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  • Locations: News Published

    Carbondale’s Creative District gets boost after Pryor visit

    The process of getting Carbondale certified as its own Creative District got a boost last week with a visit from Wendell Pryor, a consultant from Chaffee County who has been hired to assist the Carbondale Council on Arts and Humanities in the three-year certification process. Pryor, who also is the director of the Chaffee County Economic Development Corporation and is listed as a lecturer at the University of Colorado Denver Graduate School of Public Affairs as well as at Colorado Mountain College, is being paid by the state to help Carbondale through the Creative District process. Meanwhile, said CCAH Executive Director Amy Kimberly, the Carbondale Creative District has $15,000 in grant proceeds and other contributions to kick-start the process in its first year. She said the district has been told to expect another $10,000 in grant money in year two, and a final grant of $15,000 in year three, which is the year that certification is to occur. read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    Dentists developing near Alpine Bank

    In keeping with Carbondale’s growing reputation as a healthy place to live and work, the town is about to get yet another large medical office facility — a dental office on a now-vacant lot between Heritage Park Care Center and Alpine Bank, near the corner of Village Road and Highway 133. This will be the town’s second new, enlarged medical business, following recent completion of the Roaring Fork Family Physicians of Valley View Hospital facility further south along the highway. The new dental office is being built by Doctors Matt and Taylor Verheul (pronounced ver-heel), and their partner, long-time local dentist Eugene Covello. read more →
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    Hetty Van Kesteren: Indonesia native loving life in Carbondale

    Considering her diminutive stature, Hetty Van Kesteren’s joyful and easy laugh can seem out of context until you grasp the emphasis in her statement “I have found my place in life.” Born in Jakarta on the Indonesian island of Java, Hetty is the epitome of a person who has lived a multi-cultural life. When she was a child, Indonesia was a Dutch colony, used for its oil, spices and sugar plantations. Both of her grandfathers came to Indonesia from The Netherlands and married Indonesian women. She grew up with 11 brothers and sisters, and her father managed a medical opium company. Indonesian labor was cheap, and Hetty grew up with servants who lived on the outskirts of town in “gedecks” — poorly constructed housing with dirt floors. “We spoke Dutch at home, Indonesian to the servants, and learned Oxford English in school. The natives were Hindu, but my family was Catholic so I went to Catholic school,” Hetty told The Sopris Sun. read more →
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    Jaywalker “Big Bus” heads back to the reservation

    For the past five years, the Carbondale-based Jaywalker Solutions Program has been taking program clients—men in early recovery from the disease of addiction—to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota to do volunteer service work. The project is a partnership with Pine Ridge-based organization Re-Member, whose name is a play on words addressing both the need to remember the history of what occurred in the past to Indian people and, in the words of Re-Member Director, Ted Skantze, “to put back together what’s broken.” read more →
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    C’dale, RE-1 resurrect 2007 housing plan

    The Carbondale Board of Trustees and the Roaring Fork School District board agreed this week that work should continue on the eight-year-old plan to build a housing project on what is now a well-used soccer field in between the Third Street Center and the Bridges High School building (formerly Carbondale Middle School). Exactly how that is to be accomplished, however, remains something of an open question. read more →
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    Marble Distilling shoots for February opening

    The Marble Distilling building at 150 Main St. may appear almost finished, at least when viewed from the street, but as co-owner Connie Baker ruefully told the Sopris Sun recently, “We’re delayed, for sure.” Problems with everything from the delivery of concrete to delays in the manufacturing of the tanks for the distillery’s eco-friendly and ground-breaking WETS, or “water-energy thermal storage” reclamation system, have resulted in sufficient tardiness that “we are shooting for the end of February right now.” She had initially hoped for a December completion date back in June, when construction had only just begun. The delays, she continued, were due to “typical construction stuff, nothing major,” such as engineering complexities with regard to the WETS system, which was designed and developed with the help of a $25,000 grant from the Community Office of Resource Efficiency (CORE). read more →
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    Trustees OK child care center, OK budget

    Carbondale is about to become the new home of the Faith Lutheran Church Child Care Center, which is moving from a previous location in Glenwood Springs to a new site at the juncture of Eighth Street, Merrill Avenue and the Rio Grande Trail, a short distance to the northwest of Town Hall. The center is approved for 15 children initially with the understanding that the number of kids could go as high as 28 starting in the center’s second year of operations. The special use permit approved by the trustees gives the child care center a three-year operating permit. The structure, at 788 Merrill Ave., is a house built in 1885 that is owned by Carbondale resident Bill Roberts and the Roberts Land & Cattle Co, and has been used as an office since the 1980s, according to application documents presented at the Dec. 9 meeting of the board of trustees. Although technically licensed as a child care center, because it will be an all-day operation, the facility is to be called the Faith Lutheran Pre-school. Pre-schools, under state law, can only offer half-day care for children, according to the application documents. read more →
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    WRNF releases FEIS

    Conservationists, ranchers, recreationists, elected officials and others were elated at this week’s decision to limit future natural gas exploration and production in the White River National Forest, although the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and draft Record of Decision (ROD) will not have any impact on existing leases that would allow drilling south of Carbondale on the Thompson Divide. read more →
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    “Green rush” is over, industry keeps shaking out

    When the so-called “green rush” of marijuana businesses began several years ago, Carbondale at one time boasted 13 pot shops selling to customers throughout the middle portion of the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond, when one counted tourists and customers from other parts of the Western Slope. Today, that town’s roster of pot related businesses has dwindled to a total of nine. That list, according to Town Clerk Cathy Derby, includes: • Three “recreational” pot shops, which do not require doctor’s prescription for sales (with one application pending), and one medical marijuana dispensary where a doctor’s prescription is required; • Three cultivation operations or “grows” (with one application pending); • One outfit making “marijuana-infused products” or MIPs, also known as edibles; • And one testing facility, for testing for contamination and other aspects of the process of growing, cooking with and selling pot to the public. “It’s kind of like … the green rush is over,” said Derby, referring to the thinning-out process that has cut into what once was seen as a massively expansive growth industry. read more →
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    KDNK GM hangs on to job following ouster bid

    Steve Skinner, the general manager at KDNK, Carbondale’s community access radio station, held onto his job this week despite an attempt to oust him over his refusal to sign a set of “directives” aimed at tightening oversight of his duties by the station’s board of directors. The decision to keep Skinner on the job came after a tense three-hour special meeting on Dec. 1 at the station, during which at least three members of the board, President Mark McLain, Treasurer Susan Darrow and member Bob Schultz (who was not at the meeting but sent in a written statement of his feelings), indicated that Skinner’s 11-year reign over the station had run its course and should be ended. Skinner, in his own defense, stated at one point, “I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t been accused of doing anything wrong.” read more →