A weeks-long effort to create legislation that will limit where — and with whom — registered sex offenders can live in the city of Longmont came to a head Tuesday night.
City council voted 6-1 to move a bill forward that would prohibit registered sex offenders from living within 500 feet of schools, daycares and public and private parks, and prohibit more than three offenders from living together. Council will hold a public hearing and final vote on the ordinance at its May 20 meeting.
As of March 4, 286 registered sex offenders reside in the city of Longmont. There are 202 with felony offenses — 21 of whom are unhoused.
Residents first brought concerns about a state-certified sober living residence that houses multiple registered sex offenders in their neighborhood to Longmont City Council during a Feb. 25 meeting. The city had no prior knowledge of the home.
In the weeks following, residents packed the council chambers nearly every Tuesday to urge councilmembers to take action.
“It is not just one neighborhood involved here. Please be strong in setting these ordinances in place,” Longmont resident Bobette Berger said during public comment at the May 6 meeting. “Please keep Longmont safer, I beg you.”
These types of limitations, generally referred to as residency restrictions, range in intensity and can drastically reduce areas within a city where a sex offender is allowed to live. On the surface, residency restrictions are intended to create safer neighborhoods and prevent previous offenders from repeating their crimes. But research calls the efficacy of this type of legislation into question, and a lack of funding for prevention programs leaves local elected officials with few options — which could create more problems than they solve.
“Ultimately, they just try to make it so that people on the registry cannot live there, and that’s honestly a terrible shame for public safety,” said Laurie Kepros, director of sexual litigation for the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender.
How did we get here?
Approximately 30 states have distanced-based residency requirements for registered sex offenders. But in Colorado, there is no state law restricting sex offenders from living within a certain distance of schools, parks and other areas frequented by children. The state Sex Offender Management Board (SOMB), originally formed in 1992 as the Sex Offender Treatment Board, is charged with providing guidelines for the management, evaluation, assessment and treatment of people convicted of a sex offense.
Many of these offenders are subject to close scrutiny from their supervisory officers under Sex Offense Intensive Supervision Probation or Parole, Kepros said. An offender’s supervisory officer “is going to have to approve of where you live. It’s not like you can just go live wherever you want.”
In addition to approved living standards, offenders are often restricted from making contact with anyone under the age of 18 — whether or not their offense involved a juvenile — subject to regular polygraphs, GPS tracking, phone and computer monitoring and court-mandated treatment, Kepros said.
While many of these measures are not required by law, Kepros said “the reality is, this is what probation is asking these judges and parole board for, and this is mostly what they are doing.”
Without a state statute, residency restrictions are left up to city governments. At least 30 municipalities have passed laws restricting where or with whom registered sex offenders can live, including Broomfield, Englewood, Erie and Greeley.
Longmont’s proposed law isn’t particularly unique — in Aurora, no more than one sex offender is allowed to live in the same house unless they are related. But the effectiveness of such residency restrictions has largely been unproven.
A 2004 study conducted by the SOMB found that placing location restrictions on sex offenders “may not deter the sex offender from re-offending and should not be considered as a method to control sexual offending recidivism,” and “efforts should be made to ensure that the sex offender’s support in the home is positive in order to aid in his or her treatment.”
While the SOMB has not issued a formal stance on the issue, the report was provided to members of Longmont City Council in a March 19 email from the Office of Domestic Violence and Sex Offender Management obtained through the Colorado Open Records Act.
“I would like to provide this information for you from our office so you all have what you need to make the best decisions possible for your community,” the letter from SOMB implementation specialist Erin Austin stated.
Still, the Longmont residents who have been fighting to push the ordinance forward argue this is the only way.
“I also recognize and appreciate the efforts of sincere individuals and orgs that want to help reduce the likelihood of individuals recommitting a sex offense,” resident Steven Faas said at the May 6 meeting. “Our community needs to balance this with safety and the needs of other residents. We need to protect the vulnerable. We need boundaries.”
Unintended consequences
Residency restrictions are definitively effective at one thing: banning registered sex offenders from certain neighborhoods.
The proposed distances in Longmont leave far less area for offenders to legally reside; and the number of feet, council acknowledged during a public meeting on March 4, is mostly arbitrary.
“To make sure I’m understanding, the 1,000, 500 and 300 feet here, those are entirely arbitrary numbers right?” council member Matthew Popkin asked Longmont assistant city attorney Jeremy Tyrrell while council debated what they would like to see on a map before selecting a distance. “There’s no science, data or other thing that is informing those numbers, correct?”
“To my knowledge, those are arbitrary numbers,” Tyrrell answered.
Research from the U.S. Department of Justice states that 93% of juvenile victims of sexual abuse knew the perpetrator. “The people who are harming you are people you know, are people invited into your home, are friends and relatives,” Kepros said.
“The notion that somebody who’s already been caught, punished, typically treated is the person you need to look out for is misunderstanding where the risks are and what actually keeps people safe.”
At the same time, Kepros said, these restrictions undermine approaches proven to reduce recidivism.
“The place where their family and support system lives, that’s probably the place they’re going to do the best. People who have nothing to lose are not what you want. You want people who are engaged and invested in their communities,” she said.
Data from the SOMB suggests that the risk of recidivism is drastically reduced when offenders reside in supportive environments — especially shared living arrangements (SLA).
According to the 2004 SOMB report, an SLA is loosely defined as “either two or three sex offenders living together in a house that they either rent or own,” typically seen as an extension of treatment and monitoring, where “offenders hold each other accountable for their actions and responsibilities and notify the appropriate authorities when a roommate commits certain behaviors.”
In the study, offenders living in SLAs had significantly fewer total violations than any other living arrangements besides incarceration.
Residency restrictions create barriers to housing for sex offenders, making it more difficult to find stable housing in the community. Criminal violations were the highest for unhoused offenders, or offenders living in homeless shelters.
The residence that initially mobilized residents on this issue, Mobarez Solutions, focuses on substance abuse treatment for registered sex offenders. It is a certified recovery residence through the Colorado Association of Recovery Residences (CARR), a state contracted third-party certification body. Currently, eight offenders live there, in what the organization calls congregate living.
Mobarez Solutions is not a halfway house; clients are not sentenced to the program, and the organization does not itself provide any state-mandated treatment that Colorado sex offenders are required to receive per the terms of their sentencing.
According to Roohallah Mobarez, the founder of Mobarez Solutions, the clients in the residence have “direct guidance 24/7,” and they “provide peer coaching to our clients daily. We have mandatory groups clients are required to attend” about twice a week.
The clients in their home have been evaluated as low risk by the state, Mobarez said.
“They’re already in the community,” he said. “In some cases, they will be homeless, or they would be in a very bad situation, versus being in our safe and supportive home with all of the added elements of support that we offer.”
Litigation threats
Barriers to housing for registered sex offenders have historically been challenged as constitutional rights violations in Colorado.
In 2012, Brett Ryals filed a lawsuit against the City of Englewood for its sex offender residency ordinance that restricted registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools, parks and playgrounds, and 1,000 feet of daycares, rec centers and public pools. After four years of litigation, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city. (The city has since voluntarily reduced all restrictions to a uniform 1,000 feet.)
Litigation is costly for a city, and by extension its taxpayers, a notion that Longmont City Council acknowledged during an April 22 discussion about adding a limit of three sex offenders per residence to the ordinance.
“We have a fiduciary responsibility to the city of Longmont, and that includes whether we decide to take on lawsuits, because that costs taxpayer dollars,” council member Aren Rodriguez said. “I want to be darn sure that we are ready to go to war if we’re gonna go to war.”
Despite the data and potential litigation costs, council members have voiced their belief that these restrictions will assuage fears in the community.
“I don’t necessarily think that residency restrictions are a problem solver,” council member Rodriguez said during an April 1 meeting. “With that said, to alleviate fear in the community going forward with the ordinance, I believe is prudent.”
Prevention vs. Exclusion
One in three Coloradans experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetime, 80% of which happens before the person turns 25, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Teaching kids how to recognize early signs of abuse, Kepros said, should be the priority.
“I would much rather see local governments get serious about prevention in the form of education, in the form of teaching kids about boundaries, about giving them access to information, about their right to privacy in their bodies and how to tell adults when something concerning might be happening around them,” she said.
Blue Sky Bridge, Boulder County’s child advocacy center, began teaching body safety curriculum to classrooms across Boulder Valley School District, St. Vrain Valley School District and private schools across the county in 2010. The program is facing severe funding cuts, Boulder Weekly reported in April.
On the state side, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Sexual Violence Prevention Program is set to allocate $430,000 each year through 2029 to programs aimed at reducing disparities in sexual violence by addressing the social and structural inequities that drive them.
By comparison, Colorado spent $3.5 million on the treatment and evaluation of sex offenders in 2024. The state also spent more than $600,000 on polygraphs required by probation. According to the state’s Lifetime Supervision of Sex Offenders annual report, “[t]he Judicial Department continues to seek options for the containment of these costs.”
In 2021, the U.S. government spent $5.4 billion incarcerating child sexual abusers, a Johns Hopkins University study revealed. That same year, it had $1.5 million budget for research on child sexual abuse prevention.
“It breaks my heart that we do not seem to have any appetite for preventing these crimes,” Kepros said. “Instead, we just kind of reach for dots on a map, for these non-evidence based, band-aids that don’t solve anything.”