January 2017

Roaring Fork School District is accepting applications for a new Roaring Fork High School principal after Drew Adams announced he will be leaving the position at the end of the school year.
Adams took the helm at RFHS five years ago. In an email to community members on Jan. 11, he explained that he had previously contemplated working abroad and felt that the time had come to pursue his options in that regard.

The Pitkin County Open Space & Trails department last week got its first look at public preferences regarding plans to build a bicycle trail from Carbondale to Crested Butte (a former mining town turned ski resort in Gunnison County), following open-houses that drew more than 130 people to two meetings in Redstone and Carbondale. The county has about $300,000 to work with in the trail-planning task — $100,000 from Great Outdoors Colorado (GoCo) and $200,000 from the Open Space & Trails (OS&T) itself.

Gavin Dahl, who has been news director for about nine months at KDNK-FM, Carbondale’s community access radio station, was promoted to the post of general manager by the station’s board of directors this week.
He formally takes the reins of the station on Feb. 1, according to Andi Korber, chair of the station’s board. When contacted on Wednesday, Dahl, 35, prefaced his remarks by stressing that he was grateful for the work done by Skinner over the decade that he ran the station, and to the community for starting and maintaining the station’s vitality over its 38 years of existence.

A local judge this week unsealed a court file containing charges of embezzlement against Garfield County Commissioner John Martin, and appointed a special prosecutor to oversee the investigation of those charges. Ninth Judicial District Judge James Boyd, in an order dated Jan. 22, has appointed Fifth Judicial District Attorney Bruce Brown, whose district includes Eagle County, to look into whether Martin is guilty of improper use of public funds. The Ninth District comprises Garfield, Pitkin and Rio Blanco counties, with its central district offices in Glenwood Springs.

Jan. 27, 1977: Carbondale and Basalt students and teachers all reported that the newly constructed Basalt High School and Roaring Fork High School were working out well, despite deficiencies, electrical-system problems and other hitches about the buildings. In Carbondale, the new Roaring Fork High School on Snowmass Drive (which has since been replaced with a bigger, more modern building further south) offered a more spacious environment than the old building, including a much larger cafeteria space, a well-equipped auditorium and classroom space that made way for a broadened science curriculum.

Erica Sparhawk, program director for regional alternative-energy advocacy organization CLEER (Clean Energy Economy for the Region), was picked on Tuesday to fill the trustee vacancy that came open last year when Mayor Dan Richardson was elevated by voters from his original role as a trustee to take on the mayor’s job.

While resistance continues at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation against an oil pipeline routed through reservation lands straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued an executive order that caused alarms to be raised among the pipeline’s opponents. The president’s executive order, according to press reports, called for resumption of work on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the equally controversial Keystone Pipeline, which is meant to take an estimated 800,000 barrels per day of tar sands crude oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to Steele City, Neb., where it would connect with existing pipelines that would carry the crude to refineries in Texas.

This week, a local entrepreneur and his team are taking the next step toward launching an innovative new app with the launch of their Kickstarter campaign.
In addition to raising at least $5,000 to get GoRound off the ground, they hope it will demonstrate widespread interest in a different kind of dining app. Already, the company is incorporated as an LLC, with officers in markets around the country.

Up until a few years ago, the town trustees didn’t always know what their advisory boards were up to.
Sometimes, the advisory boards’ plans didn’t “align” with the trustees’, Carbondale Town Manager Jay Harrington told The Sopris Sun. The upshot was that on at least one occasion, an advisory board spent an entire year heading in one direction, and it didn’t head back in the right direction until the trustees figured out what was up and reined it in.

The Colorado Highway Department held one of an ongoing series of meetings on potential improvements to State Highway 82. In addition to the potential to expand from two lanes to four between Carbondale and Aspen – a possibility that had generated considerable debate at a meeting the previous November – several potential changes to the route were discussed…