Deb Gray stood before the House Energy & Environment Committee and described the moment her life changed. On August 1, 2025 — one month after Elbert County had already denied the Colorado Power Pathway project — the Public Service Company of Colorado initiated eminent domain proceedings against her family's property anyway. The power line corridor would run within 100 feet of her house. Xcel's offer was to clear-cut forest to make way for 150-foot steel towers. Her neighbors had already been told the same thing, over and over: take the money, or we'll take the land through condemnation.
The message from the utility, as Gray put it, was blunt: "We're just going to take it anyway."
That was the atmosphere in the committee room on March 5, 2026, when Rep. Chris Richardson brought HB 26-1278 before the House Energy & Environment Committee. His bill would have required investor-owned utilities to obtain a certificate of public convenience and necessity from the PUC and all necessary local government land use approvals before initiating condemnation proceedings for high-voltage transmission projects. It was, as he described it, a simple question of sequencing. When the hearing ended, the committee killed it 7-4.
A $1.7 Billion Line That Serves None of the Land It Crosses
To understand what brought two dozen Elbert County ranchers, farmers, and commissioners to the Capitol on a Thursday morning, you have to understand the Colorado Power Pathway — a $1.7 billion, 500-mile transmission line cutting across 12 counties on Colorado's Eastern Plains, projected for completion in 2028 by Xcel Energy.
Kim Boyd, who lives in rural El Paso County directly in the project's path, put it plainly: "Not a single mile of it is intended to serve Elbert county or rural El Paso County." The power flows to Front Range population centers and, according to Deb Fletcher, potentially to data center development near Denver International Airport. The communities hosting the infrastructure bear the burden; they receive none of the electricity.
Elbert County Commissioner Dallas Schroeder explained the timeline that inflamed the dispute. Xcel chose its preferred line route in 2021 — with, as county attorney Lance Ingalls testified, "no input from Albert county representatives at all." The company then waited until November 2024 to submit a formal permit application. Elbert County heard the application and denied it in July 2025. One month later, condemnation proceedings began against landowners. As Ingalls noted: "There's more than three years of delay that has nothing to do with the county."
Gary Austin was served a condemnation summons while permit applications were still pending. Brad Ray testified he was forced to sell a property at "a $750,000 loss and could be upwards of a million" factoring in his business losses — against Xcel's initial offer of $25,000. Carrie Giblets, representing the roughly 400-member Elbert County Environmental Alliance, testified that members "were sued for condemnation by Public Service Co. of Colorado, who demanded immediate possession of their land" before Elbert County had even ruled on the application, forcing some "to empty their savings and retirement accounts, even sell their herds of cattle to afford legal representation."
What the Bill Would Have Done
Richardson's HB 26-1278 was narrow by design. It applied only to investor-owned, PUC-regulated electric utilities — not co-ops, not municipal utilities, both of which already have democratic accountability built in. It only covered transmission lines above 115 kilovolts. And critically, Richardson insisted it didn't touch eminent domain authority at all. "This bill does not remove eminent domain authority," he told the committee. It simply made condemnation the final step rather than the opening move.
Richardson, a former Elbert County Commissioner, framed the problem with a sharp image: "Right now, it's theoretically possible for a utility to acquire the entire route for a project through condemnation and then arrive at a local government's door with the practical message that the land is already secured. So the outcome is inevitable. A local public hearing still needs to take place. If what we're setting up and setting in motion is simply the rubber stamp of somebody else's actions, the input of our citizens means nothing, and the input of our citizens should mean everything in the work that we do."
During the hearing, Richardson adopted four amendments to address concerns. Amendment L001 clarified that a successful PUC or judicial appeal of a local denial counts as equivalent to local approval — so there was no local veto. L002 confirmed voluntary land negotiations could continue at any time. L003 required meaningful community engagement with disproportionately impacted communities before condemnation. L004 struck Section 3 of the bill entirely, removing the provision that opponents said would have eliminated a utility's right to appeal a local permit denial to the PUC.
Commissioner Mike Buck of Elbert County made the landowners' core argument simply: "Eminent domain should only be used as a last resort when the health and safety of our citizens are at risk, not a shortcut to lessen the timeline of a large project."
"It Would Ultimately Never Even Really Happen for Us"
The opposition came in two voices: the Colorado Energy Office and Xcel Energy itself.
Will Tor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, testified that HB 26-1278 "does the opposite" of its intent, making transmission "both slower and less likely to be constructed." He argued that before the L004 amendment was adopted, Section 3 of the bill "eliminates the ability to appeal transmission permit denials by an IOU to the PUC," upending decades of balanced state-local oversight. Even after that section was struck, Tor maintained that serializing the condemnation and permitting processes would add delays to an already cumbersome national infrastructure buildout he said, according to the Department of Energy, runs at roughly one-tenth the pace needed.
Holly Velasquez Horvath, Xcel Energy's Regional Vice President of State Affairs, went further. She argued that most local governments require land rights before they will even process a 1041 permit application — meaning the bill would create an impossible loop. Without condemnation authority to access land for surveys, she said, Xcel couldn't complete the application required to get local approval in the first place. The bill, she warned, would mean the permitting process "would ultimately never even really happen for us."
Rep. Jenny Willford pressed her directly: has Xcel ever completed a condemnation on a property not ultimately needed for a project? Velasquez Horvath said no — but acknowledged that accessing land through condemnation proceedings to conduct surveys was essential to completing 1041 applications in the first place.
Lance Ingalls, Elbert County's attorney, had a direct answer to the chicken-and-egg argument. He testified that no Colorado statute requires a local government to demand property ownership before considering a permit application. And if any local government had such a rule on the books, passing HB 26-1278 would simply force that government to update its regulations. "It's fixable," he said flatly.
The Question That Hung in the Air
Rep. Dan Woog asked Will Tor a pointed question: "Is it the position of the Colorado Energy Office now that Excel's infrastructure needs are more important than the property rights of Coloradans?"
Tor answered carefully — "No, I do not believe that that is our position" — arguing instead that the existing statutory framework already appropriately balanced state interests and property rights. Woog also asked whether Tor, during his roughly 15 years in local government as mayor of Boulder and a Boulder County Commissioner, had ever voted against proposed Xcel infrastructure. Tor said he could only recall one case — a natural gas compressor station that his government ultimately approved after extended negotiation.
The exchange was revealing. Richardson had argued all along that the bill's real purpose was to change the power dynamic at the negotiating table — that the mere threat of condemnation hardened resistance, lengthened negotiations, and drove up costs for everyone, including utilities. He pointed to a different Xcel transmission line in Elbert County, just 15 miles away, that crossed seven large properties through entirely voluntary negotiation and was completed quickly. "Going a little slower at the front end," he said, "could very well lead to a much faster project."
Rep. Junie Joseph raised the counterargument that dominated the majority's reasoning: the bill could allow "a single local government to halt or significantly delay a transmission process project that may serve multiple regions across our state." She referenced legislation from the prior session, HB 25-1292, which she said had already worked to expand transmission with community engagement. The tension between statewide infrastructure needs and local property rights was, in the end, the fault line the majority chose to fall on the far side of.
A Room Full of Grief
Before the vote, Leah Bratton — the transcript lists her name as "Brayton" — took the microphone. Her husband Howard had fought the Power Pathway project to the end. On November 14, 2021, after reading an email from Xcel, he suffered a brain aneurysm. He spent 72 days in the hospital, survived the surgery, contracted MRSA and C. diff, and died on January 25, 2022. His last words to his wife, she told the committee, were: "I will fight as long as I can."
The room was quiet.
Brad Ray, testifying online, named what he saw as the operating logic behind it all: "Imminent domain is part and parcel of their business model of coercively taking property from landowners who do not have the ability to fight them. And we have no recourse other than our elected representatives to help us with this dilemma."
Colorado Counties Inc., which represents county commissioners statewide, voted 100% in support of the bill that morning — one abstention, zero verbal opposition. The Colorado Municipal League, representing 271 member municipalities, also testified in support. Routt County Commissioner Sonia Macy testified alongside Elbert County's commissioners, making clear the concern extended beyond a single project.
The Vote — and a Contradiction Left Unresolved
The committee also heard, during a separate bill's hearing that same day, something that cut quietly against the debate's premise. Rep. Lesley Smith had stated during the HB 26-1278 discussion that Colorado "is also an island, so we don't tie into other grids." Witness Maria Sumnick, testifying later on HB 26-1124, the grid-resilience bill, stated directly: "Colorado grid is not an island. It is an interconnected grid with both the eastern and western grid." Smith voted with the majority. No one addressed the contradiction on the record.
When the votes were counted, HB 26-1278 failed to advance on a 7-4 motion, then was postponed indefinitely 7-4 on a reverse roll call. Rep. Smith joined Reps. Lori Goldstein, Junie Joseph, Amy Paschal, Jenny Willford, Elizabeth Velasco, and Alex Valdez in the majority. Reps. Carlos Barron, Ken DeGraaf, Scott Slaugh, and Dan Woog voted no on the indefinite postponement — meaning they wanted the bill to survive.
The same committee also killed HB 26-1124, Rep. DeGraaf's grid-resilience bill, 8-5, over concerns about duplicating federal NERC and FERC standards. Xcel's Aaron Wilson testified the bill "creates a duplicative state level framework layered on top of existing mandatory federal reliability standards without clearly identifying any Colorado specific gap that those standards fail to address." DeGraaf countered with a stark metaphor about the adequacy of existing protections: "The best visual I have is the threat that we face is this. We are standing behind a 1.5 foot wall hoping not to get hit by an 85 foot wave. Knowing that those 85 foot waves have gone by us on a regular basis." Rep. Smith voted no on HB 26-1124 as well, citing the bill's fiscal note and Colorado's existing Space Weather Prediction Center.
The one bill that survived the day was HB 26-1208, Rep. Elizabeth Velasco's bill to continue a small-business air pollution advisory panel required under the federal Clean Air Act. It passed 7-4 and moves to the Committee of the Whole. Rep. Scott Slaugh voted against it while acknowledging on the record that "this bill must pass under federal law."
What Happens Next
HB 26-1278 and HB 26-1124 are both dead for the 2026 session — postponed indefinitely, with no path to revival.
The fight over the Colorado Power Pathway, however, is not over. El Paso County's 1041 permit denial covering 45 miles of Segment 5 remains on appeal before the Colorado PUC; Deb Fletcher testified a ruling is not expected until April 2026. Until that ruling, trucks carrying transmission installation equipment have already been spotted driving past her farm.
For Deb Gray, Gary Austin, Brad Ray, the members of the Elbert County Environmental Alliance, and the hundreds of rural Eastern Plains landowners in the path of a 500-mile line that will not serve a single one of their homes — the legal machinery of condemnation remains available to Xcel Energy from the moment a certificate of public convenience and necessity is issued. No local permit required. The sequencing Richardson wanted to change stays exactly as it was.
If HB 26-1278 had passed and eventually become law, utilities would have been required to obtain a certificate of public convenience and necessity and complete local permitting before initiating forced land takings — giving county commissions real leverage in negotiations and protecting landowners from legal pressure during what can be a multi-year review process. Because it died, the status quo holds: condemnation can begin before a single public hearing concludes, before a single permit is issued, and — as the families of Elbert County learned — even after a county has already said no.