Last month, we shared how Colorado PERA’s $4.78 billion in annual retirement distributions flow through the state economy, generating $7.32 billion in total activity and supporting 26,500 jobs. Those numbers are reflected in the lives of thousands of retired teachers, engineers, counselors, and public servants who stay rooted in their communities and keep spending, volunteering, and showing up long after their last paycheck.
Take Terri Helm. After 20-plus years as a guidance counselor in Cortez, nestled in the state’s rural Southwest Mountain region, Helm retired in 2003 and never slowed down. She reads with kids one day a week at a local charter school, has appeared in two community theater productions this year alone, guides field trips at two area museums, and works with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library.
“I couldn’t do all that I am doing if I had to work,” Helm said. It’s a small window into a pattern the Economic and Fiscal Impacts report captures at scale. Because PERA benefits arrive as a predictable monthly check rather than a market-dependent withdrawal, retirees keep spending steadily in their hometowns even when the broader economy wobbles. This is the “automatic stabilizing effect” the report credits with propping up rural business districts.
That stability matters most in places like Cortez and Delta County, the latter on the Western Slope, where Roger Fulks taught school for more than 30 years before retiring in 2000. Roger has spent much of his retirement as a volunteer advocate, showing up at county meetings with a clear message: PERA payments function as both personal income and a boost to local commerce.
“We’re all grandmas and grandpas, and we’re buying cars, we’re buying toys, we’re buying groceries,” Fulks said. “Nobody sees us as an economic engine, but we are one.” The report bears that out. Statewide, every dollar of PERA benefits generates roughly $1.53 in total economic output as it moves through grocery stores, pharmacies, and main street shops. And in smaller counties with fewer large employers, that retiree spending carries outsized weight relative to the local payroll.
Then there’s Beverly Green, a retired educator in Greeley who has turned retirement into something close to a full-time civic calendar. She serves lunch at the Greeley Senior Center every Monday, has ushered at the Union Colony Civic Center for two decades, and holds leadership roles with two separate retired-educator associations, including a stint on the Colorado Education Association’s statewide board.
“Once you start (your public sector career), you realize how rewarding it can be,” Green said, “through the differences you make—big or small—and the people you meet along the way.”
Green’s story points to a quieter piece of the report’s findings: real estate, healthcare, finance, and retail account for nearly two-thirds of the economic value generated by retiree spending, the same everyday categories—housing, medical care, groceries—that compose Beverly’s monthly budget and, by extension, Greeley’s Weld County economy.
None of these retirees set out to be an economic statistic. Helm wanted kids to have somewhere to turn. Fulks wanted his students to graduate. Green wanted to give back to a community that gave her a home.
But their steady habits of spending locally, volunteering consistently, and paying taxes are precisely what the Economic and Fiscal Impacts report measures when it tallies $406.6 million in state and local tax revenue and $1.84 billion in labor income tied to PERA distributions each year.
It’s a reminder that behind every regional map and per-capita figure in the report is a retired public servant still showing up for their neighbors—at the senior center, the county fair, or the back of a middle school classroom. Their pensions provide secure retirement while supporting a sustained investment in the communities they’ve chosen to call home.
Read the full 2026 Economic and Fiscal Impacts report for a county-by-county breakdown of PERA’s reach across Colorado.
