The Greeley Tribune reports today how Residents of the Greeley neighborhood around Glenmere Park “were collectively puzzled, angry and heart broken when they discovered on Sunday two roughly 10-foot-by-10-foot swastikas dug out of the snow on the lake at Glenmere Park.” One of the locals who spotted them at first couldn’t believe her eyes. “No, that can’t be,” she told the newspaper from her home near the park. “Then I took a step back,” she said, “and yep, that’s what it is.” The Nazi symbols, which an officer said looked like one person made by shuffling through the snow, were found blocks away from a local synagogue. “I would have been a lot more concerned had it been on the lawn of the place of worship as apposed to the park nearby,” a local police lieutenant told the paper. “There was nothing to indicate it’s more than a knucklehead that was maybe even inebriated at the time.” Swastikas were recently found carved at a playground in a Longmont, Colorado park.
Colorado, a state that embraced national healthcare reform under President Barack Obama, is getting ready for a repeal of Obamacare at the federal level, The Denver Post reports. The prospect is sending “tremors across Colorado, with activists and accountants both preparing for a seismic shift in policy.” The paper reports how under the 2010 law, “policymakers expanded the number of Coloradans who receive health insurance through Medicaid, created a program for residents to buy coverage through a state exchange and reduced the cost of emergency-room visits by patients without insurance. But the program also was a precursor to new problems, notably the collapse of a nonprofit insurer called Colorado HealthOP — which forced more than 80,000 residents to look for new insurance and wasted an estimated $72 million in federal loans.”
It was a dark year for coal in 2016— production dropped 40 percent, reports The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. “The U.S. Energy Information Administration said Thursday that the state’s 2016 production was 11.4 million tons last year, down from 18.9 million in 2015, or a 39.5 percent decline.” The paper also takes a look at sentences imposed after a state felony DUI law went into affect in 2015.
About 40 Greyhound passengers riding from Salt Lake City to Denver found themselves stranded in Steamboat Springs for two nights after a mechanical failure. But “community organizations, including the American Red Cross and the Steamboat Springs Police Department, came together during the weekend to help,” Steamboat Today reports.
The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent profiles a local security firm run by military vets in Rifle. “For more than a decade, CEO Justin Hale watched Citadel Security grow from a post-military career idea to a security firm that provides services for events such as the X Games, Aspen Food and Wine, Country Jam and much more. After serving stateside in the military for eight years, Hale opened Citadel Security in Rifle in 2007.”
“Rocky Mountain National Park’s cutest critter is in trouble,” reports The Coloradoan in Fort Collins. “Loss of snowpack means less winter insulation and a risk of freezing to death. Temperatures above about 80 degrees are equally lethal for the creatures, which look like a cross between a rabbit and a guinea pig and have a distinctive call that sounds like a squeaky toy.”
The Durango Herald reports on concern among state Democrats about a revenue drop. There is a “$500 million gap between Gov. John Hickelooper’s proposed budget for 2017-18 fiscal year and the money likely to be available,” according to the paper. “Basically we have conflicting constitutional provisions that make it difficult to enact rational policy, or enact policies that voters actually want,” one lawmaker told the paper. “An example,” The Herald reports, “is in the interplay between the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, passed in 1992, which limits the total amount of revenue generated by taxes that can be retained by the Legislature, the Gallagher amendment passed in 1982 and Amendment 23 passed in 2000.”
