Rocky Mountain Voice

Menu

Tag: Public Policy

The quiet takeover: What early oaths and a Friday ultimatum meant for Douglas County Schools
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, Local, Top Stories

The quiet takeover: What early oaths and a Friday ultimatum meant for Douglas County Schools

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Douglas County’s newly elected school board majority took office days early and outside public view after a week of private oaths, a Friday deadline, and a dispute over whether a policy on the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey (HKCS) should be added to the December 2 meeting agenda. Emails, texts, and public comments released since then show conflicting explanations from the incoming directors and intensifying concerns about transparency. A Sudden Shift in Board Composition Outgoing Board President Christy Williams said she first learned something was wrong on November 26. “I was notified by the superintendent that Tony Ryan had gone to get sworn in the day prior to that, and I said, ‘so what does that mean for Beck...
Read More
Inside the story Colorado rarely hears: Trauma, transition and the path back to truth
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Inside the story Colorado rarely hears: Trauma, transition and the path back to truth

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice “It took me almost two decades to realize the error,” Antoinette De La Cruz told a Fort Collins audience on November 20. “Transitioning didn’t fix anything. It delayed the inevitable. Healing.” It was the first time many Coloradans had heard a detransitioner describe her path into transition, what it cost her and what brought her back. Read RMV’s reporting on the event here. Here she shared the fuller account of her story. Where it began De La Cruz said her transition began long before hormones or surgery. “I learned very young as a little girl that I was not valued as a woman, and I definitely was not safe as one,” she said. When she was seventeen she met someone who told her she could become a man. “I had no idea you could even do ...
Read More
Joy Reid discovers the Y in XY stands for “Yikes!” when she envisions locker-room reality
No Comments
American Thinker, Approved, Commentary, National

Joy Reid discovers the Y in XY stands for “Yikes!” when she envisions locker-room reality

By Brian C. Joondeph | Commentary, American Thinker Joy Reid, the fired MSNBC commentator who swung from defining women as ‘a social construct’ and invoking Nazi Germany when anyone challenged transgender orthodoxy, now says she would “freak out” if she found a man in a women’s locker room. https://twitter.com/TheFive/status/1991506817138999298?s=20 A belated moment of honesty, it seems, yet it only underscores how privileged it is to hold ideological positions until they actually affect you. That’s the essence of one of the left’s modern pastimes – virtue signaling. Nothing reveals the hollowness of progressive politics faster than the moment when theory collides with biology. In a clip shared widely on X/Twitter, Reid admitted that yes, if she walked into the ...
Read More
New X.com Feature Reveals Surge of Overseas Operators Pushing Misinformation
No Comments
TownHall.com, Approved, National

New X.com Feature Reveals Surge of Overseas Operators Pushing Misinformation

By Dmitri Bolt | Townhall Elon Musk’s company, X, recently launched a new feature on Friday that reveals the country of origin for every user account. The update is already raising eyebrows, offering a glimpse into how foreign-operated accounts may be using the platform to push misinformation on what has become one of the most politically consequential social media sites. Many of the accounts based in foreign countries are pretending to represent the America First agenda. https://twitter.com/authorrochelle/status/1992635515573580190?s=20 For example, an account called "@1776General_" which describes the owner as a "constitutionalist, patriot and ethnically American," with over 140,000 followers, is based in Turkey. The owner posted that they work in international business, an...
Read More
Colorado chose Medicaid expansion and now the bill is past due
No Comments
Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Colorado chose Medicaid expansion and now the bill is past due

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Our state is Medicaid (and government) poor Do you have a friend or relative that’s house poor? Truck poor? They live in (or own) something that’s beyond their means, and this financial decision makes their lives more difficult than it has to be? I read the Sun article linked first below recently and it struck me that our state is Medicaid poor. As a result of our state’s poor financial decisions, we have some fancy stuff, but we’re financially struggling right now. The thrust of the Sun’s piece is that our state’s budget gaps (the unhappy kind where we are short of money) are recurring and likely to continue to recur. Why? Medicaid’s a big reason, but there’s more to that picture. A couple of non-contiguous q...
Read More
Approved HHS Gender Medicine Review Stands Firm After Peer Scrutiny, Reaffirms Evidence of Harm
No Comments
Just The News, Approved, National

Approved HHS Gender Medicine Review Stands Firm After Peer Scrutiny, Reaffirms Evidence of Harm

By Greg Piper | Just the News Final version, written mostly by "liberals," makes small changes and answers critics including American Psychiatric Association. "It is fair to say that their work has withstood scrutiny," Washington Post editorial board says. Social scientist Lisa Littman put a target on her back seven years ago by documenting "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" in youth, prompting her to leave Brown University after the Ivy League school tried to discredit her research by implying her study was retracted rather than slightly revised.  Another publisher retracted a subsequent ROGD paper under threat of an academic boycott and a demand to fire the journal's editor, gender dysphoria research pioneer Kenneth Zucker, claiming it lacked "informe...
Read More
Caven’s report exposes how failed policies fueled Colorado crime and created a safety crisis
No Comments
Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

Caven’s report exposes how failed policies fueled Colorado crime and created a safety crisis

By C. J. Garbo | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice Elizabeth Caven's Crisis of Safety report merits serious attention. It is grounded in empirical data and addresses one of the most urgent public policy failures facing Colorado: the collapse of public‑safety outcomes amid rising crime, diminished law‑enforcement presence, and liberal reform policies that weaken accountability. According to Advance Colorado’s public‑safety section, the state is “in the midst of a crime tsunami,” with property theft and violent crime at 25‑year highs. 1. Data‑Driven Approach The report builds on strong factual foundations: credible crime‑rate increases (for both property and violent crime), sharp rises in auto theft, and clear indicators of diminished police per capita. For example, the Common ...
Read More
Hospitals on life support: Report says 70% of Colorado facilities losing money
No Comments
The Denver Gazette, Approved, State

Hospitals on life support: Report says 70% of Colorado facilities losing money

By Marissa Ventrelli | The Denver Gazette Nearly 70% of Colorado hospitals ended 2024 with “unsustainable” margins, according to a new financial report from the Colorado Hospital Association. Tom Rennell, the group’s senior vice president of financial policy and data analytics, said hospitals’ expenses are outpacing their revenue, as an increasing number of Colorado patients are losing their insurance coverage, partially due to the post-pandemic Medicaid unwind. “Over the last several years since the COVID times and through the high inflationary times, hospitals have been experiencing some significant econmic turbulence,” Rennell said. “We don’t have the full picture yet, but I can tell you that what we’re seeing so far in 2025 is that there has been even more of a deterioration a...
Read More
Audit Finds Financial Strain Growing in 16 Colorado School Districts
No Comments
Colorado Politics, Approved, State

Audit Finds Financial Strain Growing in 16 Colorado School Districts

By: Marianne Goodland | Colorado Politics Sixteen school districts in Colorado, almost all of them rural, are showing signs of financial stress, according to an audit released on the fiscal health of the state’s 178 public school districts. Eighteen other districts, however, are moving off the list with improvements to their fiscal health in the 2023-24 fiscal year. The Ellicott School District, east of Colorado Springs, was under the bullseye Monday, with five missed benchmarks in 2023-24, up from one in 2022-23. The district had no missed benchmarks just two years earlier.  School districts with two or more missed financial benchmarks, 2021-2022 to 2023-24. Of the 16 school districts that missed financial benchmarks, four were in rural El Paso County. The...
Read More
Colorado must stop pushing unfunded laws on local governments, lawmakers say
No Comments
The Daily Sentinel, Approved, Commentary, State

Colorado must stop pushing unfunded laws on local governments, lawmakers say

By Rick Taggart, Janice Rich and Matt Soper | Commentary, The Daily Sentinel When lawmakers pass a new bill, there’s one question we should all ask before we vote: Who’s going to pay for it? Too often, that question goes unanswered. Across Colorado, local governments are being asked to carry out new state laws — on everything from wildfire codes to building standards — without the funding to make them possible. These are called unfunded mandates, and they’ve quietly become one of the biggest threats to local budgets and the essential services people depend on. In Mesa County alone, these mandates now cost nearly $10 million each year. Statewide, the total is estimated at more than $360 million — money that could otherwise fund deputies, road repairs, or mental health programs. Ins...
Read More