Former Colorado Representative Steph Vigil is running to retake her House District 16 seat. Rep. Rebecca Keltie (R-Colorado Springs) narrowly defeated Vigil in 2024 by just three votes, after Vigil beat Republican Colorado Springs City Councilor Dave Donelson by a margin of just 710 votes in 2022. This year, Vigil is hoping the voters will swing back to her side in one of the most contentious districts in Colorado.
“I think we need more working class folks and more people with a high-struggle background to know what it’s like to try to survive in this kind of economy and the world that we’ve built for ourselves, and get into public office and move things so that it’s better for people,” Vigil told the Colorado Times Recorder after addressing picketers outside of a Colorado Springs School District 11 board meeting last week. “This is what I committed to — to represent this district. So three votes ain’t nothing. We’re gonna win it right back and by more than three.”
Vigil addressed the crowd outside the D11 administration building who were picketing in response to a lawsuit from D11’s ombudsperson, Natasha Bullard Kaonohi, against D11 Deputy Superintendent Brandan Comfort and Superintendent Michael Gaal, alleging that Comfort stole confidential files from her office at Gaal’s direction.
“Democracy has to be hands-on,” Vigil told the crowd. “The superintendent answers to the board and the board answers to you all as voters. That’s who elected officials answer to. And that goes for me — when I was in office before and when I am again. In my first term, I proudly co-sponsored the Protection for Public Workers Act which is specifically designed to protect teachers like Dr. G [Angelica Givler-Viers] and other public workers who are being retaliated against in this era for speaking truth to power off the clock and for being whistleblowers in their capacity at work, and we must protect that right. I proudly stand with our teachers, our teachers union, D11 parents and kids all over our district who depend on this school to deliver a high quality education for every kid in the community — and the lack of accountability on this board is diminishing that. We need public dollars to stay in public schools and for there to be full transparency and accountability for every dollar spent and every action taken on your dime.”
Keltie won’t be running for re-election, but she has endorsed D11 Vice President Jill Haffley as her successor. During her time on D11’s board, enabled by an infusion of $144,532 in dark money in the 2023 election, Haffley has built a strong conservative reputation during her time on the D11 board — voting to end the long-running contract with the teachers union and supporting the district’s policy to limit the sports participation of transgender athletes. During Haffley’s tenure, D11 was involved in a failed lawsuit against the Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA), joining a host of plaintiffs represented by conservative attorney of choice Brad Miller. In June, Haffley beat out Jamie Koch, a secretary and Practical Government School coordinator at Charis Bible College, for the Republican nomination in HD16.
“She is part of a broader movement that has been underway for a while to push this board to the right, make it beholden to corporate developers and fringe radical groups on the right and all of that,” said Vigil. “She’s run a lot on divisive culture war wedge issues and hasn’t really been accountable to the public for the actual performance of the district. And she’s gone around openly bragging about how she was instrumental in axing the teachers union contract, and I think that’s a strange flex, considering that the district started losing teachers immediately after canceling that contract. It’s been a wildly unpopular move. And that it doesn’t serve our community well for teachers to not attract and retain great teachers for our district. It’s a dumb move if nothing else. I think she doesn’t have much to offer people. She’s showing it here. With the way that she governs — or attempts to — on the D11 school board.”
During a candidate forum at Church for All Nations in April, Haffley repeated the oft-debunked claim that “Mail-in ballots breed fraud,” and cited as evidence the fact that her dog once received a credit card application in the mail.
Vigil said her priorities include public transportation and affordability. “ I have more work to do in the transportation space, especially for multimodal — we want to enable more more multimodal options here in the Springs, whether that’s cycling and walking infrastructure, transit, getting the Colorado Connector funded and down here to the Springs,” she said. “We have a lot to do still on LGBTQ rights — I’ve got a couple things up my sleeve there. The community is really hurting for better paychecks and lower cost of living, and we can’t get that without electing working class people.”
A recent profile in Heidi Ganahl’s Rocky Mountain Voice noted Haffley’s position on affordability. “Our legislature side steps TABOR by adding fees and surcharges without considering what those costs look like when they land on a family’s kitchen table,” Haffley is quoted. According to RMV, “She wants a cumulative accounting of state-imposed costs before new fees are added, and she wants to eliminate fees she considers duplicative or obsolete. She calls herself ‘a strong supporter of TABOR’ and says the answer to budget pressure is to ‘prioritize essential services, examine existing spending, eliminate waste and duplication, and grow the economy.’”
Vigil noted TABOR’s impact on education in Colorado. “We have a perennial funding issue, right, partly because of TABOR and partly because we have sort of this patchwork way that we fund education in this state,” she said. “That it’s partly statewide and partly local, and the local control element butts up against school choice because folks will live and vote in one district, but send their kids to another, and people are frequently confused and these elections don’t turn out a lot of voters. So [boards of education] are answerable to fewer people, all of which is just a recipe for a lack of accountability for how our dollars are spent on public schools. I consider public education a public good. If we wanted it to be a private commodity, we could just not have public schools at all, which no doubt some political reactionaries would really like. They would like to not have every child receive a world class education, and they would not like to have a well-educated public. But I think we need that, to have healthy democracy and for everybody to live their happiest, healthiest, best life. You need a high quality education for every kid.”
Ballots are due by 7 p.m. on Nov. 3.
