I will not be ranking these candidates for you, but you get to!
Before an election, these were People already busy using their skills to think about the community. After an election, these People won’t cease to exist! You can work with them and generate support for what they do.
By the outlets
This necessarily can’t be an exhaustive list, but I hope you look into some of these links.
Their sites
I will present them in “ballot order”, which wasn’t decided by me, but it’s better than nothing. May you form mnemonic bonds to this order based on your adventure down this piece.
Coloradoan
This piece’s topic link is repeated here and in the table of contents.
Individual profiles of each candidate are available as well:
CRES Mayoral Candidate Forum
The renewable energy forum was a great early look at candidates. Unfortunately it took place on the same day as political violence. Colorado experienced a school shooting on the very same day as The Other Violence. Whether or not you like it mentioned, most people in that room had the day’s events ringing in their ears.
Locally we’re allowed to keep pursuing renewables, though the federal lines of funding might go away. Local effort is understood to be the tangible ask.
Snapshot News
Marjorie (Jorie) Kramer of LWV hosted a question forum in Fort Collins City Hall, but also interviewed the candidates individually for Snapshot News:
This is Hirschhorn’s dominant appearance for subjects.
YIMBY Fort Collins
This is a group that likes initiatives which address the housing situation. The movement seems bigger than its YouTube channel subscribers will reveal, another example of how social medias don’t actually model real life.
As someone unfamiliar with the deeper particulars, the popularity of this seems directly driven by the overt, gaping wound in us from software-enforced rent inflation, and real house costs besides. (If we’re ever brash with an entire inheritance right there at the end of our lives, we might own grass before we die.)
- ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwXFrNDotFI
- ://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2025/07/14/where-fort-collins-mayoral-candidates-stand-on-housing/84535667007/
LWV Mayoral Candidate Forum
This forum took place in City Hall and featured the candidates answering questions that were gathered and prepared for the host, Jorie Kramer, at the event. There were strict time limits, and the questions were a useful tour, but difficult to dig deeply on.
Fort Collins Report
Chris Crenshaw runs FC Report and is looking for board and content contributions. He’s also seeking to serve small journalism projects to give them a platform in this community lacking outlets for writers to use.
ANTIBODY
It was not easy to decide who to write about in Loveland or Fort Collins, as both are having their elections for council seats and more.
In my work so far with FCCOPI, I’d met local community leaders at libraries and universities running extensive student-led services.
When I first met Pete Waack, CEO of Rocky Mountain Student Media and its ventures, it was with the local retreat of journalism in mind that some of the citizen committee were there asking for insights on approaching new local media for a targeted purpose. The committee had a clear goal statement, but not a lot of specific asks yet; We were researching.
I had already asked another former city official on the committee for his personal view into local races he thought counted as interesting. He told me Tricia and Shirley were both campaigns who were worth looking at. I may have implied that I was looking for work with someone, and I was, but in a ranked choice election it was a good chance to write about a lot. If candidates like anything about what I do, they have a line. If I like the opportunity, it’ll include liking the initiative.
As a resident of Loveland, I attend my own City Councils and hear them cite Fort Collins in discussion. I’ve had much more beer in Fort Collins than my town, so it made sense to me why we had this mixing. In NoCo, you find yourself in Timnath for the Beerwerks. We go to Longmont, and west just over our mountains. We are connected, surely.
When I discovered this year that AT&T was using phone upgrades to opt-in attack the public to resume selling your realtime location and ethnicity to literally anybody, I was concerned in general. Then I found out Fort Collins buys this kind of data to do economic development, and had started virtually immediately when AT&T’s program began.
- ://www.att.com/legal/terms.personalizedPlus.html
- ://antibody/journal/autumn-ryan-Personalized-Plus/
- ://openbook.fcgov.com/#!/year/All%20Years/explore/0-/vendor_name/PLACER+LABS+INC/1/service
I had to stop and wonder at if Fort Collins was buying my realtime location, every time I made it to Visit Fort Collins for a 1 Million Cups meeting of entrepreneurs doing pitches to each other, or when I participated in a citizen committee.
Was the city getting my data even though I’m not a resident? Am I close enough that they just get me most of the time anyway? Who else “just gets me”, actually? Who else can buy my location at will?
I found myself convinced that I deserved to pay attention to Fort Collins, because at minimum, I can assume Fort Collins is already paying attention to me.
A reason to stay
Generations are being raised in their first ever glimpse at national political climate, and it has been openly violent. These are national issues, but do not mistake that for a reason to dismiss them: The Tesla dealership in my town was in national news. I’m not online too much, the DOJ yelled into cameras about standing a security force on my way to anywhere here.
The non-partisan election is a source of gladness for me. That conflict is Gordion and we need to share a local mindset first.
I have not seen a single local political ad. I don’t lead a life that puts ads in front of me. I pay for my media, and I am busy in my community, and yours, Fort Collins.
Sadly, as I asked people face to face in preparation for this piece if they knew any of the candidate names, none do. I haven’t asked Everybody, but I’m asking the ones I know don’t vote. (Where would they find the motive?)
The politicians, for all they reach spending levels they’re satisfied with, are not reaching people.
My own lack of media exposure to these candidates is not the anomaly. This is endemic in our public.
2026 will become storied with my planning for how I can progress the metric of how many people know your names, candidates. That is how low the bar is. Hold my Fort Collins-bought beer.
I can’t vote for what happens next in Fort Collins, so why don’t you handle it?
What Do You Need?
On November 20 2024, I scrawled my notes on a weekday night for the only public project concept that wouldn’t leave my mind. Its name was only “What Do You Need?” because it seemed so few actually heard such needs.
I see people with bills they can’t pay before there is any eviction notice, so orgs can’t help. I see people with eating disorders unable to get the care they need because their BMI is a fraction of a point too low. I see beloved businesses close because it’s just too expensive. I hear people struggle to get transportation when they need it without extravagant prior arrangements.
There are help organizations which push paperwork in someone’s hands, replete with every niche question they might ever want to know about their concept, only for the first meeting to be with someone who hasn’t read that unholy stack of paper. Maybe the meeting is a rejection, and everyone’s time was wasted.
To seek help is costly on time, and to be lost in a game of qualification is insulting to them. They resent this declaration that they are not right for help. It is monstrously alienating and strengthens any underground culture that critiques the worth of these systems. The systems and agents do not ask for meaningful feedback, and certainly can’t implement unsolicited feedback.
I needed to promote leaders who knew the heartbeat of their city and where it needed some of that listening I heard about at the forum. I needed voices that could foil for the front-runners and make them accountable to their stances.
In Fort Collins, a ranked choice election gives you the power to say more with your vote, to pack more metadata. Your vote is more sophisticated now.
Technically, you don’t have to do more than rank a first and finish, but at long last, that failure can be on us and the candidates, not the medium itself.
Fort Collins candidates aren’t taking party money, so more than ever they need to mean what they say and earn your high rank.
Vote fearlessly for your honest firsts. You could rank several underdogs above your safe pick and face no loss of control.
Let your intent be seen, even if you can’t win it all. They can measure it now.
Help your candidates know you see them through general noise of all else. They really do need you.
Meetup recently harmed the local 1 Million Cups chapter by raising the cost to run organizing on the platform. Their listing closed and attendees come less often, because they mistake Meetup for the True listing of what’s going on.
Maybe Meetup should label events with the organizer’s last bill amount and cycle. I think that would be an uncommonly unbiased transparency detail for users to see when they use the platform, don’t you?
I met Shirley Peel first, with a running candidate for City Council. They found us despite no more Meetup listing. I want you to wonder: How would you learn about this event?
She did this unspecified task, and came into Visit Fort Collins for the entrepreneur event. She was with a City Council candidate and expressed elation that they had learned about the group.
Connecting with our own local business owners is so hard. Discovering our own locals and what they do is impossible in the practicals; Until Meetup makes it clear which of their players are bankrolled, I don’t see how a Person is supposed to know more about what isn’t listed.
Culturally, we need to unplug from some of these platforms to remember what infrastructure we lack. We need each other. That’s you together up there in Fort Collins, and Loveland is spooning you; Sorry.
We are This Close and still not talking to each other, still unable to see each other.
Find Us. Tell us what you need. Stop People on the street and ask them what they call neat in their life. Help them talk about it if they want.
Talk about what you see, what you need, and what you can do. You can copy the entire ANTIBODY website right this second if you click a single link:
- Copy the ANTIBODY template to your own GitHub account for free
- or this entire literal website’s code and content.zip
Just add or remove things from the docs/journal folder and follow the patterns you see. If you’re struggling, put new instructions in AGENTS.md and tell an agent what you’re hoping to do. Even if AI agents get things wrong during some steps, they will heal the damage over time.
If you prefer to write pieces on ANTIBODY itself, start a pull request from your copy and let’s talk at The Neighbor.
No one can stop you. What are you gonna do with that?
Centering
Each candidate discussion I got to hold was in our local spot The Neighbor. There’s space and music if you come at the right time. They close down early sometimes and I think the employees like how things are working.
In conversation, they all know there is an observable effect on the centering.
Not a mere average of Real Positions, this centering is helping these party-less individuals identify priorities that have voters they can count.
These candidates remember their party affiliations, but I pay for the media I consume and haven’t seen an ad in years. It doesn’t make me centered, but I certainly got to calibrate with them directly.
They have to conjure their own money, and so the game does become a bit about who can summon donations with their bespoke grit and prior credentials. Despite this, the content of their speech is on display.
I know well that Shirley Peel observes what I do, that whether or not memes, videos, ads or news stand by what passes for their sources, the grand act of washing data through many sources makes it too easy for outlets to say by the weight of context that they need not even cite their hearsay anymore, because it is consensus.
You reader, and you candidate, will be benefitted from real experience with this phenomenon of laundered facts: It is hearsay that has lost its citations when you encounter it in the wild, having gotten away with it by trust, apathy or nepotism.
To my wondering with Shirley whether there was candidate willpower for the same overall format into future elections, Shirley could imagine opportunity to refine it for the free speech core at any politician’s platform. City Council is full of the women she knows and works with personally and professionally, but they don’t represent her better than she represents herself. She’s looking for ways to gather local voices.
If you instead want “centered” the way r/moderatepolitics is centering tone to discuss big things, Adam Hirschhorn can serve you. He may not want to meet just anybody, but he might plausibly explain why that lets him protect you from rogue Authority.
Despite a functioning society, it is a sign of times that some of us sense the earnest truth of Adam Hirschhorn’s promise on that point, and could rank him well for some times. It’s hard to know when to break the glass for The Emergency, but I know a few who would be happier to put any ranked vote on Hirschhorn than they usually are in a closed party system with rogue independents.
What I think will be truly centering in Fort Collins is the data from the ranked results. Not just a binding upon them, I hope the format affords our city’s candidates fresh new access to their public, a more centered reflection of support that they can look forward to cultivating.
Civility
There is little to address on the point of division. At the last forum, ScottyV presses on the extremely shortened format to highlight its lost authenticity. Our candidates want discussions, whether or not they are using the 90 seconds to say it or another thing.
Social medias have showed us how hard it is to say anything at all in a whole enough form not to draw argument. With civility, we say call off the argument and focus on your positive motion. Seated with the mics though, like for surveys, they only get to answer the questions as brought to them at last.
The forum was a good tour, but clipped in its way. What I like about real life is that People can’t yet use ChatGPT to speak for them.
Very sensibly, they all invite direct discussion, but it is a measure of something real when I get to see what animates them with time limits involved.
There is a lot of discussion of listening to solve problems.
In my time attending political action groups in the state of Colorado, I find them engorged on national discussions. They want to help locally, but we’re the ones sitting down thinking of how to do that, and we have no idea. We should barely be responsible, but it feels like you’re burning oil because you’re the only ones tonight.
Those of us working on issue selection were doing our best but I watched basically nobody else mark “truth in media” as an issue that affected them personally, and I call that a lie. That Is A Lie. Our media is syndicated and damaged and branded when it arrives to us, even (especially) on social media.
I fear there isn’t enough for our leaders to hear in elections. People can’t say it unless they can skillfully conjure tricks in social media, where content is encouraged to be shorter and shorter.
I promote civility, though like ScottyV I must wonder loudly sometimes at what we are expected to say with our brutally short time slots.
Do A Trick, observers will demand, and I don’t blame ScottyV or hypothetical others for saying No to the premise and selecting their own.
What does it look like to resort to other civil means?
What can we say yet, except to notice that our time has by and large been taken from us People?
May We Have Our Time Back?
Water
At risk of over-representing Shirley Peel, talk of water sounds different from her than the other candidates at the public forum. Sharing water districts is a possibility that is starting to count its pros more than its cons, but this would represent a change around here, and so the evidence required to make that switch might need to be sizeable.
I haven’t been able to tell yet if Sizeable would describe emergency or credibility. The home team should build their own valid working model without sharing districts, so that their case can be made with more metadata. We’re still working on getting their names known at all, but we’ll add water discussion to the list.
For one paragraph, I will containerize my concern about Water:
The world over: Mercenaries contested control of water shared by India and Pakistan. Government threaten water agreements. War replaces wheat, embedded in the ground. Our farmers are failing financially this year specifically and need a bailout. Agriculture is falling derelict and climate is changing much. The federal government of the United States has Bureau of Land Management territories and costly ways to develop them. The Unitary Executive spectates Netanyahu’s failings and offers to take Gaza away for development dreams. It solicits Greenland with hostile embedded measures, and frequently seeks Canada’s land by absorption specifically. The Unitary Executive’s interest in land is also domestic. It ordered our streets to be the military’s practice grounds, where they are masked, heavily armed and paired with bluejeans terrorists with zipties. If the Unitary Executive wants land, and cannot get it elsewhere, it can empty a city by waiving its hand and taking away our water source. We will flee without a bullet.
Northern Colorado’s water is a series of connected paths. In 2025, Loveland’s semi-local digital paper remarked about the low canals and found quotes from Greeley:
“
Low water levels in Lake Loveland keep boats out, kill hundreds of fish
://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/loveland/low-water-levels-in-lake-loveland-keep-boats-out-kill-hundreds-of-fish
¶ 7: To understand the reasons behind the declining water levels, Denver7 spoke with Leah Hubbard, deputy director of water resources for the City of Greeley. She said Greeley owns more than 50% of the water in Lake Loveland.
¶ 8: Hubbard explained that this year, the rapid snowmelt from the mountains and a lack of additional snow in April contributed to the reservoir’s insufficient fill. These levels are expected to fall even further in the coming weeks.
¶ 11: “Over time, there has been recreational purposes on that lake, but before — long before the houses in the community surrounded it — it was there for the irrigated crops out towards Greeley,” said Hubbard.
¶ 10: Hubbard noted that the lake is managed by the Greeley Loveland Irrigation Company (GLIC), which uses it primarily for irrigation purposes, meaning it is designed to be drained.
Free movement
Tricia Canonico is doing a lot to cooperate for rail in Fort Collins by 2029. This is an air quality topic because of cars. She believes the rail site choice in Fort Collins is the right one and is working with our Governor’s office to validate and move forward. She can speak well about it and go to bat.
Our key demographics in sustainability are vanishing, but transit could make it tolerable to commute to Denver from Northern Colorado, maybe even if you don’t own a car.
I have wanted to rid myself of a vehicle before, and I have wanted to live in one before. What I want is free movement. The environment or methods make it possible. I don’t like living in big cities, but it is enlightening to see what density really means for what you can do with 10 minutes on foot. A 15-minute city means you could have warm food inside you by then, without any prior technology or mechanical requirements. Try walking for 15 minutes outside of college town and see how far that gets literally anybody in a mass housing installation.
Housing and free movement are difficultly linked to roads, which are nicely laid out with a grid at large scales, and then rammed full of things you would literally never walk to, like other People’s houses, unless you were there to levy the annual Treat tax.
For a long time in other states, only parks fill the need for walkable places, and the subdivisions that got them early enough are considered family spots. Apartments in other states sometimes build charming but ridiculous terraces that don’t fit, to give people somewhere the hell to be that is not in their four walls.
If you need to figure out what to do as a public servant, help us walk places. Help us spirit ourselves to places that only the power of civilization can do. Let us ride trains places. The busses are working, let’s keep those running to the right places at the right times on sane schedules.
Loveland and Fort Collins share a regional airport which opened its new terminal in 2025. I went thinking it would be a small thing, but it was very well attended, and I don’t think it was just the option for a free glass of wine.
Parking fees in Fort Collins have been an issue for some, and the City is promising to take feedback.
We are really into travel. Fort Collins has been trying to keep the fee taxation very low, but we know which way fees like to go.
Rising rates for transit is a warning dial that is easier to treat before it’s a decade’s old deficit of value. Don’t wait like Minimum Wage, when it’s so far out of date that it’s tempting to treat it like forgotten law more than something to be modernized.
Pay doesn’t keep up properly, and so we can’t keep up with anything. Small transit costs are a wonderful reset on the “fuel cost” of movement. The system isn’t even a hassle. I’ve had Words for bus systems elsewhere, but Fort Collins really is thinking for itself and being active in the design of its transit.
The Yarrow Collective is a local group in town that does alternate discussion therapy to give people more ways to escape addiction and feel good about their autonomy. Spanish-speaking families are raising kids who have to learn about what their heritage means to them, and some are finding out that they feel less hispanic.
Their families have been here all along too, and now their home looks segregated by developments. They require cars to cut through town, or a little less car and a little more nearby park. Their community has shrunk, less mixed in. They act out the 15-minute city dream, in what’s left of their space.
If we need to redefine diversity for our politics, let us do it with descriptions of receptive interest. We’re distinct but can communicate with waving hands, so how much does sex, race, or drugs matter really?
Low costs enable possibility for those don’t have it. The more we can decouple money from movement, the better off our society in isolation will be.
Housing
The stats are pretty brutal. It’s not affordable. Key demographics are fleeing. It seems we all know we need a change, but those close to governance know the money has to come from somewhere. Short active development, land use code is a key subject.
Mixed zoning and land use is under review because of what inspires the 15-minute city concept. Development for business includes figuring out what to do with derelict projects that are weird just because we’ve never reused those before in our society.
I’m not here to tell you to make Fort Collins Just Like Austin, but in Austin I ate a fine steak and seafood meal in an old laundromat. It is sexy and fun. We are like cats if you just give us boxes to jump into. We like em weird.
Weird can be the active ingredient. Adam Hirschhorn has thoughts about closed systems, vertical building, and removing restrictions on smaller dwellings on owned property. For a pedestrian or a student they may not matter (yet), but I will highlight just that the way the law defines land use is important to everyone.
There is a demographic hole in Fort Collins that is will not heal quickly, and this gaping thing might be ignorable if the city is content to drive away everyone away like a right a passage at some age.
YIMBY Fort Collins held a forum with the active candidates, and got to look at housing questions. I think Scott VanTatenhove had the closest pulse on what to do in practice for target goals with legislation. He seemed to me to peer through the stats at the People and motion and opposition. YIMBY wrote about housing after their forum.
Scott wants a compromise, but he’s real about it and he does care. He’s plugged into the state legislation that has gone on this year. He is an earnest observer and seems to see the human structure of affecting change, because he’s done it.
I am tempted to make Housing my shortest piece of this write-up, but because if the issue animates you at all, there are probably People looking at it. You can get involved now, not when you sit back and wait for your vote to go off.
Local businesses
Though I met Shirley at an entrepreneur event first, I met Emily Francis at one last.
I had a very difficult time trying to write about the entrepreneurs in Fort Collins. They are active here, but I can’t get many to attend the Community Conversations series going on at the Poudre Libraries. It has remained unclear to me how to say anything that helps these solo business owners or dreamers.
Adam Eggleston was the closest thing to one of these business owners, and his testimony of local business agreed with mine, that it felt bad to sell products he was losing price control over. He didn’t have a taste for the consumer’s blood, and wanted to play a better kind of game.
Local employment issues and quagmires won’t be healed by any city representative, after one or two asks from us. We need to bring our own x-factor and teach locals why it’s better to be hired in town, and then the representatives can discover value for us with that data.
On November 3rd, I was able to watch Emily be brief, together with the Visit Fort Collins staff leadership apologizing that they were interrupting such a smooth-gliding social event to yap at them.
My intuition says that they cut their remarks deeply. Deeeeeply. They had pages stapled together, and read only tiny bits to fulfill a need to be seen, but also a need to get out of the way.
At Visit Fort Collins on the night before election day, she knew that things were taking place on the floor between the entrepreneurs, and that very few of the words on those papers were more important than what we were already doing.
In searching for someone whose powers of decision made me resonate with agreement, I did certainly feel that here. How easy it may have been for a candidate to use that microphone like they stole it, like it was their race and ego to bandy about with the power of the floor.
Emily Francis has an advantage with visibility and speaking time. I’ve seen her standing in the City Council chamber as she receives comments, while others must be seated. Her levelness suggests to me a kind of alertness about what is immediately head, like she’s reading her rooms.
I could never rubber-stamp another person, but I am glad that Emily is steady and even.
$11M
Fort Collins has had excess money to argue about more often than not. All of Larimer County can vote on ballot measures for the cities to keep money in excess of declared goals, if collected via tax, instead of returning it.
I have been a fan of the concept of capped amounts and returns, because it forces much care at the design stage of the ask, and fewer moving goal posts. It is a nice feeling, to know that a number actually means something, instead of being a literally fake piece of data lacking impact on any decision the officials face.
The $11M shortfall in 2025 feels like a stick that got caught in their bike wheel, but they’re strong enough to handle it. The projected shortfall in the year ahead is larger.
This bucking of TABOR-like restraint can and will unlock new funding, though not in a fully wildcard way.
My eye is on this category of issue in 2026, as it may properly annotate something about how money gets hard to talk and campaign about when it is an untested mirage. Speculative thinking about forward money is risky, and the public is often susceptible to speech that can flick its wrist about unknowable details. The limits are valuable, but all across Colorado we may be bucking our TABOR roots. Our cities need money, though I am happiest when I see planners on the field, not just progressives who squeal happily at found money.
I know Fort Collins has practice operating from a position of excess and their voting blocks are often resoundingly clear on the ballot results. The locals aren’t fearful of this $11M oopsie, and I didn’t see much attention reflected on it besides with Adam Hirschhorn.
Sustainability
Adam Hirschhorn is the only candidate who uses sustainability-oriented thinking the way I want everyone to. I couldn’t vouch for specific candidate policies or how they’d improvise in a pinch (sometimes creativity can violate a lot of norms without time to explain; See the Unitary Executive), but I appreciated that this larger political environment produced a candidate that could look us in the eye and promise he understood what the breakdown of order can require from us.
The notes I took away for sustainability come after I spoke with John Grant, a member of the citizen committee seeking support for a Community Opinion Platform and many climate issues. Grant’s efforts for Sustilience brought me a unique focus on what it means to endure disasters, not prevent them by strange principles of Exceptionalism.
Adam Hirschhorn spoke more like a Resilience observer I had hoped to locate, but the ideas are a hard side turn.
One day not far away, we may need people brave enough to use the wheel in front of them. People who contemplate how to use it (who contemplate anything at all, tbh) are rare.
Hirschhorn is using the tools available to locate information in the wind, and I know well that the wind is the only place to find it, when so-called Journalists write under digital accounts named “Staff Writer” and fulfill their obligation to reblog whatever is emailed to them with only sparse interest.
If at some time we must be a closed system, I understand how Hirschhorn would approach it. Reliance on ourselves is fundamental. I’m concerned that Fort Collins is arriving at a plan to federalize more traffic systems to tap federal funding.
Reliance must be on ourselves, not on the federal vending machine that threatens to wink out of existence to please some types of federal Authority.
Unions make this possible in the basics, but unions are vanishingly rare for our working population. I find it hard to blanket promote unions, because the devils are always in details, but I admit for us that we need the power to conspire against those who conspire against us first.
There is so much to say about sustainability, resilience and the confluence of them. We will hunt for value at this intersection of needs, because no one is bringing a compatible plan, and no one is really yet listening.
Fort Collins was ranked a Number One place to live, and locals often know it. Yet, software workers are getting destroyed and leaving for other markets (actual or remote). The defense industry alone is Teeming. Well, ad-tech tech too, but that is a parasite industry.
Anduril will have notes soon.
You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.
