Left Face
Join Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson while they talk politics and community engagement in Pikes Peak region.
Left Face
Kat Gayle's Fight for Colorado Springs
What does it take to challenge the status quo in local politics? Today, we sit down with Kat Gayle, a candidate for the Colorado House in District 14, who has been making waves in Colorado Springs. Growing up in Loveland with a strong conservation ethic, Kat's career has spanned law and human rights work across various countries. Her journey back to Colorado Springs, spurred by a contentious amphitheater project, highlights the power of grassroots activism in addressing community concerns and shaping local governance.
Kat shares eye-opening insights on the financial and legal challenges faced by citizens contesting local government decisions, particularly in development projects. She emphasizes the critical need for fair representation and justice in our communities. We discuss the broader implications of uncoordinated development on local infrastructure, safety, and public services. This episode is a must-listen for those interested in the dynamics of local governance and the balance of power between developers and citizens.
We also delve into the preservation of open spaces and the challenges of urban development in Colorado Springs. Kat voices her concerns over the commercialization of parks and the impact of infill development on wildlife habitats. We tackle the pressing issue of affordable housing, critiquing the shift towards "attainable housing" and the lack of necessary infrastructure to support increased density. Join us for an inspiring conversation that underscores the need for responsible growth to ensure a sustainable future for Colorado's residents.
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Hello everybody, welcome back for another episode of Left Face. I am joined today with my co-host, adam Gillard, and we have a guest with us today, kat Gale, who is seeking office in the Colorado House, district 14. Hello, kat. Hello, we are going to jump straight into the interview this morning. Sometimes we cover some local topics, but we've got a really interesting conversation with Kat this morning, so we are not going to waste any time. We're going to get straight into hearing about her efforts to take this seat. So, kat, if we could start with the easiest question that you can answer tell us about yourself and tell us about what, in your background or in your current life, has inspired you to run for office.
Speaker 2:Right, so I'm a Coloradan. I grew up in Loveland, left Loveland when I graduated from high school and went to college in Massachusetts, my dad is a professor at CSU, so I had to get as far away from that as possible. My dad is a summer ranger, or was a summer ranger, in Yellowstone National Park, so I actually did the Abraham Lincoln thing and lived in a log cabin. That was back in the days when the grizzlies were there and the brown bears and black bears everywhere, because the landfills weren't covered. I've grown up in conservation. Wildlife, hunting, fishing, outdoors, shooting, sports have been a passion of mine and continue to be in our family. But after I left and went to college, went to law school in Washington DC, met my husband on an airplane. He's a Marine and that was my history.
Speaker 2:So we spent most of the next 30 years overseas serving the US government, and my work overseas was often in voting rights, transparency in government democracy projects. My last job before returning to Colorado Springs, I was the senior human rights advisor for USAID in Haiti, so again it was about voter rights, education, human rights. Came back to Colorado Springs ready to retire, spent some time in my home state and learned that our government wasn't really taking care of the people the way I thought it would, and I thought this wouldn't fly in Haiti, this wouldn't fly in Egypt, this wouldn't fly in Pakistan. So I thought it's time to get involved, pay it forward, serve my country that served me for so many years. So I started when, out of the blue, they put an amphitheater in the middle of a bunch of neighborhoods in the northern part of Colorado Springs. Now I love live music. I was a DJ when I was in college and have been to shows all over the United States but there's a difference to loving music and putting it in the middle of a neighborhood. So we looked at federal law state law local
Speaker 2:ordinances and they violated law after law, after law. But that didn't seem to stop our city council. They went right on through, so our hearing went to one o'clock in the morning. I called a friend of mine who works for the Independence Institute because one of my big problems my future son-in-law was a veteran in Afghanistan, got blown up six times in three days traumatic brain injury, ptsd, and so having bass noise thumping, predictable explosions, flashing lights wasn't going to work and so got involved. Called my friend. She said you should run for office. I said I have no filter, that's never going to work.
Speaker 2:And she said just try. So on Friday, the 13th, I went and picked up my package from the city by the following Monday. I had enough signatures and I was in the race running for a large seat. So I went all over the city and it was good. I crawled out from underneath the rock that I've been living under and got to meet people from all over and said, ah, this is what they're trying to do in this part of town. This is what they're trying to do in this part of town Development of Gold Hill, Mesa, arsenic flats, the Mill Street neighborhoods that have lived there for generations. That's affordable housing. Those people have lived there. Their houses are paid for.
Speaker 2:When Drake came down, all of a sudden developers say, whoo, downtown property, waterfront mountain view, let's just displace all those people. They were going to extend Constitution Avenue so that new homes, by banning Lewis Ranch, could do a straight shot over to I-25 and hook on up to Denver where they'd work. It was not about accessing Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs got no benefit from that, so we were fighting that. And so then I got increasingly involved in what is our city council doing? What's our county doing. So I lost the race. I had a $3,000 budget. I came in fourth. There were three seats available. They ran on half a million dollar budget.
Speaker 3:So I came close.
Speaker 2:Who were they? Yes, it came from Colorado Springs Home Builders Association, norwood, the usual suspects, the usual developers, colorado Springs Forward. I mean, those seats were bought and paid for. So then, because of meeting so many people, a lot of people asked me if I would advocate for them in their own neighborhoods. Fights against the city. So recently I've been involved in this fight about putting in 360 houses with one road out into a neighborhood that already has only one road out. That was within a mile of the Black Forest fire.
Speaker 2:Fire safety doesn't matter. All the neighborhood's involvement, all the neighborhood's research, all the heartfelt testimonies irrelevant. So most of the development goes back to safety, and here in Colorado Springs it's evacuation safety in wildfires. You could see from the Marshall Fire that you don't have to be up in the woolly or the mountainside west of I-25 to be at risk, even though we saw from Wallop Canyon. That is definitely important. And then just last April we had a fire at the Air Force Academy that closed. That's suburbia Black Forest. We have that interesting bit of woods. That's also on the plains in suburbia. So we have to think about infrastructure before we do any more development.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, because we look at the grass fires that Denver experienced a couple years ago now, maybe a year ago, but I mean in an afternoon it was $20 in damages just wiped out neighborhoods. Oh, and we're in the same path right now.
Speaker 2:Yep, and I was saying I'm from Loveland. We just had the fire up there and we were out there evacuating chickens and horses from suburbia.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep no-transcript.
Speaker 2:I mean plenty of homes were lost, and so there's a concept that's called evacuation modeling, and this is something that FEMA uses. This is something that the Clear Regulatory Commission uses. This is something that they're using throughout the state of California, where they actually run models, for if there's a fire here and the traffic comes here, and what will this traffic light do? Because it turns out the Paradise Fire? There was a traffic light. I think it was six miles away, nine miles away. They just set that on green. Those cars could have kept on going, but you don't think about it. Look at Lahaina. You just don't think about it. And so what we have now is something called Zone Haven, where you're supposed to evacuate when your zone is called. Well, here's the thing in an emergency, what's the first thing that goes?
Speaker 3:Communications. Right, yeah, and common sense, and common sense. Once they start you back, you'd be like I'm not waiting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's neighbors across the little valley that you're in. You know they're leaving.
Speaker 1:You're not going to wait for the text message, because why wouldn't you get ahead of an emergency instead of wait your turn?
Speaker 3:to get out of the emergency. Yeah, even if like flow in the end would work out, people aren't going to. Yeah, yeah, it's unrealistic.
Speaker 1:Absolutely not, we can't get 10 people that are inside a building in a fire with instructions and directions everywhere, if we had a fire right now, I'd be out the door before you guys.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I play rugby. I can take you down and I'll be out.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, kat, I think you're probably the first person that I heard of that has such a drive for really very specific local issues that are, state and county focused issues. As far as housing and safety evacuations, do you feel like the process of how these things are deployed?
Speaker 2:to your military or deployed into our neighborhoods.
Speaker 1:Deployed into our community do you feel like that's transparent? Do you think? I know you made some comments around how the city council is making these decisions. What have you fought for or what are you trying to change so that people in a neighborhood or people that are engaging with the city or the county will understand the problem, understand the topics better? You plan to increase transparency or change the way that the citizens are incorporated?
Speaker 2:Well, that's probably the hardest thing because, proud American, my dad's Army, husband's Marine, father-in-law Marine, future son-in-law Army I believed and worked for our country my entire life. And when you see that, in fact, our government is serving developer interests, not individual interests, not the citizen's interests, something's got to change. And my opponent not only advocated for, but voted for this law that if a citizen sues the government on a decision based on development and loses, the citizen has to pay the government's attorney's fees.
Speaker 3:Wow Okay.
Speaker 2:What's wrong with this picture?
Speaker 3:Number one we already pay their legal fees.
Speaker 2:That's what our taxes are. Number two the citizens have nothing to gain from this. They have no financial interest. They're just trying to protect their homes their safety their sanity.
Speaker 1:If they win, their life stays exactly as it is right now Exactly.
Speaker 3:They're trying to prevent harm. Getting some benefit out of the process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's whack-a-mole, so it's like, okay, we hit this one, we've got to wait and see where the next one pops up.
Speaker 1:I hear that policy would be. I mean whether it's designed that way. Talk about attention to the policy discourages it discourages anyone from taking on a case like their property line partners and neighbors right there to think twice about jumping into that because there's thousands of dollars penalty if they and then this is the case where they lose. And so now they've got a few thousand dollar lawyer bill and things are going to get billed.
Speaker 2:And it's not just a few thousand dollar legal fees, because in Northgate we had hundreds of people that were fighting putting the amphitheater in but the only attorney we could find who would take it on was from Boulder, because everybody else works in town and doesn't want to touch that. And they said it would be a minimum $30,000 retainer, $33,000 retainer and it could go up to $100,000. And we're like and the law.
Speaker 1:It's got to be motivated and it may have nothing to show for it.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and the law is written that the government knows how to interpret the laws. I beg to differ, but there you go. So this new law. The citizens group already is responsible for their own legal fees and then the government's legal fees. Who even knows where they're going to come up with that? Do we have to pay for the air conditioning of the city buildings? Because that's what the lawyer said. But what if the developer also hires one of the big Denver firms or Washington DC firms where the people bill at $500 or $1,000 an hour and so they're fighting the government's case? Do we have to then pay those legal fees? Right, but get this. If the people win, the government doesn't have to pay the people's legal fees. If the developer that actually has a huge financial interest in this process loses, they don't have to pay the city's legal fees.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're protected.
Speaker 2:They're protected. So the only people who are losing the constitutional right to sue the government. That's part of the First Amendment. You know we all talk about free speech, free religion. There's also the right to petition the government against grievances, which basically means government you screwed up, I'm suing you. So they're taking away that constitutional right. Also, they're taking away due process and that all of us are equal under the law. Because how is it that the people are less equal than the? The people, the only ones who don't stand for anything, are the only ones who are responsible. So my opponent lobbied for this and pushed it through.
Speaker 3:So what about when they make the argument that it creates jobs and keeps our government benefit from that? Oh, I have more jobs.
Speaker 2:They can have those jobs. Are the jobs of a construction worker worth the lives of people who cannot get out in case of a wildfire? And again, most of these suits will fail.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:And so what it is doing is it's taking away your constitutional right. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's a great point to draw the contrast that it's where somebody's left. We could even go further in building our infrastructure more complete. Before you start doing these things we want to create these things. Focus on building base layer infrastructure. We're talking roads or transportation systems in these areas. We're talking roads or transportation systems in these areas. We're concerned about those.
Speaker 2:Yeah, two ways out. Multimodal transportation yeah, exactly, fix these roads.
Speaker 1:Well, you know on that topic and we spoke a little bit about this earlier.
Speaker 1:But folks in Colorado Springs and anybody that's listening that doesn't live right here in the area we've got kind of a diverse layout for the city where we've got mountains, we've got pikes, peak, we've got heavily forested areas and then it moves down to the river and then it turns into plains and all of that exists all right here in town. So what kind of challenges are there in the local government and, from the state perspective, how do you impact those challenges to make sure that we are keeping, as we talked about, two egress points for development? That sounds like just a bear, I feel like if we can achieve the bear minimum.
Speaker 1:How do we just be even? More forward, leaning on making sure that this is how these requirements be developed.
Speaker 2:I think part of the problem with the governmental process of approving any development is they're approving a development on a case-by-case basis and nobody is looking at the big picture. I'm for smart growth, but smart growth includes not only this new development that's going in with two ways in and two ways out for safety.
Speaker 2:but it also includes how does this impact the existing development? What does it do to our schools, to our libraries, to our emergency services? This impacts the existing development. What does it do to our schools, to our libraries, to our emergency services? And another flim-flam game that our city council played is this water ordinance. I can't remember what it is. They changed it to 132% or 128%, but the number of percentage that they have to have before they can annex any new land is not based on science. It's arbitrary.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely arbitrary, and when you're dealing with water in a temperate desert?
Speaker 2:like Colorado you need to think about science, and so that also goes into the planning, because now, when I was growing up, everybody had their Kentucky grass lawns that all looked like the Brady Bunch, and so now it's like, okay, we're going to do something about water, so we're going to xeriscape. But people have turned from xeriscaping to hardscaping and they just throw rocks down everywhere. Rocks create an impermeable surface. In order for a recharge, the rain has to have somewhere to go, and these rocks are absorbing heat all day, so by the time the water hits it, it's evaporating instantly, it does not go down into the ground.
Speaker 2:Also, we have something it used to be that for every 1,000 residents, we had to set aside seven or seven and a half acres in a given area, which would be green space. It would be a park, it would be like that. Then first they took it down to five and a half acres. Now they turned it to something called payment in lieu.
Speaker 2:So somebody comes up somehow with a formula how much that land is worse and they give that land to the city, but that's not protecting chunk of land in that area. Which wildlife corridors are necessary? The animals need to be able to get from one place to another to migrate.
Speaker 1:Take us to the street.
Speaker 2:No, I mean there were pronghorn all over where flying horses knew Right, and I saw a semi had taken out most of her herd. I feel sorry for the semi, I feel sorry for the animal, but there's no longer corridors. But also just having the hardscape and the rocks raises the temperature. I think they're calling it heat islands. Now you go down to Phoenix, arizona. It was going to bring Phoenix, yeah, pacific, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's a different area.
Speaker 2:It's like 17 degrees hotter. You know what's funny about that?
Speaker 3:though Is you know, know, like black lines and stuff like that do the same thing. Really. Just read yes, once you hit 125, it's a black flag and you're supposed to shut operations and stop working. Never gets to 125.
Speaker 2:It's amazing it's like there's a bubble around that flight line so we keep working oh funny about that, yeah it's weird but you know like, even if you're walking your dog and you're walking past grass versus past somebody that has just river rock right, you can feel that little amount of temperature difference and so that's something else that needs to be considered statewide if the cities are going to be taking care of it, and we have home rule here, which is great, except that we have switched home rule into we can do whatever we want.
Speaker 2:In actuality, home rule gets its authority from the state and the federal government. So by law, colorado spring city government and el paso county government should be following the constitution of the state of colorado and our constitution but and smart growth planning yeah planning should be what the planning office does, not just approving.
Speaker 1:Right now, 70 of the people that sit on the planning commission are related to the construction industry we talked the dangers of wildfires here, but that comes along with the reason why a lot of people live here is because we have access to this natural meat, and so it should give and take the risk of a wildfire, at risk of poor management causing problems. But we also have the benefit year-round we can just drive a couple miles and we're in the most beautiful natural place. So I'm curious if you have some plans on how we can make sure that the parks, the green spaces, the beautiful attraction that brings everybody to Colorado Springs stays intact. You know, in spite of all the lack of transparency, poor choices around development, how do you plan to do that?
Speaker 2:Well, that goes first to conservation versus preservation, and preservation would be if we just put a fence around something that said leave it alone. Conservation is whether it's timber hunting, fishing licenses, sales on ammunition and taxes all go to supporting our great wild areas, and so we have to encourage that. But in order to encourage that, we have to leave some of these spaces open. So when you have the city selling off 60 acres of land for yet another housing development, this is a problem. I believe in actually claiming blighted areas, like if you look along some parts of the city where the dog track used to be.
Speaker 2:I used to work at the dog track in Loveland, just because I'm that color on. That would be an area where you could do infill, but instead I think infill is let's go build west of I-25 into these open spaces. Those open spaces need to be protected and preserved, number one for the wildlife and number two for wildfire evacuation. We cannot increase density or we don't have infrastructure to support it is now is using urban renewal allocation funds to build an amphitheater on pristine grassland rather than actually using those funds or what they're needed to reclaim the area where the dog track is. So also part of that we are commercializing our open spaces rather than maintaining them with tax dollars and our TOPS funds that Colorado Springs voted to tax ourselves because we think parks and open spaces are important.
Speaker 2:This new bike park maybe called parasailing, okay maybe creating more parking lots, but this is all for profit rather than for all of us like yeah yeah, so again I Coloradan. We used to tear everywhere on dirt bikes as well as our little regular bikes, but when you have taken a huge chunk of our trails to turn it to motorized vehicles, like these electric bikes. Electric bikes, on the one hand, create access for people who don't have the physical capabilities of riding a bike, or at least not in that type of a setting. And yet some of the electric bikes are cruising along at 40 and 45 miles an hour.
Speaker 2:One of my friend's sons just went to the emergency room because wrecking at 45 miles an hour is a lot faster than wrecking yourself. So the fact that we have taken that budget to open space and are creating huge parking areas and that's preventing people go there to ride their horse, walk their dog, take a jog, because you can't have that much competition for a limited amount of open space.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and those open spaces are kind of what really gives Colorado Springs the city as it is its uniqueness. Even the pocket parks you know walking around town here where you fall into some of these things. I think that's the charm that people want to keep in Colorado Springs. It's pretty disheartening to hear that. You know city council sounds like they're actively trying to reduce those sizes and commercialize it, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I know as a I like business, I like expansion, I like new people, I like new houses. But I don't like when I'm a citizen and I want to take my son, the teenager, out to a public, feel like he's a public space or a park, and I have to pay somebody Exactly.
Speaker 3:And I'm like wait, wait, wait. Why is this? I can see this and it just looks natural to me.
Speaker 1:And so I get heartburn over the $10, $20, whatever to essentially just use something that is really a natural environment. So that's where my heartburn comes from. Just to do what's. Yeah, walking around on trails and mountains shouldn't be restricted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've given somebody a concession to what we all want.
Speaker 1:And it's 100% profit-driven.
Speaker 2:It's one thing if.
Speaker 1:I'm like all right, I know that the state wildlife fund is getting this money. That's different.
Speaker 2:When it's you knowils of. Wonder.
Speaker 3:Emporium. Why am I paying for this?
Speaker 1:Well, Kat, I wanted to ask if there's anything else that you wanted to cover today, if there's anything for your constituents as far as a parting message that they need to know about you that we discussed.
Speaker 2:I think the most important thing about me is I stand for Colorado. I stand for Colorado Springs and for all of us, and if I get new information I will pivot. I am not entrenched in party lines. I'm not entrenched against the GOP and for the Dems and for the Dems Like my fighting about this new law that my opponent passed. That was a big part of the Democrat agenda as well. That's why it passed, because we have super majority in the House. And yet I think the most important thing is that we have a Colorado that we can be proud of, that we raise our children in, our grandchildren in, and that it will last, because when these open spaces are gone, when we run out of water, it's forever. I mean, you can look at what they're doing in the middle east and they're trying cloud seeding and they're doing this, that and the other thing to try to create rain and grass in the desert can't do it so I heard california had a bow turn and just take the waterfall out of the sky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, nancy Pelosi invented it, I guess.
Speaker 2:I'm science for water policy and energy policy, not just making things up. I mean the idea when I Zara escape my yard.
Speaker 2:So I'm therefore using less water that creates more water for the developer to develop, more land. To recapture, when the developers are building development after development east of powers, they're closing down my library in rock rimmon because, oh, it's so unfair. Everybody east of powers doesn't have a library. Well, you know what? Maybe the developers could build a new library. Maybe the developers could fund the new library instead of them profiting at my expense and leaving bills behind essentially for the public Precisely.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a whole other thing with their special taxation districts. Starting the henhouse.
Speaker 2:Yes, we're going to collect taxes from these people. We're not going to pay for curbs and gutters, we're not going to pay for a new station for the police and even the Humane Society. It's way down south on I-25. So if there's a lost dog or some issue up north or east, how do they get there? And people that have jobs from 9 to 5 can't get from their Denver job or from their house to get down to the humane society to get their pet. Yeah, I mean it's. It sounds like a small thing, but this is all part smart growth planning versus let's just keep going and what we're building is not affordable housing. They they switched the narrative to call it attainable housing. It's like oh, houses are starting at $500,000. Starting means pretty much don't have doorknobs.
Speaker 3:Don't have counters.
Speaker 1:For whom is that?
Speaker 2:attainable.
Speaker 1:Well, I tell you you're taking on some challenges. I think you've got your work cut out for you. We're excited to see how your campaign goes and we're excited to see how November goes for you. It sounds like the passion is there, putting in the footwork, so we've had a great time speaking with you today. We're here to support you and all of our listeners that are able to vote. Get out and mark your name on the ballot.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much and thank you both for your service.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
