The state of Colorado formally declared the 30-person Town of Hartman abandoned after all of its elected officials resigned and its drinking water became a public health hazard, leaving residents trapped in a legal no-man's-land with no government to fix the crisis.
Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Kline signed the abandonment order after a July 13 public hearing laid bare the full scope of the collapse: no mayor, no trustees, no town clerk, no one authorized to sign a contract, spend a dollar, or call an election. The town's water system had gone without chlorine for more than a month. Residents had been boiling their water since October 2025. The tap water, one resident wrote in her formal petition, "smells horrible." Fox News Digital reported on the order and its implications for the remaining residents of this southeast Colorado community.
Hartman sits in Prowers County, in the far southeast corner of the state, cattle country, sparsely populated, hours from Denver. With a population of just 30, the town had struggled for years to maintain basic governance. But the final unraveling came fast.
In January 2026, a brawl broke out among four women after a board of trustees meeting. The next day, all three remaining active trustees submitted their resignations to the Department of Local Affairs. The mayor had already resigned months earlier, in October. No one stepped forward to replace any of them.
One of the departing trustees, Pam Packer, offered a blunt explanation to The Denver Post: "Our safety was more important than having a government."
That single sentence captures the depth of dysfunction in Hartman. Local government didn't just fail, the people tasked with running it concluded that holding office put them in physical danger. The New York Post reported that the last three trustees stepped down on January 14, and that years of fraud allegations and lawsuits had long destabilized the town before the final collapse.
The troubles predated the brawl by years. Eric Bergman, the director of Colorado's Division of Local Government within the Department of Local Affairs, testified at the July 13 hearing that state representatives had visited Hartman more than 30 times since 2022. Those visits covered elections, recalls, resignations, budgets, audits, grant administration, and training for new officials, a staggering level of state intervention for a town of 30 people.
Bergman also told the hearing that a regional manager in southeast Colorado had worked extensively with Hartman for five or six years. The state tried. It kept sending help. The town kept burning through leaders.
Small-town leadership vacuums are not unique to Hartman. In one Long Island village, nobody even filed to run for mayor, forcing voters into a write-in free-for-all. But Hartman's case went far beyond an empty ballot, it ended with no government at all.
The water crisis made the governance collapse a matter of immediate public health. Bergman testified that the town had been under a boil advisory since October 2025. The water needed testing and chlorine. The water tank was compromised and required repair or replacement. No one was operating the system.
State and health officials had not ignored the problem. The Department of Local Affairs and the Colorado Department of Health and Environment had previously provided grants totaling more than $1 million to Hartman specifically for water system improvements. But those funds were reimbursement-based, meaning the town had to enter contracts and spend money first, then get paid back.
Without a single government official authorized to sign a contract, the money sat untouched. The grant mechanism designed to fix the water system required a functioning government to access it. Hartman had neither.
Resident Jessie Simmons, who described herself as a landowner and voter in Hartman, filed the formal application to the Secretary of State in mid-June requesting an abandonment determination. She wrote that the water had lacked chlorine for over a month, was not drinkable, and that the town had been under a boil order for months.
The pattern of local governance failing the people who depend on it plays out in cities large and small. In Seattle, one Democrat who once cheered the city's leftward turn has since warned of businesses fleeing under troubled leadership. Hartman's version of the same failure is starker: the leaders didn't just govern poorly, they left entirely.
Kline's written order spelled out the legal reasoning in detail. The Secretary of State's office found that Hartman had no board of trustees, no town clerk, could not hold elections, and owned water infrastructure critical for treating and delivering water to residents. Under Colorado law, specifically § 31-3-201(1)(b), the state statute governing municipal abandonment, those conditions justified the formal declaration.
Kline wrote that the alternative was worse:
"Importantly, not determining that the Town of Hartman is abandoned as contemplated by § 31-3-201(1)(b), C.R.S. (2026), would leave the 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."
That last line is worth reading twice. The state of Colorado concluded that the only way to get clean drinking water to American citizens living in a town inside its own borders was to declare that town no longer exists as a legal entity.
The order also documented what Bergman described as a complete absence of governing authority. No official in Hartman could approve contracts, spend funds, appoint replacements, certify elections, or make decisions about the water system. No clerk or governing body existed to call, conduct, or certify a municipal election. The town was, in every functional sense, already gone before the state made it official.
Abrupt departures from office create cascading problems wherever they occur. When the DOJ fired a court-appointed U.S. attorney less than an hour after federal judges swore him in, it raised questions about institutional stability at the federal level. In Hartman, the institutional collapse was total, and the consequences fell on 30 people who just wanted drinkable water.
Under the abandonment order, all streets, avenues, and alleys within Hartman that are not privately owned now belong to the Prowers County Board of County Commissioners. Ownership of the water infrastructure, the pipes, the compromised tank, the treatment system, also transfers to Prowers County, which must then hand it off to an entity whose primary purpose is water treatment or delivery.
The order does not name that entity. Whether Prowers County has identified a water provider willing to take on a failing system serving 30 people remains unclear. So does the status of the $1 million-plus in state grants, whether those funds can be redirected to Prowers County or a new operator, or whether they are effectively frozen.
Hartman's troubles did not begin with the January brawl. The Denver Post previously reported that the town had grappled with embezzlement allegations and restraining orders, details the abandonment order does not elaborate on, but which paint a picture of a community where personal feuds and financial disputes had corroded public trust long before the last trustee walked away.
When local government fails at the most basic level, keeping the water safe to drink, residents pay the price. In larger cities, policy failures drive businesses and families to leave, as controversial proposals to strip property from landlords have shown in New York. In Hartman, the residents who remain cannot leave and cannot fix the problem themselves. They are stuck between a town that no longer legally exists and a county that just inherited a broken water system it never asked for.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold's office made the formal determination. The state used the only tool its own statutes provided. Whether that tool actually delivers clean water to Hartman's residents, or simply shifts the burden from a defunct town to an unprepared county, is the question no one has answered yet.
Thirty Americans needed their government to do one thing: keep the water clean. Every official quit, and the state's answer was to erase the town from the map. If that is the system working as designed, the design needs work.