Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- And Now, Back to Your Local News…Since the weather’s getting better, I’m sure we’re all totally jonesing to get onto the trails, but in general, they’re a mess. It’s a bummer to see nice singletracks get trashed and widened, so like all of you, I’m grinding my teeth in annoyance while I try to be patient. The good news is that you [...] […]
- Downieville, Take ThreeOkay, well, things went pretty haywire in race promotion after the registration debacle. The organizer received so many hateful emails and comments about the mishap that it made him wonder if he should even bother putting the race on. I can’t blame him, really. In his shoes I might do the same thing. It sounds [...] […]
- And Now, Back to Your Local News…
- Edgy Veggie
CU lawyers: The rules of the river are broken
The Colorado River | USGS
How do you solve a problem that nearly everyone knows exists, but no one will talk about? Or at least no one with any political power will talk about?
That seems to be the case with the Colorado River. The annual demand on the river by the seven basin states and Mexico — just more than 15 million acre feet — is more than the average annual flow. (And if you live anywhere in Boulder County, you’re part of the “demand.” About 20 percent of the city of Boulder’s water is pumped from the Colorado River’s watershed over the continental divide. If you live in most other towns in the county, your percentage is far higher.)
So something’s got to change. Which, like I said, everyone seems to know. But, then, why doesn’t it seem like anyone’s getting serious about a change? Maybe it’s because talking about changing the rules of the Colorado River is a big political landmine.
Take John McCain. Remember when he told the Pueblo Chieftan in August 2008 that the 1922 Colorado River Compact — which divvies up the river water between the seven states — should be renegotiated? If you do, you might also remember the immediate outrage from Coloradans like Ken Salazar, whose immediate reaction was, “Over my dead body” will the contract be renegotiated.
Now a handful of lawyers from the University of Colorado are looking at what rules govern the river (and this means picking through a web of complicated treaties, compacts, state laws and court rulings) and what should be changed to create a sustainable mangement plan. With no political horse in the race, the lawyers hope that their suggestion for improvements can be picked up later by politicians…. making it a safer topic to discuss. (“Hey,” the politician could say, “this wasn’t my idea… I’m just looking into this report from these lawyers.” Then after gauging the public response, he or she could say, “Hey, this was kind of my idea.”)
You get the picture. Read more about CU’s yearlong project at DailyCamera.com.
Feds search for northern leopard frog, which sometimes live in Boulder ponds
A northern leopard frog | National Park Service
Perhaps you recognize the northern leopard frog from the dissection tray in your high school biology class?
But have you seen one (alive) lately?
The northern leopard frog used to be easy to find across 19 states, including Colorado — and they were one of the key species fried up for frog legs.
But over the last few decades, the species has been on the decline.
Now the feds are out counting the small frog to see if the spotted amphibian needs protection under the Endangered Species Act.
The leopard frog is known to live in Boulder County. A 2006 study by the city’s open space department scoured 32 wetlands (which included ponds, intermittent streams and irrigation ditches) and found 172 leopard frogs.
Federal biologists believe leopard frog populations are currently undergoing a dramatic decline from vast areas of its historical range in the western United States and Canada. Read more
Boulder County workers are coming to your door, and they’re armed (with low-flow showerheads and CFL light bulbs)
If you want to save energy (and water), you probably know what you should do. But maybe, you just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
A CFL bulb | Associated Press
Boulder County is taking that kind of good intention (but lack of action) to task. The county is launching the Energy Corps, which will pay young adults to go door to door, educating those who need it, and then doing what needs to be done (in the energy sense, of course) right then and there.
The new program, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will work with community groups such as homeowners’ associations to target willing neighborhoods.
“The goal is to do a new neighborhood every Saturday,” said county spokesman Dan Rowland. “If your HOA contacts us and says, ‘OK we’re going to do this,’ we’ll have the whole team out in the neighborhood. They’ll crank through 15 or 20 houses that are already signed up.”
Individual houses will be scheduled for two-hour energy assessments, during which corps members will install compact fluorescent light bulbs, low-flow showerheads, programmable thermostats, weather stripping and clotheslines free of charge. Energy Corps members will also help homeowners save energy by adjusting thermostats, refrigerators, freezers, water heaters and furnaces.
Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, or to get your neighborhood on Energy Corps’ to-do list, contact Beth Beckel at bbeckel@bouldercounty.org or 303-441-3502.
Boulder County wants to get climate smart(er)
Earlier this year, Boulder County launched the ClimateSmart Loan Program, which gives low-interest loans to property owners who want to give their buildings an energy face lift.
The loans (which are attached to the property, not the owner, and stay with the house even if the owner moves) can be used for insulation, new windows, ground-source heat pumps, solar panels… pretty much anything that will lower a building’s energy use.
The program has been wildly popular, and since the program launched in May, more than 600 homeowners have borrowed nearly $10 million for their projects.
The loans are made possible by bonds that voters approved last November, and this November, the county is asking voters to double the available funding from $40 millino to $80 million.
Read more about the request to double ClimateSmart on November’s ballot at DailyCamera.com, or learn more about how to get a loan at www.ClimateSmartLoanProgram.org.
Boulder County Issue 1C would halve jail’s utility bill
Inmate Kevin Halfen loads a massive washing machine with towels while doing laundry Wednesday at the Boulder County Jail. With laundry going 16 hours a day, among other needs, the jail burns through a lot of electricity. But Boulder County officials hope voters will pass a ballot measure to allow energy-efficiency upgrades at several public buildings. Photo by Mark Leffingwell.
The Boulder County jail does a lot of laundry.
If it’s not uniforms, it’s bed sheets or underwear, meaning that the industrial-sized washers and dryers are often running 16 hours a day, greedily sucking electricity off the grid.
About 500 people live at the jail, so when you add the laundry to a flood of hot showers and countless burning light bulbs, the facility racks up a pretty hefty utility bill: $250,000 a year.
The Boulder County commissioners want to slash that bill, and if voters give them the thumbs-up at the ballot box in November, they say they can cut the amount of money spent on jail utilities in half.
This November, the county commissioners are asking voters for permission to make major energy-efficiency upgrades to the jail with the ultimate goal of cutting its $250,000 annual utility bill in half. Boulder County Ballot Issue 1C would allow the county to take advantage of new federally backed, zero-interest loans to make $6.1 million worth of improvements to county buildings, including the jail, the justice center and the sheriff’s headquarters.
The new loan program is part of the federal stimulus bill, and the money must be used for public buildings. Read more
Not so fast, biotech beets — federal judge orders environmental study
A sugar beet | DailyCamera.com
A federal judge has told the USDA that they should’ve slowed down — and considered the environment — when the agency approved genetically modified sugar beets, which have recently caused an uproar here in Boulder County.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ruled Monday evening that the USDA has to go back and produce the environmental impact statement that the agency should have worked on before.
Last December, six Boulder County farmers asked for permission to plant Roundup Ready sugar beets on the open space land they lease from the county. Since the county already allows GMO corn — 1,500 acres of open space is planted with it this year — the farmers thought the request wouldn’t be too big a deal.
But the issue blew up, thanks in part to a group of riled up leaders from the area’s organic and natural food industry. In August, the county commissioners agreed to delay the controversial decision on whether to allow the GMO beets while the county debates what to do with genetically modified crops in general. Read more
Cone-collecting efforts strive to save limber pines
Cones on a limber pine tree | Jesse Speer, rockymountainnationalpark.com
First it was the mysterious, wide-spread death of aspen trees.
Then it was the near annihilation of all of Colorado’s mature lodgepole forests by a plague of pine beetles.
Now, the forest service is worried about limber pines and their relatives in the white pine family, including the ancient bristlecone pines.
The combination of blister rust — a non-native fungus — and pine beetles, which also feed on limber pines, is killing off the ancient trees at unprecedented rates.
The U.S. Forest Service has recently beefed up a campaign to save limber pines by looking for the hardiest trees and collecting their cones.
From last weekend’s Daily Camera:
On Saturday, the first of several groups of volunteers organized by Boulder County’s Parks and Open Space Department will scour the mountains west of Boulder in an effort to save the limber pines by collecting their cones.
The cones — and more importantly, the seeds they contain — will be handed off to the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, where researchers will cultivate young pines, searching for the healthiest individual trees.
“We’re going to test the resulting seedlings for resistance to blister rust, an introduced fungal pathogen,” said Thomas Crow, manger of the limber pine program. “It’s part of a more proactive approach to management.”
Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, or learn more about blister rust at the Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Web site.
Read more posts about forest health on BigGreenBoulder:
 Beetle-killed trees threaten Colorado power grid |
 Rocky Mountain aspens could disappear by 2090 |
Beetle-killed trees threaten Colorado power grid
The U.S. Forest Service wants to clear dead trees from powerline corridors in Colorado. Falling trees or a fire have the potential to affect wide areas of the western power grid. Summit Daily/Bob Berwyn
Pine beetles have infested about 2 million acres of Colorado’s lodgepole pine forest, and utility companies are worried that when the dead trees fall, they’ll fall on power lines.
This from the Vail Daily:
A wildfire along one of the West’s key power line corridors could shut down the grid in a worst-case scenario. To avoid disruption, the U.S. Forest Service wants to remove dead and dying trees along power lines crossing national forest system lands in northern Colorado. …
“There is an imminent threat to power lines from an increasing number of hazardous trees falling in the three forests,” said Cal Wettstein, commander of the Forest Service’s Bark Beetle Incident Management Team.
The U.S. Forest Service wants to work with utilities to cut down beetle-killed trees on land it manages in Colorado, including trees in the Roosevelt National Forest, which covers a swath of western Boulder County.
There are around 800 miles of distribution and transmission lines on the three National Forests — White River, Medicine Bow-Routt, and Arapaho and Roosevelt — according to the forest service, and about 400 miles run through lodgepole pine that has been or will likely be killed by the bark beetle.
Read the full story from the Vail Daily, or read the press release from the U.S. Forest Service.
GMO beet debate will go on — and on, and on, and on…
A big old pile of sugar beets. About 57 percent of all domestic sugar in the United States comes from these gnarly looking veggies. This year, about 95 percent of all sugar beets grown in the country are genetically modified.
With just a few minutes to spare until midnight, the Boulder County Board of Commissioners wrapped up a seven-hour-long public meeting on whether to allow GMO sugar beets on publicly owned farm land… by unanimously deciding not to decide.
Instead, the commissioners asked county staffers to begin working on a plan for how to deal with all types of genetically modified crops.
In 2003, a different set of commissioners voted to allow GMO corn on county open space land leased to farmers, but stipulated that each new genetically modified crop would need new permission. This means that when farmers asked to grow GMO sugar beets last December, the request ate up hours and hours of staff time and triggered three public meetings that drew hundreds of locals.
And even if the beet question was put to bed Tuesday, herbicide-resistant wheat and drought-resistant corn are just around the corner, waiting to pull the county back into another long debate.
“We do not want to be in a position of doing hand-to-hand combat about every GMO seed,” said Commissioner Will Toor at Tuesday’s public hearing.
Last night’s decision by the commissioners to create a larger plan could save time in the future, but for now, it means that there’s no end in sight. (Last time the county debated GMO corn, it took nearly three years to get a decision.)
Read more about Tuesday’s meeting at DailyCamera.com, or peruse the county’s extensive list of resources on the Parks and Open Space Department’s Web site.
Boulder County gets a super-sized wind turbine
Workers install the second half of a new wind turbine tower at the National Wind Technology Center in south Boulder County. Look carefully and you'll see little people on the rim of the lower tower section. Photo by Marty Caivano.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has added the first of two super-sized wind turbines to its research center in southern Boulder County.
Already, more than a dozen wind turbines — from graceful lattice-mounted units with 2-kilowatt capacities to hulking white turbines from the mid-1980s that can crank out 600 kilowatts — stand facing into the wind gusting off the foothills at the National Wind Technology Center.
The new turbine, which is rated at 1.5 megawatts, will allow reserachers to tinker with a type of turbine that is becoming widely used at wind farms across the country. The second turbine, which will be added later this fall, will be even bigger at 2.3 megawatts.
Read more about the National Wind Technology Center’s new turbines at dailycamera.com or learn about Center for Research and Education in Wind, a new collaboration betwen researchers at the Universtiy of Colorado, Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines and NREL.
