Southeast Colorado Springs has been represented by the same council member since 2017. Three new candidates are running in the April election to become District 4’s representative on the Colorado Springs City Council.

Yolanda Avila is term-limited after completing eight years on the City Council. Appearing on the April 1 ballot to succeed Avila are Kimberly Gold, president of the Colorado Springs Black Chamber of Commerce; Sherrea Elliott-Sterling, a stay-at-home mother of three on the city’s drainage board; and Chauncy Johnson, a former aide to Democrat Rep. Marc Snyder of Manitou Springs.

District 4 makes up the southeast portion of the city, surrounding the Colorado Springs Airport and Peterson Space Force Base. The area has a more diverse population and lower incomes on average than the rest of the city, as highlighted in the Southeast Strong Community Plan released last year.

Gold has lived in Colorado Springs since 2020, when she moved following her Army husband, but said she immediately felt at home. Gold said she wanted to take a data-driven approach to giving back to the city as a council member.

“As city councilors, you have access to so much information and you have to be the person to connect the dots, to say these are the ways we can connect to work more powerfully and be the solutions,” Gold said.

Johnson, 25, said working for Snyder and interning for other legislators helped him learn to be outspoken, collaborative and versed in state programs.

Johnson said that Colorado Springs needed to start acting more like it is one of the 40 largest cities in the United States.

“I don’t think many other cities are doing what we’re doing. They are looking at the future and finding ways to innovate, and I think we have been stuck in some ways of thinking about things,” Johnson said.

Elliott-Sterling said key components of the district have not improved over the past few years and felt she had the “desperation and determination” to improve the area. Her major focus was economic expansion and work opportunities.

“What I don’t want to see is someone taking the seat that might have the information and they might have the connections, but the results are lagging. I want to see results,” Elliott-Sterling said.

Jeannie Orozco-Lira had also filed to run for the District 4 council seat. In early February, she announced that she was suspending her campaign because she would not be able to afford to focus on city business full-time with the small stipend for council members.

Annexations and housing growth

The Karman Line annexation approved by the City Council in January and the unsuccessful Amara annexation last year have placed a spotlight on housing supplies and affordable housing in District 4.

Gold said that the city has a long history of annexations and the issue will continue to come up. All three candidates said the city needed to use firm criteria and data around the Colorado Springs Utilities impacts to approve annexations in the future.

Johnson said that continuing to add land in the southeast would eventually cause Colorado Springs and Fountain to border each other, which raised broader questions about how the cities would collaborate. Johnson said the Springs needs long-term planning around police staffing and water supplies to stay ahead of the annexation demands.

“They’re essential things that people need in their daily lives that are never going to go away, so we need to look at how it affects things five or 10 years down the road,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the city could consider investing in rental assistance and utility assistance programs and advertising the resources that were already available.

While Gold supported the need for more affordable housing, she did not want District 4 to become the place where the city concentrated its affordable-housing projects. Gold said the area needs diverse options for the military families on the east side and the growing businesses near the airport.

Elliott-Sterling was big on city partnerships with developers to encourage projects and on facilitating with groups like the Colorado Springs Urban Renewal Authority for incentives. At the same time, she said the council’s biggest responsibility was financial and that they needed to avoid going too far with taxing residents for new projects.

“Growth has to be in the right timeline. Too much growth too soon can be detrimental to anyone or any environment. I don’t think anyone on council is looking to grow fast,” Elliott-Sterling said.

Public safety funds and police

Johnson lives a few blocks away from where De’von Bailey was killed in 2019 and knew him growing up. His death by a Colorado Springs police officer led Johnson to get involved with the local Black Lives Matter movement and the 2023 Stop Cop City campaign to reject the ballot measure to build a new police training academy.

Johnson said the city needed more oversight on police misconduct and recruiting, both to avoid additional deaths and to avoid costly lawsuits that the city would eventually settle.

“We’re just saying $4.5 million in taxpayer money could have been put into a lot of other things, like being put into a fund so that people can have assistance for housing,” Johnson said.

Both Johnson and Elliott-Sterling brought up the juvenile crime rate as a specific area of focus in the district and the need for more youth activities. Johnson brought up mentorships and city-provided rides to youth programs, while Elliott-Sterling talked about the lack of indoor event centers and community centers.

In addition to the community centers, Elliott-Sterling said she was a parent who believed in discipline. She said the city should expand the number of beds available in the juvenile detention facility and offer resources there to help prevent teenagers from reoffending.

Gold’s primary public safety focus was on increasing pay for Colorado Springs firefighters and police. She said the city had strong training programs but had trouble retaining firefighters when they could make more money working for a city with a smaller workload than Colorado Springs.

To afford the significant pay increases, Gold said the city might have to ask voters to approve another TABOR measure.

“If we want to live in a world-class city, we have to make world-class investments, and we need to have those difficult conversations,” Gold said. “How do we make strategic investments now to ease the burden later?”

Investment, engagement

Community activation was a major question for the candidates looking to get voters to show up in April. District 4 had by far the lowest voter turnout within the city during the 2021 election. The district saw 5,900 votes cast during that election, about 5,000 fewer votes than the district with the next-lowest turnout.

In February, the City Council hosted an appreciation event for the city’s various boards and committee volunteers. A chart shown during the event showed that only 4% of the city’s board volunteers came from District 4.

Elliott-Sterling said she would hope to continue door-knocking and talking to residents in person if she was elected. She thought the in-person questions were a possible substitute for asking more ballot questions, another approach that’s been floated this year by some groups, which she said could cause voter fatigue.

“As long as we’re staying connected with our constituents, we will have a good pulse of what they’re wanting and a good sense of what they want us to ask them about,” Elliott-Sterling said.

Gold said the city had similar struggles to businesses in breaking through the volume of information online to get people engaged. If elected, Gold said she wanted to launch a podcast and a newsletter where she could highlight businesses or notable residents of the district. Gold said that collaborating with the nonprofits and active community groups would help the city address homelessness and reach more residents.

“They are strong at being plugged into our community members and when we do that with them, that opens the door for them to feel known, valued and included and get more engaged,” Gold said.

Johnson said the city sometimes seemed to talk down to voters, which could leave people feeling slighted or annoyed.

Johnson said that Colorado Springs as a whole was behind other major cities on implementing new sections of the city government or using the home-rule abilities. He pointed to Boulder, which implemented open-carry restrictions and other gun limits after the 2021 shooting at a King Soopers.