Lesley Smith
Priorities
- Environment
- Public education
- Housing and healthcare affordability
Smith has spent most of her career as a teacher and scientist at CU Boulder. Her first elected position was on the Boulder Valley School District Board of Education from 2005-2013. She’s been on the University of Colorado’s Board of Regents since 2019.
Smith is well established in the political realm, with numerous endorsements from elected officials spanning local, state and federal offices like Congressman Joe Neguse and commissioners from each of the four counties overlapping her district.
While she knows District 49 from interacting with community members and from her previous campaign for the regent chair, she also relies on those political connections to understand local issues like “lopsided” distribution of gaming funds between Black Hawk and Central City and Gilpin County. While she doesn’t have specific plans to allocate more dollars to under-funded county services, she says she’s committed to working with Sen. Dylan Roberts (District 8) to find solutions.
She has more concrete ideas that support other priorities. For example, one way Smith says she will support healthcare affordability is by reintroducing and co-sponsoring a failed bill from this year, HB24-1075, that would look into a statewide universal healthcare payment system. It’s unclear if reintroducing that bill would be successful after a similar bill from 2023 concluded with the same outcome, and Colorado voters rejected a universal healthcare amendment in 2016.
Smith speaks Spanish and has made efforts to hear underrepresented voices as an elected official, such as participating in roundtable discussions after groups like the Latino Action Council criticized the hiring process for CU president Todd Saliman, a process she led. Smith stands by the search process, saying the committee she chaired was “a super strong and very diverse group” that considered “a diverse pool of candidates.”
Some of Smith’s solutions are Boulder-centric, which is where she lives, especially surrounding transportation. She says to maintain her already-established connections in the district’s rural communities, she’ll host town halls and keep the door open for her constituents.
Do you support the state’s elimination of local occupancy limits? Yes
Do you support ending the state’s prohibition on local rent control? Yes
Do you support requiring more density in your jurisdiction as a way to address the affordable housing crisis? Yes
Do you support the Front Range train as the state’s highest priority for passenger rail? Yes
See Smith’s full questionnaire: bit.ly/LesleySmithBW
Max Woodfin
Priorities
- Healthcare
- Climate
- Infrastructure
Woodfin hasn’t held an elected office. He’s been a public school teacher, a psychotherapist and an Army officer and veteran with a decade of service in the Colorado National Guard and one year overseas.
Woodfin’s platform focuses on supporting rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged areas in District 49. He wants to provide greater access to mental healthcare services, especially for Medicaid users, by establishing a minimum provider-to-patient ratio, streamlining credentialing processes and increasing reimbursement rates. That focus expands more broadly into affordable and quality healthcare, which he says is difficult for rural residents of District 49 who are far from public transportation, reliable internet access and clinics.
Another major piece of his platform is funding climate resilience projects, like wildfire mitigation, in rural and lower-income communities. Woodfin will lobby to increase state funding, grants and tax credits to create more fire-resistant communities specifically directed at this demographic.
He supports the pending Front Range Commuter Rail Project, but is concerned with how to get “people who are beyond the last mile” more reliably connected to existing public transportation. For example, he says many folks from Nederland avoid taking the RTD to Boulder on Friday and Saturday evenings because there isn’t a bus after 11 p.m. back home. He suggests expanding rural transportation services, like nonprofit Via Mobility Services’ The Climb from Boulder to Gold Hill, to give people in his district more opportunity to access public transportation.
In short — he says “I’m going to be a person who’s talking about getting more money for a lot of things.”
Although he doesn’t have experience in elected office, Woodfin has specific projects that, if funded, will help achieve his goals. Whether he’ll be successful advocating for dollars at the Capitol is yet to be seen.
Yes/no questions
Do you support the state’s elimination of local occupancy limits? Yes
Do you support ending the state’s prohibition on local rent control? Yes
Do you support requiring more density in your jurisdiction as a way to address the affordable housing crisis? Yes
Do you support the Front Range train as the state’s highest priority for passenger rail? Yes
See Woodfin’s full questionnaire: bit.ly/MaxWoodfinBW