Fire from Coot Lake

21:36 Tomorrow is a work day. Wish I could stay up all night, but you can check Boulder County Fire Live Audio Feed. Well wishes to everyone and a hearty thanks to all the firefighters. I have been utterly impressed by the organization and management of such limited resources. Thank you all and be safe.

21:02 Gold Hill proper is OK for now.

20:49 Power line down at the 4300 block of Sunshine Canyon making road impassable.

Sign up for Emergency Text Alerts.

20:43 The Nederland Community Center evacuation center is closed.  Anyone trying to go to Boulder from Nederland should use Coal Creek, not Boulder Canyon. North Boulder Recreation Center evacuation center is closed, evacuees are being directed to the CU Coors Events Center. The CU Coors Event Center is open as an overnight shelter. Only service animals allowed.

20:34 Do not go down CO 52 from Peak to Peak, smoke is too intense.

20:23 If you need to evacuate from Magnolia, you can come down to Boulder Canyon and head east.

20:09 Lost Angel is still under mandatory evacuation.

20:05 Request to cutoff power all the way up Sunshine Canyon to Gold Hill. Reports of some structure fires in that area.

20:04 Flare ups on North side of Sugarloaf. South side of Sugarloaf evacuation not necessary.

19:47 No east bound traffic is being allowed on Sugarloaf.

Google Map of Fire Area based on information grabbed from comments, news reports, and police feeds. Not official.

19:25 Power lines in the Wall Street and Salina area have been deactivated.

19:15 Boulder Canyon remains closed and will remain closed indefinitely.

18:58 Do not go up Left Hand, it will be closed shortly at Hwy 36.

18:48 Bow Mountain 911 calls have gone out along with Boulder Heights and Pine Brook Hills.

Nederland Community Center 303-258-9721 and North Boulder Rec Center 3170 Broadway are the two evacuation centers.

18:40  Evacuations from Lee Hill to 36 and Left Hand to 36. Fire still up at around Boulder Heights and Pine Brook Hills.

18:33 Old Stage Road evacuated down to Buckingham Estates. Wagon Wheel is to be evacuated now.

18:24 Fire is coming down towards Lee Hill.

17:04 I’m going to go get some sustenance. My source of info is the Boulder County Sheriff and Fire scanner.

16:47 Correction from earlier post: Left Hand is NOT being evacuated at the moment.

16:38 Fire heading towards Camino Bosque and Bald Mountain area, use caution if in that area.

16:34 Phone problems are not permitting reverse 911 calls to go out to Boulder Heights and Pine Brook Hills residents. If you have friends up there, CALL THEM!!!

16:14 There is a mandatory evacuation for Boulder Heights and Pine Brook Hills, but reverse 911 calls have not been sent out yet.

16:07 Evacuation of Left Hand Canyon has begun.

15:56 Explosions in Mountain Meadow area.

15:56 Those of you in mandatory evacuation areas, if you do not leave NOW no one will be able to access you later.

15:46 Numerous fire crossings at around 6000 block of Sunshine Canyon. Numerous structures threatened including the fire station.

Nederland Community Center 303-258-9721 and North Boulder Rec Center 3170 Broadway are the two evacuation centers.

15:24 No one allowed east of 6600 Sunshine Canyon Road.

15:21 Trigger point for mandatory evacuation for Boulder Heights and Pine Brook Hills when flames jump Sunshine Canyon Road.

15:09 Voluntary evacuation for Boulder Heights and Pine Brook Hills.

Elk Park fire 100% contained.

Sunshine Canyon from Gold Hill is closed all the way to Boulder. Only evacuees are being allowed down.

Flames headed in the direction of LaBelle and Sugarloaf.

Nederland Community Evacuation Center 303-258-9721.

Wind is 10-20 mph out of north east, will shift at sunset to north westerly.

Fire on ground North of Sugarloaf Road and West of Mountain Meadows Road. Units arriving on site. Mountain Meadows and Mountain Pines to begin reverse 911 and evacuation.

Eldora evacuation cancelled.

Mandatory evacuation areas are entire length 4 Mile, Emerson Gulch, Dixon Road, Logan Mill, Salina, Poorman Road, Melvina, Gold Run Road and Summerville. Left Hand Canyon and Sugarloaf are under voluntary evacuation.

Reverse 911 calls going out to Arroyo Chico, Camino Bosco, Sierra Antigua.

Staging for Colorado Mountain Ranch horse rescue is at Peak to Peak and CO 52.

Four Mile/Logan Mill area has been completely evacuated. Anyone needing to rescue their pet will NOT be allowed up.

Four Mile Canyon Fire is now the official name.

Town of Eldora is beginning evacuation, evacuation center is Nederland Community Center.

Smoke sighted in the vicinity of Wild Basin Lodge.

Fifty to one hundred kids camping at Mont Alto need to be evacuated.

Reverse 911 going out in the Sugarloaf area.

Colorado Mountain Ranch west of Gold Hill has been evacuated.

You can listen live to the latest Boulder County Sheriff and Fire scanner. Send good vibes, prayers most of all be cooperative!

Dear Blue Line Readers,

Our web host installed a security patch  on their servers Thursday night that was incompatible with the Blue Line.  Several hours of wrestling at both the Blue Line end and the server end gave us  all a serious batittude, but we finally have it all working again.  Except for the email updates.  For some reason, old posts are being sent out, two at a time.  Apologies to all our subscribers — we are still trying to fix it.

My 28 acres of wooded and environmentally sensitive area would be wiped clean and replaced with a 5′ deep pit.  Anyone wanting to preserve the natural environment is asked to attend the Thursday, September 2nd meeting and voice their opinion. The meeting will be held at the Municipal Service Center, 5050 East Pearl Street in Boulder. The meeting starts at 5:30 p.m. and is scheduled to last 2 hours.

Read all about it at Rescue Marshall Colorado.

It’s time to get ready for Boulder’s first annual Tour de Coops.

With thanks to Betsy Burton for her inspiration, Boulder will have its first annual biking tour of backyard chicken coops, edible gardens and bee hives.  Betsy, who runs the Lyons Farmette, launched the first Lyons Tour de Coops last September, featuring 14 backyard coops around town.

Backyard gardens and ‘edible estates’ are popping up in neighborhoods around the country, and why not?  With an increasingly unstable economy, an undependable and unsustainable agricultural system, and the discovery of the pure joy that comes in growing your own food, more and more folks are taking on the challenge of producing some of their own food.  Most people think of producing their own food as growing fruits and vegetables in their backyards, patios and community gardens.  But, if you are a vegetarian, or just really enjoy eggs, the next step in backyard self-sufficiency is raising chickens.

I brought home my first chicks this March and began my journey as a chicken keeper.  I soon found a small community of other folks around town that also had chickens.  But, I also found an even larger number of folks that were interested in raising chickens but weren’t sure where to start.  The Tour de Coops in Boulder and Lyons are great opportunities for people to learn more about raising chickens by visiting a number of coops and talking with people who are keeping them in Boulder county and within city limits.

The Tour de Coops Boulder is an open tour that is free to the public, occurring in Boulder County September 4^th, 2010, from 2-5 PM.  An open tour is one in which there is no specific start or end location.  You can find a list of properties on the Tour on the YummyYards website or the Transition Colorado website.  The address of each property on the tour is listed, as well as what each property has (chickens, edible gardens, bee hives, miniature dairy goats and/or an aquaponics system).  Pick the properties to visit that have the features you are most interested in seeing, or pack in the afternoon and visit them all!  The Tour is free and open to anyone and everyone, and families are encouraged to bring their children.

There are a total of 17 properties on the tour, ranging from small urban plots with a few laying hens to a farm with 58 chickens just east of town. Participants can access a map from the Transition Colorado and YummyYards websites, or pick up a flier from a number of locations around town. From 2:00 – 5:00 p.m. tour goers can choose to visit all properties or just the ones that interest them most.

For more information, please contact the following organizations:

Event flyer

With all the talk of the awful sales numbers for both existing and new homes in July, there was one small kernel of seeming good news: existing home prices rose slightly. The national median home price actually increased by 0.7% last month compared to a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors. But don’t expect this trend to continue — prices still have a ways to fall before they settle at their natural level.

Several weeks ago, Barry Ritholtz posted the following chart. It was originally featured by the New York Times, and updated by a commenter to Ritholtz’s blog named Steve Barry.

Read the entire article at the Atlantic:   Home Prices May Drop Another 25%.

For 92 years Boulder’s municipal government has operated under the strong-City Manager, weak-City Council system. I believe it is time to consider alternatives to the current form of our local government.

In 1918 Boulder joined a growing collection of primarily small cities and towns seeking to “reform” local government. Staunton, Va., was the first town to make the change in 1908, followed by Sumter, S.C., in 1912 and Dayton, Ohio, in 1914. The City Manager movement was primarily initiated by business and civic interests concerned about the growing influence of minorities and immigrants on municipal governments. They sought to take local government out of “undesirable hands” and give to “safer,” more business-oriented officials.

Read the entire article at the Boulder Reporter:   How Boulder is governed: time for a change?

In the late 1990s, Frances Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, began interviewing female residents in the Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project on the South Side of Chicago. Kuo and her colleagues compared women randomly assigned to various apartments. Some had a view of nothing but concrete sprawl, the blacktop of parking lots and basketball courts. Others looked out on grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds. Kuo then measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.

What happened? Kuo argues that simply looking at a tree “refreshes the ability to concentrate,” allowing the residents to better deal with their problems. Instead of getting flustered and angry, they could stare out the window and relax. In other words, there is something inherently “restorative” about natural setting – places without people are good for the mind.

Read the entire article at Wired.com: The Psychology of Nature | Wired Science | Wired.com.

I guess I’ve about had it with our local hometown newspaper.

You can imagine my surprise when I saw the headline for a front page article in the Camera a couple of days ago.  Council seeks a budget increase? A 27% budget increase, no less, while city departments’ budgets were being slashed!  What?

I hadn’t even opened the budget notebook for Tuesday’s study session and had absolutely no idea what the city manager was proposing in the draft budget.  As far as I knew, the council was “seeking” nothing…

The article then went on to suggest a free-spending council giving itself meals, memberships and a variety of perks that led to consistent over-spending.  A few featured and unfortunate quotes from a city employee, a juicy quote about unbudgeted i-phones and travel costs taken from the city manager’s budget unveiled the scandal.

It took reading to the end of the article to realize that what was actually going on was a proposed transfer of funds for transparency’s sake from the manager’s contingency budget to the city council budget, plus $4000.  Others may want to speak to the details and other inaccuracies in the article (for example, memberships in DRCOG, National League of Cities, Colorado Municipal League are hardly “council professional memberships”…).  For myself, I am left utterly puzzled about the Camera’s motives.

This negative slant and sensationalist story-telling about the city council has become a pattern.  An article earlier in the week left Camera readers assuming that the council was about to vote itself a health care benefit in a sneaky move.  Truth – we had passed on first reading an ordinance change that would, if passed, allow council members to buy health care through the City’s plan with no budget implications.  There was no council discussion and won’t be until we have a public hearing.  I have no idea whether or not there is council support for the idea.  Then there was the i-phone scandal earlier this spring.  Never mind that earlier councils had been given computers, phone lines, fax machines and the like.  Never mind that for most of us the computer phone allows us to read and answer the 50 to 100 constituent e-mails we get every day while on the go.

I suppose I’d also add the petty personal attacks on council members by the same disgruntled handful of folks that are regularly quoted in the newspaper.  Today’s Camera headlines the difference between the assessed value and the asking price of a councilmember’s home.  It is a non-story whose only purpose is to embarrass and to suggest corruption by innuendo.  I think this is called yellow journalism.

There is a part of me that thinks we should just be quiet and figure that the good people of Boulder can see through all of this.  Perhaps in this era of political divisiveness, elected officials are just supposed to figure misrepresentations come with the territory. But, I worry that there are significant challenges ahead of us that may be compromised by this sort of consistent negative slant.  I am saddened by what has become of my hometown newspaper.  Boulder deserves much, much better.

The day after Macon Cowles criticized and corrected a Boulder Daily Camera article about the proposed City budget (via the Hotline and reproduced below) the paper, in its front page article (Error Leads to Tax Discount, 8/24/2010) invented a scandal and, in so doing, legitimized a personal vendetta against the Boulder councilman.

This is revenge journalism and it is where we find our local newspaper today.

Instead of offering a correction to its seriously flawed article about the budget, the Camera ran an “investigation” of  Cowles’ home’s assessed value.  Cowles, like most people, pays his property taxes each year.  Cowles and his wife, like many people today, are downsizing to a smaller house.  Cowles, like those of us who’ve lived in our houses for decades, will not know the actual value of his home until he sells it.  Cowles, like every homeowner in Boulder, relies on the county assessor to determine the taxable value of his home.  That’s the whole scandal, folks.

The Camera article begins with the casually phrased, “Some Boulder residents are calling for . . .”  Who are these “some”?  The article identifies one person.  Of course, it must be a front page story if a guy with a grudge says it is.  So what can we expect next?

Some Boulder residents think Macon Cowles has a tail.  With questions about his anatomy swirling around the community, we asked the councilman, “How can you drive safely with a tail? Does it wag when you’re happy?”  Councilman Cowles has only provided one response:  “No comment.”  The questions remain unanswered and the controversy continues.

Heaven help anyone running for City Council these days.  Some people might try to destroy you, and they may receive help from the local newspaper.

Cowles' Hotline post

]]> http://www.boulderblueline.org/2010/08/24/revenge-journalism/feed/ 4 http://www.boulderblueline.org/2010/08/23/ignorance-is-bruce/ http://www.boulderblueline.org/2010/08/23/ignorance-is-bruce/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:16:19 +0000 Alan Boles http://www.boulderblueline.org/?p=2584
Three November state ballot issues—Proposition 101 and Amendments 60 and 61—would collectively cripple state and local governments in Colorado and have so far drawn strong support among the electorate, despite near universal opposition from business and civic groups and both major political parties, according to Abigail Hinga, outreach director for the Bell Policy Center, Rollie Heath, Colorado state senator from the Eighteenth District, and Richard Valenty, a former Colorado Daily reporter and now aide to Senator Heath, at a PLAN-Boulder forum on Friday, the 13^th of August.

Proposition 101 (public service cuts) would amend Colorado’s statutes to:

• Lower the vehicle ownership tax to $2 for new cars and $1 for used cars, end vehicle rental and lease taxes, and limit the yearly registration fee to $10
• Reduce the state income tax rate from 4.63 percent to 4.5 percent right away, and under certain conditions ultimately cut it to 3.5 percent
• End state and local telecommunications taxes, although retaining the “911” fee
• Lower the current limit on state spending under the Taxpayers Bill of Rights (“TABOR”) and “ratchet” it down after future recessions

The budget effects of Proposition101 would be to reduce state general fund revenues for schools, higher education, health, human services, corrections and other state functions by nearly 20 percent, reduce funding for roads and bridges by almost 20 percent from current levels, and reduce general revenues to cities and counties throughout the state by more than $600 million a year.

Amendment 60 (local budget constraints) would amend the Colorado Constitution to:

• Cut local support for public schools in half (more than $1 billion) by 2020 and require the state’s general fund to provide the difference
• Repeal all past, local “de-brucing “elections (that allowed local governments to retain increases in tax revenues that exceed the limits imposed by TABOR) affecting real property
• Limit future “de-brucings” to a period of four years and future tax increases to ten years
• Allow citizens to petition local governments for ballot issues to lower property taxes
• Impose property taxes on governmental enterprises and authorities and require governments to reduce property tax rates so that net tax revenues are not increased

Amendment 61 (public financing ban) would amend the Colorado Constitution to:

• Prohibit any debt financing by the state, including certificates of participation often used for roads and buildings
• Reduce local governmental debt financing limits from three percent of actual value to ten percent of assessed taxable value of real property (a drop of almost 60 percent for Arapahoe County, as an example)
• Compel local governments to automatically cut tax rates when debts are repaid

Although the originators of the three ballot issues have deliberately (and probably illegally) obscured their identities, they are widely believed to be allies of Douglas Bruce and probably to include Mr. Bruce himself. Heath said that, based on discussions of the Colorado Fiscal Policy Commission in which he participated last summer, he believes that the three issues reflect an extremely limited concept of the role of state and local government.  Under that view, state and local government should only operate the criminal justice system, provide education from first through twelfth grades, and build and maintain roads, streets and bridges.

Hinga asserted that polling has so far shown that voter support for Amendment 61 is the most robust and that all three issues would be on the verge of passing if the election were held now. Valenty predicted that an unusually heavy voter turn-out opposing the three issues will be required in Boulder County in order to defeat them, because they will attract strong support in other parts of the state, such as Colorado Springs, some Denver suburbs, and rural areas. He asserted that in a normal year 65-75 percent of City of Boulder voters and 60-70 percent of all voters in Boulder County would be expected to vote against the issues, but that those percentages needed to be increased by at least five percent in order to beat them.

Valenty commented that the message of the proponents of the issues will be simple and effective: “We are going to cut your taxes.” He related that a coalition of business, civic, environmental, educational, and labor groups in Boulder County, led by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce (and including PLAN-Boulder County), had already formed to lead a campaign against the three issues and that a much larger coalition called Coloradans for Responsible Reform has been created at the state level. Money is being raised and campaign themes and strategies are being devised. Each group belonging to the Boulder County coalition is being asked to educate its members and get them and their friends to the polls in November.

Heath noted that even if the three issues lose, Colorado would still face a major financial crisis. He said that the state’s general fund has shrunk from $8 billion to $6 billion in recent years. $260 million was deducted from the K-12 state education budget this year. Federal stimulus money essentially paid for higher education in Colorado this year, and there will probably be no money in the state budget next year for that purpose. Colorado ranks last in the country for spending on higher education and mental health. Our medical school receives the 73^rd lowest funding out of 75 schools. Colorado’s Medicaid funding is at the  lowest level allowed by the Federal Government. Per capita state revenues are the 47^th lowest in the nation. $1.1 billion a year is required to maintain the state’s roads and bridges, but only $700 was budgeted for that work this year.

Heath observed he has devoted much of his time in the General Assembly trying to improve the state’s fiscal condition. Last year he attempted to push it to create a constitutional reform commission to address the state’s structural, financial deficiencies. His effort narrowly failed in the House of Representatives.