October 2017

It’s easy to take public resources in smaller communities for granted, especially in the colorful towns dotting the Roaring Fork Valley and Colorado River Valleys, where passionate people seem to go above and beyond the call of duty to simply make things work. But the reality is that some key local institutions in Garfield County, perhaps most visibly the library system, but more precipitously the network of historical societies, are struggling to keep their doors open.

Despite the state-mandated wording on the Nov. 7 ballot, Colorado Mountain College is not asking that its district taxes actually be raised — it merely wants to mitigate future losses as property taxes continue to decline in rural Colorado. It may be 2017, but the institution’s current — and future, if 4B does not pass — financial situation comes back to an amendment made to the state constitution in 1982.

If you live in the Roaring Fork Valley, you’ve likely used any one of the several Facebook group pages that exist specifically for residents’ needs. There’s the Roaring Fork Swap, Roaring Fork Rentals & Roommates, Roaring Fork Events, Roaring Fork Road and Weather… and those are just some the larger groups with “Roaring Fork” in front of their names. With more than 22,600 members, Roaring Fork Swap is the undisputed behemoth among the groups — in fact, many of the other pages that are now staples for communities sprang from the Swap’s posts and comments outgrowing the platform’s intent.

Carbondale and Rural Fire Protection District has two budgets: one for if voters approve ballot issue 4C to maintain the current level of funding, and other with a more than $600,000 reduction in income. It’s a cycle the mostly property-tax- funded organization has been caught in since 2013, when the 2-mill increase that had helped offset the worst of the recession expired. The board pursued a more substantial increase with no expiration, but it failed to pass, dropping the district to 5.903 total mills while property values continued to fall.

Oct. 20, 1977: Wildlife Officer John Seidel reflected on five years as “guardian of the king’s deer” before leaving his post to spend some time in South America. “Recreation will become more and more of a major industry,” he wrote. “With the population, the inflation and the recreational pressure, I’m sure the shock of the way this place will change in the next ten years will be important to everyone who lives here now. And in looking at all this pressure, you can use the wildlife as a good barometer of change. When you start losing your wildlife and eventually you’ll start losing all the other qualities of life that make it desirable to live here.”