearing all over Russia, attributed to careless smokers, as maybe some people are trying to send a message. The latest blurb from Moscow is that they are not planning to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant complex, which has six reactors. The Chernobyl accident involved only one nuclear reactor. Many reporters are worried as the Russian government has a history of saying one thing and then doing the opposite.

The Supreme Court issued several rulings this week. Most not well received by the Biden administration. Our Constitution calls for the separation of powers with three branches representing legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government. This was done to promote a checks and balances system where the power of the government is not concentrated in only one branch as a means of sustaining our republic. Some people seem to forget that is how our government is supposed to work, for the best interests of the American citizen.

Vladimir Putin’s excursion into Ukraine is rewriting the book on warfare. The use of unmanned drones for surveillance and targeting coupled with long range targeting has altered the landscape of warfare as has been historically known. What Putin thought was going to be a two-week effort is now approaching its 500th day. The resolve of the West to support Ukraine was totally underestimated by Putin. The reality is that the NATO countries have viewed Putin’s excursion as a precursor to his next steps. In 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea no one stood up. The writing was on the wall. I am afraid that the Russian people will pay an extraordinarily high price for Putin’s mistaken opportunism.

President Biden has a problem that will not go away. Hunter Biden’s activities are beginning to see the light of day and they are not pretty. What is perhaps worse is that it appears the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, and the Internal revenue Service may have aided and abetted Hunter Biden in his attempt to conceal his activities. Where is our sense of justice and fairness? Whether you like Joe Biden or Donald Trump should not matter if you’re a government official charged with protecting the interests of the American taxpayer. The truth should be uncovered whatever the consequences are for those involved. If you have done wrong and are convicted, you need to pay the price. People need to understand there are consequences for their actions. Arbitrary and biased decisions by government employees, of either party, should not be tolerated. We have a system of inspector generals that are supposed to provide oversight and protect the American taxpayer from abuses of power by all employees of the government be they elected or appointed. Where is that oversight? We pay our officials, both elected and appointed, a lot of money to do their jobs. Is it unreasonable to expect them to do what they are paid for? Our fault as voters and citizens is by not holding elected and appointed officials accountable. Do they really believe they are above the law because they have tenure or a degree from a prestigious school? We need to send a message that no one, be it either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, is above the law. Let us get the facts out. If we have people who obstruct that then they should be exposed and where applicable be terminated with loss of pay and pension for violating the trust the American people have given them. As the people of the State of Colorado among others are finding out, when criminals figure out there are no penalties or accountabilities for committing crime, crime grows unabated.

It is Fair season please support your local fair board efforts as it is a great life learning experience for our young people.

As always, your thoughts and comments are appreciated: publisher@lostcreekguide. com

The LosT Creek Guide, LLC

Bob Grand - Publisher 303-732-4080 publisher@lostcreekguide.com editor@lostcreekguide.com www.lostcreekguide.com

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Letter To The Editor Re: Box Elder Creek Flood

I would like to correct the misinformation that is circulating in the community concerning the flooding of Box Elder Creek. Even 9News misreported on the cause of the flooding.

The storm front that generated the tornado in Highlands Ranch continued on a southeastern path into Elbert County where the town of Elizabeth is located. Heavy rains of two inches plus fell in the area on Thursday, June 22nd. Elbert County is where Box Elder Creek originates. Due to the abundant rain that has been received since mid-May, the soil is saturated and cannot absorb a large rain event.

The Henrylyn Irrigation District has taken advantage of the increased flow rate of the South Platte River and has filled their 2 main reservoirs – Horse Creek Reservoir and Prospect Reservoir – to near capacity. After the rain event in the Box Elder basin occurred, the diversion of water from the South Platte River was turned off and the Denver Hudson Canal which carries the water to the reservoirs was allowed to drain. The canal, when built, spans Box Elder Creek.

The flood water from Elbert County arrived at the canal about noon on Friday, June 23rd. The early flow – 100 CFS – was diverted thru a structure that is used to send augmentation water down the creek. As the flow rate increased, the canal was breached with a 15-foot-wide cut to accommodate the increasing flow rate – now 300 CFS – to prevent the canal from overflowing at several points and causing more damage to the canal. The large flow arrived at 7PM and increased the breach from 15 feet to over 100 feet wide. The maximum flow rate has been estimated at over 1000 CFS. The capacity of the canal is only 400 CFS when delivering water to the reservoirs. The canal when built in the early 1900’s crosses Box Elder Creek and has experienced being breached during past flood events of Box Elder Creek.

In summary, no water was released from Horse Creek Reservoir into Box Elder Creek during this flooding. The floodwater came from the drainage basin that starts in Elbert County and was kept in Box Elder Creek. It is unfortunate that the flow of the creek was large enough to damage roads and private property, but this was a flood caused by a natural rain event miles away from our community.

Joe E. Amen President of Henrylyn Irrigation District Board of Directors

School to Work Alliance Program (SWAP)

The School to Work Alliance Program (SWAP) is a partnership between the Weld County School Districts RE-8 and RE-3J, and the Colorado Department of Vocational Rehabilitation.

What is SWAP?

The School-To-Work Alliance Program (SWAP) assists young adults with mild to moderate needs in employment to become competitively employed and to achieve successful community outcomes.

SWAP is a collaborative initiative between:

• Colorado Division of vocational Rehabilitation (DVR)

• Local school districts and Boards of Cooperative Education Services

• Colorado Department of Education

• Area Businesses

• Young Adults wanting to participate in today’s workforce

Is SWAP Right for Me?

If you have asked yourself:

• What is next?

• What do I do with my life?

• What is the right career for me?

• What jobs match my skills, interest and abilities?

• Who can help me get ready for a job and find employment?

• What tools will help me to be successfully employed?

• Why do I have difficulties keeping a job?

• Do I need additional training?

And you are:

• Between the ages of 15 and 24

• Working with or interested in working with DVR

Then you have a desire to begin taking responsibility for your future!

SWAP and DVR can help you begin that journey!

What can I Expect?

While in high school:

• Career awareness, exploration and preparation

• Work readiness skills training

• Self-advocacy training

• Guidance and counseling on career training and education

• Work experiences

After exiting high school:

• Job-seeking skills training

• Job-search activities

• Job placement

• Assistance with workplace accommodations

• Job coaching

• On-the-job training

• Job retention skills training

CONTACT INFORMATION

School to Work Alliance Program

Joetta Vallejos-Forsyth Office - 303-857-7295

Cell - 303-598-1601 jvallejos-forsyth@weld8.org

Armstrong: Liberty the Loser in Colorado’s GOP/Libertarian Alliance

by Ari Armstrong, Complete Colorado Page 2

The Libertarian Party of Colorado is now committed to electing . . . Republicans. That’s provided those candidates are sufficiently “pro-liberty.” Apparently, then, we’re going to start seeing Republican candidates run on a platform of legalizing all drugs, keeping abortion legal, expanding immigration, protecting LGBTQ freedoms, reforming criminal justice to reduce police abuses, and repealing zoning laws, right? Of course not.

What neither today’s Libertarian nor Republican party cares about is liberty by any robust conception of the term. Granted, the newly allied parties want to preserve gun rights and lower taxes—important issues. Beyond that, what they mostly seem concerned about is conspiracy mongering.

The standards by which Libertarians will judge a Republican candidate sufficiently pro-liberty remain murky. Judging from a conversation in which Libertarian chair Hannah Goodman falls all over herself praising Republican chair Dave Williams, such candidates will look a lot like . . . Williams himself.

The spoiler effect

My question for Libertarians content to elect Williams-like Republicans to office is this: Why not just become Republicans? Activism would be a lot more effectively spent working within the Republican Party to push (or become) pro-gun, low-tax candidates. I think all Libertarians, including those with a more-robust understanding of liberty (i.e., actual libertarians), should quit that party and work within the major parties. But if you’re not even ideologically distinct from today’s Republican leaders, there’s zero point in registering Libertarian—unless you just get a thrill out of being a medium-sized fish in a very small pond.

On paper, a Libertarian strategy of not acting as “spoiler” makes a certain amount of sense. I have long advocated approval voting (vote for as many candidates as you want) to eliminate the “spoiler effect,” and I think that should be a top priority especially for minor parties. In our winner-take-all system, absent approval voting or ranked voting, candidates with similar views tend to draw from the same pool of voters. So, in a three-way race, the least popular candidate is most likely to hurt the contender with the most-similar views. As I’ve reviewed, Libertarians plausibly cost Republicans some races in the last election cycle.

However, Libertarian candidates do not only pull votes that otherwise would go to the Republican. Some of the votes otherwise would go to the Democrat or other third parties or not be cast at all. In the last cycle Dan Ward may have cost Barbara Kirkmeyer her Congressional seat, yet Ward cast himself as a “Libertarian Socialist” and campaigned among the heavy metal crowd—hardly a Dave Williams clone. (Despite this, Williams suggested to Goodman that Kirkmeyer would be an appropriate candidate for Libertarians to run against if she tries again.) Years ago, when I was active in the LP, a candidate for governor led with legalizing marijuana (a goal since largely achieved) and intentionally aimed his message largely at unaffiliated and Democratic voters.

Since I left the LP, I’ve spent hours arguing with Libertarians about the “spoiler effect.” What Libertarians used to tell me is that the only wasted vote is one cast for a candidate you don’t believe in and that Republicans have no moral right to Libertarian votes. Times have changed.

Now, by explicitly working with Republicans to protect Republican candidates, the Libertarian Party has positioned itself as a de facto wing of the GOP and allied itself with social conservatives. This, to my mind, is a complete betrayal of libertarianism. Libertarianism is supposed to be neither left nor right, to be liberal in the classical sense, to be “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” to be as opposed to conservative variants of statism as to progressive variants. Now the Libertarian brand is just Republican Lite.

Williams’ anti-libertarianism

Dave Williams is a social conservative, not a libertarian. Let’s start with LGBTQ issues. The libertarian Cato Institute was on the forefront of fighting for equal rights for gay couples, including equal protection under the marriage laws. Williams took the anti-liberty side, signing onto a bill to ban gay marriage and even ban adoption by gay couples. Bluntly, for the LP to openly ally itself with such an anti-gay bigot as Williams is despicable.

What about immigration? Recently I interviewed Matt Zwolinski, co-author of The Individualists, arguably the most important book on libertarian history ever published. Zwolinski as a “bleeding heart libertarian” has many disagreements with economist Bryan Caplan, another leading libertarian of our age. Yet the two agree that among the most important policy reforms for libertarians today are (as I summarized): “1) remove legal barriers to building more housing and 2) expand immigration.” The most important libertarian intellectual in Colorado, Michael Huemer, has written an important essay defending open immigration.

Does that sound like Dave Williams? No. Rather, Williams wrote to Trump asking him to “increase ICE raids and enforcements.”

As for housing reform, most Republicans opposed Jared Polis’s proposal to preempt rights-violating local zoning restrictions that forcibly prevent people from building higher-density housing on their own property if they wish to do so.

Libertarians are split on abortion. Some take the religious conservative view that a fetus is a person with rights, so government can forcibly stop a woman from getting an abortion or at least punish her for getting one. The dominant view within libertarianism, though, is that generally a woman has a right to get an abortion, perhaps excepting some late-stage cases. (That’s my view.) Anti-abortion “libertarians” tend to look more like intrusive-government conservatives in this regard.

Williams sponsored a bill to outlaw abortion from the moment of fertilization, which would ban even some forms of birth control and most cases of in vitro conception. By my lights, Williams’s bill is radically anti-liberty and extremely oppressive. Yet now the LP apparently has committed itself to the position that a candidate who wants to ban all abortion from the moment of conception—and to impose the Orwellian government mechanisms required to enforce such a law law—nevertheless can be “liberty minded.”

Again, some of Williams’s positions overlap standard Libertarian positions, especially on guns, taxes, and some economic regulations. But Williams is hardly consistently pro-liberty from a libertarian perspective, and in important ways he is anti-liberty. You’d think that would matter to a group calling itself the Libertarian Party.

Conspiracy mongering

One thing Williams and today’s LP have in common is a penchant for conspiracy mongering.

Recently the state LP publicly claimed, without any evidence, that “a bio-weapons lab is being installed in our state.” The source for the claim is an anti-vax conspiracist. (Notably, Heidi Ganahl, who destroyed her campaign for governor by such nonsense as her anti-furry crusade, was quick to join this new round of conspiracy mongering.) For a non-delusional take on the facility in question, see a 9News report or a media release from CSU.

Williams too comfortably spouts bullshit conspiracy theories, saying, for example, “Joe Biden is not a legitimate president” and “legitimate concerns regarding election fraud have been raised by President Donald J. Trump.” That’s the sort of dangerous nonsense that encouraged the Capitol assault of January 6, 2021. (That said, there was a bit of election fraud in Colorado last year—and it was allegedly committed on behalf of a Republican candidate.)

For today’s Libertarian Party, neither Williams’s betrayals of liberty nor his betrayals of reality matter. Today’s LP leaders would rather whine for scraps from the GOP’s table than ring a clear and consistent voice for liberty for all.

Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.

More Coloradans Carrying As Concealed Handgun Permits Climb Above Pre-Pandemic Levels

by Sherrie Peif, Complete Colorado Page 2

DENVER — Despite the practice being targeted for restrictions by some municipalities, the number of Coloradans obtaining concealed handgun permits (CHPs) in 2022 still climbed above pre-pandemic levels.

Such local gun rights restrictions are possible after Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 256 in 2021. The new law unwound decades of state preemption and allows local governments to manage their own gun laws, but only so long as they are more restrictive than those at the state level, meaning the law only allows for a one-way ratcheting up rather than true local control.

To date several communities have been successful in passing laws prohibiting concealed carry in public-owned buildings or parks, including Denver, Boulder and Broomfield. The City of Edgewater originally included such a ban in a broader package of potential ordinances but backed off after a large public outcry.

Such a patchwork of laws make it tough on gun owners to know where they can and can’t carry as they travel the state, and is one of the reasons the legislature originally passed preemption around gun laws.

However, except for a surge in permits issued in 2020 and 2021 at the height of the COVID lockdowns and in the wake of the George Floyd riots, the number of new Colorado residents who have chosen to go through the process to lawfully conceal a weapon is still rising.

According to recent data recently released by the County Sheriffs of Colorado, 27,031 new concealed carry permits were issued statewide in 2022, with another 26,622 existing permits renewed. That is down from 2020 and 2021 when permits skyrocketed in Colorado and around the country, but it is 14 percent increase over 2019 (23,250) and a 6 percent increase over 2018 (25,643).

According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, just over 15 percent of the Colorado population 21 or older holds a carry permit.

Training a growth industry

Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Fort Lupton said he is not surprised by the increase considering Colorado’s crime rates are among the highest in the nation in several categories including violent offenses and car thefts.

Evans, who is a former Arvada police lieutenant and a concealed handgun permit instructor said the demand for classes has been so high, the company he works for part-time had to hire an additional full-time instructor at his location.

“They had to hire someone just to keep up with the demand from people who are scared to death because Colorado’s violent crime is just not going down,” Evans said, adding a “substantial” number of new trainees are women, and in particular female realtors. “Think about it,” Evans said. “Who is vulnerable? A female meeting a strange person she met over the internet, alone, in an empty house.”

All this comes even as Colorado’s laws around concealed carry permits are stricter compared to many other states. Twenty-five states do not require a permit for concealed carry, as long as the carrier is an adult who can lawfully possess a handgun.

In Colorado, which is what is known as a ‘shall issue’ state, permit applicants must pass both a criminal background check and a firearms training class by a certified instructor, and it must be taken in person. Sheriffs are allowed some leeway for denials or revocations if they believe the applicant is a danger to themselves or others.

Permits are usually issued by the individual elected county sheriffs, though in Denver it’s the through the police department, and depending on where you live the process could be completed in a few weeks to many months.

For example, in Denver, there are long waits because applicants must make appointments for fingerprinting and then wait longer times for the application to be processed. It is sometimes as long as 9 months or more before the permit is issued. Whereas in Weld County where there are no appointments required and the sheriff processes applications much quicker, a permit can be issued in just a few weeks. As result, Denver, with a population of 711,000 reported 2,613 applications submitted in 2022, while Weld County at half the size, 340,000, reported nearly double the applications submitted at 4,254.

Likewise, the cost can also be prohibitive. In Denver, a permit is $152.50, while in Weld County it is $52.50. Weld County, which is the ninth most populous county, issued the third most permits in 2022 (4,254), only behind El Paso and Arapahoe counties.

The law-abiding

More Coloradans Carrying As Concealed Handgun Permits Climb Above Pre-Pandemic

Levels continued from page 3...

In an open letter to the Denver City Council prior to the passage of the city’s parks ban, David Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute* and adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, noted that concealed handgun permit holders are among the most law-abiding citizens, presenting data that showed an adult with a permit is about 39 times less likely to be arrested for a crime than an adult without one. “The only people who bother to go through the onerous process are people who are so concerned about legal compliance that they spend significant resources just to obtain a card from the government allowing them to legally do what they could done anyway for free, and with very low risk of being caught,” said Kopel.

Evans said as long as Democrats in the legislature continue to hold a supermajority, as well as the Governor’s office, he believes it will only get worse, citing the past few years of legislation that has led to higher crime rates and at the same time an increasing desire to disarm citizens.

“It’s the same emotions I had when I was a police officer,” Evans said about feeling helpless to stop his colleagues. “I can’t do my job because of how the legislature is handcuffing me and handcuffing public safety. But with the numbers how they are at the state capitol, they are going to vote how the governor dictates and unfortunately that results in a less safe Colorado.”

* Independence Institute is the publisher of Complete Colorado.

Migrant Youth Advocate Program

Weld Re-8 School District in partnership with Centennial BOCES’ mission is to help students and families in the following areas:

◦ Helping Youth Improve their Academic Success

Youth Advocate Program provides:

Support for students:

• Advocate to represent migrant youth

• Academic support with classes, scholarships, and college applications

• Leadership development, trainings, and conferences

• Assistance with obtaining and transferring student educational and health records

• Help as needed to ensure equal participation in school activities and programs

◦ Support for families:

• Information and referrals to community agencies for food, clothing, adult education, health care, and other social service needs

• Parental Involvement Meetings

• School-Parent Liaison contact

◦ Support for the Migrant Education Graduation Advocate (MEGAS) & school staff:

• Training on the Migrant Education Program and teaching strategies for migrant students

• Technical assistance with identification and support of migrant students

• Coordination with Regional, State and Federal Migrant Education program to support migrant students

◦ Weld Re-8 Schools MEGAS

• Elementary MEGA: Susie Tijerina - stijerina@weld8.org

• Middle/High School MEGA: Gabriela Rivera - grivera@weld8.org

◦ The goal of the Migrant Youth Advocate Program is to help all students graduate on time from high school.

Participating Schools

• Little Trappers Preschool

• Butler Elementary

• Twombly Elementary

• Kenneth Homyak PK-8

• Fort Lupton Middle School

• Fort Lupton High School

• For more information on Centennial BOCES, please visit their website at cboces. org

A New Reality For Downtown Denver’s HalfEmpty Buildings: ‘The Value’s Not Gonna Go Back To What It Used To Be’

by Sarah Mulholland, Colorado Public Radio

It’s pretty apparent that most office workers enjoy the perks of working from home and are loath to go back to a daily commute, leaving a lot of downtown Denver’s skyscrapers half-empty on any given weekday.

What’s less clear is exactly what that means for the future of those office buildings. There’s a lot of real estate that isn’t being used, but not a lot of solid plans for what to do with it. Intuitively, converting some of it into apartments makes sense, but that’s easier said than done.

The one thing that is all but certain is that many office buildings are worth significantly less money now than they were before the COVID pandemic. Republic Plaza — the largest office tower in Colorado and an icon of the Denver skyline since it was built in the 1980s — is worth less than half of what it was valued at in 2012, according to loan documents for the property. That loss equates to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Appraisals aren’t an exact science, and the building could eventually recover some of that value. But even so, it’s definitely not worth what it was just a few years ago, according to Vivek Sah, director of DU’s Burns School of Real Estate and Construction Management. The same holds true for much of the office real estate downtown, he said.

“The value’s not gonna go back to what it used to be,” Sah said. “We are seeing [that] across all the markets in the country. It’s not ever gonna be the same .… If you add what’s happening in our downtown in terms of homelessness and crime and other concerns, the downtown market is going to shift.”

Indeed, it’s hard to see a turning point for the office market in downtown Denver anytime soon. Nearly a quarter of the office space downtown is vacant, meaning the landlord doesn’t have a paying tenant, real estate services firm CBRE said in a recent report. On top of that, companies that are paying rent are trying to offload a record amount of space because they aren’t actually using it.

“Availability has shown few signs of plateauing,” CBRE analysts wrote in the report.

Similar to home prices, commercial real estate prices tend to be cyclical, moving in tandem with economic conditions. To that end, the slowdown in the technology sector is taking a toll on Denver’s office real estate market. At the same time, commercial landlords are heavily reliant on borrowed money, making the sector especially vulnerable to rising interest rates.

But the current downturn – spurred by a fundamental shift in how offices are used – runs deeper than those kinds of cyclical issues. It could have far-reaching consequences for the future of cities that have long relied on a busy hive of office workers to bring energy and commerce downtown.

Another big thing office buildings bring to cities is tax revenues. Denver’s bottom line will eventually take a hit if millions of dollars in property value evaporates.

“The city has to budget for that because it’s gonna happen .… The city has to not rely on whatever that contribution was towards their revenues and go from there,” DU’s Sah said. “For anybody relying on those values to go back up to the … levels a few years back … it’s not realistic.”

Property taxes are a critical component for city budgets, helping fill the coffers for everything from schools and police pensions to libraries and affordable housing initiatives. Office buildings accounted for roughly 20 percent of the $1.8 billion in property tax revenues collected by Denver County in 2022, second only to singlefamily residential properties, government data show.

Just like Colorado homeowners, the state’s commercial landlords recently received an updated assessment of their property values. Unlike the state’s homeowners, many office landlords aren’t facing steep tax hikes. The value of downtown office buildings didn’t really budge since the last time the numbers were run two years ago, according to Keith Erffmeyer, the Denver County assessor.

“We didn’t have a lot of confidence, I think for obvious reasons, that things had rebounded significantly downtown,” Erffmeyer said.

That’s a big change from historical trends. Downtown office values rose 14 percent in the two years leading up to 2019 assessments, according to Erffmeyer. In 2015, they were up nearly 40 percent.

“Denver was kind of discovered, I guess is the best way to put it. We had just an incredible number of sales at very high prices in downtown Denver, where it seemed like money was just flowing into Denver,” Erffmeyer said.

If office values crater dramatically, city officials could eventually be forced to either come up with the money somewhere else or cut the budget to plug holes.

For now, it’s difficult to say where values will eventually shake out. A lot of businesses are in a freeze frame as executives struggle to figure out the best way forward. The picture will crystallize as more leases expire over the next couple of years, according to DU’s Sah. A lot of companies won’t renew their space, he said. That’s when landlords will be forced to lower rents more broadly to attract new tenants.

Some buildings will fare better than others. Newer properties with modern amenities are picking up tenants that are leaving their outdated spaces.

Still, there are plenty of outdated office buildings in Denver, including some of the most recognizable features of the Denver skyline, like Republic Plaza. It’s not clear what will happen next at the 56-story tower. The owners of the building, a partnership between MetLife’s investment arm and property company Brookfield Properties, have run into trouble with the mortgage on the property. Neither firm responded to questions from CPR about whether there’s a plan to reverse the slide in value.

Erffmeyer is hopeful Denver will be able to come out OK on the other side of the remote work revolution.

“I haven’t seen signs of a complete collapse or a complete cave-in,” Erffmeyer said. “It just seems to me like it’s still transitioning and kind of looking for the right new normal.”