Iran War Rattles Energy Markets, Wyoming Wind Wall Grows, and Colorado’s GOP Primary Ballot Takes Shape

On Monday, April 13, 2026, Kim Monson opens the week with the official launch of the Kim Monson Community, a rundown of Saturday’s Colorado GOP state assembly in Pueblo, and two featured guests on the energy and land-use fights reshaping the Rocky Mountain West. CEO of Laramie Energy Bob Boswell explains how Colorado’s enterprise-fee end-run around TABOR and its 75 percent renewables data-center rules are strangling the state’s second-largest natural-gas reserves while the Iran war scrambles global oil markets. Cheyenne realtor Wendy Volk returns with the Wyoming Wind Wall petition, a citizen push for a cumulative-impact review of thousands of proposed turbines across the Laramie Range. Roger Mangan of State Farm walks through why auto premiums keep climbing. And Kim tracks Colorado’s 26-bill legislative fight, including an anti-ICE bill and a Senate Bill 135 assault on TABOR.

Iran War, Natural Gas, and Colorado’s Enterprise-Fee End-Run Around TABOR

Start listening at 30:13 – Hour 1

Bob Boswell, CEO of Laramie Energy and a goal sponsor of the Kim Monson Show, says Colorado is deliberately throttling the development of its natural gas reserves, the second largest concentration in the United States after the Marcellus shale on the East Coast. The state has piled on roughly thirty enterprise fees, a workaround that lets the legislature collect revenue without triggering a Taxpayer Bill of Rights vote. According to Boswell, $23 billion of the $41 billion Colorado budget now flows through those fees, which he argues are plainly taxes and which a coming lawsuit will seek to bring back under the TABOR cap. Layered on top of the enterprise-fee regime, Boswell says, are disproportionately-impacted-community designations that have withdrawn more than 600,000 acres on the western slope from mineral development even though those rural counties would benefit most from the jobs and royalties.

Boswell also walks through Colorado’s 75-percent-renewables rule for new artificial-intelligence data centers, a standard he calls incompatible with the 99.9-percent uptime AI workloads require. Neighboring states are offering incentives, he notes, and there is no technical reason a data center on the western slope could not run on dedicated natural gas and tap the Interstate 70 fiber corridor without drawing from the regional grid. What reliable power solves for data centers, he adds, it also solves for the growing cohort of Coloradans who work from home and cannot afford an Xcel rolling blackout.

On the international front, Boswell says the Iran war will keep oil prices elevated until Tehran’s nuclear program is genuinely dismantled. Twenty percent of global seaborne oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and Boswell argues America’s relative oil independence insulates domestic consumers more than it does Asian or European markets. Iran has enriched uranium to sixty percent and has demonstrated intercontinental ballistic missile range reaching Europe, which he says makes the confrontation a responsibility the United States cannot defer. He closes with a warning that the state’s sanctuary-city policy is redirecting funds that should be flowing to Medicaid and essential services.

“The state of Colorado has the second largest concentration of natural gas resources for development, second only to the Marcellus on the East Coast. But it’s being constrained by predominantly Democratic representatives on the front range.”

Bob Boswell, CEO of Laramie Energy

The Wyoming Wind Wall and a Citizen Petition for Cumulative Review

Start listening at 71:19 – Hour 2

Wendy Volk, a Cheyenne realtor, explains that her family first learned their ranch sat on two sides of a 56,000-acre, 179-turbine industrial wind project in June 2025, through what she calls the Howdy Neighbor letter from ConnectGen, the American subsidiary of the Spanish company Repsol. After the Laramie County commissioners voted three to one in September to deny the local site permit, ConnectGen filed in district court to force a reconsideration and then announced a second attempt this year at the state level, this time scaled to roughly 42,000 acres and 130 turbines. Volk notes that the proposed turbines are 700 feet tall, each base requires roughly 40 concrete-truck pours, and the project cuts directly through an active wildlife corridor used by golden eagles, bats, and migratory species that recognize no project boundary.

Volk says the turning point for her came when she stopped looking at projects one at a time and began mapping them across the Laramie Range, which runs from the Wyoming-Colorado border north to Casper and west from Cheyenne to Rawlins along Interstate 80. She points listeners to the U.S. Geological Survey’s U.S. Wind Turbine Database at energy.usgs.gov, which plots every existing turbine as a small yellow dot with project name, capacity, and technical specifications. Wyoming alone already has roughly 1,500 to 1,600 turbines; proposals in the queue could push the total to 5,000. From the ground, each project looks local. On the map, she says, the pattern is a wall.

To force a landscape-level cumulative-impact review, Volk and a coalition of Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska residents launched a Change.org petition one week ago titled “One Corridor. No Full Review. Wyoming Deserves Better.” The petition had 232 signatures at airtime and is open to anyone in the country, not just Wyoming property owners. Volk also raises the disposal question most promoters avoid, citing a Texas project where roughly 3,000 decommissioned turbine blades were dumped illegally after the operator went bankrupt and pointing out that Wyoming has no landfill rated for 200-foot composite blades, leaving mineshaft burial as the only current proposal. The blades, she notes, do not decompose.

“Each of these projects are being looked at on a case-by-case basis, project by project, in a silo, without looking at a cumulative. Many are calling it the Wyoming Wind Wall.”

Wendy Volk, Realtor and Wyoming Wind Wall Petitioner

Why Auto Insurance Premiums Keep Climbing

Start listening at 9:00 – Hour 1

Roger Mangan, the show’s longtime State Farm agent and a great sponsor of the Kim Monson Show, walks through why Colorado auto insurance premiums keep rising. Insurance companies, he says, are fundamentally a pass-through: when a liability claim or body-shop repair is paid out, the carrier is moving policyholder dollars to the claimant, minus a narrow margin. At his own agency, 89 percent of the $3.7 million in annual premium collected flows out as claims, and the uninsured-motorist line alone runs at 93 percent, leaving roughly 7 percent for the carrier to operate the business.

Mangan ticks through the drivers: inflation, supply-chain disruptions, catastrophic hail claims, legislative mandates, court awards, and between 20 and 30 percent of Colorado drivers who carry no insurance at all. His practical recommendation is that drivers buy $250,000 per person and $500,000 per accident in uninsured-motorist coverage to protect their own livelihood when the other driver has nothing to collect against. Listeners can reach the Roger Mangan State Farm team at 303-795-8855 for a complimentary coverage review.

“Twenty percent of the drivers in Colorado do not have insurance. That’s a guess number because we don’t really know. I’ve heard numbers as high as 30 percent.”

Roger Mangan, State Farm Agent

Colorado GOP Assembly, the Governor Primary Ballot, and an Assault on TABOR

Start listening at 19:32 – Hour 1

Kim recaps Saturday’s Colorado Republican state assembly on the Colorado State University Pueblo campus, where roughly 2,100 delegates narrowed the governor primary field. State Representative Scott Bottoms of Colorado Springs took top line with 45 percent of the delegate vote, and Victor Marks, founder of All Things Possible Ministries and endorsed by Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, captured 39.5 percent for the second ballot position. State Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Weld County Republican, skipped assembly and is accessing the June 30 ballot via petitions, which the secretary of state has not yet verified. Former Congressman Greg Lopez, who changed his affiliation to unaffiliated at the end of 2025, plans to access the November general-election ballot by unaffiliated petition in May, a strategic move Kim calls pragmatic given that nearly half of Colorado voters are now unaffiliated.

Kim also notes the assembly was significantly delayed, opened nearly two hours late, required candidate speeches to be cut from ten to five minutes, and resolved an 80-vote discrepancy between scan-in and ballot-count totals by accepting the overvotes as valid. On the down-ballot races, Michael Allen and David Wilson advance to a Republican primary for attorney general, Libertarian James Wiley won the secretary-of-state race, former state senator Kevin Grantham is the treasurer candidate, and state senator Mark Baisley locked up the U.S. Senate slot, eliminating Montrose County Commissioner Sean Pond and retired Marine Colonel Mark Marquardt. On the Democratic side, Attorney General Phil Weiser earned the top governor-primary slot, U.S. Senator Michael Bennet is also running for governor, and state senator Julie Gonzales earned top line in the U.S. Senate primary challenging John Hickenlooper.

Finally, Kim previews the Colorado Union of Taxpayers position on Senate Bill 26-135, a referred ballot measure sponsored by Senator Jeff Bridges, Senator Cathy Kipp, Representative Jennifer Bacon, and Representative Megan Lukens. The bill would ask voters to let the state keep revenue above the TABOR limit for K-12 public education and raise base funding up to two percent annually for ten years. CUT argues the language is dishonest: money not spent on education could be redirected elsewhere, TABOR refunds would be permanently diminished, and Colorado’s third-graders, more than half of whom cannot read, write, or do grade-level math according to Common Sense Institute data, would see no measurable academic return. Kim notes Senator Jeff Bridges is the son of Rutt Bridges, one of the so-called Gang of Four donors who bankrolled Colorado’s turn blue.