Last year’s legislative session saw an unprecedented number of new faces from all over Colorado, each legislator bringing distinctive backgrounds, experiences and perspectives to the state Capitol, where they have pursued, broadly speaking, common goals but with divergent approaches.

And by the end of this term, several longtime lawmakers are departing the Colorado General Assembly.

Colorado Politics caught up with several of the state’s lawmakers currently in the middle of their very first session to get a behind-the-scenes look at what their life has been like. Colorado Politics also spoke with several outgoing legislators to see what it is like serving in the final session of office.

Whether the legislator is brand new or serving in their final session – all of them offered for politically minded citizens  who may be interested in running for office at the local or state level or simply looking to become more involved in their community.  

Different backgrounds, one goal

While some new legislators arrived with years of political or government experience, others entered the arena with no background in politics at all.

Rep. Stephanie Vigil, D-Colorado Springs, who grew up in a working-class family and spent years working in the service industry, said her journey into the political world began when she noticed what she described as inequities in the state’s healthcare system, while struggling with her mental health starting in her late 20s.

“Going into long-term recovery, I just really felt like I got very lucky at the last minute in a couple of ways to stay alive and get healthy and thriving, and I just feel like those odds were so not acceptable; it shouldn’t be like that,” she said. “We can stabilize life for everybody. We don’t need to leave people behind or have cracks that people fall through.”

At that same time, Vigil said, she noticed a political shift within her age group, and it just so happened that there was an open House seat in her district, which leaned Republican. She jumped at the opportunity and launched her campaign.   

“I love my city so much,” she said. “I want to do good things for her, so it just kind of made sense to me [to run]. It just felt like I was the person to do it.”

Vigil won the 2022 election with just under 50% of the vote.

By contrast, Castle Rock Rep. Lisa Frizell, a Republican, came to the state Capital with plenty of political experience, having served 25 years in the Douglas County Assessor’s office.

For eight of the those years, she was the county assessor.

“I never really thought that much about being a politician ever in my life,” said Frizell, adding that while she never expected to run for office, she was always interested in politics. She had served as a member of her local metro district board and served as president of her HOA. 

“Community service is really important to me, and that’s just kind of evolved,” she said.

That evolution came ahead of the 2022 election, when colleagues asked if she would consider running for office. 

Encouraged by a former legislator, who is a friend, and supported by family, Frizell began her campaign.

She believes her experience at the assessor’s office could greatly benefit the legislature, particularly as it wrestles with issues pertaining to property taxes. 

“I realized, because of our situation with property tax, I had a unique skillset to bring to the legislature, and I was really excited to do that,” she said.

For other legislators, such as Rep. Chad Clifford, D-Centennial, politics is practically second nature. Clifford said his family has always been involved in politics on both sides of the aisle, and he grew up exposed to healthy debate between family members.

“I’ve been around campaigns all my life,” he said. “So, I have a unique view when it comes to engaging and what it is to listen to people and make change in that particular area.”

Regardless of their backgrounds or party affiliation, the legislators said they share a common goal – to improve the lives of their constituents.

“My job is to go try to become a subject expert on what my constituents tell me is important,” Clifford said. 

NATO skills 

No matter their background, each lawmaker brings a unique set of skills to the legislature.

For Rep. Jennifer Parenti, D-Erie, her time as a strategic planner at NATO has helped her navigate debates and ensure all parties are accounted for when crafting policy. 

“My time on the NATO staff taught me about how to listen,” she said. “I can’t say that I’m always driven by the idea of compromise and that we should compromise on everything. Sometimes, there’s a principle or a value that you’re not going to compromise on, and I think that’s okay too, but the NATO organization is a unanimous organization.”

“Everything there has to be done on a vote of every nation. It’s certainly about compromise, but it’s also about understanding how to give everybody a win or how to ensure that when we do this, we’re not running roughshod over any groups,” she said.  

Rep. Matthew Martinez, D-Monte Vista, credits his experience on the Monte Vista City Council for giving him a better understanding of how things work at a municipal level, which he says has been extremely helpful during his time at the Capitol so far. 

“I think it’s really helped out a lot, because understanding how some of the policies that we do up here affect the municipal level is really important,” he said.

Martinez said he also finds himself tapping into the people skills he honed as a Marine in the early 2000s.

“Being able to approach different topics in different areas with different people I think has helped me out,” he said. 

People skills are a necessity in the service industry, something Vigil knows well. They can also be quite handy for a politician, she noted.

“Anything that you learn how to do in the service industry, you can apply here,” she said. “Dealing with difficult people and difficult conversations and having to think on your feet and be quick and adaptable, I think, are all a really good skillset to have here.”

As Frizell’s experience at the assessor’s office demonstrates, expertise in specific career fields can prove advantageous in the legislature as well. Frizzell has introduced several bills on property tax relief and has worked on a bipartisan panel in the the 2024 session to address the issue.

As the owner of multiple successful businesses, Clifford said his appointment to the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee is “a natural fit” for him, and he enjoys being able to provide insight to his fellow committee members and hear about their own experiences as business owners. 

Clifford spent time as a lobbyist before being elected to office, so he was very well acquainted with the ins and outs of the Capitol.

So was Rep. Julia Marvin, D- Thornton, the legislature’s newest member.

Elected by a vacancy committee in late 2023, Marvin holds a degree in political science and spent time as a legislative aide during college. While working in public relations, she was elected president of the Adams County Young Democrats and eventually won a seat on the Thornton City Council. 

Marvin said she had never intended to run for office but that she was troubled by the city council’s lack of representation of people like herself and felt something had to be done. 

“Within my work with the Young Dems, I was starting to really pay attention to what was happening at the municipal level, and I just felt like there wasn’t a lot of representation of people like me who were younger, progressive and from a working family,” she said.

During her time on city council, Marvin said she was able to increase voter turnout in her ward by 8%. She ran for mayor in 2023, but ultimately lost to the 10-year incumbent. 

Her loss may have been serendipitous, however, as the House seat for her district was left empty after the December 2023 resignation of former House Rep. Said Sharbini.

Marvin decided to run for the seat, using the insight, she said, that she gained from constituents in campaigning locally to her advantage. 

“During my mayoral campaign, I’d have really great conversations with people, and there was a lot of times that I found myself saying, ‘Oh, you know, that’s actually something that needs to be addressed at the state level, and I’ll make sure to work with our legislators to address those concerns,'” she said.

“So, I’m really honored to now have the chance to be the person that gets to address those concerns,” she added. 

Balancing priorities

For new legislators from politically diverse “purple” areas, balancing the wants and needs of all of their constituents with their personal convictions can present a challenge.

Erie Rep. Parenti ran against the incumbent for her seat, a Republican. She called her district “dead purple” and said her top strategy for navigating the priorities of both her Democratic and Republican constituents is simple – hear everyone out.   

“I think that the best thing any of us can do as state representatives is listen to our constituents and try to hear all the different perspectives and also think about the unique aspects of our district, and in the end, do what you think is right,” she said. “I never take a vote I can’t justify. I always make sure that I can justify every vote that I can take.” 

Vigil faces similar challenges in her district, she said. However, dealing with opposing constituent priorities is something all legislators deal with, regardless of where they’re from. 

“Everybody here has some amount of their constituency that didn’t vote for them, and you’ve got to figure out how to serve your whole constituency.” she said. “I have found that there are some issues where I break from my party and that it aligns well with some of my constituency who wouldn’t normally favor me.”

“With policy, I always start with what my conscience tells me is the right thing to do. I don’t flip-flop around for political convenience, and I really go out of my way to communicate with my constituency consistently,” Vigil said.   

‘Drinking from a firehose’

Starting a new job is always stressful, but even more so with the pressure of representing one’s community and making decisions that could affect the entire state, lawmakers. 

“It’s like drinking from a firehose,” said Martinez. “Little by little, it’s just trying to pick up as much information as you can.”  

For some legislators, the reality of the job was not exactly what they had imagined. Frizell admitted she was a bit “Pollyanna-ish” in her thinking before entering the legislature and assumed she’d be able to have civil, productive conversations with colleagues from all sides.

But that’s something that, she said, hasn’t always been the case. 

“I did not understand the intractable level of partisanship that actually exists, and that on some issues, there is no middle ground, and that’s disappointing to me,” she said. “That said, I’m gonna be a glass half-full kind of gal. I choose to work a lot on policy that we can find a common ground on, and that’s how we can actually serve the citizens of this state is to seek those opportunities.”  

Other legislators, such as Parenti, struggled with adjusting to rules and procedures that differ greatly from what they’re used to.

“I would say my biggest disappointment is how little time and space there actually is to just sit down and talk about the issues,” she said. “We can’t have those strategic conversations, and that is actually my background. The system’s not set up that way. Everybody crafts these little pieces of legislation in their little vacuum, not because they necessarily want to, but because they’re actually not allowed to have broader conversations about policy and strategy.”

“At NATO, we were looking 5, 10, 20, 50 years down the line. We’re not allowed to have those conversations here without breaking the Colorado Open Meetings Law, so that was really frustrating my first year. I just don’t think that that process lends itself to the best policymaking,” Parenti said.  

There are some perks to being an elected official. 

It’s the little things for Clifford, who was pleasantly surprised at how quickly his calls to high-ranking officials within state agencies have been returned.  

“That’s kind of a neat perk and it certainly helps the process to get to the bottom of things or to understand things quickly,” he said.

For Marvin, the differences between Thornton City Council and the Colorado House of Representatives have been night and day – or rather, red and blue.

“I came from a council that was pretty notorious for being a bit contentious, so I always tried to work with everybody,” she said. “It was not always reciprocated. I was in the minority at the time, but that’s how I always tried to lead. So, the biggest difference for me was going from a Democrat minority in city council to being in a Democratic majority here.”

When asked what their most memorable moment in the legislature has been so far, just about everyone had the same response – passing their first bills. 

“I think about the bill signing for the election bill that I ran last year, which was about municipal campaign finance reform,” said Parenti. “That bill was so important to my district, and it was the first bill that I really put forward and I knew I was doing it for my district. So, when that got through and the governor signed it, we were really excited about that.”

Martinez said he will always remember his first bill that was signed into law. That bill allowed nonviolent offenders to earn sentence reductions for completing an accredited higher education program. The bill held special significance for Martinez, who had previously served as the director of Adams State University’s prison education program. 

“Seeing that going into effect was just really, really special,” he said.

Rather than a specific memory, Frizell chose to acknowledge the bond she had forged with her caucus members over the last two sessions. 

“The camaraderie in my caucus is heartening,” she said. “We’re all very different, and we are all free thinkers, but the reliance that we have on one another is among the closest bonds that I’ve had professionally. It’s really amazing to me.”

For Vigil, seeing democracy function as intended has been the most rewarding part of her time in the legislature. She spoke of the debate that ensued regarding a clean hydrogen bill that she sponsored alongside Rep. Brianna Titone, D- Arvada, which ultimately became law. 

“We had a real showdown in the well that was a struggle against my own party members and partly across the aisle,” Vigil recalled. “I was trying to really hold the line on this one really challenging piece of the policy that people wanted to amend out of the bill. At the end of the day, we held our ground, and now Colorado has some of the strongest clean hydrogen standards in the country, and ultimately the Federal Department of Energy followed our lead.”

Departing wisdom 

After serving over two decades in the Marine Corps, Rep. Don Wilson, R-Monument, went on to pursue a variety of endeavors, from teaching aeronautics serving on city council and ultimately as mayor of Monument. Wilson was elected to represent House District 20 in 2022 and will be leaving the legislature at the end of the session to run for El Paso County Commission. 

“I’ve always thought that that county commissioner was a good fit for me,” he responded when asked why he would not be returning to the Capitol. “I had never really planned on coming to the state until the opportunity came up. That opportunity was a good fit at the time, and I truly enjoyed it. I don’t think being at the state is any less satisfying or more satisfying than being at the county for me, I just think with my background in local government could possibly be more productive at the county than the makeup of the state right now.”

Wilson said his time in the legislature has helped him learn about the inner workings of the state and build relationships he hopes to carry with him into his next role. 

“Having that knowledge of who’s really good and who really understands this topic and that topic, I see myself using that moving forward as much as I can, even if it’s just for my own better understanding,” he said. 

Looking back at the past three sessions, Wilson said his biggest point of pride is the work his caucus has accomplished as a “super minority” in the House.

“Our caucus has done amazing things to work together and identify individual strong points to help us as a whole group,” he said. “If I remember right, we’re the smallest representation in the House that we’ve ever had, but we’ve managed to keep up. We’d love to be able to do more, but we’ve managed to keep up and have effective movement with our caucus.”

When asked what advice he would give to new legislators or individuals interested in running for office, Wilson’s response was three-pronged – have thick skin, be patient and be methodical.

“Your first feeling on things is not always the appropriate way to go about it,” he added. “Be patient and understand that sometimes in debate it feels personal, but it’s not. I think those would be some of the most important things to be prepared for.”

Wilson concluded: “My time in the legislature has been an amazing experience. I’ve enjoyed it. Even if I move on to county commissioner or if that doesn’t work out, I still plan on continuing to be more in touch with my state legislators and continuing to be engaged.”