Evie Hudak

DENVER– Juveniles charged as adults in Colorado and awaiting trial as inmates in adult prisons find themselves part of a system that fails to educate them, provide them equal access to services like mental health care or even to ensure they are housed according to strict safety guidelines. People involved in the system admit to not knowing how many young people charged as adults are presently being held by the state and in which prisons. Colorado sheriffs frankly admitted to the Colorado Independent that their adult facilities are inappropriate for managing juvenile detention.

DENVER– Colorado state Senator Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, is weighing strategies to secure passage of a bill she’s sponsoring that seeks to ensure youth prisoners charged as adults receive education. Lawmakers have signaled that any bill that requires new spending will likely fail this session. There are currently more than 130 young prisoners in Colorado awaiting trial whose constitutional rights to an education are not being met.

DENVER– A controversial bill that sought to expand space for religion in Colorado’s public schools failed to make it out of committee Monday. Even before the hearing began, the bill’s sponsor, Christian conservative state Sen. Dave Schultheis, R-Colorado Springs, seemed to have accepted the fact that his “Public School Religious Bill of Rights” would very likely fail to pass and so offered amendments that significantly weakened its provisions. In the end, so little was left of the bill that the majority Democratic committee members said it simply offered no new provisions on the matter. In the end, the four Democrats voted against the bill and the three Republicans voted for it.

DENVER– Juvenile suspects awaiting trial as adults in Colorado jails languish without education, sometimes held in solitary confinement while they wait for their day in court. The harsh conditions come partly as a fact of the state’s more generally overcrowded prison facilities, where the young people are held in adult prisons, shunted into solitary confinement in order simply to keep them segregated from the adult population. State Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, told the Colorado Independent that young people held in these conditions have committed suicide.

In Colorado, recklessly making false statements about candidates who are running for public office is a criminal offense. But, years after the strict sanctions were adopted, no one has gone to jail for knowingly lying about their political enemies — indeed many say that making such a case stick would be nearly impossible.

There were mixed results Tuesday in pair of key state Senate races targeted by the shadowy, pro-energy nonprofit group Western Skies Coalition, which is being investigated by the IRS to determine if it’s actually engaged in social welfare activities or hard-core politicking.

It’s as clear as the Western Skies: Nonprofit 501(c)4s are the new 527s of the Colorado political scene, the latest way that shadowy special interest groups are tapping into seemingly unlimited undisclosed special interest cash to attack or support candidates who can further their agendas. Take, for instance, the Western Skies Coalition, a conservative group claiming to be a 501(c)4 nonprofit dedicated to “promoting issues that make our nation great.”

The Western Skies Coalition, a conservative Virginia corporation with an office in Littleton, is allegedly being used by state Sen. Josh Penry (R-Fruita) to raise funds from oil and gas companies in a bid target several key Colorado state Senate races and win back a Republican majority in 2010, according to several sources.

A conservative Colorado political group allegedly backed by big-oil money and calling itself the Western Skies Coalition has targeted key state Senate races, apparently bent on portraying pro-oil Republicans vying for those seats as champions of alternative energy.

Evie Hudak, member of the State Board of Education, has announced she is running for State Senate 19, a seat that will be vacated because of term limits by Sen. Sue Windels in 2008. Hudak filed with the Secretary of State on Monday.