News

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.

With police officer and firefighter Mark Luttrell preparing for retirement, Carbondale is losing a fixture of late nights downtown who sought to defuse situations before they started. “I always saw my position as more of a peace officer than a law enforcement officer,” he said. “I loved working with the Carbondale people.” That’s not to say he hasn’t seen some action in three decades on the force. He was on scene for some of the area’s worst disasters like the MidContinent mine explosion, South Canyon Fire, and Rocky Mountain Natural Gas blow up.

At roughly the same time as huge Saturday demonstrations take place in Washington, D.C., Denver, and other national and international venues too numerous to count, activists in the Roaring Fork Valley will be engaged in exactly the same kind of activity.
The rallies, aimed primarily at mobilizing women but also open to men, are being held in opposition to the pronouncements, policy proposals and behavior of President-elect Donald J. Trump, on Jan. 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration.

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…

Local government agencies may soon move to acquire and redevelop a small, 50-year-old shopping plaza that sits at the northern edge of Carbondale, and that long has been viewed as an eyesore by some or a historical bit of “messy vitality” by others. Carbondale’s Board of Trustees talked over a broad array of topics Tuesday night at a work session, ranging from ideas about what to do concerning the dilapidated wood-shell shopping center on Highway 133…