Garfield County’s longtime sheriff, Lou Vallario, is stepping down at the end of this year, and two Republican candidates — Garfield County Sheriff’s Office Patrol Lt. Brent Baker and Eagle County Undersheriff Dan Loya — are competing to take over his position in the June 30 primary election. Only registered Republican and unaffiliated voters will get to cast a ballot in the race because there are no Democratic candidates running.
Vallario's retirement ends a 24-year, six-term tenure that locals repeatedly endorsed at the ballot box despite persistent controversy under his leadership, including clashes with state immigration laws.
Now, Garfield County could see a new direction for its sheriff's office as the two candidates — both longtime Garfield County residents who currently work in law enforcement in the region — try to distinguish themselves from the current sheriff.
Baker, who grew up in Parachute, has been the patrol lieutenant for Garfield County for just over two years and has worked under Vallario’s leadership for about two decades.
Baker’s parents were first responders, and he followed in their footsteps, working on an ambulance after college and later getting his start in law enforcement with a six-month stint at the Parachute Police Department before joining the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office in 2002.
“I spent my childhood watching my parents serve the community,” Baker said. “My dad was both the assistant fire chief and fire chief down there in Parachute for 20-plus years, and my mom ran on the ambulance as well, so I learned emergency services and my love for serving from them.”
Baker’s involvement in the community also includes sitting on the Garfield County District 16 School Board and serving as a volunteer firefighter.
Loya has been the undersheriff for Eagle County since 2020 and has worked for the department for three decades.
Loya, who now lives in Rifle, was born in New Mexico and grew up in the Roaring Fork Valley. He joined the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office in 1996, shortly after earning his degree in criminal justice and graduating from the Law Enforcement Training Academy at Colorado Mountain College’s Spring Valley campus.
“I would love to come serve the community where I grew up, raised my family, graduated high school and college from, and have been part of for the last 45-plus years,” Loya said. “I think it's time for a new vision, new leadership and new perspective. … If the citizens of Garfield County want the same structure and the same routine, they should vote for the other candidate.”
Although Baker acknowledged the support he has received from Vallario both during his recent campaign and throughout his career, he agreed with Loya that it’s time for a change in leadership.
“Sheriff Vallario has been a great mentor to me and a great leader for us, but we have not always seen eye to eye and he did not hand-pick me,” Baker said. “I’m not going to be ‘Lou 2.0’ — I'm a very different person, I have a different vision, I have different ideas of where we want to go forward.”
Baker focused on deputy wellness and traffic safety
Loya and Baker share some goals, including improving staff retention amid the rising cost of living as well as cracking down on drug trafficking and major crimes in the county, but the two candidates diverge when it comes to other top priorities as well as in their approach to public safety and building trust with the community.
During recent campaign events and candidate debates, Baker cited deputy wellness, a new county jail and increased traffic enforcement as his core objectives.
Although Baker said the staff turnover rate at the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office — at about 12% — is on par with the national average for local law enforcement agencies, he wants to improve access to mental health and wellness support for deputies.
He proposed allowing officers one hour per shift for mental and physical wellness as well as adding a swing shift to handle the early-evening rush and shortening long work hours that can lead to burnout.
“We've worked 12-hour shifts for 24 years since I've been here, and
doctors and psychologists will tell you that's not a good shift — it's a long shift that's very taxing,” Baker said. “So we're going to look at changing a lot of that and looking at like 10- to 10.5-hour shifts, to get our deputies some wellness.”
In addition, Baker stressed the need to begin financial planning for a new county jail, citing what he sees as the nearly 25-year-old facility's problematic three-story design.
“Anybody that builds a jail or a prison will tell you that having multiple floors is a bad idea — we've got three,” he said. “That's why when you see a prison or a jail anywhere that's really big, they expand out, they don't expand up, because when you put inmates in an elevator and rely on an elevator to take people places, it's not a good solution.”
Baker also distinguished his leadership style from that of Vallario, whom he described as “outspoken” and “very opinionated.”
“When you have a sheriff, you want somebody who's going to stand up for your rights and stand up for what is right, and so it's not a bad thing, but I am very much different than that,” Baker said. “I am a team-oriented person, so when I go into a room, I want to sit back, listen to all the opinions, take in everybody's views and make an informed decision.”
Loya prioritizes disaster response and Latino outreach
Loya’s top priorities outlined at recent campaign events are distinct from Baker’s, including Loya’s stated commitment to improving emergency management and disaster response as well as building trust with Latino and Spanish-speaking residents.
In his role with Eagle County’s sheriff department, Loya has worked closely with regional incident-management teams and helped respond to disasters such as the Lake Christine fire in Basalt and the Grizzly Creek fire and subsequent mudslides in Glenwood Canyon.
Loya said these experiences will help him prepare Garfield County for the next emergency, especially with ongoing drought conditions and high fire risk in the region.
“We know this last snow season was one of the worst seasons on record, and we may have a pretty catastrophic wildfire,” Loya said. “It's imperative we have a good working relationship with our firefighters and our emergency management systems in place to make sure we don’t lose a life and try to preserve as much property as we can.”
Loya also highlighted his more senior leadership role as the undersheriff for Eagle County compared with Baker’s current role overseeing the sheriff’s patrol division in Garfield County. Loya said his experience would be especially useful in streamlining the department’s budget, along with its staffing and command structure.
“I’ve been in charge of hiring, discipline, managing budgets, negotiating contracts and developing policy for the last six years, … and I oversee the jail now,” Loya said. “I'm making executive decisions now, and I can also serve everyone in this community — I’m bilingual and bicultural.”
Loya’s parents were from Mexico and he grew up in Carbondale and Glenwood Springs speaking Spanish at home and English in school. He said being bilingual and bicultural has helped him build relationships with Latino residents in Eagle County who might not feel safe reporting crimes — and he wants to bring more of that ethos to Garfield County.
“Regardless of where you stand on the immigration aisle, we have a fairly large portion of our community that is Spanish speaking — they’re taxpayers, they’re residents, they’re business owners — and we're here to serve them as well,” Loya said. “With everything going on with the current presidential administration and here locally, it’s imperative that we get out there and build trust because we want everyone to have services if they're being victimized.”
Candidates disagree on controversial email
Loya said he appreciates the fact that Garfield County pays its bilingual staff more for their skill set, but he was disturbed by a controversial email sent to department staff in January.
In the email, a senior member of the sheriff’s office asked employees to minimize socializing with co-workers in the front office and to speak only English in the department’s shared workspaces unless necessary for interpretation needs.
“Translating with customers when needed is greatly appreciated,” the staff member wrote in the Jan. 30 email. “To make sure that the rest of our staff is included and comfortable, please keep all on-duty conversation with staff and vendors in English while in shared work spaces or when other staff are around.”
Loya said he often speaks Spanish with employees who feel more comfortable communicating in their first language at the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office — and he sees the directive outlined in the email as discriminatory against Garfield County’s bilingual employees.
“They pay their staff extra money to speak dual languages,” Loya said. “Their staff are also there to speak to people that need that service, so now you're being told you're only allowed to do it when somebody needs it — I think that's the wrong message.”
For his part, Baker defended the departmentwide email saying the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office values its bilingual staff and that the directive was intended to improve communication and a “team environment.”
“That email developed out of a group of our administrative specialists who work in an office together, and a couple of them are bilingual, which is great — we pay more for that and we want that — and then there's a couple people in that office who are not bilingual,” Baker said. “I would probably handle that the same way, right? Like, you have somebody complaining, saying, ‘Hey, I don't know if they're talking about me, I don't know what's going on and I feel out of place,’ so we want to fix that work environment.”
Stance on federal collaboration
Both candidates agree that working closely with federal law enforcement is crucial for tackling major crimes in the region such as drug and sex trafficking, but said they’d handle recent controversies surrounding Garfield County’s Special Problems Enforcement and Response (SPEAR) task force differently from Vallario.
According to the sheriff department’s website, the interagency group allows local law enforcement to share information and collaborate with federal agencies to investigate crimes. But the agency has come under increased scrutiny in the past year over the legality of the task force’s formation and for its alleged unlawful involvement in federal immigration enforcement.
Vallario has largely denied these claims, calling them “lies” and “misinformation.” Last month, he lashed out against the city of Glenwood Spring in a strongly worded letter shared with some local news media after members of City Council decided to withdraw their police department from SPEAR.
“You chose political FEAR over the SAFETY of your residents. How pathetic,” Vallario wrote in the May 6 email.
Baker, who was previously assigned to SPEAR, defended the task force and agreed with Vallario, saying the city’s decision to withdraw was misguided. But he added that better communication between the parties might have been more effective than sending an inflammatory letter.
Baker also acknowledged a case last year in which five Garfield County deputies helped Homeland Security Investigations arrest and transport a local man to custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Baker said he was not aware of whether deputies were presented with the necessary judicial warrant for the man’s arrest — and that the task force should not be enforcing civil immigration matters.
“I can't go enforce immigration law any more than I can go enforce a wood-cutting law in the White River National Forest,” Baker said. “Those are all federal laws that have nothing to do with me, and I can't enforce, and so that's kind of where I stand on all that.”
Loya, who also has experience working with interagency task forces and federal agents, agreed that groups such as SPEAR must comply with Colorado laws that limit their ability to assist with federal immigration enforcement.
“There are a lot of laws we as law enforcement officers don't agree with, but they're laws and we all take an oath — whether you're the sheriff, a deputy, a police officer — you take an oath to uphold the constitution,” Loya said. “When you're working with federal agents, you have to know your lane, … and you’ve got to have clear-cut policies of what your staff can and can’t do.”
Voters weigh in
Carbondale resident Skye Skinner is a former Democrat who changed her registration to unaffiliated several years ago because it allows her to have a say in who her political representatives and local leaders are, regardless of their party.
“With this sheriff's race, I'm really concerned about the fact that people may not be aware that they won't be able to vote for our sheriff if they are registered as Democrats,” Skinner said. “And I strongly believe that everybody should be able to vote for their sheriff.”
Skinner is voting for Loya to be Garfield County’s next sheriff because he has more executive leadership experience as the current undersheriff for Eagle County.
She also thinks Loya’s bilingual and bicultural background will help bring needed changes such as building better relationships between local law enforcement and Spanish-speaking residents.
“I think that a lot of us live in this community because there are people here from all over the world, and it enriches our valley so much,” Skinner said. “We have such extraordinary culture here, and for us to have a sheriff who can connect with different segments of our community and care about where they're at, … that is so important to me.”
While researching the candidates, Skinner said she learned about a report that was made against Loya in 2009 by a third party for alleged domestic violence against a woman. The report resulted in the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office conducting a welfare check with the alleged victim, but no charges were filed.
Loya addressed the incident in a public statement saying he was never contacted by law enforcement and was unaware of the details of the report until recently — suggesting its resurfacing was politically motivated.
Skinner said she learned what she could about the report, but she didn’t feel there was enough evidence to sway her vote.
“It seemed like the due diligence was done, and certainly his family and his staff, his peers have really stood behind him, so it's a little bit murky, but it didn't rock my confidence,” Skinner said. “I think what bothered me the most was that it was being raked up now as a way to, you know, potentially smear his campaign, and that backfired for me.”
Ultimately, Skinner said she is ready to see real change at the sheriff’s office and she hopes that Loya can be the one to lead that.
Rifle resident Seth McMillen said he is also ready for a change in leadership — but he thinks Baker is the best candidate for the job.
“You know, Lou [Vallario] has been here forever, and maybe it's time for an outside voice to come in, and not necessarily to shake up the department, but a different perspective,” McMillen said.
Although he initially did not want to support an internal candidate that already worked in the sheriff’s office, McMillen and his wife decided to support Baker after meeting him at a campaign event and finding him to be more friendly and approachable than Loya.
McMillen said he hopes Baker will help protect citizens’ rights such as freedom of speech and will stand against Colorado laws that limit things such as access to guns and local law enforcement’s ability to assist with federal immigration enforcement.
“I don't want them to break the law,” McMillen said. “But I would love for them to be able to go, you know, as sheriff, … go down to the Capitol and and just advocate all he can for our constitutional rights.”
The views of voters like Skinner and McMillen reflect a county that is ready for new leadership, but divided over what that leadership should look like.
The race ultimately comes down to a question of what kind of change Garfield County wants — and the outcome will shape not just who runs the sheriff's office, but how it defines its relationship with the community’s increasingly diverse population for years to come.
Primary ballots are arriving in voter mailboxes starting this week and must be received by 7 p.m. on June 30, which is the day of the primary.
The last day for registered voters to change party affiliation for the primary election was June 8. Garfield County residents who are not currently registered, but who have resided in the state for at least 22 days, can choose their party affiliation by registering at one of the county’s four in-person voting locations: Carbondale Town Hall (election day only), Glenwood Community Center (June 22 – election day), Garfield County Fairgrounds – South Hall (June 22 – election day) and Parachute Town Hall (election day only). Vote center hours are listed on the Garfield County Clerk and Recorder website.
