Colorado Declares 116-Year-Old Town of Hartman Abandoned After Government Collapses, Water Ruled Unsafe

A Town of 30 to 54 People Just Stopped Being a Town

Hartman, Colorado is gone. Not physically. The New Deal-era gymnasium is still standing, the vintage playgrounds are still there, the dogs are still barking. But as of July 28, Hartman no longer exists as a legal municipality, according to a 15-page order signed by Colorado's Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Kline.

The reason: nobody was left to run it.

It Started With a Fight Over a Water Bill

At a January 23 town meeting, then-trustee Melissa Venegas and mayor pro tem Tammy Lucero got into a physical altercation over a water bill dispute, according to Courthouse News and the Denver Post. Both women were charged with misdemeanor disturbing the peace and got deferred sentences. A second trustee, Velma Cassanova-Cooper, had a seizure during the fallout and was hospitalized.

"Yelling and screaming has happened in Hartman since forever," Venegas told Courthouse News. "It's always somebody hyped up about something, and it's never turned physical." Until it did.

The remaining trustees paid the town's electric bill to keep the water pump running through the summer, then resigned and handed town records over to Prowers County. That left Hartman with no mayor, no trustees, no clerk, and no legal way to hold an election to replace any of them.

The Water Was Already a Problem

This wasn't a sudden crisis. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment had flagged deficiencies in Hartman's water system dating back to 2001, according to the Denver Gazette, with more than $100,000 in penalties issued between 2023 and 2025 for failing to properly operate the system, monitor contaminants, and fix holes in the town's storage tank.

A boil-water order had been in place since October 2025. By June 2026, resident Jessie Simmons wrote in her application to abandon the town that the water had gone over a month without chlorine and was "not potable" and smelled "horrible."

Colorado and the CDPHE had already sent Hartman over $1 million in grants to fix the water system. But with no functioning government, there was nobody authorized to sign contracts or spend the money. The Division of Local Government, according to testimony from its director Eric Bergman, visited Hartman 30 times since 2022 trying to help. It wasn't enough.

Residents Fought the Abandonment, and They Deserve a Fair Hearing

Some coverage overlooks this: people in Hartman did not want this. Several residents drove 200 miles to Denver to testify against the abandonment petition at a July 13 hearing, according to Courthouse News. Every person who signed up to speak that day opposed it.

Resident Shauna Casey, testifying on her 70th birthday, told the state, "This isn't a simple question of whether we have a government. I want to make sure you know why this happened." Resident Greta Caddick asked, "Why can't good old Colorado help this little town?"

Their concern is legitimate and worth stating plainly: abandonment permanently erases 116 years of self-government for 30 to 54 people who didn't all take part in the January fight, and it hands control of their roads, alleys, and water system to Prowers County and outside entities they didn't choose. For people who've lived there their whole lives, that's not a technicality. That's losing their town.

But under existing Colorado law, the state couldn't have run a new election for five years after Hartman's last one, according to Courthouse News, which cited a law signed by Governor Jared Polis this year that created an expedited abandonment process specifically for towns with collapsed governments and failing water systems. Without that legal off-ramp, Hartman residents were facing years without clean water and no legal path to fix it themselves. Kline's order concluded abandonment was "the only legal mechanism in Colorado statute" to get residents clean water in any reasonable timeframe.

What Happens Now

Prowers County takes over Hartman's public roads, alleys, and water infrastructure, and the state says it will transfer water responsibility to an entity whose primary job is water treatment or delivery, according to the Secretary of State's office. Colorado's Department of Safety is soliciting contractor proposals to fix the water system, per Bergman's testimony, and county officials coordinated with the state to restore water service after power to the pump was cut on July 7.

Kline's order specifically noted Hartman is not "deserted or uninhabited," per the Denver Gazette, just without a government. The roughly 40 households still there will keep living in Hartman. They just won't be electing anyone to run it, because there's no legal path back to incorporation once abandonment is finalized. Whether the new water system gets built faster under county and state control than it would have under three trustees who couldn't stop fighting long enough to sign a contract remains unclear.