September 2015

Carbondale’s Board of Trustees narrowly avoided passing a new ordinance regulating the freedom of domestic cats on Tuesday night, opting instead to create a subcommittee to work on the proposed ordinance, an exercise that Mayor Stacey Bernot jokingly said might be like “herding cats.”
That subcommittee is to include two trustees — Frosty Merriott and Allyn Harvey — Police Chief Gene Schilling and a member of the town staff.
In addition, the subcommittee will include two local women who have come to symbolize the “pro” and “con” side of the debate over the control of cats, Mary Harris of the Roaring Fork chapter of the Audubon Society and Cindy Sadlowski, founder of the Street Cats Coalition, which has worked for 15 years to keep down the number of feral cats in the region by spaying or neutering the animals.
The town staff wrote up a proposed ordinance after Harris told the trustees in July that the predation of birds by free-roaming cats is essentially pushing some bird species toward extinction.

As Carbondale officials took their first steps this week into deliberations about the 2016 municipal budget, one bit of bad news greeted them from the outset — revenues from the state’s mineral severance tax fund plummeted this year, meaning Carbondale will have far less next year than it has received from state energy impact funds in the past.
But the Board of Trustees, at its meeting Tuesday, also got some good news — sales tax proceeds have continued to rise, property tax revenues are expected to be up by about 26 percent, and the town’s general-fund reserve cash balance should be nearly $5 million at the end of this year.
The general fund, which accounts for most of the town’s operating revenues and expenses, is expected to have a year-end balance of just over $4.9 million, according to a presentation by Finance Director Renae Gustine.

A new Carbondale-based online magazine (AliceTheMag.com) owes its name to a pair of Alices. One, of “Alice in Wonderland” fame, was born at the hand of author Lewis Carroll in 1865. The other Alice, with the last name of Paul, is lesser known, at least to most guys. Paul (1885-1977) was an American suffragist, feminist as well as main strategist and leader of the 1910s campaign for the 19th Amendment which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote.
“We named it Alice because we want the content to be both brazen and imaginative, like our inspirations: Alice Paul and Alice in Wonderland,” Alice co-founder Maura Masters told The Sopris Sun. “Alice is an honest depiction of what real women think about and go through each day.”

The Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District board of directors last week formally approved a ballot question seeking a tax hike from district property owners, and a committee of concerned citizen activists is being organized to advocate for passage of the tax question.
The committee, which numbered 15 members as of Tuesday, is composed of such noted Carbondale-area luminaries as local philanthropist Jim Calaway, Pour House restaurant manager Skip Bell, local resident Casey Sheehan, Dr. Sandy Devany, rancher Kit Strang, KDNK manager Steve Skinner, and former Carbondale mayor Michael Hassig.
“And there are more who want to join in,” said Carbondale attorney Tom Adgate, who is heading up the committee. “By this time next week, it should be a Who’s Who of people who care about Carbondale.”

The town of Carbondale has written a letter to the state of Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED) of the Department of Revenue, asking that the state do something about a bureaucratic roadblock that is preventing a local cannabis-testing laboratory from doing its work.
That business, Green Hill Laboratories LLC, has gotten all the certifications needed from the state and the town to conduct microbial testing of marijuana smokable and edible products, to detect contamination such as mold and mildew and prevent products from making consumers sick, according to Jessica Olson, lab manager.
But the state has yet to get to work enforcing laws requiring that that testing be conducted, as laid out in statutes legalizing cannabis for recreational consumption.
Colorado voters in 2000 legalized marijuana use for registered medical-marijuana patients, and in 2012 for recreational marijuana use by anyone over 21 years of age, though the testing requirements only apply to the recreational cannabis industry.
As part of the state’s bureaucratic framework for overseeing the cultivation, sale and consumption of smokable products as well as edibles, the state was supposed to require that all cannabis products be tested by certified, professional laboratories.
But those requirements, though they apparently have been completed and the relevant documents issued to testing labs, have yet to make it onto the state health department’s website, from which cannabis-related growers and sellers get their legal-compliance information.