Urban Decay, Oil and Gas Taxes, and the Fight for Property Rights

On the July 30, 2025 broadcast, Kim Monson examines how government policies are driving urban decay, crushing Colorado’s energy industry, and eroding property rights from the local level to the federal level, with former state legislator Ramey Johnson, Laramie Energy CEO Bob Boswell, and sixth-generation farmer and rancher Trent Loos.

The Psychology of Living in Urban Decay

Start listening at 16:00 – Hour 1

Ramey Johnson, former state legislator and Lakewood city councilwoman, sounds the alarm on the psychological toll of watching neighborhoods crumble under failed public policy. Johnson, who grew up in Lakewood, describes a community that has shifted 180 degrees from what she knew, with Colfax Avenue nearing collapse as businesses flee and buildings stand boarded up with broken windows. She cites research showing that residents living amid urban blight experience increased stress, anxiety, depression, and a dangerous phenomenon called degradation desensitization, where people simply accept filth and neglect as the new normal.

Johnson traces much of the damage to Governor Polis’s House Bill 1313, which designated a half-mile zone on both sides of light rail corridors for transit-oriented development. Six Colorado cities have sued the governor over the bill, claiming it violates home rule authority, but Lakewood has not joined the suit. Johnson believes the city is intentionally allowing property values to decline along Colfax and 14th Avenue so developers can move in with high-density housing. A Safeway at Garrison and Colfax is closing due to rampant theft, leaving nearby residents without a neighborhood grocery store and creating the very food deserts city officials claim to oppose.

“A degradation desensitization, which means that the decay and neglect and filth is basically you’ve just come to accept it as the norm.”

Ramey Johnson, Former State Legislator

Colorado’s Billion-Dollar Energy Tax Burden

Start listening at 32:33 – Hour 1

Bob Boswell, CEO of Laramie Energy, breaks down the staggering tax load Colorado imposes on its oil and gas industry, a burden that totals roughly a billion dollars a year before income taxes. Boswell explains the three main property tax categories: ad valorem taxes at 87.5% of estimated property value, which is three times higher than other businesses and twelve times the residential rate; severance taxes based on production levels; and a mill levy aimed at plugging and abandoning orphan wells. On top of these, the state has layered 23 additional fees, several targeting oil and gas specifically, that Polis’s administration uses to circumvent TABOR protections.

The consequences are stark. Colorado is losing major economic opportunities as data centers and AI facilities choose Utah, Wyoming, and Texas over a state weighed down by hostile regulations and excessive taxation. Crusoe, a Denver-based company, recently announced a $1.3 billion project in Wyoming rather than building in Colorado. Meanwhile, the state faces a $1.2 billion budget deficit even as it continues policies that drive the very industry generating those tax revenues out of the state. Boswell argues that the environmental narrative has been weaponized as a tool for political control rather than genuine stewardship, noting that CO2 is nature’s fertilizer and the Earth thrives at 1,000 parts per million.

“But these big opportunities data centers are being offered in other states, but not in the state of Colorado because of our repressive regulatory and tax system.”

Bob Boswell, CEO of Laramie Energy

Land Use Rewrites and the Assault on Property Rights

Start listening at 71:14 – Hour 2

Trent Loos, a sixth-generation farmer and rancher, exposes a coordinated nationwide effort to strip landowners of control through land use code rewrites funded by federal dollars. Loos fields roughly six inquiries daily from communities facing situations identical to what happened in Chaffee County, Colorado, where new land use plans sideline primary industries and the people who built those counties. He shares a Texas case study: Susan Grisham’s family, on their land since 1850, sold their property for $1,200 an acre under threat of eminent domain to make way for a reservoir. The unused portions of that family land are now listed at $850,000 per lot, and the reservoir water is being piped to Plano, Texas, to cool an AI data center.

Loos identifies $3.6 billion in Community Development Block Grants funneled through HUD to 7,000 local entities in 2024 as the mechanism driving these land use changes. The federal money incentivizes municipalities to restructure zoning in ways that benefit out-of-state and out-of-country investors rather than local businesses and residents. Kim Monson recalls her time on city council during the Obama administration, when she discovered CDBG grants were being used to push affirmatively furthering fair housing mandates, and notes that Douglas County was one of only two counties in the country that voted to refuse the money. Loos argues that real change requires states to stop accepting federal funding that compromises local sovereignty.

“I am no longer in the camp that we need to fix DC. We must dismantle DC and that happens when we get states stop taking money for things they shouldn’t be taking money for.”

Trent Loos, Sixth-Generation Farmer and Rancher