Colorado's Office of Public Guardianship exists for the people nobody else will take: adults a probate court has ruled cannot make their own medical, housing, or financial decisions, and who have no family member, friend, or private fiduciary willing to serve. It is the guardian of last resort, which means its clients are, almost by definition, the most isolated and highest-need people in the state. That office is now attempting what its leadership frames as a cultural reset, Colorado Politics reported Sunday, after years of understaffing, departures, and client deaths [1].
The record the reset is answering for deserves to be laid out in order. The office was created in 2017 on a financing theory that failed almost immediately: it hoped to raise $1.7 million in donations and collected about $2,000 in its first two years [1]. Lawmakers eventually put it on stable footing, and it now runs on $3 million a year drawn from probate filing fees [1]. Staffing collapsed anyway. By January 2025, seven of the office's eleven guardians had departed [1].
The hardest number in the record is the death count: of the office's first 80 clients, more than two dozen died within three years [1]. That figure calls for care before it calls for outrage. A guardian of last resort serves people who are frequently elderly, seriously ill, or both by the time a court concludes no one else can act for them, and deaths in that population are expected. The number is a flag for scrutiny, not proof of neglect. What it does establish is the size of the stakes. An office whose clients die at that rate cannot lose seven of eleven guardians without the question of oversight becoming urgent, because every departure means cases handed off, institutional knowledge lost, and wards who may be unable to report a problem even when they see one.
The reset now has a face. Amelia Milton McKeon, the office's new director, states the mandate in the language of modern guardianship practice, which treats a ward's remaining rights as something to support rather than manage: "It is my statutory obligation that anything they can exercise, I'm going to support them in doing that" [1]. Taken seriously, that is the correct frame. Guardianship removes a person's legal power to decide; the measure of a functioning guardianship office is how much of that power it hands back, decision by decision, wherever a client can still exercise it.
The office's critics are not persuaded that a reset is the right answer to this record. Critic Maureen Welch calls the office "a state office that sanctions civil death by court appointments" and describes its budget growth as "empire building" [1]. Her objection is structural rather than managerial. On that view, the problem is not that the office was underfunded or badly staffed; the problem is a state agency whose function is to hold court-stripped decision-making power over people who cannot contest it, and every dollar of growth compounds the arrangement. A cultural reset does not answer that critique. It answers the narrower one.
The reset is also running against a deadline that guarantees the office will get bigger, not smaller. SB 26-149 requires the office to provide statewide coverage by 2030 [1]. Colorado is therefore scaling its guardian of last resort at the same moment it is trying to repair it, on a $3 million annual budget, with a workforce that recently lost seven of its eleven guardians. Whether those two projects can succeed simultaneously is the question the next few years will answer.
The through-line is worth stating without adornment. The people in this office's care have the least voice of anyone in Colorado; a court has formally ruled they cannot speak for themselves in the decisions that shape their lives. They depend on the state office with the most turnover, and the state's chosen remedy is an internal reset rather than external oversight. McKeon's standard, if it is enforced case by case, would be a real change. The record above is the reason enforcement, not intention, is the thing to watch [1].
