Giving birth to a new town is exciting, but running one can be far more challenging than city fathers and mothers ever imagined. Just ask the folks of Foxfield, a 1.3-square-mile town at the corner of Parker and Arapahoe roads. Foxfield is only four years old, created after 700 residents…

The Sunday worship service at Christ of the Canyons church in the small southern Colorado town of Cokedale took a decidedly secular turn one morning this past August. A process server came into the church and tried to deliver papers to Dave Groubert, a church elder who also runs a…

Freddy Lipton is crusading for $16 a month. The 56-year-old Lipton suffers from colon cancer, but he hasn’t let that stop him from waging a tireless campaign on behalf of Colorado nursing-home residents. Medicaid recipients living in nursing homes receive a personal-needs allowance of $34 a month, which Lipton hopes…

Frank and Norma Dougherty lived a modest American dream. It should not have ended in a nightmare. Frank served as a lieutenant colonel in the Army during World War II, then worked for years as a mechanical engineer at the Denver Federal Center. Norma was a homemaker who devoted herself…

A lease announced earlier this month between the Denver Broncos and the Metropolitan Football Stadium District would give Broncos owner Pat Bowlen virtually all the revenue from football games at the proposed new stadium, including tickets, concessions, parking, and luxury-box rentals. Since Bowlen has made it clear that he wants…

Every good entrepreneur knows that a successful business venture requires a mix of personalities that work well together. The eccentric but brilliant software designer can be teamed with an experienced manager, then money is raised, contracts are signed, sales flourish. The right combination of talent can work marketplace magic. Then…

The Rocky Mountain News expects to soon be an official sponsor of the Jefferson County public schools under an agreement that calls for the newspaper to provide everything from high-school journalism workshops to commencement speakers. In return for $95,000 a year for the next five years, the News will get…

Ida Mae Brueske has lived in her small, north Golden home since 1962. An affable 76-year-old grandmother who raised five boys in this house with her late husband, Brueske thought she’d spend the rest of her days on the quiet street of well-kept lawns and backyard barbecues that, appropriately enough,…

Last August, David Rocha, a 38-year-old immigrant from Mexico, went to work at a building in the Denver Technological Center, just like thousands of other people. But it was a day he’ll never forget. A janitor who worked for just over $5 an hour for Maintenance Unlimited Inc., the largest…

Kathi Williams and Neil Macey have spent a good part of their lives working in real estate, but their biggest deal, the one they’ll always be remembered for, still embarrasses them. They built Coors Field. Perhaps more than any other two people, Williams and Macey are responsible for bringing major-league…

Has Denver’s much-ballyhooed “pop-top” ordinance gone flat? The ordinance was passed five years ago by the city council after Washington Park residents complained bitterly about huge second-story additions to area homes that dwarfed neighboring houses and blocked sunshine. The ordinance imposed height limits on the additions–commonly known as “pop tops”–and…

Call it the fence from hell. A Denver man has spent thousands of dollars fighting a city board’s ruling that a ten-foot-high fence between his house and garage must be lowered to eight feet. Despite receiving no objections to the 24-foot-long fence from neighbors, the city is insisting that Jay…

Is there any way to prevent the Front Range from becoming a nonstop city that stretches from Wyoming to New Mexico? A state senator and a group of local activists, frustrated by legislative inaction, may try a direct appeal to the voters to fight sprawl. They’re about to issue a…

Longmont’s Main Street still reflects its farm-town roots, with mom-and-pop diners serving homemade pie and realtors posting notices for “horse property” in storefront windows. But like so much of Colorado, Longmont is changing. An influx of high-tech firms has sparked an economic boom. Subdivisions are going up on all sides…

Is Denver ready for an 86-story high-rise? A downtown Denver property owner is working on plans for the highest skyscraper ever built in the city, a behemoth that would tower almost thirty stories over the city’s existing skyline. While memories of half-empty office towers in the 1980s make many skeptical…

If you’ve rigged the wires on your cable box so you can get HBO for free or bought a “descrambled” black box so you won’t have to pay for cable at all, a new law says you could be fined $4,000. The legislation, signed last month by Governor Roy Romer,…

The ballroom of the Westin Tabor Center was filled with hundreds of couples one Saturday night this past March. Supporters of the Colorado Easter Seal Society had gathered to fete the winners of the society’s most prestigious honor, the Edgar F. “Daddy” Allen Award, given annually to the group’s biggest…

For years, Ann Bonnell has been a volunteer at the Denver Botanic Gardens’ Chatfield Arboretum. The former farm next to the Chatfield Reservoir has been operated as a nature preserve since the 1970s, and volunteers have planted thousands of trees and bushes on the property that parallels Deer Creek. Bonnell…

Plan Jeffco, the citizens’ group that launched a pioneering open-space program in 1972, is working on a plan to ask Jefferson County voters to approve a $160 million bond issue for open space that could halt a proposed Nike plant on South Table Mountain. It would be the largest open-space…

Standing outside Denver’s Forney Transportation Museum, in a yard filled with antique locomotives, cabooses and passenger cars, owner Jack Forney beams at a small nineteenth-century locomotive painted in splashes of forest green. The coal-powered locomotive would look more at home today in an amusement park than in a busy railyard,…

Hiking up the steep slopes of South Table Mountain is like stepping back in time. Prairie grasses shimmer in the sun and the wind whistles across the broad mesa, which rises 1,300 feet from the Colorado prairie west of Golden. Goldenrod, sage, yucca and prickly pear cactus stud the open…

A three-acre plot of land along Leetsdale Drive has become a major headache for nonprofit KRMA-TV Channel 6, which has been battling neighbors over its proposed profit-making commercial projects on the property it’s owned for the past decade. A recent proposal to build a 24-hour Amoco station and a Grease…