June 17, 2026 12:12 PM UTC

Don't Gloss Over Barb Kirkmeyer's Resume Hole

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• by: Colorado Pols

As we approach the June 30 Election, The Denver Post is among the news outlets running feature-length stories on the top names on the Primary ballot. On Tuesday, the Post dug into the background of Republican gubernatorial candidate Barb Kirkmeyer…to an extent.

Here’s the lede from Nick Coltrain’s profile of Kirkmeyer in The Denver Post:

Only one candidate for Colorado governor, of any political party, has helped write the state budget, led a state executive branch and spent decades overseeing local government.

Yet state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer, a Weld County Republican who checks all of those boxes, is millions of dollars behind the leading primary competitor in fundraising. She’s fighting to make the case that her experience — not a biography of bravado or no-compromise, conspiratorial conservatism — makes her the best person to lead the state.

The Post feature of Kirkmeyer caught our attention for something that wasn’t fleshed out enough: Kirkmeyer’s (brief) history leading a state executive branch.

Kirkmeyer does have experience directing a state office…but not much. She served as the interim director of the Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) for less than 8 months in 2006 — at the end of former Gov. Bill Owens’ second term in office (Owens is the only Republican to have been elected Governor in Colorado in the last 50 years). Kirkmeyer resigned from that position in August 2006 in the wake of allegations that millions of dollars in federal anti-terrorism grants had been misspent. As 9News reported in 2006:

The federal review was sparked by Colorado auditors who found 13 percent of $15.8 million in grant funds might have been misused by some security regions across the state. Federal officials required the state to repay $1.5 million in questionable spending involving a state emergency operations center in Centennial.

9NEWS has also learned some security officials in Colorado sent Kirkmeyer a letter of “no-confidence” on August 14th. Kirkmeyer was supposed to respond to that letter Wednesday, but instead, she resigned Tuesday…[Pols emphasis]

…Other officials, requesting anonymity, said they believed DOLA was ignoring input from the state’s homeland security regions about priorities for spending. In a press release Tuesday, Governor Bill Owens said he appreciated Kirkmeyer’s service to Colorado.

Kirkmeyer did not respond to a request for comment in that 9News story from 2006. While Kirkmeyer frequently mentions her “executive experience” on the campaign trail, she never elaborates on her brief time leading DOLA and why she abruptly resigned in the midst of controversy. As far as we can tell, Kirkmeyer has never gone on the record to explain why she resigned from DOLA after less than 8 months on the job.

Owens is apparently willing to overlook that hole in Kirkmeyer’s resume as well, praising her candidacy with a bit of a strange quote:

“She will bring in not only folks with government experience, but a lot of additional expertise in the private sector,” Owens said. “I feel like that’s been lacking in recent years. The bureaucracy has been heavily bureaucratized.”

The bureaucracy is a bureaucracy!

We certainly wouldn’t argue that Kirkmeyer is the most politically-experienced candidate of the three Republican hopefuls for Governor, though that bar is impossibly low considering the ridiculousness of fellow Republicans Victor Marx and Scott “Rock” Bottoms. Kirkmeyer, meanwhile, seems to believe that her resume is beyond reproach:

“The only people who like to spin (my experience) as a negative are the people who don’t have a record like I do,” Kirkmeyer said.

It’s true that Marx and Bottoms have never directed a state executive office. It’s also true that neither Marx nor Bottoms have ever resigned from leading an executive office in the middle of a scandal.

Kirkmeyer shouldn’t get to play the experience card if she won’t also take accountability for the results.