Systems | The Docket

December 30, 2021. Boulder County had received 0.66 inches of precipitation in three months. A prairie grass fire, driven by 100-mile-per-hour winds, destroyed or damaged nearly 1,300 structures and forced 35,000 people to evacuate. The most destructive fire in Colorado history happened in the last days of December, on the flatlands, in a place where the word "wildfire" had always meant something that happened in the mountains, in summer, to someone else.

The Marshall Fire caused roughly $2 billion in damage. FEMA's Public Assistance to Colorado exceeded $37 million. Only 8% of families who lost homes had enough insurance to replace them. Eight percent. The other ninety-two faced insurance gaps averaging over $100,000 per household. "There aren't enough financial resources to deal with the financial need in this disaster," said Katie Arrington, a recovery and resiliency project manager for Boulder County. "There's just not enough funds."

What the fire didn't destroy, it rearranged. Boulder's 2023 budget added $2 million for fire response and three new firefighters. Voters approved an expanded Climate Tax with $1.5 million for wildfire resilience and authorized the city to borrow up to $52.9 million against future revenue. The 2024 budget added over $1.1 million for wildfire protection planning and risk-reduction grants. By September 2022, Jonathan Koehn, Boulder's Director of Climate Initiatives, had co-signed a council memo with the city manager and four department directors laying out how drought, flood, and wildfire were converging on a water supply built for a climate that no longer exists. His job, in practice, is tracking every budget line that keeps growing because the weather changed.

By 2026, City Manager Nuria Rivera-Vandermyde released a budget that cut the General Fund 7.8% and closed a $7.5 million gap. "Constraints require choices," she'd written the year before. The squeeze is visible across the county. This January, twenty fire agencies applied for emergency services grants, the most in the program's history. "Things that they used to be able to cover in their own budget, they can't anymore," said Barb Halpin, the county's special projects coordinator. Twenty agencies, one grant program, costs that didn't exist a decade ago now crowding out everything else.

Follow the money and you arrive at a courtroom, because there's nowhere else to go.

In April 2018, Boulder County, San Miguel County, and the City of Boulder sued Exxon and Suncor, alleging the companies misrepresented climate risks to protect profits and left communities to absorb the costs. The case survived multiple attempts to move it to federal court. In May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that Boulder's claims could proceed toward discovery and trial.

Then on February 23, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The central question: whether federal law bars state-law claims seeking damages for injuries caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Oral arguments are expected in the October 2026 term.

The terrain is hostile. The Trump administration filed an unsolicited brief supporting the companies, calling the Colorado ruling "manifestly wrong on a question of vast nationwide significance." Twenty-six state attorneys general and over 100 Republican members of Congress filed on the same side. Five days before the Court took the case, the EPA rescinded its endangerment finding, the scientific determination that greenhouse gases harm human health. The fossil fuel companies have argued for years that federal regulation of emissions preempts state lawsuits. Now there is less federal regulation to preempt with. The legal ground shifted under both sides at once.

"When the Supreme Court takes a case, it usually reverses it," said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia. For Boulder, reversal would close the only upstream path to recovering any of those costs. "But those are merely odds," Gerrard added. "It's not a certainty."

Boulder is one city with one lawsuit and enough institutional capacity to sustain eight years of litigation. Most cities don't have that. The fire agencies applying for emergency grants, the small towns absorbing smoke-season health costs, the communities that never had a Director of Climate Initiatives to begin with. They're watching Boulder's case because they have no case of their own.

Fire season won't hold for oral arguments. Boulder's budget will keep absorbing costs regardless of the outcome. Whether the companies that profited from the emissions share any of the tab, or whether the only cost-recovery path available to local governments gets closed off for good. That's what October decides.

For Boulder, and for every community behind it in line.