December 2014

Carbondale is about to become the new home of the Faith Lutheran Church Child Care Center, which is moving from a previous location in Glenwood Springs to a new site at the juncture of Eighth Street, Merrill Avenue and the Rio Grande Trail, a short distance to the northwest of Town Hall.
The center is approved for 15 children initially with the understanding that the number of kids could go as high as 28 starting in the center’s second year of operations.
The special use permit approved by the trustees gives the child care center a three-year operating permit.
The structure, at 788 Merrill Ave., is a house built in 1885 that is owned by Carbondale resident Bill Roberts and the Roberts Land & Cattle Co, and has been used as an office since the 1980s, according to application documents presented at the Dec. 9 meeting of the board of trustees.
Although technically licensed as a child care center, because it will be an all-day operation, the facility is to be called the Faith Lutheran Pre-school. Pre-schools, under state law, can only offer half-day care for children, according to the application documents.

Steve Skinner, the general manager at KDNK, Carbondale’s community access radio station, held onto his job this week despite an attempt to oust him over his refusal to sign a set of “directives” aimed at tightening oversight of his duties by the station’s board of directors.
The decision to keep Skinner on the job came after a tense three-hour special meeting on Dec. 1 at the station, during which at least three members of the board, President Mark McLain, Treasurer Susan Darrow and member Bob Schultz (who was not at the meeting but sent in a written statement of his feelings), indicated that Skinner’s 11-year reign over the station had run its course and should be ended.
Skinner, in his own defense, stated at one point, “I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t been accused of doing anything wrong.”

The new owners of the Crystal Village Plaza shopping center in Carbondale paid approximately $9.7 million for the property, which covers a little under five acres of land at the intersection of Highway 133 and Main Street.
The plaza, which is called the TKG St. Peters Shopping Center in documents on file at the Garfield County Courthouse in Glenwood Springs, was purchased on Sept. 13 from the Carbondale Square LLC partnership, according to the county assessor’s office.
And at least for now, the new owners, The Kroenke Group out of Missouri, have no immediate plans for development on the site, according to a spokesman, Mike Tamblyn of Denver.
“At the moment, it’s business as usual,” Tamblyn told The Sopris Sun on Tuesday.

Organizers say they are likely to appeal the recent denial of at least one of three protests filed over a controversial land swap between the federal Bureau of Land Management and an Aspen couple, Leslie and Abigail Wexner, involving land at the base of Mt. Sopris near Carbondale.
The appeal, according to area resident Anne Rickenbaugh, would be based on arguments that the BLM undervalued the public lands included in the exchange, by calculating the public lands’ value according to appraisal standards that assumed public ownership, instead of appraisals based on private-land values.
“They didn’t apply the free-market standards at all,” said Rickenbaugh, “even though they could have.”
Rickenbaugh is the board secretary of the Colorado Wild Public Lands, Inc. (CWPL), a relatively new organization which has members throughout the Roaring Fork Valley, which filed one of the protests over the land swap.