Will Grandbois

The Carbondale Board of Trustees is working its way to taking a renewed look at an old question — how the town can best articulate its broad environmental goals, which include reducing the town’s carbon footprint, safeguarding the quantity and quality of Carbondale’s water supplies and cutting back on the amount of trash heading to local landfills, among other things.
A discussion on the topic, at one time scheduled for April 18, is meant to address the idea that Carbondale could use an “environmental charter” or an “environmental bill of rights,” as has repeatedly been proposed by Trustee Frosty Merriott in recent months.

The Roaring Fork High School girls’ junior varsity lacrosse program is into its second year, with plans for fielding a varsity team in 2019. The team is composed of nine players from Roaring Fork, with one each from Glenwood Springs, Basalt and Yampah Mountain high schools.
How did the team come to be? Head coach Sarah Klingelheber filled in The Sopris Sun this week.

In the last week of October 2016, Steve Hunter, a concerned local citizen, approached the biology program at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) with a problem.
A young couple of ospreys had nested on top of an 80 foot XCEL power pole next to the RFTA Bus Stop along Highway 133 in Carbondale. The birds presented safety issues such as getting shocked or causing a power outage. Additionally, the nest has twice blown off the power line, though thankfully no eggs or fledglings were in the nest yet.

Residents in a neighborhood immediately southwest of Sopris Park are protesting a building permit that allows for a five bedroom, 4,455-square foot house (with basement and second floor) on a 7,040-square-foot lot, according to documents filed at town hall on March 31. The property, at 728 Euclid, sits between the old Ferguson “farm-house” that is undergoing an extensive renovation, and a single-story contemporary house to the west.

Around here, most kids don’t go to wild, unsupervised parties on high school graduation night.
Instead, you’ll find most of them at Project Graduation, a parent-sponsored event that got its start in Glenwood Springs 28 years ago and has since spread to Carbondale and Basalt.
“It’s usually at least 90 percent turnout, if not more,” said Cathy Derby, one of the organizers for the Carbondale event this year. “I think even more than prom it’s an emotional day. It’s their last night together, and we want to keep them safe.”

The Roaring Fork School District Board of Education voted unanimously on April 12 to approve Superintendent Rob Stein’s controversial selection for Roaring Fork High School principal, among other items on the routine personnel consent agenda.

Smiley Wise, the current streets foreman for Carbondale’s Public Works department, is a ubiquitous presence around town, checking out the condition of the streets, the progress of ongoing streets projects, and generally being a kind of unofficial ambassador of goodwill for residents and town workers alike.
But on Saturday, April 29, he will be one of the ramrods overseeing the town’s annual Waste Diversion and Spring Cleanup Day, Carbondale’s increasingly popular opportunity for clearing out the house or the shed at a subsidized cost (see related story).

There were several plumes of smoke in the air on April 7 when Brad Palmer, caretaker for the HHH property just east of Carbondale, set to work burning a ditch he’d cleaned out many times before.
He could have moved the bales of hay in the back of the nearby barn, or started with the tall grass on the outside of the barn’s wide slats to create a firebreak before things really got going. He could have scooted the tank of water a little further into the back of his pickup or called one of his neighbors with a full sprayer setup to help.
“Hindsight is 20/20,” he said later. “There’s probably 10 ways I could have done it different … I was just too complacent.”

Carbondale’s town leaders on April 11 agreed to “intervene” on behalf of federal land managers in a court fight over a recent decision to cancel oil drilling leases in the controversial Thompson Divide region southwest of town.But the Board of Trustees declined to take a second step that, according to Mayor Dan Richardson, would have gotten the town involved in the litigation in a much more direct way.
“I was comfortable saying ‘no’ and following Jay’s (Town Manager Jay Harrington) recommendation, until we can get more information,” said Richardson in a telephone interview the following morning.