Politics |

How the Marshall fire sparked a rare disaster recovery success story

This story was originally published by Grist and is part of State of Emergency, a series exploring how climate disasters impact voting and politics. It was published with support from the CO2 Foundation.

As the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Marshall fire approached, Kyle Brown was serving as a city councilman in Louisville, a Denver suburb 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 1,000 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, a nonprofit, independent newsroom that focuses on climate and environmental reporting. “I took notes on everything they said, and I turned it over, and I turned it into bills.”

This combination of organized advocacy by disaster survivors and ambitious lawmaking by sympathetic politicians could become a model for other disaster-prone places, but it was only possible because many well-heeled Marshall fire victims had the resources to organize and press for change after the fire, a luxury most disaster-stricken communities don’t have.

Lower-income communities around Colorado may benefit from the Marshall legislation, but it may be difficult for survivors in other parts of the country to emulate it.

The Marshall fire wasn’t like the massive forest fires that have tortured Northern California or the desert blazes that rage across Texas and New Mexico each year. It ripped down from the Front Range in December of 2021 and all but vaporized a fast-growing segment of metro Denver, bringing about what climate scientist Daniel Swain calls the “urban firestorm.”

High winds whipped the grass fire to full size in a matter of hours, igniting vegetation that had dried out during a severe drought of the kind that global warming is making more common. In contrast to California, where burned communities have often been rural and less well-off, the affected suburbs, Louisville and Superior, are dense and suburban, filled with well-to-do lawyers and consultants.

For that reason, there were several fire victims who had the time and money to become volunteer recovery advocates. One of those survivors was a patent lawyer named Tawnya Somauroo, who was galvanized to action when she learned that Louisville had not issued an evacuation order for her subdivision, most of which burned in the fire.

She spent months bird-dogging the mayor’s office and local law enforcement on her own time to ask about their evacuation procedures, but found herself making little progress.

“I didn’t even know where City Hall was before the fire,” Somauroo told Grist. “I just started calling City Council members and talking to them and getting not a very good reception at first. It just became this narrative of, ‘the survivors versus everyone else.’ ”

In other words, elected officials were weighing the need to finance the rebuilding of public parks and facilities against the need to help the hundreds of displaced homeowners.

As Somauroo watched local Facebook groups devolve into hubbub and confusion, she turned to a less commonly used app to make order out of the chaos — she downloaded Slack, the messaging platform normally used in white-collar workplaces, and invited hundreds of locals to join her there. The app allowed survivors to create individual message threads to discuss specific insurers, specific permits and specific federal aid deadlines.

“People would join a certain thread, and then someone would pop up who had the same problem, and then coach them (on) how they solved it,” she said. “And you know, little by little, we started identifying problems that way.”

Meanwhile, a former Boulder resident named Jeri Curry moved back to the area from Virginia to help aid in the long-term recovery. She and a group of fellow volunteers established a long-term recovery center in an office park, opening it up about 10 months after the fire as FEMA and Colorado wound down their recovery operations.

In addition to providing free food and computer access, the center provided guidance to survivors navigating the process of filing an insurance claim and applying for FEMA aid.

“The big thing that we believed the community overall needed was a gathering place, a central place where people could get everything that they needed,” she said. “The agencies put their mission first, their service delivery and resource delivery first, and they don’t put the survivor in the middle.”

These casework conversations alerted volunteers to the dynamics holding back the recovery — lowball cost estimates from insurers, delays in securing claim payouts and construction material sales taxes that many residents were struggling to pay.

Frustrated with the response from city officials, the survivors’ group — now incorporated as a nonprofit — decided to get in touch with their new state legislator, Brown, who was looking for ways to help fire victims.

Brown had worked for Colorado’s insurance department while serving on the Louisville council and had experience dealing with complex policy issues, but property insurance and housing law were new to him. So he relied on Somauroo’s expertise, letting her and the other survivors guide the bills he wrote and introduced.

This strategy soon produced a number of laws that gave immediate financial relief to fire survivors who had been struggling to rebuild. Brown passed a bill that stopped mortgage servicers from holding back insurance payments from customers who were waiting to rebuild, eliminating a delay that stopped many survivors from rebuilding for months.

He passed a bill that required insurers to take into account the state’s own estimates of rebuilding costs, a measure designed to stop them from lowballing homeowners trying to rebuild. Bills that gave survivors grants for rebuilding with fire-safe materials, provided them with rebates on construction material taxes, and plowed resources into studying smoke and ash damage all sailed through the legislature with ease.

“It feels really good to be listened to,” said Somauroo. “I would just sort of brief him on, like, people with this problem, that problem, that problem, and he would go move the bill forward.”

Beyond assisting Marshall survivors, Brown and the survivors’ groups also took on other institutions that hampered fire recovery in general. Somauroo had become incensed that homeowners’ associations in Louisville maintained design rules that prohibited residents from replacing the flammable wooden fences that had ferried the fire across the city.

Somauroo’s own subdivision had a decades-old deed covenant that in theory could have allowed any other resident to sue her for rebuilding with a fire-resistant fence. She took her concerns to Brown and he drafted a bill that prohibited HOAs, which represent more than half of Coloradans, from impeding a fire-safe rebuild.

One of Brown’s most difficult fights was against multifamily property owners, whom he accused of price gouging after the fire.

Some renters reported increased rents of 10%-15%, as displaced homeowners competed with existing tenants for a tiny number of available units, mimicking a dynamic that had emerged in California years earlier. In theory, there is a simple legislative solution to this problem — bar apartment owners from raising rents after a fire — but few jurisdictions have enacted it, in part because property owners have lobbied fiercely against such moves.

Earlier this year, Brown passed a strong bill that prohibits price gouging after fires, including with some Republican support.

Many of the bills Brown introduced faced initial objections from insurers, banks and landlords, all of whom had an established presence in the state Capitol. In other circumstances, this opposition might have doomed the laws, but the survivors of the Marshall fire acted as a political lobby; rather than just plead for help, they tweaked bills in response to industry criticism and ensured lawmakers knew they were paying attention to their votes.

Still, not everyone is happy. Betty Knecht, the executive director of the Colorado Mortgage Lenders Association, a trade group representing banks and other lenders, says she worries the legislature veered too far to the left in addressing the fire recovery.

“You had a very unbalanced legislature, which unfortunately allows for a lot more to be passed,” she said, referring to the large Democratic majorities in both chambers. She also pointed out that more than two dozen legislators at one point in their careers were appointed to fill vacancies, like Brown, rather than elected.

Knecht argued that Brown’s price-gouging legislation wouldn’t hold down rents and that the new pressure on insurers might make many leave the state, as has happened in Florida. However, she praised him for workshopping his mortgage-servicers bill with her group before it went up for a vote and adjusting the payout requirements.

The group didn’t end up endorsing the bill, but it didn’t come out against it either.

The Marshall fire victims secured a far bigger legislative response than the victims of past Colorado fires. The district adjacent to Brown’s had suffered a disaster of its own a few years earlier when the East Troublesome fire roared through the mountain town of Grand Lake, leaving hundreds of underinsured residents without the means to rebuild.

That district’s representative, Judy Amabile, had worked for most of 2021 on a bill that would prohibit insurers from haggling over the value of personal contents, but it still hadn’t come together when the Marshall fire struck that December.

Frustrated with the lack of progress, Amabile used the surge of attention around the Marshall fire to push through the bill that was designed to help the East Troublesome survivors. The experience of seeing her bill pass with bipartisan support made her realize that the Marshall fire had opened a window for big-picture lawmaking that no other disaster had.

“If you have more resources, you have more time to invest in the recovery effort,” said Amabile. “There was some pushback, like, ‘All these rich people in Boulder are getting all this stuff.’ But they were a force. They really made stuff happen for themselves.”

Somauroo and Curry, two of the lead post-fire organizers, acknowledge that the high education and income levels in the cities impacted by the Marshall fire helped the rebuilding effort move faster.

Two and a half years after the fire, Brown says around 35 percent of displaced homeowners are back in their homes, which is a far higher rate than communities like Paradise, California, have been able to achieve after fires of comparable magnitude. This is in part because the community had more resources to begin with, but it’s also because survivors had enough political clout to secure financial relief that other survivors have not obtained.

Curry’s disaster recovery center also managed to pull in $1 million from faith-based organizations and nearby businesses, allowing the center to stay open until this past June. The Boulder Community Foundation also raised more than $43 million to help victims, much of it from wealthy private donors, and used some of that money to fund case workers at Curry’s recovery center.

The irony is that while this effort would likely never have happened in a lower-income and less-educated area, it will benefit future fire survivors in worse-off areas of Colorado.

The mortgage-servicer delay and rent-gouging laws will only apply to survivors of future fires, which are far more likely to start in the state’s rural mountain communities than in the suburbs of the Front Range. It may have been Democrats who pushed the bills through, but the benefits will reach Republican sections of the state, and Brown and Somauroo have talked with people in other states about authoring copycat bills.

“There were no lobbyists, there’s no big money running these bills,” said Brown. “We got this done through sheer community advocacy. We talk about policies, and then I run bills, and they show up and testify and make their voices heard.”

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