WILDFIRESHow the Marshall Fire Sparked a Political Transformation in Colorado
After the fire destroyed his town in 2021, a state rep took on insurance companies, mortgage lenders, and landlords — and beat them all.
As the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Marshall Fire approached, Kyle Brown was serving as a city councilman in Louisville, Colorado, a suburb of Boulder that had been devastated by the blaze. Brown’s own home had escaped damage, but hundreds of his neighbors had lost everything to the costliest and deadliest fire in the state’s history, which caused more than $2 billion in damages and destroyed more than a thousand structures.
Despite Brown’s efforts to help the victims, the fire recovery was stalling out. Displaced residents were struggling to secure insurance payouts and scrape together cash to rebuild their homes, and most couldn’t afford the jacked-up rents in the area. The City Council was supposed to be helping these victims, but instead it was locked in a dispute with them over whether they should have to pay local taxes on building materials.
Brown was desperate for a way to do more. When the incumbent state representative in the area resigned after it emerged that she didn’t live in the district, he saw an opportunity and put his name forward as her replacement.
What happened next is one of the rare disaster recovery success stories in recent U.S. history. After securing a seat in the state legislature, Brown, a Democrat, spent the next two years working with a highly organized group of survivors to pass a suite of ambitious bills that have made Colorado a national leader in responding to climate disasters. Many of the same issues crop up across the country after fires and floods, but survivors rarely succeed in getting lawmakers to pay attention to any of them, let alone all of them. Brown, however, was able to gain bipartisan support for bills that give fire survivors leverage against insurers, mortgage companies, homeowners associations, and rental property owners, elevating concerns that have often been ignored in other disaster-prone states.
This legislative success wasn’t thanks to any political horse-trading or inspiring rhetoric on Brown’s part. Rather, it’s the result of a hand-in-glove collaboration with a well-organized and often militant group of fire survivors, drafting bills based on their recommendations and needs, and allowing them to tweak and strengthen legislation where necessary.
“We needed to accelerate the pace of recovery, so I just listened,” said Brown in an interview with Grist. “I took notes on everything they said, and I turned it over, and I turned it into bills.”
