It’s been a rough time for people who rely on the Animas River in southwestern Colorado, ever since the August 5 blowout at the Gold King Mine that released three million gallons of toxic, heavy-metal-laced gunk into the river. A consortium of businesses, public agencies, environmental groups and other stakeholders…
Bowing to public sentiment and the urgings of the dental establishment, the Snowmass Water and Sanitation District voted 3-2 last week to lift a controversial ban on fluoride in its drinking supply, which had been imposed last July. That prompted one water board member — whose wife had been one…
Back in the lock-’em-up frenzy of the 1990s, the Colorado Department of Corrections became increasingly reliant on private prison operators to stash its excess supply of felons. Those private companies tended to build their McPrisons in small towns on the eastern plains, far from the occupants’ families, promising to hire…
It’s not personal. It’s just business. Last week’s post about Danny Ledonne, the former Adams State University film instructor who was abruptly banned from the Alamosa campus with little explanation shortly after he launched a website critical of the school’s administration and pay policies, has generated some interesting e-mails and…
Filmmaker Danny Ledonne says he had no reason to expect the chief of campus police at Adams State University to show up at his Alamosa home last week. He was even more surprised when the chief told him he was there to deliver by hand a letter from ASU president…
Two weeks later, the calls and emails are still coming from readers responding to “Halfway to Nowhere,” my feature about Tooley Hall, a Denver halfway house for women, and the state’s struggling community corrections program, which relies largely on private operators to supervise and assist ex-cons who are trying to…
Forty years ago, the big crime news in this wide-lapel cowtown had nothing to do with six-year-old pageant queens, high-school shooters or feuding gangbangers. The obsession of the moment was the 1975 murder of businessman Hal Levine, and the prosecution of Michael Borelli, a supposedly mobbed-up former New York police…
For more than a decade, officials in southwest Colorado have been embroiled in a complex legal battle to regain access to a more direct route to public lands and recreational opportunities in San Miguel and Dolores counties, including hiking trails to Lone Cone, the westernmost peak in the San Juan…
The U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum outside Florence, Colorado, better known as ADX, has a deserved reputation as the highest-security supermax prison on the planet. It houses some of the most notorious inmates in North America — from Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and shoe bomber Richard Reid to Aryan Brotherhood leader Barry…
As the U.S. Bureau of Land Management sees it, last month’s removal of 167 wild horses from a rugged, remote area in Rio Blanco County was a success, easing the strain on damaged rangelands and substantially reducing a herd that had become too large to be sustainable. Wild-horse advocates tend…
After more than a decade behind bars, serving time for a crime she could never take back, Michelle was determined to make a new life for herself. She was going to stay clean, get a job, eventually get her own place. And this time, she told herself, she was not…
Less than a month after his trial, Aurora theater shooter James Eagan Holmes has begun serving his sentence of life without parole — plus 3,318 years — in Colorado’s highest-security prison, the Colorado State Penitentiary. The supermax is known for housing some of the system’s most dangerous inmates in isolation;…
It’s probably not all that surprising that officials in oh-so-health-conscious Snowmass Village decided a few weeks ago to remove fluoride from the town’s water supply, deeming that the additive offered more risks than benefits. What is surprising is that the humble villagers (median household income: $81,362) beat the residents of…
This week’s feature delves into a subject doctors don’t like to talk about much — their mistakes. It focuses on the case of Ruth Farfan, a 68-year-old patient who died in 2012, shortly after what was supposed to be “routine” surgery at Denver’s St. Anthony Central. Farfan’s family has reached…
How did we get here? Robin Valdez asked himself that question as he sat with his mother on her hospital bed, rubbing her back and trying to soothe her agitation and pain. It had been a week since Ruth Farfan had come to St. Anthony Central for surgery, and her condition…
It can often be difficult to assess the true costs of mineral extraction and energy production across the West. Take, for example, the massive blowout from the much-neglected Gold King Mine earlier this month, which sent three million gallons of metal-laced, toxic water into the Animas River, an orange plume…
Bureaucrats aren’t terribly fond of employees who go behind their backs and over their heads to expose waste, fraud, corruption, or just plain incompetence. That’s why there are laws in place that are supposed to protect government whistleblowers from retaliation. But according to Representative Mike Coffman, the Department of Veteran…
Two weeks after an EPA crew accidentally released three million gallons of toxic mine water into the headwaters of the Animas, the river has been declared safe for irrigation, recreation, and other uses. No doubt many people — including Governor John Hickenlooper, who guzzled some Animas water to demonstrate that…
There are half a million abandoned mine sites across the western United States, including more than 23,000 in Colorado. Many of them have the potential to expose high-country waterways to runoff from a highly acidic brew of tailings, mine dumps and metal ore. Last week’s dump of millions of gallons…
The last time Teri Font saw her longtime friend Sam Forgy, he was relaxed and in a mood to celebrate. The 22-year-old University of Colorado student had just completed an intensive math course and was looking forward to the start of the fall semester and a prestigious internship that involved…
The exercise in mass hysteria known as the Salem witch trials lasted little more than a year. Nineteen people were hanged, and one was pressed to death with rocks. Hundreds of others, mostly women, were accused of practicing the dark arts but spared execution. Fifty of them confessed to being…
Next month the Colorado Judicial Department will start charging interest on the court-ordered restitution that state prisoners owe to crime victims — a surcharge that was supposed to be imposed across the state under a law passed fifteen years ago, but which officials in many judicial districts neglected to collect…
