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Coal-fired power plant in northwestern Colorado still set for 2028 closure despite Trump administration orders
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Coal-fired power plant in northwestern Colorado still set for 2028 closure despite Trump administration orders

By Mark Jaffe | The Colorado Sun The coal-fired Craig Station is still set to close in 2028 — even as the Trump administration is making a drive to keep coal units going — according to the operator’s electric resource plan filed with Colorado utility regulators on April 11. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which runs the plant, says in its preferred plan that the Craig Unit 1 will close by the end of this year and units 2 and 3 will be shuttered in 2028.  Battery storage and a natural gas-fired plant will be added in Moffat County as part of the plan. Three days before Tri-State filed its plan with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to expand production of “beautiful clean coal” a...
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State bill rewrites how Colorado decides school vaccine mandates
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State bill rewrites how Colorado decides school vaccine mandates

By John Ingold | Colorado Sun An amendment slipped into a bill by Democrats would shift reliance away from a key federal committee in determining which vaccines Colorado schoolkids are required to get Colorado lawmakers have quietly moved to shift the state’s school immunization requirements away from the recommendations of a prominent federal committee, in response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. taking over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The move comes in an amendment to a bill, House Bill 1027, currently awaiting Gov. Jared Polis’ signature. The amendment makes a change to how Colorado decides which vaccines to require. Colorado’s Board of Health sets the rules for which vaccines schoolkids need to receive or to have a valid exemption for. The current law sa...
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Colorado’s backlog leaves sexual assault survivors without answers, without closure
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Colorado’s backlog leaves sexual assault survivors without answers, without closure

By Bente Birkeland | Colorado Sun, CPR and Andrea Kramar Editor’s note: This story contains details of sexual assault and might be difficult for some readers. Originally published at cpr.org. It’s a situation Miranda Spencer never thought she’d find herself in. The Denver mom was going through a divorce in November of 2023, when she decided to try a dating app for the first time. She used Bumble.  “That’s one I thought was safe,” she recalled. After a few uneventful first dates, Spencer agreed to meet a man who had been persistently messaging her.  “So I let a friend know, ‘hey I’m gonna go out,’ and the exact words that I used were, ‘on this pity date. You can come over afterwards and hang out.’” Those ended up to be fateful words. She said she only remembers the fi...
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Taxpayers could foot the bill—twice—for Democrats’ lawsuit to dismantle TABOR
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Taxpayers could foot the bill—twice—for Democrats’ lawsuit to dismantle TABOR

By Jesse Paul | Colorado Sun Colorado taxpayers may foot the bill twice if Democratic lawmakers manage to pass a resolution directing the legislature to sue the state in an attempt to invalidate the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.  That’s because not only will taxpayers likely be responsible for paying the lawyers hired by the legislature to bring the case, but they’ll also be on the hook for the costs incurred by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to defend against the legal challenge to TABOR, a constitutional amendment voters approved in 1992.  If House Joint Resolution 1023 passes as expected, the General Assembly’s nonpartisan Office of Legislative Legal Services would likely hire a group of attorneys to file the lawsuit. In the past, the legislature’s third-par...
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Ghosted by USPS: Crested Butte faces losing its only post office
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Ghosted by USPS: Crested Butte faces losing its only post office

By Jason Blevins | Colorado Sun For three years, the town of Crested Butte has labored to find a new place for its overwhelmed U.S. post office. The town bought a parcel and began negotiating with builders, offering plans that involved the town either leasing the land to the Postal Service so it could build its own facility, the town building a new $12 million post office and leasing that to the service or even selling the land outright to the Postal Service.  “We drafted a cost-sharing agreement with the Postal Service and they told us a year ago, ‘We can’t do this,’ and then we have heard nothing from them since. Every plan we offer, we do not hear anything back. They are silent and nonresponsive,” said Dara MacDonald, the town manager of Crested Butte. “So we are stuck. We can’t r...
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Trump greenlights AI data center at Colorado’s NREL to ‘win the AI race’
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Trump greenlights AI data center at Colorado’s NREL to ‘win the AI race’

By Mark Jaffe | Colorado Sun The Trump administration is looking to locate a private data center and power plant on land owned by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of a broader plan to site such facilities at 16 national laboratories. “Private data center companies, that’s where the capital is, that’s where the investment is and on federal land, we make a commercial arrangement with them,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a press conference Thursday at NREL. The arrangement could be a combination of lease payments and an allocation of data center computing to the lab. “It is using our land to get some value out of it with a private company,” Wright said. “It helps the lab and helps the country by getting more data centers built.” The underlying goal is to ke...
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Federal judge dismisses drug company’s suit challenging Colorado prescription affordability board
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Federal judge dismisses drug company’s suit challenging Colorado prescription affordability board

By John Ingold | The Colorado Sun A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit filed by the pharmaceutical company Amgen challenging the authority of a Colorado board that seeks to rein in high-priced prescription drugs. U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang ruled Friday that Amgen had not shown it has or likely will suffer harm from the board’s actions. As a result, she granted the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, but she did so “without prejudice” — meaning Amgen could sue again if it can later show harm. “The economic injuries alleged by Amgen are too speculative and too attenuated to support standing in this case,” Wang wrote in her order. The case involved a relatively obscure body known as the Colorado Prescription Drug Affordability Board, or PDAB, which has the authority...
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Lawmakers propose risky PERA maneuver for voter-approved police funding amid budget shortfall
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Lawmakers propose risky PERA maneuver for voter-approved police funding amid budget shortfall

By Brian Eason | The Colorado Sun Something’s missing from the Colorado state budget proposal — and it’s a biggie. The Joint Budget Committee last week finalized its budget package without deciding what to do about Proposition 130: the voter-approved requirement that the state spend $350 million to support law enforcement. But the six-member panel does have the makings of a plan. The JBC was briefed last week on a draft bill to dole out the $350 million in regular installments over the next 10 years. If only it were that simple. READ FULL ARTICLE ON THE COLORADO SUN
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Rural Colorado school districts that once served students online could see brunt of major state budget cuts
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Rural Colorado school districts that once served students online could see brunt of major state budget cuts

By Erica Breunlin | The Colorado Sun As Colorado lawmakers try to solve a state budget crisis, Gov. Jared Polis’ office is advocating for a new set of changes to student averaging that would significantly impact a handful of rural school districts and charter schools that found a lifeline for their budgets by enrolling online homeschool students. Vilas School District RE-5, in far southeastern Colorado, along with Plainview School District Re-2, about 100 miles to the north, and three Colorado Early Colleges campuses in recent years ran online enrichment programs for homeschool students with help from an outside vendor. Those programs — which the districts and charter schools no longer operate — emerged during the pandemic, when the Colorado Department of Education relaxed rules a...
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Did Boulder County ban firearms on hiking trails? 
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Did Boulder County ban firearms on hiking trails? 

By Por Jaijongkit | The Colorado Sun Firearms and projectile weapons including paintball guns and slingshots are prohibited in all parks and open space in unincorporated Boulder County.  Open and concealed carry of firearms are also prohibited in other “sensitive” public areas including hospitals, county government buildings, child care centers and polling places. The ordinance says the presence of firearms in those locations poses unreasonable risks of gun violence.  A person can generally be charged only if these locations post signs regarding the prohibition. A conviction is punishable by up to 364 days in jail. Boulder County also prohibits the sale of firearms to people younger than 21 and has a 10-day waiting period for gun sales. READ THE FULL STORY AT THE COL...
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