Tag: Christine Scanlan

The stories have reached almost rural-myth status in Colorado’s high country: rocks being thrown at paddlers, wires strung across rivers at head height, even occasional shots fired. The problem? Some private landowners really don’t like it when rafters or kayakers float through their property.

State Sen. Al White (R-Hayden) has scrapped plans for a bill this session that would have set up a state medical marijuana growing and...

Easily one of the most divisive and hotly debated bills passed by the state legislature last session was SB 108, aka FASTER (Funding Advancements for Surface Transportation and Economic Recovery). It was a hike in vehicle registration fees meant to raise $250 million a year to fix the 125 bridges around the state deemed structurally deficient, and it has become a rallying cry for Republicans around the state bent on recapturing seats in both the House and Senate next fall.

One of the least-publicized aspect of the mountain pine bark beetle epidemic, which has decimated nearly 2 million acres of trees in Colorado, is the threat it poses to the region's power grid. Whole mountainsides of dead and toppling trees throughout the state raise the specter of disaster on the scale of the great Northeast Blackout of 2003.

Vail police last week successfully lobbied the town council to temporarily ban medical marijuana dispensaries, essentially passing the bud to the next council to...

One of the biggest loopholes conservationists want closed in Colorado’s revised roadless rule released by the state Monday is an exception for logging roads...

Two state lawmakers from mountain districts are working Capitol Hill the next couple of days in a bid to get the federal government to find some funds to fight the growing mountain pine beetle infestation that has laid waste to more than 2 million acres of Colorado forest. State Rep. Christin Scanlan, D-Dillon, and state Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, whose districts have been ravaged by the rice-sized bugs, testified before the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands Tuesday that resulting wildfires could knock out the nation’s electrical grid and spoil water supplies for millions of downstream consumers in other states.

Picture a scenario sometime after 2010 where -- if Gov. Bill Ritter is reelected and the Dems keep control of the statehouse -- we’ll all be driving plug-in hybrids that run on a mix of ethanol and ground-up bark beetles, with tiny snowboarders emblazoned on our license plates. It’s a nightmare vision for most right-wingers, straight out of the Shangri-La they sneeringly refer to as the “People’s Republic of Boulder,” but it’s a little closer to reality today after Governor Renewable signed House Bill 1331, which provides state tax incentives for high-tech, fuel-efficient vehicles.

Funding sources to turn millions of acres of dead and dying lodgepole pines into biomass-generated heat and electricity are seemingly coming out of the woodwork. With the governor’s Energy Office pushing state grants and aggressive renewable-energy programs — coupled with the potential for millions in federal stimulus dollars — the beetle-kill biomass dreams of ski towns like Vail and Avon no longer look like a kooky environmentalist's pipe dream.

Lawmakers are increasingly banking on bugs, providing tax incentives to businesses dealing with the Colorado’s massive mountain pine beetle outbreak and at the same time trying to mitigate the epidemic’s potentially devastating economic impacts.