News

Carbondale Town Manager Jay Harrington confirmed on April 13 that he is one of three finalists for the job of town manager in Vail.
Harrington, 50, who has been the town manager for Carbondale since the summer of 2011, said he should learn more about his chances of being offered the job after interviews of the finalists have been concluded on April 18-19.

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.

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.

Bighorn sheep no doubt hate fire, but they will sure warm up to its aftermath following a Upper Colorado River Interagency Fire and Aviation Management Unit controlled burn up Avalanche Creek south of Carbondale on April 7. Early this week, White River National Forest wildlife biologist Natasha Goedert explained how the controlled fires help bighorn sheep.
“This area is winter range,” Goedert told The Sopris Sun.

Carbondale’s increasingly popular Spring Clean-up and Waste Reduction Day, scheduled for April 29 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and sponsored by the town’s Environmental Board and Public Works Department, is expanding this year to include recycling of mattresses, ink and toner cartridges for printers, and other electronic devices.
And, according to organizer Julia Farwell, chair of the E-Board and member of the Waste Diversion subcommittee of that board, volunteers will be handing out twice as much compost as was distributed last year, thanks to an expected increase in demand.

It’s a story so embedded in our psyches that many of us refer to it off handedly. Who hasn’t teased a cold-hearted friend that she’s acting like Nurse Ratched?
Sopris Theatre Company is bringing the award-winning play “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to the New Space Theatre at Colorado Mountain College Spring Valley on April 14-23.

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.