{"id":42,"date":"2026-08-31T18:17:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T18:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/?p=42"},"modified":"2026-08-31T18:17:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T18:17:18","slug":"buses-sidewalks-and-a-shuttered-coal-plant-yolanda-avilas-vision-for-a-sustainable-colorado-springs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/2026\/08\/31\/buses-sidewalks-and-a-shuttered-coal-plant-yolanda-avilas-vision-for-a-sustainable-colorado-springs\/","title":{"rendered":"Buses, Sidewalks and a Shuttered Coal Plant: Yolanda Avila\u2019s Vision for a Sustainable Colorado Springs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bella Houck<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Yolanda Avila walks into a room, she doesn\u2019t so much take up space as open it. At the Tutt Library, she arrived with what I can only call a \u201clarge polar bear\u201d of a service dog, a warm smile, and a presence that was somehow both steady and electric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She laughed easily, slipped between stories of childhood, policy fights, and salsa orchestras, and spoke with a warmth that made me want to curl up and listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yolanda is blind. She is also a former Colorado Springs City Councilmember and Utilities Board member who has helped reshape the way this city thinks about transit, infrastructure, climate, and who growth is actually for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because for Yolanda, climate and sustainability aren\u2019t abstract debates. They are sidewalks that end mid-block, a coal plant that never shuts off, a bus that doesn\u2019t come on Sunday, a blind woman asking: Who is this city designed for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yolanda\u2019s relationship with Colorado Springs began when her father, a Mexican American soldier, was stationed at Fort Carson in 1958. Her family moved between postings in France, Texas and Germany, but Colorado Springs remained the constant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo since the age of three, I lived here off and on from 1958. This is my city.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her childhood landscape included places that now define the region\u2019s outdoor identity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe visited the Garden of the Gods often, Manitou Springs, Cave of the Winds, the Air Force Academy. We did a lot of just staycations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those early \u201cstaycations\u201d anchored her sense that land, water, and community here are inseparable. That sense never left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Defying the Script<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yolanda moved to the southeast side of town at 12 and married young, having her first child at 16\u201317. She didn\u2019t finish high school during her marriage, something she always regretted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, as a single mother of two, she returned to school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am<\/em> going to go get my education so I went to Pikes Peak Community College, got my GED, and then I got my AA from there. Transferred over to Colorado College, and graduated here in \u201985. I was a single parent. I was a nontraditional student. I really don\u2019t know how I did it with two kids, a job.. but I still kind of live that way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduation, she worked for nonprofits helping women move from public assistance into training and jobs before moving to California and eventually becoming a criminal defense investigator for the Orange County Public Defender\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There, she helped organize defense investigators after discovering that prosecutors\u2019 investigators \u2013  \u201call ex-cops, all white men\u201d \u2013 made 25% more. They didn\u2019t win full parity, but they did win a 17% raise and step increases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her life in California was full: a career she loved, salsa dancing, a new car with a moonroof, nights driving beneath palm trees in Newport Beach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, three years into her career, she was told she was going blind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis was not the plan. I was like, \u2018What am I going to be able to do as a blind person? Am I going to just have to go on disability and go home\u2026 and die?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, she adapted. She trained at the Braille Institute and changed how she investigated cases, bringing interns into the field while she listened, coached and corrected. Many of those interns went on to become attorneys, judges, and FBI and CIA staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her world changed, but her core practice didn\u2019t: see the system, organize people, push it to be fairer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat Happened to My City?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2011, Yolanda retired and returned to Colorado Springs to be near her mother, who was turning 90. What she found shook her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c2011\u2013  a third of the city lights were out. I walked a lot, and if there were sidewalks, they were deteriorating. The intersections were so dangerous, sometimes the sidewalks would just end in the middle of a block, and I\u2019m like, where do I go? What do I do?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Near her Southeast home, a bridge on Airport Road had been built in 1964 without pedestrians in mind. Its drainage channel is filled with mud and ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI could tell people in wheelchairs were going out on Airport Road. I was like, this is a death trap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bus service ran Monday-Friday, ending at 5:30 p.m. No Sundays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLord, what happened to my city?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She began showing up at City Council and the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation Authority, arguing that transit was not a luxury but a basic public service \u2013 just like roads and bridges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI can\u2019t even go to church on Sunday because you don\u2019t run buses on Sunday! I feel like I\u2019m on a curfew.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within three years, organizing with others, she helped secure seven-day bus service, longer hours, and more frequent routes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her experience navigating Colorado Springs without sight had made infrastructure intensely personal. A sidewalk, bus route or intersection could determine whether someone could safely participate in their own city. Soon, she would bring that understanding into decisions about Colorado Springs\u2019 environmental future, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Coal Plants to Bus Stops: Climate, Up Close<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On City Council and the Colorado Springs Utilities Board, Yolanda\u2019s lived experience as a blind transit-dependent resident collided with big-picture climate and energy decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At public utilities meetings she had once attended \u201cjust for fun,\u201d she heard debates over the Drake coal plant downtown. The board resisted naming a closure date, convinced coal was cheaper and fearful that rate hikes would anger residents. Reliability was king.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she got on the board, the context had shifted:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s really the timing now, we\u2019re moving into renewables. Solar and wind, they\u2019re still expensive, but they\u2019re getting less and less expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drake, she notes, was nearly 100 years old and belched pollution continuously because, unlike modern gas turbines, it couldn\u2019t simply be switched off. Nixon, another coal plant, was \u201cspewing 2,000 pounds of CO\u2082 every hour because there\u2019s not a switch to turn it off and on. You have to keep it running all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her approach to the transition was pragmatic. She supported using natural gas turbines as a bridge:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s not a 24 hour warm up. It\u2019s a switch. You use it instantly. And when you don\u2019t need it, you turn it off. They\u2019re used for peak hours, people want their heat in the winter, and they want their air in the summer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drake was fully closed in 2022 \u2013 13 years ahead of the initial 2035 target. Yolanda is aware: the gas turbines still emit \u201c600 pounds  of CO\u2082 an hour when they\u2019re on.\u201d But they can be shut down when demand drops, unlike coal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, she never let go of what climate justice looks like at street level. Under her leadership, more than $2.7 billion went into roads, bridges, sidewalks, ADA ramps, and traffic signals. She pushed for more frequent, later-running buses, especially in Southeast. She championed Panorama Park, a 13-acre park in her district, redesigned with community input and accessibility in mind, now a regional destination and winner of the 2024 Colorado Lottery People\u2019s Choice Starburst Award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She also fought for inclusionary zoning and affordable housing across the city, arguing that \u201cteachers, firefighters, police officers, baristas\u201d should not be priced out of neighborhoods by speculative development and water-allocation politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a warming, growing city, she sees climate resilience as whether people can afford to stay, breathe clean air, and move safely, not just whether the grid hits a renewable percentage on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Different Kind of Vision<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being blind on council was its own battle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not easy being blind on counsel,\u201d she says. Presenters would point to slides: \u201cOh, see this chart here? The purple line indicates\u2026 I\u2019m like, \u2018what the heck are they talking about?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accessibility improved during her tenure, but she still often had to insist on descriptions and formats that allowed her full participation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That experience shaped her politics. She talks about governance as needing to see the whole globe, not just the slice in front of your face:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re looking at a globe, you\u2019re only seeing this part of it. If you\u2019re on city council, it\u2019s like you\u2019re standing on the top and you\u2019re looking around.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From that vantage, climate, disability, housing, transit, and economic development aren\u2019t separate issues. They\u2019re facets of the same question: Who gets to belong in the Colorado Springs of the future?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yolanda\u2019s answer is rooted in five generations of her family who have lived here at the same time, from a grandfather born in the 1800s to a great-grandson born in 2024. That continuity gives her both urgency and patience. She points to past leaders who built reservoirs and early transit as shoulders she stands on, even as she challenges today\u2019s decision-makers not to stall on buses, housing, and cleaner energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is hopeful, especially about younger generations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou all give me a lot of hope, I see a service that this generation wants to bring to the table, and curiosity. I do hope that that curiosity stays.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pikes Peak Climate Archive seeks to capture how global forces \u2014 climate change, water scarcity, energy transitions \u2014 play out in local lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yolanda Avila\u2019s story is one of those lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It begins with a little girl in a military family walking Garden of the Gods and returns, full circle, to Southeast Colorado Springs, where a blind woman and her polar-bear service dog fight for buses that run, sidewalks that don\u2019t end in the dark, and a city that understands climate justice as the right to move, breathe, and stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She doesn\u2019t claim purity, but she insists on honesty about trade-offs, about data centers that drink potable water yet fuel our digital lives, about light rail that might seem \u201ctoo Denver\u201d but could knit an increasingly sprawled region together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Above all, she insists that sustainability and equity are not competing agendas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are the same project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bella Houck When Yolanda Avila walks into a room, she doesn\u2019t so much take up space as open it. At the Tutt Library, she arrived with what I can only call a \u201clarge polar bear\u201d of a service dog, a warm smile, and a presence that was somehow both steady and electric. She laughed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1827,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1827"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/pikespeakclimatestories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}