November 2016

The Dandelion Market in Carbondale (formerly known as the Carbondale Community Food Co-op) will be holding its annual members meeting Nov. 17 at 6 p.m., and on the agenda will be discussion of the possibility that the store needs to find a new home.
The meeting is to be held at the Third Street Center (the old Carbondale Elementary School building at the south end of S. 3rd Street) and is scheduled to last until 7:30 p.m., according to store manager Katrina Byars, who said the public is welcome to attend.
Byars said the store, which opened eight years ago after starting out as a natural foods buying club in 2007, might lose the lease on its current location in June of 2017.

The Roaring Fork School District recently hired its first community organizer, Janeth Niebla, a 2004 graduate of Glenwood Springs High School. This one-year position is being paid for by a gift from the Manaus Fund, although Niebla is officially an employee of the school district.
Superintendent Rob Stein told The Sopris Sun that Niebla will be “convening meetings in homes and other community spaces to help us learn more about the hopes and challenges faced by our families.”
As Niebla explained in a recent interview with The Sopris Sun, one of the “pillars” of the district’s strategic plan is community partnerships. Her primary goal in her new position will be to get families more engaged in the schools and to help build school-community partnerships.

As the Town of Carbondale grapples with angry citizen demands for increased street safety, an advisory committee to the Board of Trustees will hold a public meeting on Nov. 7 to gauge citizen feelings about which are the most heavily used pedestrian routes in town and how to make them safer at night.
The meeting, scheduled for 6 p.m. at Town Hall (511 Colorado Ave.), is being hosted by the Bicycle, Pedestrian and Trails (BPT) Committee, in partnership with Land + Shelter consultant Andi Korber.
According to an outline and statement about the meeting, issued by Trustee Ben Bohmfalk (liaison to the BPT committee), the meeting’s main purpose is to present a draft map of potential important “safe routes home,” questions about which streets people typically use more than others, and what people are hoping to see the town do in the way of making the streets more user-friendly and safer.

What we have here, it seems, is a failure to adjudicate (paraphrasing, without apology, a line from the classic film, “Cool Hand Luke”).
Local observers recently have been treated to a kind of legalistic circus involving five-term incumbent Republican Garfield County Commissioner John Martin fighting to hold onto his job in the Nov. 8 election; Democratic challenger John Acha trying to unseat Martin by, in part, accusing him of mishandling county funds; and Ninth Judicial District Attorney Sherry Caloia caught in the middle when Acha approached her office to investigate embezzlement allegations against Martin.

Asked for an accomplishment from the Learning with Love program, Katie Langenhuizen pauses. “We have had a class in Glenwood that had been together most of last year. At the end of the year, they decided they wanted to see each other more socially. They started hosting gatherings at their houses and in parks, outside the class.”
Continuing, Langenhuizen says, “This isn’t something small for these families. It took them a whole year to trust one another enough to risk making those invitations.”
Many English-speaking, U.S-born locals will be left scratching their head as to why a potluck in the park could be so frightening. But those who have worked with local Latin-American immigrants can tell tales of Spanish-speaking women who feel so isolated by language that they seldom go out in public. Laid on top of that are fears about discrimination, immigration status and social rejection.