Colorado State Treasurer

Coloradans should hope money isn’t flying around like this in the State Treasurer’s office, but it’s partially up to the Treasurer to make sure accounts are accurate and investments are sound.

The Colorado State Treasurer is the head of the Colorado Department of the Treasury. This position includes managing more than one hundred separate bank accounts and a variety of banking services for dozens of state agencies, managing the state’s investments, and ensuring accurate accounting. The most recent yearly budget for the Department of Treasury was at just above $1 billion, and the budget document said Treasury has 65 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) employment position.

The Department of Treasury includes a number of divisions and programs, including:

• Investments Division: Its mission is to provide investment programs that are safe, prudent, and appropriate for the public purpose of each fund, with rates of return consistently at or above performance benchmarks.
• Cash Management Division: provides efficient management of state receipts and disbursements, ensures effective banking services to state departments, and offers cash-management assistance to state departments and local governments.
• Accounting and Administrative Divisions: The titles for these divisions should be somewhat self-explanatory, but readers can visit the webpage for Treasury divisions and learn a great deal of information about state finances and what these divisions manage.

The Treasurer is elected to a four-year term, and elected Treasurers are limited to two four-year terms in office. The current Treasurer, Dave Young, is about to finish his second full term and is term-limited, so this seat is open. The candidate with the most votes wins. There are three candidates on the 2026 ballot, and technically it would not be necessary for a candidate to get 50% or more to win.

Jeff Bridges, Democratic

Jeff Bridges

Current state Senator Jeff Bridges is the Democratic nominee for State Treasurer, and earned the nomination by running unopposed in the June 30 primary. He did face two candidates during the Democratic State Assembly process and another dropped out just before the Assembly, but Bridges was the only candidate to earn enough delegates to appear on the primary election ballot.

Bridges attended Arapahoe High School, and received his Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. His professional experience includes working for U.S. Senator Ken Salazar. He has been on the board of the Colorado Conservation Voters and served as associate vice president at Union Theological Seminary.

Bridges was first elected to the State House of Representatives, House District 3, in 2016. He was re-elected to a second two-year House District 3 term in 2018. He then ran for the state Senate, District 26, in 2020, and won a four-year term. Bridges was re-elected to the Senate in 2024 and is currently in the middle of his second Senate term. He could continue in the Senate if he loses the Treasurer’s race, but there would need to be a vacancy election to fill his Senate seat if he wins the Treasurer’s race.

Bridges is the current Chair of the Joint Budget Committee, and the former Vice Chair of JBC – giving him four years of experience working very directly with the state budget process. While in the House, he served on the House Education Committee and the Transportation and Energy Committee. In the Senate, he has served as both Chair and Vice Chair of the Appropriations Committee, Chair of the Technology Committee, Vice Chair of the Finance Committee, and as a member of Education and Local Government & Housing.

While in the legislature, Bridges sponsored hundreds of bills that were signed into law. The sheer number of bills sponsored is sometimes misleading though, partially because there can be up to four sponsors for each bill. A number of Bridges’ bills had to do with departmental budgetary issues, and they’re fairly often passed and signed without much controversy. For a brief sample of bills Bridges sponsored that have some relevance to fiscal issues:

• HB 25-1192: Requires school districts to incorporate existing financial literacy standards into current courses required for high school graduation, and requires student academic plans to include practice in filling out financial aid forms.
• SB 25-081: Created the Building Urgent Infrastructure and Leveraging Dollars (BUILD) Authority, to leverage capital and finance certain infrastructure projects related to transportation, energy, water systems, and public facilities.
• HB 25-1320: The state does a School Finance Act every year, but the 2025 bill authorized full funding for K-12 education in Colorado under Amendment 23 standards for the first time in a decade.
• SB 26-135: This bill is now on the 2026 general election ballot as Proposition NN. It would allow the state to retain revenue above the existing TABOR cap (only with voter approval, though), and use the money to better fund education in Colorado.

Follow The Money: As of Oct. 9, the Bridges campaign had reported $468,368.00 in monetary contributions, and $22,860.74 in non-monetary contributions.

Campaign website: https://bridgesforcolorado.com/

Kevin Grantham, Republican

Kevin Grantham

Kevin Grantham is the Republican nominee for State Treasurer, and earned the nomination by running unopposed in the June 30 primary.

Per his website, he grew up in a rural farming community in Crowley County in Southeast Colorado. He was elected to the Cañon City Council in 2007. He won elections to the Colorado state Senate in 2010 and 2014, and served as the Senate President in 2017 and 2018. While he was a state legislator, he also served on the Joint Budget Committee in 2015 and 2016. After leaving the state legislature, he was elected as a Fremont County Commissioner in 2020 and 2024, and he still has two years left in his second term on the Commission if he isn’t elected Treasurer.

It’s tough for state legislators to pass sponsored bills if their political parties don’t have majorities or the Governor’s seat. Grantham was in a Senate majority from 2014-18, but Democrats controlled the House and the governorship during those years. Still, votes from the Republican majority in the Senate frequently meant Democrats were not able to pass as many bills from 2014 to 2018 either.

During his last year in the Senate, he was one of the Republican prime sponsors of a bill to reduce the state’s income tax rate from 4.63% to 4.43%, but it was defeated in committee. He was a prime Senate sponsor of a 2017 bipartisan bill that would have increased sales taxes to help fund transportation bonds (HB 17-1242), but again it was defeated in committee. Grantham was also a prime sponsor of more than 20 bills that were signed into law in 2016, although it is typical for Joint Budget Committee members to sponsor lots of budget-related bills that pass.

Again per his website, Grantham takes credit for reducing Fremont County property taxes to help residents make ends meet. He said he “stopped multiple attempts at billion-dollar tax hikes” while serving as a state legislator. He also said he passed balanced budgets as Senate President without tax hikes, although it’s fair to note that the state has to adopt a balanced budget every year.

While there wasn’t an “issues” page on his website as of early August 2026, he emphasized in a short video that he wants to keep the costs of living low for Coloradans and that he believes in fiscal accountability.

Follow The Money: As of Oct. 9, the Grantham campaign had reported $141,315.80 in monetary contributions, and $3,028.20 in non-monetary contributions.

Campaign website: https://citizensforkevingrantham.com/

Marilee Sturgis, Approval Voting Party

Marilee Sturgis is the Approval Voting Party’s nominee for State Treasurer, and she did not need to run in a primary for this nomination. As of early July, her campaign did not seem to have a website and it isn’t super-easy to find information about the campaign. She is a wedding photographer who studied photography at Rice University and CU.

Readers might find this Westword story slightly informative about Sturgis as a person, but probably not when it comes to her ability to serve as Treasurer. Sturgis’ son Emerson has sponsored about a dozen State of Colorado citizen initiatives for 2026 that were intended to allow the State of Colorado to form its own nation and set up its national structures. Marilee Sturgis signed on as co-sponsors of the initiatives (#s 287 through 299), though she was paraphrased in Westword as saying that she is “not exactly on board with Colorado’s independence.” The initiatives did not qualify for the 2026 ballot.

Business website: https://www.marileephotography.com/bio

Jodie Barr, Libertarian

Per Colorado Public Radio, “Jodie Barr lives in Littleton. No additional campaign information or resources were found.”

Richard’s Take

Vote Bridges, though I will put in some good words for Grantham. It isn’t really just that Bridges has been on JBC for four years and Grantham only for two. It’s also that Bridges has served on other legislative committees – Appropriations, Finance, and Sales and Use Tax Simplification Task Force among them – plus sponsored a number of bills having to do with fiscal and economic issues that have been signed into law. Check out Bridges’ “Expertise” webpage here, and you’ll see a candidate ready to move on to the next big role.

For what it’s worth, my observations when I worked for the State Senate left me with the impression that Grantham was a staunch conservative but a straight shooter. One major responsibility of the Treasurer’s position is to a certain extent to be a staff manager, and so to some extent is the role of Senate President where the person holding the office and staff “ought to” work with Senators from the entire state and staff to get the peoples’ work done. Also, a Senate President should be highly informed about the budget so they can manage their caucus budget priorities and processes. His Joint Budget Committee service is also a great type of experience for a Treasurer candidate to have, since JBC members have to be deeply in touch with all aspects of the state’s budget.

Of all the major state offices up in 2026, I’m probably least concerned about left-right partisan ideology in the Treasurer’s office – unless someone is really off the charts or clearly dishonest. Grantham was in the news this summer in his role as County Commissioner for saying he would refuse to comply with a new state gun law, and I’m not sure I want a Treasurer who would do this, but I’m also not sure positions on gun laws matter that much in the role of Treasurer.

The State Treasurer’s position is to a large extent a managerial role in which they supervise a large staff whose members typically have very good qualifications in fiscal/financial/tax/investment matters. As a Coloradan, I need the books to balance and the investments to be prudent, and I’m not looking for partisan political activism in this role. I would assume liberal readers will vote Bridges while conservatives will vote Grantham, but in either case you’d get experienced and devoted public servants.