I grew up in the Colorado they’re trying to erase.

Not the Colorado of glossy tourism ads and climate conferences.

The real Colorado.

The one where:

• Kids worked ranches and feedlots, not “sustainability internships.”
• You and I went to Northeastern Junior College, Aims, CSU, UNC, CU – not Cornell, Yale, or Harvard – and that was good, solid, honest.
• We measured a person by whether they showed up and worked, not by what panel they spoke on.
• A neighbor expanding his cow–calf operation was a reason to crack a beer, not a reason to clutch pearls about “emissions.”

Colorado used to be:

• Free.
• Pragmatic.
• Optimistic.

We built. We fixed. We figured it out.
We didn’t try to micromanage each other’s lives with climate spreadsheets and “behavior-change strategies.”

We kept our nose on our side of the fence unless someone needed help.
We knew that when a buddy opened a new business, or expanded a farm, or drilled a well, it meant more prosperity for everyone – the original rising tide lifting all boats.

Now?
Some of the people running this state look at that same prosperity and see a problem that needs to be “managed down.”

If I had a wagon, I’d still want to go to Colorado – the one where a man could walk a mile high and breathe free.

But the wagon already rolled in.
A flood of outsiders showed up from places they helped break – California, coastal cities, and beyond – and now they’re standing here, in our home, telling us how to live.

Weld County is bursting with promise – and that’s exactly what scares them.

Look at the county I represent and love:

• Agriculture that feeds people.
• Oil and gas that keeps the lights on and the economy moving.
• Land and space and sky.
• The University of Northern Colorado.
• A medical school about to come online.
• Aims Community College giving regular kids a real shot.
• Thirty-two municipalities full of people who still believe in work and community and possibility.

I want:

• data centers here,
• nuclear here,
• geothermal here,
• To help my buddy, Dr. Andy Feinstein at UNC, build a College of Energy and Technology here to anchor our future.

Weld County is the part of Colorado that builds the future.

And yet, down in Denver and Boulder, there’s this tightening fist of “green” central planners and professional activists who look at all that possibility and see something that must be controlled, slowed, taxed, “mitigated,” regulated, or outright stopped.

They don’t live here.
They don’t pay Weld County bills.
But they sure as hell have opinions about what our future is allowed to look like.

The moment that broke me last night.

While I was sitting in that fog of burnout, the phone rang.

Insiders told me:

“Commissioner, Elise Jones has lined up over 40 people to come to the Transportation Commission and accuse the Governor of failing on greenhouse gas goals – and demand toll money be siphoned into transit.”

Let’s be clear who these 40 people mostly are not:

• They are not the guy white-knuckling I-25 at 6:30 a.m.
• They are not the woman driving between shifts to keep up with rent and groceries.
• They are not the farmer hauling equipment.
• They are not the trucker trying to get goods to market.

Because those people are at work.

The folks who show up in the middle of a weekday to deliver coordinated talking points about “climate goals,” and “mode shift,” and “reimagining transportation” are almost always part of the advocacy machine – funded, organized, handed a script, and deployed like a political theater troupe.

And tomorrow, that theater will be called “public comment.”

The headlines will say:

• “Coloradans demand action.”
• “The people speak out on climate.”

And the Governor will be able to shrug and say:

“I heard the people.”

No, you didn’t.
You heard the activists.
There’s a big difference.

The people were at work, paying the bills your policies keep inflating.

That realization is what broke me – and woke me.

Because this is all performative and pre-planned.
The fix is in before the meeting even starts.

It’s not just bad policy. It feels like betrayal.

I’ve been at this a long time:

• Planning commissioner
• Town councilman
• Mayor
• Weld County Commissioner

I didn’t just parachute in with a foundation grant and a stack of white papers.
I’ve spent decades trying to make this place work – at the ground level.

And in 2018, the same year I was elected county commissioner, Jared Polis took the Governor’s office.

Since then, I’ve watched – up close – as he and his inner circle of well-heeled, ideologically driven friends and appointees quietly rewired Colorado’s machinery of government around one primary lens: climate ideology first, everything else a distant second.

Commission after commission, rule after rule, “standard” after “framework” after “road map,” advisory board after advisory board – all stacked with the same mindset:

• driving is bad,
• growth is suspicious,
• energy production is guilty until proven innocent,
• and if normal people suffer under the rules, well, that’s the price of “saving the planet.”

They call it democracy.
It feels an awful lot like rule by a very narrow elite who think they know better than everyone else.

And the punchline?

The same crowd that’s using unelected commissions and obscure standards to reshape your life without asking…
is the same crowd that screams “THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!” when anyone questions them.

What keeps me up at night isn’t politics. It’s loss.

Here’s what actually jolts me awake at 2:30 a.m.:

• The fear that I’m watching the state I love slip away in silence.
• The knowledge that ordinary people are getting steamrolled by processes they’ve never heard of.
• The anger that policy is now made by people who don’t live with the consequences.
• The sick feeling that Colorado is turning into an unaffordable playground designed by and for elites.
• The heartbreak of realizing my life’s work was not enough to keep my own son here.
• The possibility that, after forty years of service, I might not be able to retire in the place I bled for.

That’s not ideology.

That’s grief.

And yeah, it makes me sound like the Unabomber banging away on an old Selectric in a cabin somewhere.

But I’m not writing a manifesto. I’m writing a warning.

So here’s what this is = and what comes next.

Today’s Scott’s Thoughts are not a full exposé.
It’s not all the receipts.
Those are coming.

This is me pulling the fire alarm and saying:

“Something is very wrong in how this state is being run, and the people paying the highest price are the ones with the least time and power to fight it.”

Over the coming days, I’ll be laying out – in detail:

• How a tight network of climate-driven advocacy groups, appointees, and bureaucrats has learned to weaponize process – public comment, commissions, modeling, and “standards” – to steer Colorado in directions that voters never clearly signed up for.
• How highways like I-25, and the people who depend on them, are being treated as bargaining chips in a political and ideological game.
• How “public input” has been hijacked by professional activists while the real public is at work.
• How laws and rules have been written to make expanding and maintaining roads the exception, not the default – even as congestion, cost of living, and frustration explode.
• And how this quiet revolution in governance is hollowing out the Colorado that people like you and me actually recognize.

I’m not going to scream.
I’m going to document.

I owe you that much.

It’s now around 5:00 a.m.

I’m tired. I’m angry. I’m heartbroken.

But I’m not walking away.
Not yet.

I’m proud to be your Weld County Commissioner.

And it’s just the beginning.