RE: [External] Economic & Workforce Development of Larimer County

[Laura Light-Kovacs]

Dear Ms. Ryan/Valenta,

 

Thank you for taking the time to write and for sharing such a detailed account of your experience. I appreciate you bringing this to our attention and for articulating your concerns so thoughtfully.

 

You are correct that Economic & Workforce Development is primarily a county and state function. That said, the issues you raise, particularly around the loss of local visibility, diminished human connection, and the challenges local businesses and workers face in navigating a centralized, technology-driven system are important and worth elevating.

 

What I hear clearly in your message is a concern that the current process feels disconnected from the lived realities of local job seekers and small businesses, and that the shift toward a statewide platform may be weakening the human-centered, community-based relationships that previously supported local hiring. That kind of feedback is valuable, especially as policymakers evaluate how these systems are designed, governed, and supported.

 

To that end, I am copying our Larimer County Commissioners and our State Senator on this reply and asking them to weigh in. They are the appropriate officials to engage on questions of governance, staffing, oversight, and accountability for ConnectingColorado and related workforce systems. I would encourage you to reach out to them directly as well, as your firsthand experience and research can help inform future improvements at the county and state level.

 

While the City of Loveland does not have direct authority over these programs, I do appreciate you making us aware of the impacts you’re seeing locally. Understanding where systems may be falling short for residents and employers helps inform broader conversations with our regional and state partners.

 

Thank you again for your advocacy and for raising these concerns in a constructive way.

 

Warm regards,
Laura Light-Kovacs
Loveland City Council, Ward 4

 

 

From: Autumn Valenta <aut...@discoverywritten.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2025 6:00 PM
To: City Council <CCou...@cityofloveland.org>
Subject: [External] Economic & Workforce Development of Larimer County

 

Hello council,

 

This is Autumn Ryan/Valenta, resident of Loveland Ward 4.

 

It came to my attention this month that the state is taking Economic & Workforce Development duties from the county, making it impossible to locate local work. The state has wrested control of this data for its ConnectingColorado.gov site.

 

ConnectingColorado is a generic and valueless AI site, which purports to help business focus less on first-round interviews. I tried submitting my resume to it, only to find that it recommends pages, literally pages, of job listings for national companies like Oracle who do not need any help getting exposure. There is no method of reaching any human via the site. There is only a Google Form survey, and no one ever replies to queries I have sent to it.

 

I have been walking into local businesses and interviewing staff about their relationship to E&W employment resources, and to be brief, they have no idea what I’m talking about. They are not in these databases.

 

The state is creating a situation where local businesses cannot see local workers. This makes our businesses suffer. It makes it impossible for them to hire from our own communities. We are being made weaker for it. ConnectingColorado is not working.

 

I spoke with Tammy Olivas, a manager at Economic & Workforce Development for the county, and when I offered to help them do the outreach work, she informed me that she lost all of her staff but one assistant and was decidedly not in a position to hire anyone. Tammy refused to help me network my way into ConnectingColorado’s leadership, instead Googling for the name Kelly Folks. Tammy shut off her LinkedIn profile visibility after our conversation together. Kelly Folks is not reachable. If you know how to reach her or another reasonable contact, I would appreciate having that knowledge.

 

We are fully unable to see our own community as the county abdicates its responsibilities to an unsupervised site run by eightfold.ai.

 

I have written about this in the context of what it’s like to look for reasonable software engineering work in your city without working for Advertisement tech, or the Defense (War) industry: https://antibody.discoverywritten.com/journal/autumn-ryan/Dis-ConnectingColorado/ 

 

I know this is a county matter, but we need more people aware of what is taking place.

 

Take Heart,

 

—

Autumn Ryan/Valenta

aut...@discoverywritten.com

707-633-8446 (W)

'Emails to or from City Council are subject to public disclosure under the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA), with limited exceptions. All emails addressed to or sent from City Council, including email addresses, will be visible in an online system in order to promote transparency, except those considered confidential under CORA. Emails with “#private#” in the subject line will appear in the online system, but the content and subject line will be restricted from view. However, the City of Loveland cannot guarantee that an email marked “#private#” will remain private under CORA

[Kristin Stephens]

Dear Autumn Ryan/Valenta,

Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns and experiences. I appreciate your interest in how workforce services operate locally and statewide. Below, I’ve addressed the main areas you raised and provided clarification for each.

The State has taken Economic & Workforce Development responsibilities away from counties

The State of Colorado has not taken Economic & Workforce Development responsibilities away from counties. Counties, including Larimer County, continue to deliver workforce services locally. 

Connecting Colorado is generic, driven by AI, and lacks human access

The system replaced a platform that had been in place for more than 20 years, and the transition has not been seamless. The platform includes automated matching features. Counties continue to provide direct, human support to both job seekers and businesses outside of the online system.

Local businesses are not using or aware of workforce services

Local businesses are not required to rely on Connecting Colorado to engage with workforce services. County workforce teams continue to work directly with employers through relationship-based outreach.

The system prevents local workers and local businesses from finding each other

Connecting Colorado is intended to support local hiring, not hinder it. We recognize that the system does not always perform as intended, particularly when search results prioritize large national employers. Improving alignment between the platform and local hiring needs remains an ongoing priority being raised with the State.

Staffing losses have reduced access to help and leadership

While reduced staffing can limit capacity and responsiveness, counties continue to operate workforce programs and deliver services with the resources available to them.

Workforce responsibilities have been handed to an unsupervised vendor

Connecting Colorado is overseen by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE). While a technology vendor supports the platform, workforce policy, oversight, and service delivery remain public functions managed by state and local governments. 

The need for greater awareness and accountability

Concerns about Connecting Colorado are actively being shared through local, regional, and statewide workforce governance channels, and continued input helps inform improvements.  Contact information related to Connecting Colorado can be directed to CDLE staff members Christy Gonzales at christy....@state.co.us and Mark Duey at mark...@state.co.us

Please reach out if you have further questions.

Best wishes,

Kristin Stephens

Chair, Larimer County Commissioners

	Kristin Stephens  County Commissioner, District 2
	Commissioners' Office 200 W Oak St, Fort Collins, 80521 | 1st Floor W: (970) 498-7002| Cell: (970) 443-9577 kste...@larimer.org | www.larimer.org

[Marcie Willard]

Good afternoon Autumn-    

 

Thank you for taking the time to write to Council and for sharing your experiences and concerns regarding workforce and employment resources in our community. We appreciate residents who engage deeply with our programs and advocate for stronger local outcomes, especially for employment and wanted you to have additional information on behalf of the City of Loveland. While Councilor Light-Kovacs was correct that we do not have authority or direction over State applications & websites in place, we do have many partners that we believe offer services and can be of great assistance to you.  

 

First, it may be helpful to clarify the role of Loveland’s Economic Development department. Economic Development functions are designed holistically to bring new wealth into the community by supporting business attraction, expansion and retention, increasing the local tax base, small business resources and creating conditions that support quality job creation. While we directly support local workforce development, the City’s Economic Development role is not to operate job-matching platforms or manage employment databases, but rather to strengthen the overall business environment that sustains employment opportunities over time and work with regional partners whose mission is the same.  

 

The City of Loveland and Larimer County are resource partners and work with many regional workforce development collectives including: 

 

Noco Works - https://nocoworks.com/ 

Noco Manufacturing Partnership - https://nocomfg.com/  

NoCo Redi - https://choosenortherncolorado.com/ 

NoCo Inspire - https://www.nocoinspire.org/  

Rocky Mountain Workforce Development - https://www.rmwda.com/ 

 

Within these partnerships and collectives, you will find job-seeking services, job fairs, networking opportunities, and further development resources. A big emphasis of these partnerships is on pipeline development, versus job board creation & management.  

 

Furthermore, we partner with the SBDC to provide great training programs for entrepreneurs and small business owners who are looking to hire. Many local businesses engage in workforce development through these direct, relationship-based networks, educational partnerships, internships, apprenticeships, and network hiring, rather than relying solely on statewide job boards. As a result, some employers may not recognize or utilize ConnectingColorado or know that Economic Development can be a partner. 

 

Your idea of having a community-wide platform for jobs is a wonderful idea, but a large problem we see is that entrepreneurs and start-ups often fail to utilize even the most basic hiring platforms. And providing meaningful and current job updates across all contributors is a challenge.  However, continuing outreach and connecting more with businesses is certainly a part of our mission moving forward. As a department, we want our community to know that they have many local resources of which they may not be aware.

 

Below I have attached additional contacts for our Larimer County partners who will have information on County wide Workforce Development programs.  

   

Mollie Brazile 

Director, Integrated Training Solutions 

mollie....@frontrange.edu | 970.204.8538 

  

Janine Ledingham  

Economic and Workforce Development Director, Larimer County  
ledi...@co.larimer.co.us | 970.498.6106 

 

Again, we appreciate you reaching out and would be happy to set up a call to discuss further if this is of interest.

 

Happy Holidays

[Marcie Willard]

I realized that my email signature was not included- look forward to connecting if I may be of further assistance,

 

Marcie Willard Director Economic Development   500 E. 3rd Street, Suite 310 Loveland, CO 80537   Office: 970-962-2345 Cell: 970-481-2827 LovelandEconomicDevelopment.org

[Autumn Valenta]

Marcie,

I appreciate your detailed followup. The groups you have linked and referenced are known to me, though it deepens my outsider concern about what the offices do for the Workforce part of the mission anymore.

No one is required to use any one platform, but that ought not mean that a vanishingly small group of businesses use any local platform at all. What you observe about businesses failing to use platforms is a matter of missing value and visibility, and it is my problem statement, not a counter-point.

The “Tinder-ization” of jobseeker services is the epicenter of the modern issue. These centrally planned platforms collaborate their information on us and compile “shadow resumes” about us, which we are never allowed to see, annotating us with private information that influences algorithms. The sale and trade of our data is their fundamental business model. The licenses our states pay to use it are just gravy.

Consider eightfold.ai's Privacy Policy:

> We may obtain information about potential job candidates from (i) third parties who provide data they have collected from various sources commercially and (ii) publicly available sources where job candidates have made available their professional information including resumes, such as professional social networks or employment-related search engines for job listings.

> In the past 12 months, we have collected the following categories of personal information and disclosed such information to the following categories of third parties for the business purposes further described below:

> Records of products or services purchased, obtained, or considered, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies.

Their "Matching Model” (https://eightfold.ai/nyc-eightfold-matching-model/) describes their express purpose to map-reduce us to a ranked score 0-5 on .5 increments. Employers’ obligation is long gone, to look at resumes which the algorithm puts any lower than a perfect or highest score. This data is derived from a job history, and says nothing about actual human capabilities. The one method of learning human traits—by interview—is the one thing eightfold seeks to destroy. These tools make it possible for employers to never interview anyone unless they wear a perfect score which has nothing to do with their human qualities.

Centrally planned algorithms are in charge of what we and businesses see, and the problem is not limited to social medias.

Furthermore, ConnectingColorado.gov, like on most platforms, the job opportunities are stale, often beyond 30 days, when the platform stops bothering to count. Following links for opportunities leads us to postings that report they are already closed. These implementation patterns exacerbate every “last mile” problem all at once, by making it every individual’s problem to sift good information from bad, and the vast majority is bad.

Our children enter non-career jobs for Starbucks and others because it is what they see—even on ConnectingColorado.gov. If we want our local businesses to hire our own children and acquire meaningful experience in their home city, it must begin with radical visibility. We are losing to tech firms who lobby to get us to use algorithms instead of passionate people who get out there and foster actual community interest.

I would like to work on this problem, but I found no method of locating county career opportunities on ConnectingColorado.gov, on the footer for the county site, or on other platforms. Innovation in this space will require vision for disrupting the status-quo abdication to tech. I possess it, and I will wield it for this city’s benefit. As a result, I’ve begun the formation of my 501(c)(4) which will “compete" with your mission, and which the SBDC won’t advise on because they quit advising non-profits in 2023. Amada Simental was one of the few in town who helped, though she is alone in that task.

Take Heart,

—

Autumn Ryan/Valenta

aut...@discoverywritten.com

707-633-8446 (W)