March 2016

Carbondale voters will be asked on Election Day, April 5, to approve a new property tax to pay for capital improvements around town.
The proposed tax would assess an additional three mills to all real property within the town limits, which would amount to roughly $119 per year on a house valued at $500,000 by the Garfield County assessor.
For commercial properties, the tax hike would amount to about $870 per year on a business valued at $1 million, according to calculations by town officials.
According to town officials, the new tax would generate perhaps $425,000 a year or so, which could be used to leverage grants and other sources of income to multiply the ability of the tax to pay for costly improvements.
The tax is needed, town officials have decided, in order to create a pool of money for capital improvements, which in the past have been paid for largely by using a combination of money from the town’s general fund and payments from the Federal Mineral Lease Fund (FMLD) maintained by Garfield County, with some other resources.

Carbondale’s Mayor Stacey Bernot has, for the past couple of years, taken a little time at some meetings of the Board of Trustees to inform the others on the board that she had recently been in Washington, D.C.
No, it wasn’t a move to make the trustees jealous of vacation time spent in the nation’s capitol.
Instead, the reports were meant to let the trustees, any reporters on hand at the meeting and the viewing public (the meetings are televised) that she had once again gone east to lobby against controversial plans to drill for natural gas in the Thompson Divide area.

The meat of the Climate Action Excise Tax ballot question that Carbondale residents are voting on starting March 14 is 36 words long and says the money will be used for the “ … purposes of funding programs to increase energy efficiency, to increase renewable energy use, to reduce emissions from motor vehicles, and to take other steps toward the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and address global warming … .”
Carbondale residents are being asked to pay on average an extra $7-8 on their monthly natural gas and electricity bills, and about $15-$30 for businesses.
Any new tax can be complicated to explain and understand, global warming is plenty complicated to explain and understand, combine them both and there are lots of questions to address.

There will be no election contest for the Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District on May 3, as only two candidates submitted nominating petitions for the two seats up for grabs, according to Fire Chief and “designated election official” Ron Leach.
The seats that were to be up for election, held by long-time fire board members Bob Emerson and Lou Eller, will automatically be filled by Eller and Tom Adgate, the only two who submitted petitions by the deadline of Feb. 26.
Emerson informed The Sopris Sun earlier this year that he did not intend to run for reelection.

Bob Moore is a treat to see in any role, but you definitely won’t want to miss him as the famous — and infamous — Dr. Sigmund Freud. Recently lauded for his portrayal of Tevya in the Defiance Community Players’ production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” he’s now starring alongside Associate Artistic Director Corey Simpson in Thunder River Theatre Company’s (TRTC’s) current production of “Freud’s Last Session.” The play runs for the next two weekends, through March 12.
“Freud” is a furious, smartly funny, exploration of an extended afternoon conversation between Dr. Freud and the writer and scholar C. S. Lewis, himself best known (by parents at least) for his “Chronicles of Narnia” series of fantasy novels. “Freud” playwright Mark St. Germain was inspired by the bestselling book “The Question of God” to imagine what might have transpired had these two men ever met.