A couple dozen volunteers in matching “Ask me about 5” shirts stood outside the Douglas County clerk’s office Friday morning, just after they turned in the boxes they’d spent months filling. Inside were 578 petitions and 22,974 signatures asking voters to add two seats to the county commission.
For most of the spring, they didn’t have enough. Three weeks before the deadline, two donors gave the campaign $55,000 to hire paid circulators, and the numbers finally moved.
If enough signatures hold up, voters in November will decide whether to expand the Board of County Commissioners from three seats to five. The change would break the two‑vote majority that has run nearly 400,000 people’s county government for decades.
State law set the floor at 15,046 valid signatures from registered voters. Organizers say they checked about 17,000 against the voter rolls before filing, to leave themselves room for errors.
How they got there
The campaign ran mostly on volunteers, about 150 of them, who logged more than 2,000 hours over the spring and summer. They set up at libraries, farmers markets and concerts, in a county where every signature has to be gathered in person and witnessed.
The $55,000 arrived about three weeks before the deadline, when organizers weren’t sure they would make it.
“That was really the turning point,” Angela Thomas said. “It gave our volunteers new hope.”
What the measure would do
The ballot asks two questions. The first is whether to grow the board from three members to five, and the second is whether all five would be elected by district or three by district and two countywide. Today, all three commissioners are elected at large by every voter in the county. That means any two of them can decide most matters between themselves.
Lora Thomas, a former commissioner who resigned in December 2024, says that’s the heart of the problem. “While DougCo residents are clearly dissatisfied with this BOCC and their disdain for public opinion and feedback, this movement has always been about improving the representation of our citizens,” she said. “A county of 400,000 should not be governed by only three people.”
“With a board of five, you need a majority to spend our money and impact our lives; with three, all you need is a buddy,” she said. “We need to be governed by a representative majority rather than just a pair of good ol’ boys doing the bidding of their crony special interests.”
Adding a fourth and fifth seat changes the math. Two commissioners could still agree, but they would have to bring at least one more colleague along instead of settling it between themselves.
Why now
The petition follows a year of friction between residents and the board.
In March 2025, Teal, Laydon and Commissioner Kevin Van Winkle voted to ask voters to adopt home rule, a change that could have given the commissioners more control over local land use. Voters rejected it in June, with about 71% voting no on more than 93,000 ballots.
Angela Thomas, who ran the Stop the Power Grab campaign that beat home rule, read the result as a vote of no confidence in the board. The same committee is behind the current petition.
Teal read the rejection of home rule as a matter of pace. “We did hear several times from the public we were going too fast,” he said, and pledged to keep working on home rule.
Months earlier, the board had already narrowed how residents could reach the commissioners. In late January, it removed general public comment from its business meetings, saying the periods had grown theatrical and off‑topic. Residents can still speak, but only on agenda items and only for two minutes. Signs and message‑bearing clothing are barred from the room.
Then, on April 2, a state appeals court found the board itself had been meeting out of public view. The court ruled that the commissioners’ advance planning meetings and closed sessions fell under Colorado’s open meetings law, and it identified 11 closed, unnoticed meetings between December 2024 and April 2025.
That case grew out of the same lawsuit that tried to stop the home rule election, brought by Lora Thomas alongside state Rep. Bob Marshall (D-Highlands Ranch) and Lone Tree resident Julie Gooden. The county has asked the Colorado Supreme Court to take it up, with a decision on whether the court will hear the case expected later this year.
For Lora Thomas, the closed meetings and the comment cut come back to the same math.”George just decided that’s what was going to happen,” she said, “and because he and Abe had this agreement, he knew he could do whatever he wanted.”
What they heard at the tables
At the tables, the talk was less about abstract representation and more about the current board. “People were coming to us saying, I don’t like what these people are doing. We need to change it,” Angela Thomas said.
Teal and Laydon are both term‑limited, Laydon this year and Teal in 2028. Teal has said publicly that expanding the board would “effectively end term limits in Douglas County,” because he believes commissioners could move between district and at‑large seats.
The record points the other way. Colorado Counties Inc., which represents the state’s counties, traces local term limits to Amendment 17, which voters approved in 1994, and explains in its term‑limits overview that only local voters can change those limits. Only a separate vote of the people can change those limits, and Douglas County voters have never been asked to.
A July 2000 opinion from then‑Attorney General Ken Salazar addressed Teal’s scenario directly. Moving to a new district, redistricting, or changing a seat from at‑large to district does not let a term‑limited official run again right away,
The objections
The Douglas County Republican Party has opposed the expansion petition since spring, in a county where only about a third of voters are now registered Republicans. In a June 11 resolution, the party’s executive committee urged residents to keep the board at three seats.
Douglas County GOP First Vice Chair Matt Smith told Denver7 the county is running well, with strong credit ratings and a balanced budget, and questioned why anyone would change it. He and other Republicans have also argued that adding commissioners would cost about $500,000 a year in salaries and benefits and that “few problems are solved by more politicians.”
Angela Thomas also puts two more commissioners at about $500,000 a year in salary, benefits and incidentals, which equates to under one percent of the county’s $650.8 million budget. Commissioner salaries are set by the state, and the measure itself carries no tax increase.
The party has also tried to cast doubt on the petition process. Smith claimed on Facebook that 98% of signers don’t fully read what they sign, while acknowledging that number wasn’t scientific. Thomas said she doesn’t know where the figure came from and that most people who came to the tables already knew what the petition was and were eager to sign.
Jake Bockenfeld, who won the Republican primary for Laydon’s seat, opposes the measure as well. In an April debate, he argued that a larger board would let urban areas outvote rural ones and leave rural residents without a voice. “Douglas County has always had three. Why would we need more now?” he said.
Supporters point to Arapahoe County as the counterexample. The county leans Democratic and elects five commissioners by district, and its one Republican, Jeff Baker, who represents the rural eastern plains, has served as chair of the board.
Bockenfeld is partially correct: Douglas County has had three commissioners since its founding in 1861, as one of the original seventeen counties of the Colorado Territory- pre-dating statehood by fifteen years. In 1870 its population totaled 1,388 people.
Teal’s wife, Laura, posted on Facebook that with a five‑member board, two commissioners could meet alone without violating open meetings law. Two commissioners “would now be legally allowed to have private meetings about policy, behind closed doors, because those two wouldn’t be quorum,” she wrote.
Angela Thomas, who wrote the ballot language, said the change would cut the power of two‑person deals rather than expand it. “Two of five can meet,” she said, “but they still have to persuade at least one more.” And courts have also warned against “daisy chain” or serial meetings, where two commissioners meet privately, and then one of them meets privately with a third to pass along the same discussion, effectively building a majority outside public view
What the board says
The commissioners haven’t fought the measure as openly as their party has. Asked about a bigger board, Teal told CBS Colorado in May he’d be as comfortable serving on five as on three.
“It’s really nice being able to find one guy to agree with me here instead of two, but it really doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. He added that he’d put the question on the ballot if organizers gathered the signatures.
Laydon has been cooler. “Things rarely improve by adding politicians,” he said.
What comes next
The clerk’s office will now check the signatures against the voter rolls. Angela Thomas said the office estimated about three weeks, up from an initial seven to 10 days once it saw nearly 600 petitions.
If the count holds, the measure goes on the November ballot.
