The Coloradoan reports how disaffection with President Donald Trump “is showing no signs of slowing in Fort Collins. A march to show solidarity with immigrants and Muslims is expected to draw the better part of a thousand protesters to the sidewalks outside U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner’s office Tuesday, while thousands more have shown interest via Facebook in attending a Feb. 11 rally to support Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, groups like Fort Collins for Progress are taking steps toward realizing official nonprofit status, NoCo Spark is organizing quarterly action plans and untold other progressive groups are working to harness a swell of energy stemming from an antipathy toward the Trump administration.”
In “Helpless,” The Greeley Tribune profiles a local mother who lost her 25-year-old son to heroin. “Mark had Asperger Syndrome, or at least he was on the spectrum. He was a happy kid, though, and Jennifer fought through the autistic tendencies by hugging him constantly. She was, she said with a grin, always about feelings. She made him a sweet, sensitive kid. She called him her best friend. Yet after a car crash on a snowy road, he got a head injury, and he wasn’t the same person. He was still Mark, but a darker version of him. He became depressed and had anxiety. His decision to try heroin leaves her flabbergasted, but it also makes sense. ‘I don’t know what he was medicating,’” Jennifer told the paper. “But maybe that was a way to feel good.”
The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reports how Congressman Scott Tipton of Cortez qualified his support for Donald Trump’s executive travel ban. “I support strong security vetting for anyone who wishes to enter the United States, regardless of their faith, so a temporary halt on accepting new immigrants and refugees from certain countries that are known hotbeds for terrorism while we strengthen our screening procedures is a reasonable action,” Tipton said in a statement issued on Monday. The paper reported how “Security officials last year told the Obama administration that they were unable to verify the identities of Syrians seeking to enter the country, Tipton said,” and quoted the congressman as saying, “Until we have this ability, I do not think it is unreasonable to halt resettlement.”
“The Steamboat Springs School District doesn’t have the lead time this year to pursue a grant program to help fund capital projects, but staff hopes to pursue the program in 2018,” The Steamboat Pilot & Today reports. “On Monday, the Board of Education learned more from district staff about the Building Excellent Schools Today, or BEST, program, which offers matching grants for Colorado school districts pursuing new school construction and deferred maintenance.”
Vail Daily reports how patience pays, and “Eagle County Schools has saved roughly $4 million by waiting a month to issue its voter-approved bonds. Eagle County voters in November gave the district permission to borrow $144 million for construction and renovation projects. The district was scheduled to borrow that money in December by issuing bonds. However, Eagle County Schools Chief Operating Officer Sandra Mutchler and the district’s bond counsel, George K. Baum & Company of Denver, anticipated interest rates would fall in coming weeks. They were right. When the school district issued its bonds last week, the 20-year interest rate was .25 percent lower than it was in December — 3.22 percent compared to 3.45 percent.”
“More than 600 people died on Colorado’s roadways last year, according to statistics gathered by state transportation officials, up about 11 percent from 2015 and the highest total in a decade, despite increased work to brake a now-six-year rise in fatalities,” The Denver Post reports. “Of the at least 605 deaths on Colorado’s roads in 2016, 380 were drivers or passengers in cars, sport utility vehicles and trucks, the Colorado Department of Transportation numbers show. Motorcyclists accounted for another 125 of the deaths, while a 15-year high of 84 pedestrians and 16 bicyclists died on the road. In 2015, 547 people died on the state’s roadways. The last time the fatality count was so high was in 2005, when 606 people were killed.”
The Longmont Times-Call reports how Colorado GOP Attorney General Cynthia Coffman still contends Boulder’s oil-and-gas moratorium is illegal. “Boulder County has prohibited new oil and gas development for the last five years and has continued its ban even though the Colorado Supreme Court ordered the cities of Longmont and Fort Collins to lift theirs,” she said Monday. “Last Thursday,” the paper reports, “Coffman sent Boulder County commissioners a letter asserting that the county’s current moratorium — the latest in a series of oil and gas development timeouts the county originally put in place in February 2012 and has extended several times in the years since — is illegal.”
“At least two Christian leaders in the Pikes Peak region said that compassion needs to win out when it comes to providing refuge for immigrants in need of relief from religious or political persecution,” reports The Gazette in Colorado Springs. “In the wake of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Friday and a wave of protests and rhetoric that has ensued since, Brady Boyd of New Life Church in northern Colorado Springs and Bishop Michael Sheridan, who leads the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs, each talked about conflict Monday with the new president’s decision. “On the one hand, there is expressed concern for the safety of our country and the need to vet as carefully as we can those coming into the U.S.,” Sheridan said. “But there is great concern for those who are suffering, religiously, politically or whatever.”
The Glenwood Springs Post-Independent reports how a federal crackdown on marijuana could be catastrophic for Colorado’s economy. “With the likelihood of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions being appointed as the U.S. attorney general, marijuana businesses are left uncertain about how he might approach federal law on marijuana,” the paper reports. “The Obama administration chose not to enforce the federal ban on the drug when states led by Colorado legalized it. Advocates say that the medical marijuana industry has won wide acceptance across the country, but recreational marijuana is the more likely to be in danger.”
“The shoulder of rural and scenic Lookout Road was lined Monday afternoon with news vans and national reporters hoping for a glimpse of a man on the speculated short list of those President Donald Trump may nominate for the Supreme Court vacancy,” reports The Boulder Daily Camera. “Neil Gorsuch, the man they were waiting to see but never did, is a conservative jurist in the intellectual mold of the late Antonin Scalia, and he hails from deep-blue Boulder, of all places.”
