Tag: Ken Salazar

There’s more bad news for water watchers in the Rocky Mountain West, where record snowpack from last winter has led to a dangerous runoff in some places, including Colorado’s Western Slope. The bad news is this season is apparently a statistical blip in a 30-year historical decline in Rocky Mountain snowpack, which provide between 60 and 80 percent of the water supply for the 70 million people living in the western United States.

National and state conservation and sportsmen’s group had mixed reactions to Wednesday’s memo from Interior Secretary Ken Salazar dialing back the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Lands policy in response to the ongoing budget battle in Congress.

A victim of the ongoing federal budget battle, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is backing off of last December’s Wild Lands Order, which would have compelled the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to make millions of acres of federal land eligible for wilderness protection.

Third District Colorado Congressman Scott Tipton unseated Democrat John Salazar in last year's Tea Party-fueled Republican wave election, where voters sought to shake up business-as-usual in Washington. The brother of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, John Salazar is a long-time government employee who served in the state House before heading to Washington for three terms. He was a ripe target in 2010. Tipton was no political innocent, however, and now just months into his term he has admitted to the House Ethics Committee that his daughter has been using his office to promote the tele-townhall company where she’s employed.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today joined Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper at the ribbon-cutting for the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center to announce that they will partner together to advance three conservation initiatives in Colorado as part of President Obama’s America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat, and Rep. Scott Tipton, a Republican, are miles apart on energy and environmental policy, but the two have come together on the issue of determining the future of Colorado National Monument between Grand Junction and Fruita.

Just two days after the U.S. Senate rejected a bill that would have ended billions in tax breaks and subsidies for the nation’s top oil and gas companies, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., today introduced a bill aimed at “removing barriers to American onshore oil and natural gas production.”

U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, the Republican who beat out Democrat John Salazar in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District last year, is taking some political heat of late for trying to save $15,000 in federal funding on a mass transit project in the Roaring Fork Valley while simultaneously declining to oppose more than $16 billion in tax breaks for oil and gas companies reaping record profits.

Redistricting happens every 10 years. It's the law. It's never pretty and it is seldom fair, but it always gets done. Last time, it took years and years before the U.S. Supreme Court finally said enough is enough. Will Colorado go down that road again this year? No one knows. Democrats and Republicans will either compromise or they can carry their briefcases from the Capitol to the Court House. It is up to them.

The nonprofit Checks and Balances Project today released an analysis of the skyrocketing profits of the nation’s top five oil and gas companies in...