Saving Kit Carson: Inside one rural Colorado town’s battle to stay alive and revitalize its community

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KIT CARSON

From where John Mitchek stands, smack at the intersection of two wide, quiet streets, he can turn one direction and imagine his hometown’s future. He surveys a corner lot currently under contract to the local redevelopment agency, which plans to level the two long-vacant, dilapidated houses and replace them with a pair of new, desperately needed single-family homes.

On the opposite corner, he sees a nettlesome past, festering in the form of two ramshackle houses bordered by a tangle of half-dead trees and shrubs. The structures serve as reminders that roughly 1 in 5 of Kit Carson’s 144 houses stand vacant — often retained by owners who choose to pay paltry property taxes rather than rehab or sell parcels that could be turned into new housing stock.

For Mitchek, the town’s recently hired housing specialist, the contrast further reflects the idiosyncrasy of rural Colorado towns that already face their own brand of interconnected economic and administrative hurdles to growth — or even survival. Low residential inventory. Outdated ordinances. Government programs that don’t quite fit. Declining local businesses. Dwindling population.

But on a stroll through town, the housing problem provides the sharpest visual. Well-maintained older homes and a handful of still-pristine new builds stand in contrast to properties fallen to neglect, with little to no consequence — reminders that the same dogged independence that powers rural life can also hold it back.

“It’s kind of a generational thing where some people that are holding onto their houses, they’re not thinking outside of themselves,” Mitchek says. “They’re not thinking about the actual community surviving long term. They’re just saving money or whatever, while the rest of us have a stake in the community for the long term.”

At 31, Mitchek represents the archetype of so many young adults who have left Kit Carson, but also embodies the hope for the town’s future — sons and daughters descended from agricultural roots, farmers and ranchers who settled in the region generations earlier. His great-grandfather staked a claim around nearby Cheyenne Wells in the 1920s, making Mitchek the fourth generation to grow up on the land.

Although he followed a familiar and well-worn path away from small-town life on the Eastern Plains, several years later he finds himself back in Cheyenne County. Not only has he rediscovered the sense of community he took for granted growing up, but Mitchek has joined the vanguard of local efforts to preserve the very existence of a town that has lost nearly a quarter of its population since he was born. 

With Kit Carson hovering around 250 souls after a dip to 206 in 2009, the pre-K-12 school built just five years ago for $32 million as a sparkling hub of the community now faces declining enrollment, which this fall is expected to dip below 100. One common way some describe such a low-water mark: There won’t be enough high school students to field even a six-man football squad.

For more than two years now, locals have sounded the alarm. Public meetings have been convened under the dire rubric of “save our town.” No-bad-ideas brainstorming focused on ways to attract more residents. And perhaps most significantly, strategies for expanding housing inventory and triggering economic growth, however incremental, have started to gain traction.

And this is where Mitchek figures in.

Kit Carson’s efforts to reverse its decline have been led primarily by Amy Johnson, who resurrected the dormant Kit Carson Rural Development, or KCRD, 20 years ago. For the past several years she has led the nonprofit’s effort to acquire properties — including decaying houses often beset with expensive asbestos issues — and seek a patchwork of grants and government funding to help turn them into viable homes to sell or rent.

Her constant ally is Jason Dechant, the town’s mayor and high school basketball coach when he isn’t tending to his farm and cattle. Johnson, too, juggles her volunteer position with the constant demands of the family ranch just outside of town. 

Mitchek fills the gaps, thanks to a full-time, grant-funded position that he’s defining — and learning — on the fly. He has dived into projects as varied as revisiting long outdated local ordinances; hatching creative strategies to acquire vacant and uninhabitable homes; and joining local leaders in pleading the town’s case at the state legislature. 

Perhaps most importantly, he’s been available to turn ideas into action when Dechant and Johnson are pulled away by other demands. A full-time presence makes a difference.

“Having him in there for a small town like this has just been a godsend, really,” Dechant says. “He’s the epitome of somebody you want to come back, get a job, get his hands into volunteering. He’s a perfect example of what we’re trying for here.”

“Hiring John was the biggest win ever,” Johnson adds, noting that the town council recently passed a resolution to continue funding his position beyond the life of the initial grant. “John has enabled us. He grew up here and wants to see the town survive. College educated, motivated, intelligent, resourceful — he can understand stuff that old me does not.”

A meandering path home

Mitchek’s path to the housing specialist position was anything but direct and intentional.

After high school, he left his family’s sprawling farm north of Kit Carson to attend Colorado State University and majored in journalism and technical communications, though he eventually added agricultural literacy, then a new course of study at the school. After graduation, he returned to work on the land when job prospects didn’t pan out. But before long, he was once again itching to leave and moved back to Fort Collins. 

Eventually, through a college buddy whose parents owned a cannabis farm, he found a comfortable fit for his agricultural upbringing and started helping out. Soon he was running the operation until, after about five years, a downturn in the cannabis market put him once more at loose ends.

Mitchek returned home to help out on the farm while he looked for jobs, but still struggled to find work that excited him. His father, Loren Mitchek, had been working with Johnson on various KCRD projects and, thanks to his fleet of heavy machinery, providing inexpensive demolition services on properties that had been acquired for redevelopment. Johnson, looking for some part-time help for KCRD, hired John Mitchek to assist with grant writing and whatever else she didn’t have time for.

One of his first projects was to apply for a grant that would fund the full-time position of housing specialist, tapping into state funding made available for affordable housing projects by Proposition 123, passed by voters in 2022. After the grant came through but applications for the job were sparse, Mitchek figured he might as well apply himself. He got the job in October.

“In the last couple years, there’s been a lot more momentum to make sure Kit Carson survives long term, to make sure that we can bring families in here,” he says. “I was pretty skeptical of that, how can we actually make Kit Carson something. It just seemed futile.”

But the more Mitchek immersed himself in the sometimes peculiar machinations of rural housing and economic development, the more he realized he was “weirdly this perfect fit to do this type of thing.” And the more excited he became about the possibilities. 

The grant included money for the mentoring services of senior planner Michael Yerman, who drives nearly 2,000 miles a month for his one-man company, My Rural Planner, visiting small towns, mostly across the Eastern Plains, and helping them address primarily housing issues. He’s careful to emphasize that he functions in an advisory capacity. Solutions tend to be local.

“There’s a healthy skepticism around consultants in rural communities,” Yerman says. “And I will say that that’s warranted. At the end of the day, I don’t live there. And while I have a tremendous amount of passion for helping rural communities, it takes a community champion to be there 24/7, and to be a resource when the resource is needed.”

As Yerman helped Johnson vet Mitchek for the job, he noticed one particular quality that recommended him for the position: Eastern Plains work ethic.

“That’s what really stood out to me, that he was willing to roll up his sleeves and do the hard work,” Yerman says. “That’s the part that you don’t learn in school.”

The formidable headwinds of an inverted housing market, one where the cost to build exceeds a home’s appraised value, blow through the prairie town with sufficient force to keep developers at bay. Costs for both stick built and even modular options have spiked — stick built by as much as 100% in the last decade and modular over 50% in the last couple of years.

State programs to encourage housing usually come with specific sale or rental requirements and deed restrictions on resident income that limit flexibility to respond to shifting circumstances. A few months ago, Mitchek accompanied Johnson to Denver to talk with lawmakers about the challenges their community faces.

Their presentation included a map, crafted by Mitchek, of the town’s housing inventory, illustrating in color-coded contrast the troubling number of vacant properties sprinkled throughout the downtown grid. They concluded with suggestions on how to tweak state programs to make housing funds more accessible.

Towns like Kit Carson aren’t looking for massive projects. Just another 10-15 homes, they told their audience, would get them where they want to be.

“If we don’t say something, if we’re not the squeaky wheel, we’re not going to get the grease,” Mitchek says. “If we don’t advocate for ourselves and really be a voice to the state, they’re just going to keep leaving us behind. So it might seem like an arduous path, but if we don’t just make ourselves heard and don’t show what our problems are, they will never consider them to begin with.”

On a broader level, Kit Carson grapples with the chicken-or-the-egg proposition of small-town economic development. Does more housing equal greater business opportunities or vice versa? And how do you solve that equation?

For years, the town has been hoping to entice investors to construct a truck stop. And in recent months, the possibility is at least moving forward with a landowner who appears committed to the project, with its prospect of increased commerce and sales tax revenue.

The conundrum: If the truck stop needs to hire, say, a manager and a few workers, where do they live? Does the town extend itself financially to build houses now, with fingers crossed that the truck stop deal goes through and it will be able to fill them?

“We can’t afford to do that,” Johnson concludes. “We don’t have the funds to build right now.”

It’s a simple truth: Progress, when it comes at all, tends to come slowly. Consider the effort to nudge longtime property owners — especially absentee owners — to fix up or sell dilapidated properties. Sometimes the owner just uses the property as a giant storage unit.

Johnson describes the situation as an odd intersection of a frontier spirit that’s extremely protective of private property and basically the abandonment of houses, sometimes passed down through generations, by owners squelching the option of turning them into additional housing stock. 

One avenue Mitchek is exploring, inspired by other rural communities, would be an ordinance allowing the town to charge property owners who have vacated homes where water has been turned off but meters remain, bringing the town up to speed with standard practice. 

Another possibility he’s looking at, with Yerman’s guidance, is a dangerous-building ordinance that would be adapted from a universal code for abatement and narrowed to fit Kit Carson. The aim would be to flag only the worst offenders — buildings that pose fire hazards or safety risks — and work with property owners to resolve any conflict.

“It’s all in the vein of getting the town up to a point where we actually have ordinances and an actual structure and method and the wherewithal to even go about remediating some of these buildings,” Mitchek says, “so that we can actually have more houses.” 

Still, these ideas have already stirred up some property owners. 

“It’s an interesting conundrum,” Johnson notes. “You can lean on people, but you’ll piss off most of them. In the end, hopefully, people’s situations change. We have one property we were after for 20 years, and we finally got it two years ago. 

“So you’ve got to be patient.” 

Reviving a flagging student body

Myles Johnson, just two weeks into his job as superintendent of the Kit Carson School, flips through the poster-size pages of class photos where generations of students look back at him in the hallway just outside the gymnasium. On one page, he finds his father. On another, his grandmother.

On yet another, he sees himself.

For Johnson, 37, this is a homecoming. And he hopes that it’s part of a broader trend that sees young adults who have left Kit Carson find their way back — much like Mitchek — to embrace the kind of supportive community that defined their youth. Scanning the walls inside the gym, he points to one of several giant photos of state championship teams, one that includes him as a member, though he says his role was minor. 

“Benchwarmer,” he laughs.

In fairness, that season he was an underclassman on a super-talented team. But the life lessons that led him into his career in education filtered down largely from his legendary multisport coach, Jim Trahern. In 2021, the gymnasium was dubbed “the Jim” and dedicated in honor of the man who taught and coached the town’s children for more than three decades. 

Dechant, the mayor and current basketball coach, also felt Trahern’s influence as he developed into a deadly three-point shooter and was twice named to the all-state team. Mitchek, by extension, benefitted from Dechant’s guidance. He graduated in 2012 from the Kit Carson School, where as a barely 6-foot, 250-pound senior — “kind of a bigger kid, not great at basketball” — he played center on the first Dechant-coached team. (“Because you can’t be from Kit Carson and not play basketball,” Mitchek says. “We’re a basketball town, so it kind of runs through the blood here.”)

Those kinds of shared experiences, handed down over the years, add to the essence of small rural towns like Kit Carson.

“Everyone has their own version of what their childhood meant to them,” Johnson says. “But I wouldn’t trade my upbringing here, my educational experience here in Kit Carson, for anything in the world. I have my own three young kids and would love it if they had the same type of experience that I got to enjoy.”

Johnson senses that more people his age are returning, though he understands the dynamics of rural housing and economic development — he’s KCRD director Amy Johnson’s nephew, after all. His departure from Kit Carson took him on a career path that eventually led to Idalia, a town about an hour and a half northeast of here that claims fewer than 100 residents, and where he spent the last nine years serving as a school administrator. He says that the Kit Carson position is the only one that could have pried him away.

“I think there’s something to be said about coming home,” Johnson says.

He arrived at a fraught time for the school, the town’s social hub and largest employer — though it’s facing the challenge of having about a half-dozen of its 32-person workforce retire or leave the district within the next three years. Enrollment for the next school year stands at 95, well below the building’s capacity of 216. 

Johnson and his wife were lucky to find a rental house big enough to accommodate their three children literally across the street from the school. Long term, he might look at building a place out on the family cattle ranch or just purchasing the current rental.

But the housing market already nearly cost the school a prime applicant for a kindergarten teaching job. The only available rental property didn’t fit her budget, prompting some creative problem solving.

Amy Johnson’s husband, Toby, serves on the school board and saw at least a temporary solution. His mother lived in a house on their ranch until her death in 2022. Since then other family members have used the property, but it currently sits empty. The Johnsons are working on arrangements for the teacher to live there for a year — after which, if all goes well, more rental properties could open up in town.

Myles Johnson realizes he faces a monumental task in a town where, as in many small rural communities, so much of civic life revolves around the school. And this one, with its pristine hallways and proud, sparkling trophy cases, comes with a built-in selling point: With a low  student-to-teacher ratio, it’s almost like giving your kids a private school education.

Despite the uphill battle ahead, he doesn’t call the situation a crisis.

“I think there’s urgency any time you have fewer than 100 students,” he says, “especially in this brand new facility that we’re proud of. We’d like to see it north of 100, certainly. And I think part of my job is to see that come to fruition.”

Amid challenges, progress emerges

Kit Carson’s save-our-town meetings started about two and a half years ago, convening in the school cafeteria. In the wake of COVID, businesses had sputtered and disappeared, stoking fears that the town was losing its footing on a slippery slope, despite the best efforts of local leaders to nurture both housing and economic growth.

While the slow pace of progress sometimes obscures positive steps, the call to action that began with those early meetings has produced some notable wins for the town. A restaurant and hotel, sitting idle for a couple of years since the owner died, reopened as the Kit Carson Cafe and the Bin Inn, (as in grain bin, referencing its ag roots) under the ownership of Mitchek’s 20-year-old uncle, powered by money from a family inheritance. 

Within walking distance of the cafe, Tesla installed an electric vehicle Supercharger station. Down the road, the local bank president opened an RV park. A local woman opened a liquor store. The owner of the town’s other hotel launched a small grocery store in a town that had none. The local sheriff and his wife looked to solve both recreation and family demands and opened an arcade and an adjacent daycare center.  

Even relatively small, incremental gains have impact. 

“Things are happening. Things are changing,” Mitchek says. “We’ve got to keep pushing, even though it seems like these things take forever.”

When the community meetings lamented the town’s lack of recreation, Cheyenne County Sheriff Michael Buchanan and his wife, Kayla, hatched an idea. Kayla’s aunt owned a building just off U.S. 287 on Main Street. The couple started thinking about buying the property — and imagining what they could put inside. 

A golf simulator had been pitched in the town meetings, and once they’d priced them and calculated they could afford that on top of purchasing the building, Michael Buchanan started tearing out carpet and remodeling. They closed the sale in April of 2023, opened for business just a few weeks later. 

“We just decided that it was our time to do something,” Michael says.

Since law enforcement officers are prohibited from holding a liquor license, Buchanan’s Golf Garage became a BYOB membership club — $400 a year for a family membership, half that for an individual. Pool tables and arcade games were added, as well as dart boards that spawned popular league competition. With the space accessible via an app, it never really closes.

Kayla, who had been doing home daycare, found the demand so high that she eventually decided to expand under the flag of a nonprofit and is on the cusp of opening Country Living Learning Center in the space next door to the Golf Garage, providing an oasis in a rural daycare desert.

She’s awaiting a licensing inspection on the newly remodeled space for licensing, but once the administrative details are complete, the facility will open at close to its capacity of 20 kids from infants to toddlers to preschoolers.

Just across the highway, Keith Curry opened Kit Carson Mercantile about a month ago. Curry, 59, moved here from Oregon 10 years ago to buy and run a motel with the help of his twin brother. Now he can’t imagine leaving.

A mini-mart in the motel lobby had proven popular and, based on people’s requests for specific items, grew until it became obvious that Curry would need more room. 

“And this space became available, and I thought, why not turn it back into a grocery store like it used to be, back in the early 1900s,” he says. “It’s just been growing from that point. We stock by request. If they want us to carry something, we get it.”

The store also offers Skylar Watson — Curry calls her his “star employee” — a summer job heading into her sophomore year of high school.

“One neat part is knowing the names of 98% of the people that walk through that door,” Curry says. “You get to know them, and you watch their kids grow up. I remember when (Skylar) was 6. Now she’s working, so it’s cool.”

Like other recent additions to the town’s economy, Curry’s venture grew out of those save-our-town conversations that seemed to carry an implicit ultimatum for Kit Carson.

“Move forward or die, quite literally,” he says. “And this is just my contribution to it.”

A nod to his ag roots

In the sticky afternoon heat, as dark clouds gather to the west, John Mitchek drives north out of town for about 20 miles before veering off the pavement onto a gravel road and then turning east toward an assortment of vehicles parked next to fields of winter wheat stretching to the horizon.

His dad, Loren, and his mom, Marianna, watch a combine, little more than a speck in the distance, crawl toward them, gradually growing larger in slow-motion service of the midsummer harvest. A nearly full semi-truck waits at the edge of the field to receive the rest of its payload.

Everyone keeps an eye on the approaching weather, hoping that rain clouds will skirt their operation and not wet the fields and shut down the massive GPS-tuned machinery gradually shearing more than 10,000 acres-worth of their livelihood. 

Although John Mitchek doesn’t feel his heart tied to the land so closely as his parents and other family members, that doesn’t mean he can’t drive a semi-load to the grain elevator in Cheyenne Wells, a 100-mile round trip from the fields. But living back on the farm the last couple of years confirmed what he’d suspected even in college — that his future doesn’t lie in agriculture.

“I’ll still help my family and I’ll drive a truck on the weekends for my dad and stuff,” he says. “I’m happy to do that. But I don’t want my entire life revolving around a couple patches of ground that I can never leave for more than a couple days.” 

That said, Mitchek could see himself staying in the area for the long term — especially if the town can maintain economic momentum and extend the job that has made him feel like he’s making a difference. But even if that’s not in the cards, he will have assembled a skill set touching on many elements of rural planning, like bread crumbs suggesting an exciting career path. 

He loves the work, in large part because he loves the town.

“I wouldn’t be who I am without this place,” Mitchek says. “So I want people to be able to still live here and have families. And if people like Amy and Jason weren’t trying, this place would have already dissolved into a ghost town years ago. I think it’s too good of a place to let it disappear.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.