This story is part of State of Emergency, a Grist series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics, and is 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, Colorado, a suburb of Boulder 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 a thousand 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.
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