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Six online schools, a $15 million balance, one district: What D49 took on when it dissolved ERBOCES
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Six online schools, a $15 million balance, one district: What D49 took on when it dissolved ERBOCES

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Five days before the School District 49 board voted to dissolve Education ReEnvisioned BOCES (Boards of Cooperative Educational Services), the withdrawal that had pushed the co-op to the brink was deferred. Pikes Peak State College had signaled it would leave the co-op effective Aug. 15, a move that would have dropped ERBOCES to a single member and made it ineligible to operate. Then ERBOCES produced a 2013 memorandum of understanding requiring a year's notice, and on Aug. 12 the college indicated it would stay through summer 2027 to honor that notice. D49 dissolved the co-op anyway, on Aug. 17.  The reversal settled little, because the state had already raised a deeper question about the MOU. The same agreemen...
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Big government or individual freedom: There is no third choice.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, National, Top Stories

Big government or individual freedom: There is no third choice.

By Jay Davidson | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice Both good and evil ideas start with a vision. That vision promises to solve a problem we have. Politicians fit the same mold. How to differentiate, how do we tell if a vision is good or evil? And if evil sounds good in the beginning, what shall guide us to choose the right path? These issues have perplexed philosophers since the beginning of time. Each person must decide for himself; fortunately, many great thinkers have pondered these profound ideas and many have written their revelations into books or carried them through the spoken word. Although the knowledge is readily available, it seems our Creator wants us each to find the answer to that question in our lifetime. The fact that our Creator wants each person to see...
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What DSA wants to do to the Senate, the presidency and the courts
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Rocky Mountain Voice, National, Top Stories

What DSA wants to do to the Senate, the presidency and the courts

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Cliff Connolly wanted his fellow socialists to understand why the fight was worth having. "The whole point of having the Senate, the president, and the Supreme Court is so that, if popular legislation passes through the House of Representatives, the ruling class has these other levels they can pull to stop it from happening," he said, according to City Journal, which reported from inside the meeting. He pointed to the Supreme Court striking down President Biden's student debt plan as his example. Connolly sits on the Democratic Socialists of America's National Political Committee, the group's highest governing body between conventions. He was arguing for language DSA has now adopted as official policy: a plan to take a...
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Bermúdez: Colorado voters become a test case for Democrats’ transgender long game
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

Bermúdez: Colorado voters become a test case for Democrats’ transgender long game

By Alejandro Bermúdez | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice As national LGBT activists prepare a decade-long campaign to reshape public opinion on transgender issues, Colorado voters will face two major questions this November: whether biological males should compete in female sports and whether minors should undergo transgender-related surgeries. According to The Washington Times, members of the Democratic National Committee’s LGBTQ caucus recently acknowledged that Republicans are preparing to make transgender policies a major issue in the 2026 campaign, especially those involving children, medical interventions and women’s athletics. Rather than retreat, activists are pursuing a longer strategy modeled on the campaign that transformed public opinion on same-sex marriage. ...
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Colorado’s contract reports were off by as much as $2.1 billion. The next is due Sept. 30
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Colorado’s contract reports were off by as much as $2.1 billion. The next is due Sept. 30

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice By Sept. 30, Colorado's Department of Personnel and Administration is due to produce its annual tally of contracts covered by the state Procurement Code — the number awarded, the initial dollar amounts recorded, and the share that went to service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses.  The last three tallies were wrong by hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, the state auditor has found. And this year, the department has said it does not plan to send the report to lawmakers at all. The Office of the State Auditor laid it out in Report 2556P, a performance audit of the state's contracting goal for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, released in May.  The audit's stated purpose was to f...
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Colorado made registration more expensive. Now it punishes drivers who fall behind.
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

Colorado made registration more expensive. Now it punishes drivers who fall behind.

By C. J. Garbo | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice There is something almost perfectly governmental about Colorado's growing obsession with expired license plates. First, make an unavoidable part of ordinary life increasingly expensive. Then act surprised when more people struggle to pay for it. Then impose late fees on the people who fall behind. Then send police out to fine them again. And finally, call the whole thing "compliance." Across Colorado, law enforcement agencies have been escalating their efforts against motorists with expired registrations. Denver has conducted repeated enforcement campaigns. Colorado Springs and surrounding agencies have organized regional crackdowns. Police departments speak of zero tolerance. Drivers can face registration cos...
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CoCo’s tax heads to the ballot as backers move to pull Initiative 175
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

CoCo’s tax heads to the ballot as backers move to pull Initiative 175

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice For months, two transportation questions were headed toward the same November ballot, pulling against each other. One would have locked specified vehicle and fuel revenue to roads. The other would raise a new tax to build a train. Within 24 hours, backers moved to pull one as the district referred the other. On Aug. 27, Restore Our Roads announced it would withdraw Initiative 175, the construction-industry measure that would have amended the state constitution to reserve specified vehicle and fuel taxes and fees for roads.  The next day, the Front Range Passenger Rail District board voted 14-1 at the Transportation Technology Center near Pueblo to send its own funding question to voters. It asks for a 0.333% sales...
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Riess: Give rural patients more choices, rural providers more flexibility
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Commentary, State, Top Stories

Riess: Give rural patients more choices, rural providers more flexibility

By Naomi Riess | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice Healthcare access in rural Colorado is not an abstract policy debate. It is about whether a family can find a primary-care provider, an expectant mother can receive care close to home, or a patient ends up in an emergency room because there was no timely alternative. In Southwest Colorado, we know the problem: too few providers, long waits, financial pressure on clinics and hospitals, and a system too often designed around the Front Range. In 2027, I would pursue a practical, bipartisan Rural Colorado Primary Care Access Act built around four principles: access, provider capacity, sustainability and flexibility. My proposal would build on ideas in HB26-1096, Colorado Medicaid Access to Primary Care Services, considered by th...
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Is Raeden setting a new data center standard in Colorado Springs?
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Rocky Mountain Voice, Local, Top Stories

Is Raeden setting a new data center standard in Colorado Springs?

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice Jason Green will take the hard questions. That is the pitch. The co-founder and president of Raeden says his industry has never done a good job showing up to answer for itself, so he has. "I've just kind of held the mantle of that," he said. In interviews before his data center goes to the Colorado Springs City Council, he made himself available for whatever anyone wanted to throw at him. Whether that adds up to a new way of building data centers, or a well-argued case for a project a lot of his neighbors still do not want, is the question Colorado Springs has to settle on Sept. 17. The project Project Taurus would put an artificial intelligence data center in the old Intel chip plant at 1565 High Tech Way, off Gard...
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Another error from Griswold’s office exposes confidential voter records for 11 days
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Rocky Mountain Voice, State, Top Stories

Another error from Griswold’s office exposes confidential voter records for 11 days

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice For 11 days in August, the profiles of Colorado voters who had specifically asked the state to keep their information hidden were searchable by anyone who knew where to look and had the information the tool required. These are people the state allows to shield their records because they said public disclosure could expose them or a household member to criminal harassment or bodily harm.  On August 14, an update to the Secretary of State's "find my voter registration" tool removed the setting that kept their records out of public view. The office didn't notice until the late afternoon of August 25. Fifty-nine of those profiles were pulled up before anyone caught the mistake. What broke The change was suppo...
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