Rocky Mountain Voice

Menu

State

There is No Such Thing as “Non-Partisan” 
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

There is No Such Thing as “Non-Partisan” 

By Michael J Badagliacco, “MJB” | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice I recently stumbled across yet another sanctimonious article whining that school boards, city councils, and other local bodies are supposed to be “non-partisan.” The author practically clutched their pearls at the thought of politics creeping into these sacred spaces. Absolute BUNK! There is no such thing as “non-partisan,” never has been, and pretending otherwise is intellectual dishonesty wrapped in a bow of naive wishful thinking. The “Non-Partisan” Myth Is a Dangerous Delusion This whole non-partisan charade is sold as some noble experiment: take the big, bad party labels off the ballot and, poof, suddenly everyone becomes a pure-hearted servant of the public good, free from ideology, bias, or...
Read More
Colorado ratepayers foot the bill for the “Just Transition”
No Comments
Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Colorado ratepayers foot the bill for the “Just Transition”

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Who gets stuck with the bill for the “Just Transition”? You. There’s a lot of detail in the Sun article linked below about various communities and how they feel as if Colorado’s “Just Transition” for coal-fired power plants isn’t too just for them.I don’t blame them. With a vote and the swipe of a pen, Colorado Democrats have hamstrung communities that were built around coal-fired power plants in the name of their arbitrary climate mandates. Quoting the article:“Colorado’s push to close all its coal-fired power plants by 2031 — to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — is creating a major economic threat to communities that have relied on jobs and taxes from those plants and the mines that feed them.”*I will leav...
Read More
New Colorado Law Limits Childcare Waitlist Fees and Requires Refunds
No Comments
CBS Colorado, Approved, State

New Colorado Law Limits Childcare Waitlist Fees and Requires Refunds

By Gabriela Vidal | CBS Colorado For new parents in the Denver metro area, finding the right child care facility can be challenging and expensive. However, a new state law beginning this year can help ease some of the financial strain. "I became pregnant in November 2023, and I started calling around in January 2024," said Emily Rinkel. "The last thing that I should have to worry about is where I'm going to get my childcare from." Yet that is exactly the struggle Rinkel faced when she began searching for childcare facilities for her newborn. "I put my name on the waitlist on one of the corporate facilities," she said. "It was $150, and non-refundable, and I had to pay it whether my child got into the center or didn't get into the center."By Gabriela Vidal | CBS ...
Read More
Colorado Hospitals Halt Gender Treatments for Minors After Federal Warning
No Comments
TownHall.com, Approved, State

Colorado Hospitals Halt Gender Treatments for Minors After Federal Warning

By: Amy Curtis | Townhall On December 18, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced new and sweeping regulatory changes that would bring an end to "gender-affirming care" for minors. This includes a ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures for those under 18 years of age. The reforms mean that hospitals that continue to provide such "gender-affirming care" to children would be stripped of all federal funding as a condition of their participation in Medicare/Medicaid programs. In his announcement, Kennedy said, "Doctors assume a solemn obligation to protect children. Yet doctors across the country now provide needless and irreversible sex-rejecting procedures that violate their sacred Hippocratic oath, endangering t...
Read More
Cheers and Condemnation Follow Maduro Capture Across Colorado
No Comments
CBS Colorado, Approved, State

Cheers and Condemnation Follow Maduro Capture Across Colorado

By Chierstin Roth, Jasmine Arenas | CBS Colorado President Trump says U.S. forces carried out strikes in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, early Saturday morning and captured Venezuelan leader NicolásMaduro and his wife to be taken to a detention center in Brooklyn, New York, facing narcoterrorism charges. The capture of Maduro prompted mixed reactions from Venezuelans in Colorado, some of whom lauded his removal, and others who said the U.S. government had no business bombing Venezuela or removing Maduro. Nelson Altuve moved his family from Venezuela to Denver two years ago. "We come from so much suffering," Altuve said.  He was in search of a better life. "The violence, the shortages of supplies and food — all of that ma...
Read More
Feds threaten takeover of Colorado wolf management amid compliance dispute
No Comments
The Coloradoan, Approved, State

Feds threaten takeover of Colorado wolf management amid compliance dispute

By Miles Blumhardt | The Coloradoan Colorado is now facing a potential federal takeover of its wolf reintroduction program. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will take over management of wolves in Colorado unless the state adequately addresses compliance issues under its memorandum of agreement with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, according to a letter sent from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik to Lauren Clellan, Colorado Parks and Wildlife acting director. The letter, dated Dec. 18 and obtained by the Coloradoan through an open records request, states if a complete report of all gray wolf conservation and management activities that occurred from Dec. 12, 2023, to the present is not supplied within 60 days of the letter, the U.S. Fish and Wildlif...
Read More
Who funds Colorado’s legislative fellows and how much influence do they have?
No Comments
Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, State

Who funds Colorado’s legislative fellows and how much influence do they have?

By Cory Gaines | Colorado Accountability Project Meet the Fellows SB25-309, linked first below, has lofty and not-unreasonable goals. Quoting the bill’s fiscal note:“The bill authorizes the Legislative Council Committee to approve agreements between the Legislative Council Staff (LCS) director and nonpartisan organizations to place nonpartisan legislative policy fellows in LCS. Any agreement approved by the committee must ensure that the director retains supervisory authority over fellows, and also specify that any work created during the fellowship remains the property of the General Assembly.”The concept is simple. We all have our areas of expertise and education, and we are all ignorant outside of those areas. Our legislators are no exception; they’re not super men...
Read More
After the rhetoric, Colorado secures $200 million for rural health care
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

After the rhetoric, Colorado secures $200 million for rural health care

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice “People will die—tens of thousands, perhaps year after year after year—as a result of the Republican assault on the health care of the American people.” That’s what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on July 3, during the longest speech in House history, in an effort to delay passage of H.R. 1—a.k.a. the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB)—before it was sent to President Trump for signature. The eight-hour-plus speech set a tone, framing the bill as “a crime scene.” The 43-day shutdown fight came with its own healthcare messaging. “Republicans have tried to stick us with a partisan CR that fails to protect Americans’ healthcare,” the Democrat leader said on the Senate floor. With the performative politicking now in the re...
Read More
When caps don’t cap costs
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

When caps don’t cap costs

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice A familiar promise, a familiar frustration Voters are often told that a policy includes a built-in safeguard — a cap, a limit, a hard stop designed to keep costs under control. In Colorado, that promise came with the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, approved by voters in 1992 as a constitutional amendment limiting how much revenue state and local governments can keep and spend without voter approval. Nationally, it appeared in the Affordable Care Act’s limits on how much of each insurance premium can be kept for administration and profit under the law’s medical loss ratio rules. The two systems regulate very different things. One governs government revenue, the other private insurance markets.  But cr...
Read More
“Not a Land Grab”
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

“Not a Land Grab”

By Aimee Tooker | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice The proposed Dolores River National Conservation Area is a total of 68,000 acres along the river in Montezuma, Dolores and San Miguel Counties and was the result of over 15 years of stakeholder engagement. Despite the remote and beautiful nature of the Dolores River, over a century of coordinated collaboration among stakeholders has determined its optimal usage and management, and those local conversations excluded the use of both Wild and Scenic status as well as a designation as a National Monument.  A “Land Grab” would have been a 500,000-acre National Monument signed over by one President. This NCA proposal does NOT include any land in Montrose and Mesa counties and the critical mineral resource known as the Ur...
Read More