A 30-person town in southeast Colorado has been officially declared abandoned by the state after all of its elected officials resigned, leaving residents with no government and a water system the state now calls a public health hazard.
Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Kline issued the abandonment order for the Town of Hartman this week under a Colorado statute that had never looked more necessary. Every trustee, the mayor, and the town clerk were gone. No one remained with the legal authority to sign a contract, spend a dollar of public money, call an election, or keep chlorine flowing into the water supply. Fox News Digital reported that the order followed a public hearing held July 13 at which state officials laid out the full scope of Hartman's collapse.
The result is a small American town that simply ceased to function, not because a disaster leveled it, but because the people responsible for running it walked away.
Hartman sits in Prowers County in Colorado's rural southeast corner. Its population of 30 makes it the kind of place most Americans drive past without noticing. But the problems that brought it down are not small-town quirks. They are the consequences of governance failure carried to its logical end.
The mayor resigned in October 2025. That same month, the town was placed under a boil water advisory. Then, in January 2026, a brawl broke out among four women after a board of trustees meeting. The day after the fight, all three remaining trustees submitted their resignations to the state Department of Local Affairs, known as DOLA. Pam Packer, one of the departing trustees, told The Denver Post the reason was blunt.
"Our safety was more important than having a government."
With no trustees, no mayor, and no clerk, the town could not hold elections, approve spending, or enter contracts. It could not even access more than $1 million in state grants already awarded for water system repairs, because those grants required a functioning government to draw down the funds on a reimbursement basis.
Meanwhile, the water kept getting worse. By mid-June, resident Jessie Simmons, a self-described landowner and voter in Hartman, filed a written application with the Secretary of State asking the state to declare the town abandoned. In her application, Simmons said the water had gone without chlorine for over a month, was not safe to drink, and, in her words, "smells horrible." The boil advisory that began in October 2025 was still in effect. The water tank itself was compromised and needed repair or replacement.
No one was operating the system.
Eric Bergman, director of the Division of Local Government within DOLA, testified at the July 13 hearing that his agency had been deeply involved in Hartman for years. A DOLA regional manager in southeast Colorado had worked extensively with the town for the previous five or six years. Since 2022, DOLA representatives made more than 30 visits to Hartman, helping with elections, budget work, audits, grant administration, recalls, resignations, and training new officials.
Thirty-plus state visits over roughly four years. Elections coached, budgets walked through, new officials trained, and the town still collapsed into a fistfight and mass resignation. That track record raises a fair question about whether any amount of state hand-holding can sustain a municipality that lacks the civic infrastructure to govern itself.
Bergman also testified that before the governance crisis, Hartman had been grappling with embezzlement allegations and restraining orders among its officials. The specifics of those allegations, who was accused, how much money was involved, and whether anyone faced charges, were not detailed in the hearing record or in available reporting. But they paint a picture of a town whose problems ran far deeper than a broken water tank.
DOLA and the Colorado Department of Health and Environment had previously provided grants totaling more than $1 million to fix Hartman's water system. Those funds sat untouched. Without a single government official authorized to sign a contract, the town could not spend the money it had already been awarded.
Kline's abandonment order, issued under Section 31-3-201(1)(b) of the Colorado Revised Statutes, laid out the legal reasoning in plain terms. Hartman had no board of trustees. It had no clerk. It could not hold an election. And it owned water infrastructure in a state of active health hazard with no one authorized to fix it.
Kline wrote that leaving the situation unresolved would strand 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."
The order transfers all existing streets, avenues, and alleys not owned by a third party to the Board of County Commissioners of Prowers County. More critically, it transfers ownership of Hartman's water infrastructure to Prowers County, which is then required to hand it off to an entity whose primary purpose is water treatment or delivery.
That transfer is the entire point. Without it, roughly 30 people in rural Colorado would remain indefinitely on a boil water advisory with no legal mechanism to fix the pipes, the tank, or the chlorine supply. The abandonment declaration is not a punishment. It is an admission that the town, as a legal entity, no longer exists in any functional sense, and that someone else has to step in before the water situation turns from a health hazard into something worse.
The detail that should stick with taxpayers is the money. State agencies had already committed more than $1 million in grants for Hartman's water system. The funds were structured as reimbursements, the town would pay for repairs, then get paid back. But a town with no officials cannot sign a contract with a plumber, let alone manage a million-dollar infrastructure project. So the money sat there, allocated and useless, while residents boiled water that smelled foul and lacked basic treatment.
Whether those grant funds can now be redirected through Prowers County or whatever water entity takes over remains an open question. The abandonment order does not spell out a timeline for the county to complete the transfer of water infrastructure, and no specific entity has been publicly identified as the likely recipient.
Hartman's remaining residents, people who chose to stay in a town with no government, no safe water, and no clear path forward, are now dependent on county officials they did not elect to solve problems their own elected leaders could not handle. It is not an ideal outcome. But as Kline's order makes clear, it was the only legal outcome left.
When every official quits, the water goes bad, a million dollars in aid goes untouched, and the state has to declare your town abandoned just so someone can turn the chlorine back on, that is not a failure of one person or one meeting. That is what happens when local government stops being accountable to the people who depend on it.
