Colorado senator barred from having state-paid aides after repeated complaints from staffers

Colorado Senate leaders Tuesday barred a Democratic state lawmaker from having state-paid aides after two of her most recent staffers filed a workplace misconduct complaint claiming she used one of them to do chores like yard work and bartend at a party at her home.

The complaint marks the second time in the past year state Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis of Longmont has been accused of mistreating her legislative aides.

“This is now clearly a recurring issue,” outgoing Senate President Steve Fenberg, D-Boulder, said in a letter to Jaquez Lewis. “In good conscience we cannot support placing an aide in your office while this behavior and complaints continue.”

The workplace misconduct complaint filed Nov. 15 with the legislature’s Office of Legislative Workplace Relations alleges that Jaquez Lewis paid the aide who did the landscaping work and tended bar over the summer with a check from her campaign’s bank account. She also allegedly used campaign money to pay the same aide for knocking on doors on behalf of an Adams County commissioner candidate who was running in the Democratic primary against the wife of one of Jaquez Lewis’ intraparty legislative rivals. 

The payments, documented in the complaint with copies of checks written by Jaquez Lewis from her “Sonya For Colorado” campaign’s bank account, were never reported on TRACER, the state’s campaign finance website. Colorado law requires candidate committees to report and itemize expenditures of $20 or more, including the name and address of the payee and the purpose of the expense. 

Colorado candidates are prohibited from using campaign funds for “personal purposes not reasonably related to the election of the candidate.” They also are barred from using their campaign accounts to donate to other campaigns. 

Jaquez Lewis ran for reelection this year and easily secured a second four-year term. Her district includes parts of Boulder, Weld and Broomfield counties.

In a written statement Wednesday, Jaquez Lewis wished the aides who filed the complaint well.  

“Out of respect to those employees’ privacy, I do not wish to comment in detail on HR matters,” she said. “I will note that all campaign work by my staff this cycle was the choice of those individuals and was fully compensated. That compensation is reflected in checks that they were paid. I regret that there was an oversight in filing these payments in TRACER. I am amending the reports to reflect these payments.”

Jaquez Lewis said the work “benefited me by allowing me to interface with donors and further my political support.”

The senator added that she looks forward to working with the new leadership in the Senate. 

Jaquez Lewis can still hire Capitol aides and pay their wages using money raised by her campaign. State law allows campaign funds to be used for “any expenses that are directly related to such person’s official duties as an elected official,” and lawmakers frequently supplement their aides’ pay with campaign dollars, though that compensation must be reported to the state. 

Still, the ruling barring Jaquez Lewis from having state-paid staffers is highly unusual. 

Each lawmaker is allocated a set number of aide hours each year. Aides are paid $23 an hour. The aides hired by legislators are often college students or recent graduates who are looking to find mentors and get their foot in the door in politics. 

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While there have been a number of disputes between lawmakers and their aides, The Colorado Sun couldn’t find evidence of another time in the past decade where a legislator was prohibited from having an aide paid for by the state. Jaquez Lewis appears to be the only sitting lawmaker who is restricted from having state-paid staffers.

Jaquez Lewis was notified of the aide decision in an email sent to her by Fenberg, who leaves office in January. Incoming Senate President James Coleman and Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, both Denver Democrats, also signed the message.

“We have recently received new concerns about the management and treatment of legislative aides in your office,” Fenberg wrote in the email obtained by The Sun. “President-elect Coleman, Majority Leader Rodriguez, and I take these concerns very seriously and want to do everything we can to facilitate a respectful and supported work environment for legislative aides and staff.”

Fenberg warned Jaquez Lewis not to retaliate against past aides or interns, or anyone else working at the Capitol. 

“Engaging in any retaliatory behavior may constitute a violation of the Workplace Expectations policy,” he said.

The aides provided their complaint, which was filed confidentially with legislative leaders, to The Sun on the condition of anonymity. They said they fear retaliation from Jaquez Lewis and her allies and that their futures in Democratic politics could be harmed by speaking out.

The complaint was forwarded to the top Democrats in the Senate.

“I’m just hoping that there’s at least some accountability towards all of this,” said the aide who was paid with a check from the campaign to do yard work and serve drinks at a July 6 party at Jaquez Lewis’ house.

The aide, who is in graduate school, said he felt pressured to do the yard work and bartending, and to campaign for Democrat Valerie Vigil in the Adams County commissioner’s race primary this year. (Vigil lost to Julie Duran Mullica, who won the general election. She’s married to Democratic Sen. Kyle Mullica.) He needed the money and said he wasn’t getting enough legislative work hours from Jaquez Lewis.

The aide worried that if he didn’t accept the side jobs, Jaquez Lewis wouldn’t promote him after working for her during the 2024 legislative session as an intern. 

“I wouldn’t have taken the landscaping work,” he said. “I felt like I had to do this kind of work to prove myself.”

The aide, who is Latino, said he was also troubled that Jaquez Lewis asked him — and no one else in her office — to do yard work. 

“It felt really racially motivated,” he said. “Why was I, the only Latino junior aide, offered this but no office work at all?”

Aides typically work every day during the legislative session, which spans early January to early May, but are offered limited hours during the interim.

After the campaign, landscaping and bartending work, the staffer said he was promoted. But in November, the promotion was rescinded and now he is out of a job.

The second aide who signed onto the complaint also was demoted around the time the complaint was filed. That ended his roughly yearlong working relationship with Jaquez Lewis, which began with her immediately asking him to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He said he was speaking out now because of how Jaquez Lewis treated his colleague.

The aide, who is also a student, told The Sun that he worked well with the senator at first and wondered why previous staffers had complained about their experiences with her. Over time, however, that changed. 

The aide wrote in the complaint that he “witnessed repeated behavior that demonstrated dishonesty, vindictiveness and selfishness toward other legislators, bill drafters, and lobbyists.” He also said that he “was asked to follow senators around the building to figure out who they were meeting with.”

The second aide quit Tuesday.

In her statement, Jaquez Lewis said she “certainly did not intend to mislead or hurt anyone.”

“These employees are all good people and I hope for the very best for them,” she said.

The November complaint was not the first time Jaquez Lewis had been accused of mistreating her staffers. 

At the start of this year, the senator was removed as chair of the Senate Local Government and Housing Committee and blocked from serving as a lead sponsor of a wage theft bill following accusations that she refused to pay one of her aides.

In April, Colorado Public Radio reported that four of Jaquez Lewis’ former staffers told the news outlet that “she withheld wages, set unreasonably demanding work schedules, and attempted to prevent them from communicating with other people in the Democratic political sphere.” 

The aides and a former campaign manager who spoke to CPR were not the same people who filed the recent complaint against the senator.

Jaquez Lewis was first elected to the legislature in 2018 as a state representative. She was elected to her first term in the Senate in 2020 and then reelected to a final, four-year term in November, winning the race in Senate District 17 by a roughly 2-to-1 margin.

The 2025 legislative session begins on Jan. 8.