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Southern Ute Tribe Secures Historic Energy Agreement With Interior Department
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Approved, KJZZ, State

Southern Ute Tribe Secures Historic Energy Agreement With Interior Department

By Gabriel Pietrorazio | KJZZ Earlier this month, a tribe from the Four Corners region has inked a historic deal with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum advancing the Trump administration’s “Unleashing American Energy” agenda. The Southern Ute Indian Tribe in southwest Colorado sitting above the border of New Mexico has entered the first-ever TERA — or Tribal Energy Resource Agreement — more than two decades after Congress enacted the law. This allows the nearly 1,500-member tribe to handle its own business — without obtaining expressed permission from the feds to lease energy projects and issue right-of-ways on the 700,000-acre reservation near Durango. Doing so is supposed to streamline the process by reducing delays. READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT KJZZ
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Bottoms And Kirkmeyer Take Stage In High Stakes Colorado Gubernatorial Debate
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Approved, Colorado Politics, State

Bottoms And Kirkmeyer Take Stage In High Stakes Colorado Gubernatorial Debate

By The Gazette | Colorado Politics The Gazette and the Centennial Institute are cosponsoring a Republican gubernatorial debate Tuesday at Colorado Christian University, featuring candidates state Rep. Scott Bottoms, a Colorado Springs pastor, and longtime GOP insider state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer. Candidates will field questions on major issues facing Colorado, including the economy, crime/public safety, state budget/TABOR, energy, infrastructure and affordability. The debate will be moderated by Shaun Boyd of CBS Colorado; Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette and The Denver Gazette; and Michael Brown of KOA. Limited tickets are available at McDonald Performance Hall in Armstrong Center, Colorado Christian University, 8787 W. Alameda Ave. in Lakewood. READ THE FULL ARTIC...
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Beyond the military record: What war left behind for one family
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Beyond the military record: What war left behind for one family

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice A faded military form cannot explain what war does to a family. The DD214 for Willie Jerome Evans Sr. records medals, overseas assignments and an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. It does not record the anger that settled over his family, the silence between father and son or the moment decades later when that same son held his father’s hand in a Colorado hospital room and whispered forgiveness. Willie Jerome Evans Sr. at his 1962 high school graduation in North Carolina. Family photos and documents courtesy of Kalvin Evans For years, Kalvin Evans knew only fragments of his father’s military story. The hardest parts of Willie’s military experience did not come directly from him. In an interview with RM...
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Trump Administration Releases Key Funds For Colorado River Water Project
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Approved, State, The Denver Gazette

Trump Administration Releases Key Funds For Colorado River Water Project

By Marianne Goodland | The Denver Gazette The Trump administration on Friday released $40 million, clearing the way for a water district and its partners to finish funding the purchase of some of the state’s most senior Colorado River water rights, Gov. Jared Polis announced. Federal funding for the Shoshone water rights owned by Public Service Company, a division of Xcel Energy, was approved by the Biden administration in 2024 through the Inflation Reduction Act. An executive order issued shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January 2025 put that funding on hold. With the $40 million in federal funding on its way, the project’s funding now stands at $97 million, close enough to its $99 million total cost that the Colorado River Conservation District can move int...
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Tina Peters Thanks Polis Accuses Democrats Of Silencing Dissent
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Approved, DENVER7, State

Tina Peters Thanks Polis Accuses Democrats Of Silencing Dissent

By Óscar Contreras | Denver7 Denver7 continues to follow developments since the disgraced former Mesa County Clerk and 2020 election denier was granted clemency by the governor last week. DENVER — Former Mesa County Clerk and 2020 election denier Tina Peters spoke out for the first time since her commutation last week, accusing Colorado Democrats of an election cover-up while defending Gov. Jared Polis for reducing her nine-year prison sentence. In a post on X, Peters accused state Democrats of putting “a bullseye on a 70-year-old, nonviolent, first-time offender” and said Democrats were attacking Gov. Polis for showing mercy. “Doesn’t that make you wonder why? It should be obvious to Democrats and Republicans alike that they have something to hide,” Peters wrote. “It is so obv...
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A Person’s a Person No Matter How Small
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Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

A Person’s a Person No Matter How Small

By Ken DeGraaf | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice This story is not merely about a brave young girl gone viral for a poignant poem. It is about a canary in a coal mine gasping for air as the poisons of a culture increasingly unable to tolerate truth swirl ever thicker in the atmosphere around it. When a 7th grader is barred from presenting a poem titled “A life is a life, no matter how small” to her Honors English classmates because it defended unborn life, Colorado should take stock of its condition. In a Jeffco district claiming that “all students…feel that their voices and perspectives are valued,” the promotion of life itself was deemed too offensive. A healthy civilization does not fear competing moral arguments. It does not silence peaceful dissent or require instit...
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Colorado’s annual seat belt crackdown returns. The numbers suggest it isn’t working.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado’s annual seat belt crackdown returns. The numbers suggest it isn’t working.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice "Their lives might have been saved if they invested three seconds in safety and buckled up." Col. Matthew C. Packard, chief of the Colorado State Patrol, said that Monday about the 191 Coloradans who died in crashes last year without a seat belt. CDOT's release marked the launch of the state's annual Click It or Ticket enforcement campaign with five years of fatality data. The numbers have not moved. Since 2021, the unbuckled share of passenger vehicle deaths in Colorado has held between 48 percent and 52 percent each year. Through May 18 of this year, 40 unbuckled drivers and passengers have died on Colorado roads, 51 percent of all passenger vehicle fatalities. Across the full five-year period, 1,052 of 2,087 passenger v...
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Colorado Marijuana Lawsuit Claims State Inflated Taxes Through Market Distortions
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Approved, Colorado Politics, State

Colorado Marijuana Lawsuit Claims State Inflated Taxes Through Market Distortions

By Christopher Osher | Colorado Politics Plaintiff says state owes over $100 million in refunds This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. The regulators of Colorado’s first-in-the-nation recreational marijuana market have allowed so many sham transactions in the industry to proliferate that honest cultivators and manufacturers shoulder an unfair excise tax burden, claims a lawsuit filed on Thursday that seeks class-action status. The lawsuit, filed by a large-scale marijuana cultivator in the state, claims the state owes millions of dollars in tax refunds. It alleges failures in enforcement by the Marijuana Enforcement Division have allowed “distortions” in how the state calculates the average market rate (AMR) for unprocessed marijuana tha...
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Colorado debated abortion oversight while Lexi’s autopsy stayed redacted
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado debated abortion oversight while Lexi’s autopsy stayed redacted

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice Taco Tuesdays with her mother. Motorcycle rides with her stepdad. Choir, books and afternoons at the Denver Aquarium. That was the teenager her family remembered. Alexis Arguello was 18 when she died in Fort Collins on Feb. 6, 2025 after a second-trimester abortion. Coincidentally, it was less than a week after her death that Rep. Scott Bottoms introduced a bill for abortion-clinic oversight. A relative of Arguello testified for the bill a month later, even while the portions describing the abortion and related medical complications remained hidden from view. It took an order from a district court judge for the records to be released unredacted.  In the order, St. John emphasized that autopsy reports are public records subject to dis...
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Gambling with taxpayer dollars: Colorado bill could allow nonprofits to get paid before work is done
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Approved, Colorado Accountability Project, Commentary, State

Gambling with taxpayer dollars: Colorado bill could allow nonprofits to get paid before work is done

By Cory Gaines | Colorado Accountability Project Gambling taxpayer money to bolster our nonprofit ecosystem. When you hire someone to do something for you, do you give them an advance? I’ve done it both ways: cash on delivery only and an upfront payment for, say, the materials. The bill linked at bottom makes some noteworthy changes to the way our state interacts with multiple nonprofits it pays to do its work. There are multiple directions you could go in with your speculation, but I think it’s reasonable to conclude overall that the bill bolsters the connection between our government and nonprofits, that it enriches the tightly-interconnected ecosystem of NGO’s and nonprofits in Colorado.** Under current law, prior to this bill, if a state awards a grant to a nonprofit for so...
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