Democrat Trisha Calvarese says a family crisis spurred her return to Colorado and sparked her desire to run for Congress.
She came back to Colorado last year to tend to her ailing parents after several years as a speechwriter and communications consultant in Washington, D.C. She said that experience focused her attention on the challenges family members face in caring for each other, and the shortcomings in government programs designed to help.
“There's a care crisis coming and so going through that challenge personally, I understand the care and economic challenges our families face.”
Calvarese, who lives in Highlands Ranch, faces Republican Lauren Boebert in the 4th Congressional District, where the winner will juggle the often different needs of urban and rural constituents. The district includes most of Colorado’s rural Eastern Plains, along with Front Range population centers including Highlands Ranch, Parker and Castle Rock to the south, and Loveland and Windsor to the north.
Boebert, who has represented Western Colorado’s 3rd District since 2020, moved across the state earlier this year and announced her bid for the 4th Congressional District.
Calvarese spoke with Colorado Matters about health care, agriculture, the cost of living and helping workers transition to higher-paying jobs.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Ryan Warner: I'd like to have you name a problem in your community and explain why voters should send you to DC to address it.
Calvarese: I would say care is a universal issue and a struggle in our district, and I'm qualified to step up on behalf of care for all of Colorado.
Warner: Care, you say.
Calvarese: Care. Care. Yes. Care.
Warner: Do you mean healthcare in particular?
Calvarese: I mean healthcare, mental health, care for our seniors, and restoring our reproductive rights. That's why I got into this race. I'm from here, I grew up here, and I moved back home when both of my parents got sick at the same time.
Now, I was working in Washington DC at the time. Thanks to my union, and thanks to Medicare, I could drop everything and provide that end-of-life care. If I couldn't be here for that, I can't even... the nightmare scenario. And I had so much support. People on the Eastern Plains do not have that. There's a care crisis coming and so going through that challenge personally, I understand the care and economic challenges our families face.
Warner: When you say there is a care crisis coming, do you want to be more specific about it and what you'd do about it?
Calvarese: Absolutely. So that's the sandwich generation where multi-families are living in a single house and the burden of care is falling to one generation, and it's elder care for our seniors -- Where are these care facilities? Are they affordable? Are they accessible?
Care for our children. I hear, everywhere I go, that there is a mental health crisis among our children. There's a maternal crisis on the Eastern Plains. There is a lack of maternal care. There are deserts, and there's also just an emergency happening in rural healthcare right now.
I was at the Melissa Memorial Hospital out in Holyoke, and this is a self-organized hospital. These are folks who came together and said, we want to provide care in our community. And so I had the honor of touring their hospital, and it's incredible. We got to the ambulance bay. How much does your ambulance cost? What is it? $330,000. That is the cost to be saving lives right now on the Eastern Plains.
Warner: And what can Congress do to improve the picture? I'll say that I heard this as well as part of our Voter Voices project. I spent some time, for instance, in Springfield and Campo, and there is a real question about how far people are driving for care, for instance, and certainly the availability of child care. How can Congress impact this?
Calvarese: It's having the right representative who's running for the people regardless of party or political agenda. So if I were in Congress right now, I would be fighting to get money that's already been appropriated through the American Rescue Plan Act. That's already passed. That funding's there. These folks just need to apply for it. There might be some coordination that needs to happen on a county level, but that is the purpose of government. That's the purpose of a congressional representative. It is that form of service. One of the problems they're having at the Melissa Memorial Hospital is they want more doctors, but they can't get doctors to move there because there's no housing, so they're paying to put people up at the hotel. That's not sustainable.
We need to develop our Eastern Plains, and we need to do it sustainably, but where we're adapting to the real care needs people are facing, right? We're also post-COVID. We lost a million people. Millions more have disabilities. We need to adjust it. I'm going to go in and continue to fight to lower prescription drug costs. And this is deeply personal, and this is actually something I called Lauren Boebert out on in the one debate she agreed on. I asked her how on earth she could vote against legislation that extends the life of seniors. And this is, again, personal. So when my dad was first diagnosed with his terminal illness, I got years beyond the expectation of that diagnosis, thanks to life-extending care that his union retiree benefits covered. Out of pocket, guess how much that medicine would've cost?
Warner: Thousands.
Calvarese: $191,000 a year, which you cannot put a price on more time with family. The Inflation Reduction Act makes it so that we can now negotiate those costs down. And Lauren Boebert voted against that. She voted on the side of big pharma to keep that medicine high and out of the reach of seniors.
Warner: You talked about there needing to be more healthcare providers on the Plains and in these rural areas, Congress can't exactly force someone to move somewhere. So how do you make sure that happens?
Calvarese: No, but we can absolutely champion rural broadband. In 2024, nobody should be without access to the internet. And that would make care more accessible on the Eastern Plains, is having those pieces.
We also need pathways into those excellent care jobs of the future. In all of Congressional District 4, 21 counties, there is not one traditional four-year college or university, not one. So we need to create pathways that meet people where they are, to bring those opportunities so that people, if they do want to become a care provider, a nurse, a doctor, that it's a good-paying job and it's accessible right in their towns where they live.
Warner: Representative Boebert has said that the Inflation Reduction Act was just too expensive overall. And I'll just note that Washington right now is occupied with a fight over the budget. The federal government will run out of money September 30th and could shut down unless Congress passes what's called a continuing resolution. The federal debt grows by $1 trillion every hundred days. Meanwhile at a recent debate, you called for a middle-class tax cut. How do you pay for all of this? You sound perhaps like a big spender, Trisha Calvarese.
Calvarese: Well, let's back up. There are lots of issues here on the table, right? Looking at debt and deficit, how we reduce those. Number one, show up for a vote. Lauren Boebert missed the vote on the debt ceiling. Didn't even show up to it, okay, and then lied about it, said that it was a matter of conscience or a moral objection, but later we saw video of her literally running and missing the vote.
Within the current tax policy that is set to expire in 2025, there are incentives for companies to offshore. There are potentially trillions of dollars right now being sheltered offshore. Let's bring it back. That could be on a magnitude of trillions. Okay, so you're talking about debt and deficit. You do not reduce it by holding the government hostage. That's people's social security. That's access to the VA for veterans. That's customs and border patrol, right? It's critical to our economy. What's really interesting about the IRA, it is designed differently. It is not meant to just pick winners and losers. It's about economic development in the places that have been overlooked and left behind.
And for every dollar that the government is putting into it, we're seeing $5 and $6 come in from the private sector. And we're bringing in partners that we haven't before. community colleges, unions, employers, thinking of, how do we build the industries of the future? How do we make sure that America is leading in these technologies?
Warner: IRA, again, the Inflation Reduction Act. You grew up and went to high school in Highlands Ranch, which is in the district you want to represent. Then you went to Washington D.C. for quite a while. As you mentioned, you served as an intern to Senator Bernie Sanders. You worked in communications, including stints at the AFL-CIO, which is a federation of unions, and at the National Science Foundation. You talked about some of your familial experience, but how is your professional experience relevant to the 4th (Congressional District) particularly, where energy and agriculture dominate?
Calvarese: Well, I have experience working with people from all walks of life, different political views, to get things done. So at the AFL-CIO I got to see, and help even, passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That's going to be critical to the sustainable energy future. And again, at AFL-CIO, as a speechwriter, I had the pen on labor's response when the Biden-Harris administration closed the Keystone access pipeline. And the response was pretty simple: not on our backs, not on the backs of working people will this transition happen. We fought to make those jobs in coal, oil, and gas good jobs. They're union jobs. They pay well. So if we're going to take those away, there needs to be jobs in place. There needs to be opportunities in place. And here's the thing, it can't be like it was in the past where we're saying, “Oh, those folks who worked on a pipeline can get up, move, and go to Silicon Valley and become coders.”
That's not realistic. That's not fair.
So the Inflation Reduction Act is very helpful because it's making these investments in a way where we're bringing labor to the table from the onset, where we're creating those pathways to good jobs from the beginning. I actually, again, out on the Eastern Plains, was just talking to a high school teacher, and he was like, “I was talking to my class, and this one kid asked, “What careers are you guys thinking of?” and this one kid raises his hand and said he wanted to be a lineman. And I'm like, “Oh, like a football lineman?” “No, a power lineman.”
Warner: I was going to say electrical.
Calvarese: That's right, with IBEW, because those are excellent jobs. They pay well. The kid sees his uncles in IBEW, sees that it buys a house, a truck, vacation, time to spend with each other.
Warner: So you have had some view, you say, of this energy economy transition. I'll say that the 4th (Congressional District) includes a lot of Weld County in Northern Colorado. Weld accounts now for more than 80 percent of oil production, more than half of gas production. And you've talked in your campaign about the environment and sustainability. But you said to the Denver Post in June, "We're not going to leave our fossil fuel communities behind. It's about making sure it's not being done off the backs of working people." Are you trying to have it both ways there?
Calvarese: Well, we can transition, right? Where coal mines or wells, we have tons of them that we need to cap. There's other mining that we need to do for critical minerals, and we need to think about how we're doing it sustainably. We have a highly skilled workforce already here, already with excellent jobs. As we look at the transition there's a drawdown strategy, right? I recently talked to the former Secretary of Energy (Ernest) Moniz. In his words, he was like, "Thank goodness we were producing LNG."
Warner: Liquefied natural gas.
Calvarese: That's right. We were able to save our allies because we don't exist in a vacuum, right? The transition has to happen globally, where we were able to defend our allies when Russia invaded Ukraine, so that Germany could keep the lights on. So we need to be effective both in our geopolitical needs right now and the drawdown for the future. And there's lots of ways we can upskill people.
Warner: Well, give me an example of that. Talk to the person whose job in the 4th Congressional District may sunset because energy is transitioning.
Calvarese: I would say where the biggest concern for that is with our farmers. That is also connected to energy, but even kind of as a separate issue is our food production. And right now, talking to farmers, prices are too high, where a corn cutter is a million dollars that you have to pay off, that's a mortgage, in five years, not 30. So looking at the ways we can make those jobs more productive. How can we help our growers grow more food? That's going to drive down costs writ large.
Warner: And what's the how there? How do you do that?
Calvarese: We look at what's working, and then technology, because that was a huge piece of the National Science Foundation and some of these bills. Both the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as the IRA, in conjunction with the infrastructure bill, can make investments to help farmers be more productive. We know there's soil intensification pieces they can do. There's different pieces of technology where we can streamline things. I would also say reshoring the manufacturing of all the chemicals that are connected to agriculture. So I was just on a farm the other day. The farmer shows me this chemical he needs, right? $15,000 for a vat of it, and it's made in China. There's no reason we can't have the entrepreneurship, the innovativeness to be making a sustainable chemical here, drive the cost down here, build the infrastructure here, fix the road so that we can move back and forth between these centers of population and the plains.
Warner: Is there anything more you want to say on the transition, though, for energy workers?
Calvarese: I'll have their backs always. It's not a simple, clear-cut, X, Y, Z needs to happen. It's a lot of moving pieces at once. And I can tell you, just when we go into the legislation for that, I'm always going to have workers' backs. I'm always going to stand up for opportunities in the fossil fuel communities, in the oil and gas places, in the places, frankly, that are so poor. They don't even have water infrastructure. I will always fight for working people and to always make sure that people can have a way to support their families.
Warner: Why don't we talk about water then? Because obviously it's critical to any of the industries we've spoken of thus far. How do you, especially in the face of climate change, ensure that there is access in the 4th Congressional District to the water that would presumably fuel so much of the growth that you're expecting?
Calvarese: Exactly. It needs to be done sustainably, and we need to really prioritize that water for our producers. I'll tell you what I won't do, I'm not going to play games with our water, which is what Lauren Boebert has done. So the bipartisan infrastructure bill had funding for our district for water storage and for different systems. Lauren Boebert voted against it. Then she earmarked a million dollar project, put it in an omnibus bill, and then voted against the omnibus bill. I'm not going to play games with our water. I'm talking to experts. I'm talking to people who created the plan for the Arkansas River conduit of what we need to do there.
Warner: I'll say for folks, (the Arkansas Valley Conduit) is to bring clean water into Southeast, Colorado because a lot of the more local resources are actually contaminated pretty naturally actually by the radioactive nature of Colorado's soil.
Calvarese: And it shouldn't just be left on those local communities to bear the burden. Again, water's one piece, and then it's the full infrastructure. But to stay on water, another concern is we cannot let foreign interests buy up farmland and waste water. So there was a couple cases of this in Arizona where we knew a Saudi-owned firm was growing water-intensive alfalfa and draining the aquifer. That affects all of us. So that's an issue of national and economic security.
And again, it's prioritizing our growers. And the way we do development, exactly like you said, Ryan, needs to be done sustainably. Look at Sterling Ranch. They have an actually pretty innovative water recycling system. That's kind of their whole model. We need to be thinking of that, encouraging that.
Warner: It is such an interesting contrast in the 4th because more than half of the district's population lives in Douglas County, which is highly urban. So contrast the picture that we've painted of rural Colorado with that suburban, exurban, Colorado. And what do you hear are the needs there?
Calvarese: Very similar. Costs are so high for food, for everything, care. There's a mismatch right now in Douglas County. I hear this over and over, especially with single moms who are like, "I'm trying to get back into the workforce. I'm working really hard. I even took an extra credit, and I cannot connect to that excellent job. I'm not getting paid more." Yet at the same time, Ryan, we know that there are going to be millions of job shortages coming online, in quantum, and AI, and biotech, and semiconductors, in the EV circular economy. Those are going to be excellent, well-paid jobs, but there's a disconnect. How do we bridge the two? And again, I love to point to the labor movement because they have these earn-while-you-learn models. They launched a tech institute when I was there, and they have a partnership with Microsoft.
Warner: You're speaking of the AFL-CIO.
Calvarese: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Warner: You mentioned the cost of living. You've mentioned the cost of farming. The Federal Reserve just lowered interest rates. The Dow's above 42,000 for the first time. Inflation is easing, but as you've noted, people still feel crunched. And any number of them would say, "The party in power, the Democratic Party, hasn't done enough for me." So why should voters trust you on the issue of the economy?
Calvarese: I hear that, and I have a mortgage. I'm your neighbor. I feel the crunch too. We're eating rice and beans and pinching our pennies. We feel it because I'm of and for all of you. I'm part of you. I'm your neighbor. Getting prices down really does depend on, one, people making more money, people being able to make more money, get into those better high-paying jobs, and then –
Warner: So what is something you do in Congress to make that happen?
Calvarese: Okay, so the CHIPS and Science Act already passed with bipartisan support. I'm going to fight to appropriate that funding to create literal pathways into those jobs, into those fields. We have tremendous potential and opportunity to build the future, to build it right here, right now. And there's lots of pieces that are already kind of working in Colorado for it where the president of the Colorado AFL-CIO is on this regional council about creating jobs in semiconductors, in EVs. We already know that there was funding appropriated in Joe Neguse’s district around quantum. There's a quantum hub. We want those pathways to those jobs, starting in CD4, meeting people where they are, using the power of this office as a convener.
Warner: As a convener, a connector is, I think, something I hear a lot from you.
Calvarese: That's right, literally connecting. Exactly, all the pieces that connect us. That's right.
Warner: I want to talk about immigration. Of course, many immigrants are on a path to citizenship or are seeking political asylum here, but clearly they've arrived in huge numbers over the last few years. Governments have spent a lot of money on services for them. What, if anything, would you do to change the system the U.S. has today?
Calvarese: So I think that immigration is a complex issue. Border security is one part of that. There was a bipartisan border bill. So I'm not running on immigration as some type of fear mongering to scare people. It's an issue we need to work on and that we need to reform. One, we need pathways to citizenship for those folks who have been critical parts of our economy. Look how we got through COVID. Who worked in our meat packing plants? Who are our care workers? Disproportionately, that is migrant work. And I tell you, I have yet to meet a rancher or farmer who says that they are for a mass government roundup of people. They do not want that, this "deport them all." Absolutely not. People on the Eastern Plains don't want that. They want the workforce. So we need pathways. At the same time, we need legal immigration, and we need to make sure that we're enforcing the laws that are on the books, right?
Warner: Would you have supported the bipartisan compromise on immigration, had it come to the House?
Calvarese: The border patrol, yes. As part of that, the border patrol had asked for certain funding and resources. Those are the people doing the job. That's what they're asking for. Yes.
Warner: In the 4th Congressional District there are almost twice as many Republicans as Democrats. Unaffiliateds, though, are the largest voting block. Before we go, what's your path to victory in a pretty red district? It seems to me you'd have to pick off, gosh, more than half of those unaffiliateds to win.
Calvarese: So let me tell you this. I was raised in a conservative traditional family values family. Both of my parents were conservative. And before my dad died, he was a lifelong Republican, and he still told me, "You need to step up and return everything that this community has invested in you." So I'm running on the principles and the values that would honor him and my mom. And my mom, honestly, she was a Trump supporter. I still want to be a person that people can vote for. I am for them and their voice. I'm also for American competitiveness. People have been overlooked, left behind, disrespected for so long. I hear that from ranchers, farmers, caregivers, firefighters. I'm running for them. I'm running also for our seniors, to protect their earned benefits.
Warner: So are you picking off Republicans?
Calvarese: Yes. Yes.
Warner: Or are you swaying unaffiliateds?
Calvarese: Both. Both. Yes and. People over politics. And I'll tell you what. Republicans show up. They've been showing up to our events. They're not necessarily signing in, but they're saying, "Okay, I like what you're saying. You seem like a reasonable person." So we do have this kind of a quiet campaign going.
Warner: When you say we are running kind of a quiet campaign, what do you mean?
Calvarese: Well, I'll make it loud then. We want to be a place that Republicans who feel they don't have a place right now, that Lauren Boebert does not represent them, that I will represent them with honor, with dignity. I will not embarrass them. I will listen to them always. I understand that's what this job is. It's not my personal political agenda or for my gain. It's to represent the people and our needs, and to go in and to advocate and to fight for it.
