By Daniel Smith It was Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin who initiated Earth Day in 1970, the first national effort to focus on environmental issues. Later that year the Environmental Protection Agency was formed, to be followed by the Clean Air Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act; and the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act …
By Daniel Smith The campaign for the Fifth Congressional District is drawing to a close. I submitted more questions to Republican incumbent Doug Lamborn and Democratic challenger Stephany Rose Spaulding, seeking to highlight the differences between the two. Last month I submitted three identical, basic questions to each, asking what they felt were the top …
By Daniel Smith Large-scale growth has arrived in Chaffee County; from Poncha Springs to Buena Vista to Salida; construction, houses and development all reflect that growth. The growth trend recently was focused on a proposed large development north of Salida at the historic Centerville ranch; a sprawling 950-acre parcel just off U.S. Hwy. 285, across …
By Daniel Smith No matter where you’ve lived, we’ve all heard the “big snowstorm” stories. Often it comes handed down as a verbal history, from older relatives or from boxed old photographs showing snowbanks as high as … well, you name it. “As high as second-story windows” is one claim I remember from my youth. …
By Daniel Smith The election is about two months off, and it’s a bit quiet in the Fifth Congressional District race between incumbent Republican Doug Lamborn and Democratic challenger Stephany Rose Spaulding. Voters may wonder whether a debate might be in the works; well, nothing yet. Last month I wrote about surprises; the infighting …
By Daniel Smith
By the time you read this, the results of the state’s open primary election will be known and the armchair political quarterbacks will have aired their opinion, critics will have done their finger-pointing and griping about who lost and why – and the electorate will have had their say about who makes the November ballot in just four months.
By Daniel Smith
After months of politics and campaigning, the decisions finally fall to the voters in the Fifth Congressional District in the Primary Election.
June 26 is the date the electorate gets its say after what arguably has been a unique election cycle this time around. And, for a first time, unaffiliated voters can participate in either political party’s choices.
By Daniel Smith
Despite reportedly strong caucus turnouts in the district, nothing is very clear yet on the strength of the various candidates running for the Fifth Congressional District seat.
By Daniel Smith
The political season usually gets in gear in March of election years with local caucuses, district and state assemblies as well as primary balloting to determine who gets on the November election ballot.
In the Fifth Congressional District, thus far there are three Democrats and three Republicans lined up to challenge Republican incumbent Doug Lamborn. More candidates are possible before the March 20 filing deadline.
The Democrats include Stephanie Rose Spaulding, a Colorado College professor and pastor; Betty Field, a former non-profit director and local activist; and Lori Furstenberg, a recent candidate who is a retail store owner. All are relative political newcomers and residents of Colorado Springs, seat of the lion’s share of district influence because of its population size.
The Republican challengers consist of more politically experienced candidates, including State Senator Owen Hill, El Paso County Commissioner Darryl Glenn, Bill Rhea, a former Texas district judge and missionary, and Lamborn, the ten-year incumbent.
Hill is considered a rising force in the GOP ranks while Glenn ran unsuccessfully against U.S. Senator Michael Bennet last election cycle.
Rhea describes himself as the “distinctly centrist” Republican candidate for the congressional race.
Lamborn is a hard-core Republican in a majority GOP district that is considered “safe” in some political assessments, but he has faced primary challengers often before, and even criticism from within his own party ranks.
Lamborn stood in opposition to the creation of Browns Canyon National Monument, stating at the time of the debate over the decade-long local effort to preserve the area that all interests, including extractive industries and ranchers, had not been fully represented.
By Daniel Smith
Newspeople can sometimes get desensitized to even horrifying news events – after all, if you’re in the news business long enough, you’ve seen and reported about a lot of them.
Last month, when I wrote about the “numbing frequency of acts of extreme violence in this county,” in the wake of the largest mass shooting in our history at a Las Vegas county music event, I never dreamed we would see another horrific mass shooting just two weeks later at a small community church in Texas. All of the country was shocked by the insane, deliberate brutality of the attack on the congregation at the Baptist church in tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas.
Donald Trump, in expressing his own shock and sadness, still managed to bring in political controversy in commenting that the slaughter was a “mental health thing, not a gun thing.”
Fifth District Congressman Doug Lamborn posted this comment on his website:
“In stunned disbelief, we’ve learned of the loss of innocents during a community church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas. I join Colorado and the nation in mourning the tragic loss of life as we stand with the survivors, united in prayer for all families affected. From the darkness of this heinous act, we’ve also learned of one heroic citizen who took up arms to protect his community from further evil. The days ahead may shed more light on the details of this tragedy, but today, we pray, we mourn. May God bless the people of Sutherland Springs.”
So we see more photos of the victims, hear how promising, precious lives, young and old were cut short, and later learn of the troubled man with a history of yes, mental instability, and red flags and warning signs in his behavior that somehow went ignored.
By Daniel Smith
Nestled in the historically important San Luis Valley, the town of Conejos is the home of one of the early settlements in Colorado, dating back to the 1850s, and a religious treasure with a history appropriate to look back on at this Christmas season.
Folk legend tells of a stubborn burro which caused the first Catholic parish to be established along the Conejos River – yes, a burro.
Our Lady of Guadalupe Church is a picturesque edifice in Conejos, beloved by the community and well taken care of over the decades.
It was fairly recently the scene of a fire, and a sign left after the fire some of the faithful considered a miracle – more on that later.
First, some history, as outlined in local accounts and in booklets provided by the church.
The old legend says that as Spanish pioneers were making their way through the territory in the valley, they had trouble, not surprisingly, with one of the mules in their pack-train, who stopped, then was unwilling to move.
According to the story in one booklet, “persuasion, threats, beatings, all were of no avail to make the mule proceed.”
In the mule’s pack (perhaps they were taking the pack off) was found a small statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, it was reported.
The Spaniards, the booklet’s account claims, declared that this must be a sign that the Blessed Virgin must want a church built in her honor, dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe – on that spot. The legend says when the Spanish vowed to build a church in that exact location – the mule, “balked no more and went jogging along with the rest of the mule train.”
By Daniel Smith
It was one of those events that still shocks us – despite the numbing frequency of acts of extreme violence in this county.
By Daniel Smith
Until the recent horrific tragedy in Charlottsville, Virginia, brought renewed attention to issues of race, diversity and white supremacist groups’ self-empowerment to demonstrate their hateful, devisive agenda, Salida had been in the national news over a shocking immigration incident.
At the end of July, eight German exchange students headed for residents’ homes in Salida, as other students had in previous years, were stopped at Denver International Airport by immigration authorities, detained overnight in holding cells away from the airport and deported back to Germany the next day.
Pressed for reasons for the unprecedented action, immigration officials insisted the student were coming in and “taking work away from U.S. citizens” – illegal since they had no work visas.
Susan Masterson, who has coordinated the exchange program for a number of years, was quoted saying she reached out to State Rep. Jim Wilson, Fifth District Congressman Doug Lamborn, Governor John Hickenlooper and Senator Michael Bennet. No one could stop the unceremonious deportations of the students.
Immigration officials said they were trying to enter on tourist visas, which was illegal, but it’s unclear just what “jobs” the students would take from U.S. citizens while here for just four weeks. It was the first time any such complication had arisen in the rewarding exchange program here.
Masterson was quoted as saying she felt the student’s treatment was definitely a result of the Trump administration’s contentious rulings regarding illegal and legal immigration. She said Lamborn’s staff did all they could, to no avail.
By Daniel Smith
Last month, Congress and the country were shaken by shootings in Alexandria, Virginia, at a Republican representative practice for the annual baseball game between Republicans and Democrats.
By Daniel Smith
When offered the chance to write this column, I thought about the complexity of tracking Congress in general and a single representative in particular – aren’t they whirlwinds of activity, needing staff to keep tabs on their daily appointments?
I also thought about those millstones around many political reporters’ necks – legalese, political nomenclature, translating endless document babble, political hack spokespeople, form letters, “spin” and, well, bullroar.
I was not needlessly worried, I must say.
My assignment is to focus on Republican Doug Lamborn, representing our own Fifth Congressional District.
Yes, he of the rigid party loyalty, patriotism-drenched press releases, and who distinguished himself in 2011 with the “It’s like touching a tar baby” remark about working with President Obama – and later apologized.
Undaunted, we’ll begin to track the activities and accomplishments of Rep. Lamborn month to month – perhaps compared to other Colorado representatives.
Have no illusions – people in congress are busy, and have lots of activities and measures to juggle; but the voluminous writing, research, interaction with constituents and office work is shouldered by harried staff and party lawyers. Keeping in touch with your people is an imperative.
By Daniel Smith
Seared into his memory, Bill Reeves remembers the moment:
“Soon the downdraft pushed us below the clouds, just enough to where I could see pine trees off our left wing tip fairly closely, and looked ahead and there was a ridge coming at us. I said ‘ridge’ and ‘turn’ and Wil turned left … and that put us into the Stout Creek drainage where he was trying to outclimb terrain in a downdraft. And so as we came down in, you know what I was seeing at that point was just rocky, bouldery walls everywhere and starting to think ‘this is it, you know, we’re not going to make it,’ and starting to figure out where I was going to hit.”
That harrowing moment has a direct link back to the story we reported in the last issue: the 1995 murder case involving victim Richard Johnson and his later-convicted killer, Jeremy Denison, a case involving drugs, an informant and a controversial trial. Denison is serving life without parole for cutting Johnson’s throat in January of that year.
About two weeks after the murder this next tale unfolds.
By Daniel Smith
For a journalist, some stories, even those which start relatively small, can have long “legs,” and can emotionally touch you.
The most intriguing stories, naturally, are those that involve human drama. But throw in a strange twist of fate connecting two seemingly unrelated events and you have … well, stories with a strange twist of fate.
This story begins 21 years ago with a local drug investigation that resulted in brutal death, and a later murder trial intertwined with a dramatic accident resulting in another death and a compelling story of grit and survival – in two parts.
In early 1995, 24-year-old Richard Johnson never knew it, but he could have died twice – a second time in a plane crash – had he not been murdered beforehand.
Johnson, a reputed illegal drug user from Alamosa who had reportedly become an informant for local and state drug investigators, had his throat cut, his body dragged off County Road 185, eight miles up Ute Trail and partially buried in pine needles.
The Mountain Mail reported at the time Johnson had turned an informant for the local authorities and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and was involved in an ongoing investigation at the time he was slain.
He apparently died the night of Jan. 24, 1995. A trail of blood and marks from dragging were found, and his body lay near glass and pieces of metal from an apparent car wreck off the rural road.
The suspect arrested on Jan. 26 was 20-year-old Jeremy Nechol Denison of Salida. He and Johnson became acquainted while students at what was then Adams State College.
The Salida Police, Chaffee County District Attorney’s Office, Chaffee County Sheriff, CBI and Colorado State Patrol Patrol all took part in the investigation. Denison was initially held on one million dollars bond.
The paper reported the next day that the debris at the scene had prompted police to search for a red car with a broken windshield and front end damage. The victim’s red Pontiac Trans Am, with a large amount of blood inside, was recovered in Denver, not far from where Denison was staying.
by Daniel Smith It’s a phenomenon affecting communities from Denver to small mountain towns – a lack of affordable housing for lower-income workers often employed in service industries vital to a community’s economic health. Many political candidates are voicing concerns over the need for affordable housing, but assessing and addressing the issue is a lengthy …
by Mike Rosso and Daniel Smith One of the joys of living in Central Colorado is the opportunity for adventurous day trips. Whether you live in Leadville, Westcliffe, Gunnison or here in Chaffee County, there are miles of scenic and historic drives one can take, see some amazing sites, and still make it home for …
