The state of Colorado has declared the town of Hartman abandoned, not because its residents left, but because every last elected official did. The roughly 30 people who still live in this southeast Colorado community now have no functioning local government, no one authorized to sign a contract or call an election, and a water system that has been under a boil advisory since October 2025.
Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Kline issued the abandonment order this week under § 31-3-201(1)(b) of Colorado statute, following a public hearing held July 13. The order transfers ownership of Hartman’s streets, alleys, and water infrastructure to the Prowers County Board of County Commissioners, the only path, Kline wrote, to getting clean water flowing again.
The decision caps years of governance dysfunction in a town so small it barely registers on a map, yet whose collapse illustrates what happens when local institutions fail completely and state agencies prove unable to hold them together.
Hartman’s mayor resigned in October. Three remaining trustees followed in January 2026, submitting their letters of resignation to the Department of Local Affairs. One of those trustees, Pam Packer, told The Denver Post the decision was straightforward.
“Our safety was more important than having a government.”
That quote deserves a second read. An elected official in the United States concluded that holding office in her own town posed a personal safety risk, and walked away. The resignations came one day after a brawl erupted between four women following a board of trustees meeting, Fox News Digital reported.
The article also references prior embezzlement allegations and restraining orders connected to the town, though specific details were not provided in the abandonment order.
Eric Bergman, director of the Division of Local Government within the Department of Local Affairs, testified at the July 13 hearing that his agency had been working with Hartman for five or six years. Since 2022 alone, DOLA representatives visited the town more than 30 times, helping with elections, recalls, resignations, budgets, audits, grant administration, and training new officials.
Thirty visits. And the town still collapsed.
Bergman testified that DOLA, along with the Colorado Department of Health and Environment, had previously provided grants totaling more than $1 million to Hartman to repair its water system. But those funds were reimbursement-based. Without any government officials authorized to enter contracts, the town could not access the money. More than a million dollars sat effectively frozen while residents drank water that, in the words of applicant Jessie Simmons, “smells horrible.”
That pattern, state agencies pouring resources into a failing institution without ever fixing the underlying problem, is familiar enough to taxpayers everywhere. When institutional chaos strikes at any level of government, the people who suffer are always the ones who can’t leave.
Simmons, a self-described resident, landowner, and elector of Hartman, filed her application for abandonment with the Secretary of State’s office in mid-June. She alleged the town lacked a board of trustees and a town clerk, could not hold an election, and owned water infrastructure needed to treat and deliver water to residents.
She also reported that the town’s water had lacked chlorine for more than a month and was not potable. Hartman had been under a boil water advisory since October 2025. Bergman’s testimony confirmed the scope of the problem: the water tank was compromised and needed repair or replacement, and no one was operating the water system at all.
Kline’s order laid out the stakes in plain language:
“Not determining that the Town of Hartman is abandoned as contemplated by § 31-3-201(1)(b), C.R.S. (2026), would leave the residents in further legal limbo during a health hazard, with no authority to conduct business, hold elections, or fix their water infrastructure so that clean water can be delivered to the town residents. Abandonment is the only legal mechanism in Colorado statute that creates an avenue for residents of the area to receive clean water.”
Read that again: the only way for 30 Americans to get clean drinking water was for the state to declare their town no longer exists as a legal entity.
Under the abandonment order, all streets, avenues, and alleys not owned by third parties now belong to Prowers County. Ownership of the water infrastructure, the pipes, the compromised tank, the treatment systems, also transfers to the county, which is directed to hand that infrastructure to “an entity whose primary purpose is water treatment or delivery.”
What the order does not answer is whether Prowers County has formally accepted that responsibility, whether any water entity has been identified to take over, or whether the boil advisory remains in effect today. It also remains unclear whether the frozen grant funds, more than $1 million, can now be accessed through the county.
These are not small questions for 30 people who have been told, in effect, that their town government was so broken the state had to erase it. In a country where government accountability is supposed to flow upward from the local level, Hartman represents a total failure of that chain, from the bottom all the way through years of state intervention that never produced a stable result.
The broader pattern is worth noting. When governing institutions collapse, whether through political standoffs at the federal level or through the quiet disintegration of a 30-person town board in southeast Colorado, the consequences always land on ordinary people first.
Bergman’s testimony painted a picture of a community that cycled through officials faster than the state could train them. Elections, turnover, recalls, resignations, DOLA dealt with all of it, over and over, for years. The agency sent regional managers. It administered grants. It ran training sessions for new officials who, in several cases, did not stay long enough to use what they learned.
And then the brawl happened. And then the last trustees quit. And then the water went bad, or stayed bad, since the boil advisory had already been in place for months.
Hartman is not a ghost town in the Old West sense. People still live there. Velma Cooper, a former board member, and her husband Mark were photographed at their home in Hartman as recently as February 2026. These are real residents dealing with real consequences: no local government, no clean water, and a legal process that required their town to be declared abandoned before anyone could act.
The situation also raises uncomfortable questions about the limits of state oversight. DOLA visited more than 30 times. State agencies committed more than $1 million in grants. Yet when the final trustees resigned, there was no contingency plan, no automatic transfer of authority, no emergency mechanism short of a formal abandonment proceeding that took months to complete. During those months, residents had no potable water and no government official authorized to do anything about it.
That gap, between the resources the state deployed and the outcome it achieved, is the kind of failure that should concern anyone who believes government has a basic obligation to keep the water running. It is a familiar story of policy mechanisms that look adequate on paper but prove hollow under pressure.
Colorado’s abandonment statute exists for a reason. It contemplates the possibility that a town can simply cease to function. What it does not contemplate, what no statute can fully address, is the human cost of waiting for that legal machinery to grind forward while families boil their water and wonder who, if anyone, is in charge.
Kline’s order is thorough and legally sound. It identifies the problem, cites the authority, and directs a transfer of assets. But the fact that it was necessary at all, after years of state involvement, more than $1 million in grants, and dozens of on-site visits, suggests that something deeper went wrong in Hartman long before the last trustee walked out the door.
Whether Prowers County can succeed where the town and the state both failed remains to be seen. The residents of Hartman, who never abandoned their homes, are now counting on a county government they did not elect to fix a water system that more than a million dollars in state money could not repair. That is not a plan. It is what happens when every other plan has already failed.
When Americans face danger because their own institutions cannot hold together, the question is never whether the paperwork was filed correctly. It is why the system broke down in the first place, and who will be held accountable for the people left behind.
Thirty Americans still live in Hartman, Colorado. Their town no longer exists on paper. Their water still isn’t safe to drink. And the only thing their government managed to do, in the end, was quit.
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