Colorado declared the Town of Hartman abandoned this week after a public hearing found the town no longer had a Board of Trustees or a Town Clerk and could not hold an election. State officials said the move was the only legal way to break a deadlock that had left the town’s water system tied to a health hazard.
The declaration lands on a town of 30 people in southeast Colorado, where the collapse of local government followed months of trouble that made the search for clean water more urgent. Hartman’s three active trustees resigned in January after a brawl erupted between four women following a board of trustees meeting, and the town had already lost its mayor in October, leaving the state with no local government to work with.
The state’s legal filing said the town owned infrastructure critical to treating or delivering water, but that without elected officials it had no authority to run business, call an election or repair the system. Andrew Kline wrote that leaving Hartman undeclared would have kept residents in legal limbo during a health hazard, and he said abandonment was the only legal mechanism in Colorado statute that opened an avenue for residents to receive clean water.
That is the part that gives the order its force, but also its sharpest edge. Hartman is still a town with residents and water lines, yet the state has now treated it as abandoned because there was no functioning local government left to act. The town was already under a boil-water order, and Jessie Simmons, who filed a written application in mid-June asking for the abandonment determination, said the water had lacked chlorine for more than one month, was not potable and “smells horrible.”
At a hearing on July 13, Eric Bergman said he had regional managers across the state and one in Southeast Colorado who had worked extensively with Hartman for the last five or six years, a reminder that the problem did not appear overnight. Pam Packer, one of the former trustees, said, “Our safety was more important than having a government.”
What comes next is less clear than the declaration itself. The state has said abandonment is the legal path to clean water, but it has not identified who will operate Hartman’s water infrastructure or how quickly residents can expect relief. For now, the town has a label that unlocks state action, but the pipes, the chlorine and the residents are still waiting on the outcome that matters most.
