Without question, those with the least suffered the most the past year. Folks with lower-income jobs — restaurant and hotel workers, childcare providers, teachers, moms — are still being tossed by the receding floodwaters of this economic storm.

The system is also awash with cash called stimulus, and it’s up to our representatives at the Capitol, county commissions and town halls across the state to direct it where it most needs to go.

The General Assembly calls it the Colorado Comeback, but where we were before left a lot of Coloradans behind. The pandemic tightened the grip on people already in a vice.

Besides the $5.7 billion or so Colorado expects from Washington, the state intends to spend about $800 million to help speed the recovery.

It’s easy to get lost in all those zeroes in a package that talks a lot about tax breaks, voluntary soil improvements, revitalized city centers, incentives for conventions and up to $3 million for “economic gardening,” a catchy term for helping businesses grow.

In a recovery, the only message should be simple: Let’s go.

The smaller pieces of the puzzle send a mixed message of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Senate Bill 231, for instance, adds $3 million to the $20 million budget for the Weatherization Assistance Program. The bad news is that legislative analysts said the program only serves about 2,000 homes a year, when about 500,000 Colorado households could qualify. A 15% one-time spike is something, I suppose.

House Bill 1215, a bipartisan bill, would put $1.75 million in each of the next two years into the existing Justice Reinvestment Crime Prevention Initiative to cut into recidivism. Staying out of jail is one way of recovering from the pandemic.

Yeah, yeah, every act of governing is for the people, by the people. For some people. Their people. The people who won’t forget them come the next election.

In a crisis it should just about all the people, but especially those who need help the most, not political agendas.

After the floods of 2013, I stayed on the relief issue a while after. I wrote about people recovering, while well-meaning appointed boards and clueless elected officials splashed around in the disaster relief money and donations that poured in. While they were holding committee meetings and bickering about how to spend it, desperate people had to wait.

It was neighbors, churches and volunteers who did the job necessary.

Just before Christmas after the floods, I met a family of six adrift in Weld County, homeless since the rising water destroyed the mobile home they were renting. They weren’t alone: The Greeley-Evans school district alone had more than 1,000 students left homeless by the flood.

The dad worked at a dairy, and his wife tended kids, because daycare was out of the question. Scraping together every dime they possibly could, they were still $7,000 short of the price of a secondhand trailer, but a bank wouldn’t loan them the rest. The mother broke into tears when she received the news from her husband on the phone. That was their last hope.

After the flood, the family had camped in an abandoned building so the dad could keep his job. Then the weather turned cold. Relocated friends from their destroyed former trailer park took them in, because there are still a lot of good people in the world.

There they were: 11 folks from two families, including seven children, jammed into a tiny manufactured home. They ate in shifts, and people slept on the floor.

The story ran on the front page the day of Christmas Eve. That afternoon I got a call from my friend Dale Katechis, the founder of Oskar Blues Brewery and a fellow ex-pat Alabamian, who, I’m sorry to say, went to Auburn. Roll Tide. The first batch of Dale’s Pale Ale was brewed in the bathroom of his mobile home off campus.

Did I have a phone number for that family, Dale asked. Why? I asked. Just give him the number, he said.

That evening I received a phone call from the mother, who was hard to understand. She barely spoke English, and it was muffled by the gush of her tears. I made out that Dale had given them the check to buy the mobile home. They could keep their down payment for furniture and clothes for the kids, Dale told them.

Dale already had punched his ticket to Heaven that year. I wasn’t surprised then, either. After the flood tore apart Lyons, his brewery was a relief center. His employees delivered precious water in beer kegs for free to people who had nothing to drink.

The bureaucracy of government and charity were too slow, so Dale raised money with a temporary, voluntary nickel surcharge on his beer, then he made up the difference from his wallet. If somebody needed a roof, Dale looked at it and wrote them a check on the spot.

There’s no difference between writing a check, if you put judgment and sincerity out front.

Like Dale, our policymakers must do both. I have faith. Like I said, there are still a lot of good people in the world.