Women in March
You hear it so often from expats who’ve made the metro area home but whose roots are firmly planted a hundred miles to the south. ‘There’s just something about Pueblo,’ they say. Many an expatriate Puebloan will also say, there’s just no place like it.
Once the industrial capital of Colorado with a steel mill that pumped out everything from rail to wire and employed as many as 15,000, Pueblo today continues to reinvent itself while steadfastly holding on to its special blue collar charm. Reinvention also doesn’t stop there, especially for one of the town’s natives who sees herself in a whole new role in just a matter of months. Her name is Kim Archuletta, and she wants to be Pueblo’s new county treasurer.
The ’Steel City,’ once the name many people used to describe the town, still relies on the mill for bolstering Pueblo’s economic foundation. But the city has evolved. It’s now more Goldilocks than heavy metal. “It’s small,” said Pueblo native and aspiring politician Archuletta, “but not too small.” It’s also a place where extended families aren’t too far extended. Her own family, parents, Mack and Peggy, brother, grandmother and two children all live there. A fifteen minute drive in any direction is all you need for an Archuletta family reunion. “We’re a very close-knit family.”
Archuletta has had an eclectic and circuitous career path. But for the moment, there’s something just down the road that she has her eyes set upon. And for a person with an appetite for new challenges and the energy to pursue them, it’s not a destination she ever imagined she’d be charting. But for those who know her, the next stop is one that should surprise no one. That stop is elected office, more specifically, becoming the county’s new treasurer.
Armed with a degree in business and finance, she’s been a banker, managed budgets for the school district, overseen its facilities and spent a few years in the canna- bis industry, an industry some might look askance at. But Archuletta makes no apologies nor excuses for what some might think about her time in the industry. It, after all, has been legal in Colorado since 2012 and is an important and growing component in the city’s and state’s economy.
Archuletta touts her time in the industry as invaluable. “I can honestly say that it was the best business experience that I could have ever received—and better than any college course could have taught me.” Cannabis, today, is quite liter- ally a growth industry in Pueblo.
Today Archuletta’s a deed preparer in the county trea- surer’s office, an office, coincidentally, she hopes to lead after November. Yes, she’s a candidate seeking to replace the person she reports to every day. “It’s nothing personal,” she said. “It really isn’t.” But she admits that it can be “a little awkward.” Still the neophyte candidate knows to sepa- rate her political goal from her daily duties. At work, it’s all business. Any campaigning is done on her lunch hours or off duty time. The interview for this story was conducted over the weekend.
Whether she wins the June 28th primary and moves on to November, said Archuletta, won’t change her motivation for entering the race. To her, it’s about equity and opportunity. “Everyday, when I get to the office, I walk down the hallway and there is a wall of all the elected officials,” she said. “Every single picture is a man. I take note of it and wonder why are there no females?”
The treasurer’s office is responsible for collecting taxes and dispersing the money that funds “rural fire, water, sanitation and schools,” Archuletta said. It’s also the agency that invests that money. She thinks her finance and private industry background give her the insight to grow Pueblo’s portfolio.
“During COVID,” she said, “interest rates were really low, and our rate of return reflected that. We’re now seeing an increase that will benefit our portfolio.” She believes she has “a good idea for how to use excess funds and make sure we’re taking advantage of short-term interest.”
Archuletta also envisions making the treasurer’s office more people friendly, including using technology that would allow customers to conduct business on-line or provide drive-through options instead of having to park and come into the building. COVID changed a lot of things, she said. The office, said Archuletta, should change to reflect the times. Adding a woman’s photograph to the wall of elected officials at the county courthouse, she said, would be a good a step in the right direction.
While Archuletta speaks with a full-throated confidence today, there was a moment in her late teens that might have derailed what has become a successful career. “I was terrified when I got pregnant,” she recalled. She was nineteen and early into college. “It was scary,” because still a teenager, the responsibility of being a mother, raising a child was infathomable. But with her parents at her side, along with the baby’s father, “we all did it.” The baby, Ashlee, is now 25, married and working as a probation officer.
Archuletta, a surname spelled with two ‘t’s’, is nothing if not confident whether she moves on to the general election in November or not. There are still plenty of things to keep her busy, not the least is being a mom. She still, after all, is raising a pre-teen. She also has a number of other civic obligations, one of which is chairing the board of the city’s retail and medical marijuana licensing authority. Her time in the cannabis industry, she said, was the perfect foundation for the job.
