Happy Wednesday, Colorado, and welcome to our second Temperature of 2025.
Today is the first day of the legislative session — sort of like baseball’s opening day in Colorado, except it’s cold, the participants aren’t paid nearly as well, and the proceedings may actually have a chance of delivering some wins.
Why are we so optimistic that something good could come from the session? Because you — yes, YOU! — have a chance to make it so. Our politics reporters at The Sun are awesome for so many reasons, but one of my favorite is how they help people who want to get involved in the lawmaking process.
This how-to guide right here provides valuable insight into how a bill becomes a law and when folks can make their voices heard. If there is something you’re passionate about in Colorado, spend some time with this guide, then go forth to make your state a little bit better. THAT, friends, is a home run.
Now let’s slide into the news.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
CLIMATE
Danger signals from Marshall fire mount, three years later
55%
Portion of survey responding residents who reported health symptoms they attributed to Marshall fire residue, six months later
Direct neighbors of the burned Marshall fire homeless suffered measurable increases in volatile organic compounds from toxic smoke in their homes, and hundreds more residents reported headaches and other health problems, according to companion University of Colorado studies published in late December.
The twin studies add to a growing body of Colorado-led research into the increasing hazards in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. Driving winds carry not just wood ash into homes, but also the residue of countless plastics, paints and construction materials from suburban structures. The potentially harmful residues require concerted efforts from nearby homeowners to clean up, and can even return in force if measures like filtered box fans are switched off.
CU researchers were inundated with public questions soon after the fire swooped in on 100-mph winds and destroyed more than 1,000 homes Dec. 30, 2021, in southeastern Boulder County.
Callers reported “intense smells that lingered for days, and that really got them worrying ‘Is this a space that I can go back to and take my family to with a clear head, or do I need to take some extra precautions. And what’s the time frame, if any, that it would be OK to come back into these spaces?’” recounted Will Dresser, a Ph.D. candidate. Dresser led the air quality half of the studies for CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.
The CIRES study set up air monitoring equipment in the homes of worried neighbors, from full-room tanks and computer terminals to small pieces that could sit in a corner while families stayed in place. The researchers call it the first study of its kind in lived-in homes, rather than test-model homes, so close to a fire and so soon afterward.
What they found, publishing in “ACS Environmental Science & Technology Air,” were spikes in volatile organic compounds blown in with ash and other residues, including benzene, toluene and naphthalene. The chemicals could have come from burned cars, carpets, paints or household materials just across the street.
The first few days of VOCs measured were as bad as the air in the Los Angeles basin in the 1990s, Dresser said. The levels dropped after a few days, but then lingered and dropped more slowly after that, raising further concerns, Dresser said. Homeowners could lower the numbers with affordable, jury-rigged solutions like furnace filters taped around a box fan (pictured here), but some of the VOCs came back if the rigs were turned off.
That parallels findings we wrote about from a previous Colorado State University study using model homes, showing that filtering the air is not enough to clean up wood smoke toxins. The CSU researchers recommended hearty and repeated scrub-downs of walls, floors and other surfaces, in addition to filtering air.
The second CU study from December, on health impacts, surveyed hundreds of neighbors whose homes were intact, but suffering from blown-in smoke and ash.
On a check-in six months after the fire, more than half of respondents spoke of more headaches, sore throats or “a strange taste in their mouth,” according to CU. The study, with lead researcher and associate professor of geography Colleen Reid, was also published in December in the ACS journal.
“Those who found ash inside were three times as likely to report headaches compared to those who didn’t find ash; those who reported an odd odor were four times as likely to report headaches compared to those who did not pick up an unusual scent,” according to CU’s account of the study.
Survey answers were similar in geographic clusters, and those findings are “consistent with chemical exposures,” Reid said, in a CU summary.
Dresser said in an interview that it’s difficult to link specific ailments to specific VOC readings, but it’s clear the chemicals detected were high, and that they came in with the smoke and ash. The companion studies should be seen as a launching point for more research on resident hazards in WUI areas, the scientists said.
“I just want to add,” Dresser said, “that it was really amazing for these homeowners to open their spaces to us, and that really was what allowed us to do this work.”
Read more about the Marshall fire studies in an upcoming story at ColoradoSun.com.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
MEDICAID
Colorado’s Medicaid director tries to fight off job cuts
Talk about a rough way to go back to work following a holiday week. On Monday morning, Colorado Medicaid boss Kim Bimestefer went before the legislature’s budget committee to make the case for saving jobs at the department, even as lawmakers look to slash its budget.
As we’ve written many times before, lawmakers are going to give a close look at Colorado’s ballooning Medicaid budget this year as they try to close a massive budget gap — something committee members reiterated Monday during the hearing.
“This is a third of our budget, and we’re cutting, essentially, a billion dollars this year,” Joint Budget Committee chair Sen. Jeff Bridges, D-Greenwood Village, said. “I don’t know how we do that without impacting this agency in some way.”
So Bimestefer didn’t fight the idea that Medicaid’s budget needs a haircut. In her opening remarks, she echoed previous concerns raised at the JBC, noting that unless something changes Medicaid spending “will continue to put pressure on the state budget year after year.”
Bimestefer instead focused her remarks on how lawmakers could cut the Medicaid budget without doing too much damage or creating unintended consequences that cost the state more in the long run.
She talked about putting a pause on coverage expansions that have not yet been or are just being implemented. This includes possibly making adjustments to the Cover All Coloradans program, which kicked off Jan. 1 and which provides Medicaid coverage to immigrants who are children or who are pregnant and, because of their legal status, are otherwise ineligible for Medicaid.
But Bimestefer was adamant that lawmakers should try to avoid cutting jobs within the department — or what she called FTE, in the budget-speak of the JBC meeting room.
Medicaid pulls in a lot of federal dollars, and she said the work of those department employees is vital in finding ways to grab even more federal cash to help with the budget shortfall. Staffers are also cheaper, she said, than the contractors the department sometimes has to hire when it is short-handed.
Out of a total proposed budget of $17.4 billion, Bimestefer said the department uses only 4% of its budget on administrative expenses, including employee salaries. The remaining 96% goes to paying for medical care.
Lastly, she said the department will need to lean on its employees to help it navigate whatever changes may happen in federal law or policy as Donald Trump returns to the White House.
“I would ask of you: We have FTE. FTE are agile,” Bimestefer said. “We had to be agile during COVID, and we will have to be agile going forward.”
MORE: Perhaps it’s a sign of how difficult it will be for lawmakers to cut Medicaid, but the most contentious part of Monday’s hearing involved JBC members criticizing a way the department tries to save money.
The debate involved what is known as prior authorization — essentially requiring a Medicaid member to get the program’s permission to undergo a treatment or start on a medication before the department will pay for it. If this sounds familiar, it’s because private insurance companies do the same thing, often to the detriment (and anger) of their patients.
Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, hammered the practice, saying it can delay needed care for patients and leave them sicker as a result.
“I understand it might save money, but at whose expense?” Kirkmeyer said.
Other JBC members joined in, raising concerns that the practice especially harms those who are most in need or most disadvantaged.
But Bimestefer urged lawmakers not to crack down on the department’s use of prior authorization — a “tool in the tool belt,” she said, for conducting what she termed “utilization management.” Prior authorization protects the state from getting bilked by medical providers determined to run up big bills, she said.
“We have a serious budget issue,” she said. “We can’t just turn off all the reasonable protocols and let people prescribe whatever they want, to do whatever they want.”
If lawmakers are concerned about delays in prior authorization approvals, she said more funding to beef up that department might be needed.
“Please don’t terminate prior authorizations,” Bimestefer pleaded. “We are not commercial insurance. We are not making profits. All we are trying to do is appropriately control our trend so that we can preserve that which we hold so dear, which is the benefits provided to 1.4 million people.”
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
MORE HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
With Medicaid under the spotlight in Capitol budget talks this year, it’s important to remember the program plays a much bigger role in some areas of the state than others.
The map above shows rates of enrollment by county in Health First Colorado — the brand name that Colorado’s Medicaid program operates under. (These rates do not include enrollment in CHP+, a program primarily for children whose families earn slightly too much to qualify for Medicaid.)
The highest enrollment rate is in Costilla County, where the average monthly Medicaid enrollment represents nearly 55% of the population. Pitkin County has the lowest enrollment rate at 8.42%.
In terms of sheer numbers, the counties with the largest number of Medicaid enrollees are also those with the largest total populations — Denver, El Paso, Arapahoe and Adams counties.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
You made it! Unlike almost every Colorado Rockies’ season, you finished strong.
Pitchers and catchers report in a little over a month. Meanwhile, headers and heelers report to the National Western Stock Show in a couple days. And we’ll report back here next week.
’Til then, stay toasty.
— John & Michael
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