Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser has been visiting communities around Colorado who could be impacted by the possible merger of two large grocery chains.
Kroger, which owns City Market and King Soopers, announced plans to acquire Albertsons, which owns Safeway, for nearly $25 billion last October.
Weiser was in Longmont Tuesday afternoon as part of his state-wide listening tour.
Previous stops on the tour include Gunnison, Denver, Cañon City, and a stop in Golden on Monday evening.
Weiser says rural communities are concerned about an increase in food deserts, but urban communities are also concerned about access to stores.
"One of the urban concerns is that there are a lot of people who have limits on their abilities to access supermarkets that are far away. They might go on foot or they might have limited public transit options. If a store closes and they can't access the store, that will threaten their food security, and that means for consumers, a huge, huge challenge," he said.
Several current and former employees of local Safeway and King Soopers stores attended Tuesday's meeting.
Trevor McCarthy who works at one of the two Safeway stores in Longmont says the union has a strong presence there and he's concerned about what would happen in a merger.
"We could potentially wind up losing lots of benefits, our wages could go down, assuming again that we're even able to keep our jobs. They might wind up shutting us entirely because they don't want to deal with a union," he said.
Several consumers attended the meeting in Longmont and told AG Weiser they were worried about the cost of groceries increasing if a merger were to go ahead.
Weiser said he's heard this concern all across Colorado.
"Food prices matter to people and they're feeling the effects and as they look at this merger they're asking 'is this going to mean higher prices?' We're asking that question too. If we believe that the answer is yes at the end of our analysis, that this merger would lead to higher food prices, we have the opportunity and the obligation to challenge the merger," said Weiser.
Kroger has said it won't close any stores if the merger goes ahead, but previous grocery chain mergers in Colorado have resulted in multiple store closures.
In 2015, shortly after Safeway merged with Albertsons, nine stores in the Denver area closed down.
Weiser says store closures can have a ripple effect on neighboring businesses in the community.
"I heard a different version of that concern from the local chamber of commerce in Cañon City where people said 'if you have this retraction of this business here, you may have people going elsewhere for their shopping. That's going to hollow out shopping in our county, in our community'," said Weiser.
The Attorney General will hold further meetings in Vail, Montrose and Cortez in the coming weeks.
Weiser says he wants to hear from as many Coloradans as possible, before deciding early next year whether to challenge the merger in court.
People can submit comments about the proposed merger online.
This story was shared with Aspen Public Radio via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico including Aspen Public Radio.
