State representative Glenn Vaad was appalled to discover recently that corrections officials have delayed opening a $200-million supermax because of Colorado’s fiscal woes. There’s nothing that offends Vaad, a Republican who represents the Greeley area, more deeply than the idea of a brand-new lockup sitting empty, forlornly bereft of the…
I’m not generally in favor of so-called NFL “legacy” games, in which teams are required to wear their hideous and humiliating uniforms of yore and the fans are barraged with waves of schlock and nostalgia: old geezers from golden-age squads out on the field to get special plaques, commemorative programs,…
For months, dozens of motion-sensor cameras along I-70 between Golden and Glenwood Springs have been snatching nocturnal images of wildlife, in an effort to study how elk, deer, bears and other species negotiate the beastly interstate. The cameras, maintained by the Center for Native Ecosystems, Eco-Resolutions, Colorado Department of Transportation…
The Denver-based Pendulum Foundation has made some significant progress in challenging the laws that can send juveniles to adult prison, serving life without parole for violent crimes committed when they were fifteen- or sixteen-years old — a wrenching issue Luke Turf explored in his 2005 feature “Headed For Trouble.” Now,…
In a teleconference with reporters today, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar declared that his department’s wild-horse management program “is simply not working” and proposed a new way of dealing with the surplus of horseflesh that is devouring millions in taxpayer dollars. Secretary Salazar wants to head ’em up and…
I am back from the front lines of the kiddie porn wars with some shocking news: The prosperous, sprawling suburbs of Douglas County conceal a steamy underbelly of underage sexual exhibitionism. Youth are being exploited right and left. Usually by each other. Sexting — the insidious, technologically inevitable, highly adolescent,…
Every presidency has its own biases about the kind of education that makes for good leaders. JFK stacked the deck with Harvard grads; Bush I and Bush II leaned toward Yalies, of course. Snobbery, Eastern elitism, Ivy Leaguism–it’s been expected of the White House since the days of Woodrow Wilson,…
The dysfunctional high-security federal penitentiary in Florence has been the scene of all sorts of gang-related mayhem, from the grisly 1999 disembowelment of inmate Joey Estrella to the 2008 racial uprising in the yard, in which guards fired on brawling prisoners and killed two (as reported in “Life in the…
Over the past few years, the ability of journalists (or any private citizen, for that matter) to access various forms of public records in Colorado has been greatly diminished, from police reports to divorce filings. The loss of access to court records has been particularly aggravating, a bit of bureaucratic…
One of Ken Salazar’s first moves as Secretary of the Interior was to visit the Lakewood office of the Minerals Management Service — an obscure, scandal-plagued agency responsible for collecting billions in oil and gas royalties from companies drilling on federal lands — and vow to clean up the place…
Since she took over as district attorney five years ago, Carol Chambers has let wrongdoers in the Eighteenth Judicial District know that she’s going to hold them accountable. She’s pursued lengthy habitual-criminal sentences for low-level offenders, gone after opposing attorneys and truth-fudging cops, and even criticized judges for taking (and…
A recent blog item featured several photos of the black helicopters of Yoder, which have been buzzing Shellie Kirby’s ranch in the southeast corner of El Paso County for the past three years. Kirby has filed several complaints with Fort Carson, the National Guard, Peterson Air Force Base and other…
One of Ken Salazar’s first moves as Secretary of the Interior was to visit the Lakewood office of the Minerals Management Service, an obscure agency responsible for collecting billions in oil and gas royalties from companies drilling on federal lands, and vow to clean up the place. As detailed in…
“WHERE WERE YOU IN APRIL?” Lauren Lollini was the first. Not the first to be exposed, certainly, and probably not the first to get sick. But she was the first patient to figure out that she had the virus and where it must have come from. “I’m one of the…
This week’s cover story, “Going Viral,” looks into how one drug-seeking hospital worker probably infected dozens of Colorado surgery patients with hepatitis C — and the emotional fallout of Kristen Parker’s recklessness for the patients, several of whom are speaking out here for the first time. Just confronting the fact…
All Shellie Kirby wants is a place where she and her husband Mark can live in peace with their Spanish mustang, Rebel, and their other horses and burros. But their seventy-acre ranch in the southeast corner of El Paso County, where the couple has lived the past fifteen years, is…
It sounds like a tidy piece of inspirational fiction: A coke-snorting, booze-guzzling dropout squanders every opportunity in life, turns to armed robbery, burglary and sleazy telemarketing scams, spends much of his adult life behind bars as a self-proclaimed “worthless piece of shit” — then discovers the secrets of better living…
For an elected official to try to brush aside term limits might seem a little self-serving. That’s probably why the effort currently underway in Adams County to ask voters to allow county incumbents to seek an additional term, on top of the eight years they’re now allowed, has such a…
Being civic-minded and all, you’ve probably already spent a great deal of time on the City of Denver’s spiffy new zoning code website, absorbing all the new terminology and figuring out exactly how it’s going to affect your neighbor’s plans to build an enormous treehouse that will blot out the…
The expected tributes to the late Rev. Charles E. Blair, the man who transformed Denver’s Calvary Temple into one of the largest nondenominational churches in the country and presided over its growth for fifty years, don’t really do justice to the man — or the scandal that hung over his…
The Obama administration talks tall about its fresh ideas and new directions. Especially at the Department of the Interior, where Secretary Ken Salazar has vowed to change course from the Bush years and develop sound public-land policy based on science, not political influence — as detailed in my April feature,…
He was in our front yard and a little hard to miss. About as inconspicuous as a Hummer in a rose garden. And my wife, Lisa, wanted to rescue him. Maybe it’s because of all the old houses and flimsy fences, maybe it’s the proximity to major highways and West…
