These are truly uncertain times for Pueblo. With the President and Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s point man for downsizing government, hell bent on cutting departments, budgets and workforces, the city has found itself suddenly in a holding pattern and not sure how it will move ahead, said Pueblo City Councilman Dennis Flores.

One of the city’s biggest planned projects for 2025, a multi-million-dollar facelift for Pueblo Memorial Airport, has now been put on hold because it may need to focus more on the city’s nuts-and-bolts priorities. Not knowing, being unable to plan, Flores said, does not stop there.

“This environment that the government has created is unsettling,” said the Pueblo native. It is that way, he said, because with DOGE, the ad hoc undertaking created to carry out Trump’s surreal federal downsizing, no one knows how to proceed. With federal grants and government subsidies now in doubt, plans all across city government are suddenly on hold.

“Uncertainty creates chaos,” Flores said. “Just look at the stock market. There are fluctuations all over the place.” And not unlike the jobs that have already been slashed by Musk and his team, Pueblo may also lose jobs. In that category, no one is safe. Some federal workers in Denver have already been pink-slipped, including IRS and Small Business Administration staffers.

“My concern is the economic welfare of the community,” Flores said. “When you think about seniors losing some Medicaid services, food programs, research, it’s going to hurt everybody. It’s mindboggling how they’re approaching it.” But says the term-limited city official, one group in the crosshairs stands out.

“As a vet, I can’t even see straight,” Flores fumed. “Even if you wanted to do this type of thing (slash workforces), why would you go after veterans right off the bat?”

Musk’s “woodchipper,” the term he uses for the disposing of departments and workers, has set 80,000 as its goal for a down-sized Veterans Administration. Of this workforce, it is estimated that a one third are veterans, many of whom are disabled from injuries—many catastrophic—suffered in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Flores is worried about how the impact of the Trump-Musk quick-strike on the federal workforce will hit two of his city’s big institutions, Colorado State University-Pueblo and the Colorado Mental Health Institute.

While many of Trump’s targets for downsizing will be invisible, Pueblo’s airport renovation was a wholesale, five-million-dollar facelift. “The foundation of this project is to expand the concourse,” Pueblo Director of Aviation Greg Pedroza told LaVozColorado last month. The project also included airport security upgrades where passengers are screened. The plan also included improvements that would improve comfort and convenience for travelers, including “new and modern restrooms.” 

But beyond the airport upgrades is another of the city’s concerns, air service. Currently, Southern Airways serves Pueblo under the government’s Essential Air Service program. EAS is a program designed to serve smaller, sometimes rural communities across the nation. Carriers using smaller aircraft are paid a stipend to ferry passengers to hub cities where they can connect for their final destinations.

Because EAS is provided across both red and blue congressional districts, it is doubtful that Congress would allow EAS from being slashed from the budget. Still, with all that has happened under the Musk/DOGE campaign no one can be entirely confident that it is safe.

“This has all happened so quickly,” Flores lamented. “When it first started you didn’t know it was going to be an on-going thing.” But the Pueblo native is concerned that the final numbers are more the focus for Trump’s downsizing than the people it affects. But, in the end, he said, no one should be surprised. 

The plan, Flores said, “was right there in Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for shrinking government. Throughout the campaign Trump said he didn’t know anything about it. “He lied,” Flores says. “He’s following it to a tee, going chapter-by-chapter. That’s his strategy.”

Like the iconic glare of Uncle Sam telling Americans, ‘I Want You,’ Pueblo executive Stephanie Garcia makes the same plea. But she’s recruiting for something entirely different.

Garcia, Executive Director of Pueblo’s arc Thrift stores, is more interested in nurturing and later, hiring intellectually and developmentally disabled men and women to staff the city’s two arc Thrift stores. 

“It’s the mission of the organization,” said Garcia in a recent telephone interview. It is also a personal duty and responsibility, she said, “to promote the rights and dignity” of an often undervalued and too often discarded group of human beings.

Since 1968, arc Thrift stores in Colorado have hired intellectually and developmentally disabled adults, people often thoughtlessly or foolishly labeled ‘handicapped.’ arc Thrift stores, Garcia boasts, “are the largest employer with people with disabilities in Colorado.”

Arc Thrift stores, here and elsewhere, accept perfectly useful clothing, furniture, household goods and, essentially, things people no longer need or want and resell them. They do the same with people, men and women, whose value is also often overlooked or even dismissed. Like the shelves of their stores where no longer wanted items are placed, arc Thrift finds a place for them.

Garcia said, arc Thrift stores are among the most committed, employment-first advocates for intellectually and developmentally disabled men and women. In addition to advocating on behalf of this group, the Pueblo executive says the organization serves as legal guardians when there is no family to fill that role.

In Pueblo’s two stores, Garcia counts “74 individuals who have no family.” The work, she said, gives them not simply an opportunity to be part of an everyday world, but also gives them purpose. It also provides arc Thrift customers an opportunity to see value in their contributions. 

While serving in Pueblo’s arc Thrift leadership, Garcia has another reason for embracing the organization’s mission. Her adult son, Lorenzo, is autistic. But, like many of arc’s employees, he also has meaningful work.

Her tone reflects her pride in describing him as “amazing.” He bags groceries and shags buggies at a Pueblo Safeway. He’ll soon celebrate 20 years at the store.

While Garcia celebrates the work of so many arc Thrift employees, it was something many years earlier and far more personal that truly inspired her advocacy for others.

It was Garcia’s own intuition with her own son, now in his forties, that first introduced her to this reality. Her pediatrician—even her own physician assistant husband—did not see or recognize her son Lorenzo’s autism. 

“I got the typical, kind of dismissive” routine, said Garcia. The doctor, she recalled, told her, “He’s never going to have language, never going to work and I got angry.” Perhaps, even more than angry. “How dare you,” she told him. “Where is your crystal ball?” She remembers that moment when “I committed to making him as successful as he could possibly be.”  

While there may be a perception that arc Thrift store workers are more window dressing than anything else. Garcia suggests taking a closer and more realistic look. At arc, she said, the mission is“employment first,” also respect.

These stores are not what one might call boutique sized. And it is no small task to keeping one running. Many of the facilities were once grocery or big box stores that had shut down and moved on to other locations. 

The men and women who perform the work to keep the stores running, earn their money. In Colorado this group of workers is paid what the state mandates. No one is getting “sub-minimum wage,” Garcia said. State statutes set minimum wage at $14.81 per hour. 

Garcia said arc Thrift and its workers find one another through referrals with local government’s adult protection. “We work with vocational rehabilitation.” Once a person is identified, there is “job training, finding out a persons’ likes and dislikes and job coaching.”

For many people, Garcia said, encountering someone who is intellectually or physically disabled is unfamiliar or sometimes even uncomfortable. “It’s somewhat like the culture that you’re not familiar with. But disability touches everybody at some point in their lives…I understand that.”