Today's News

Curtis Cunningham deserves a humanitarian award.

As the crowd at Columbine High School struggled to stay warm March 14, the senior slugger did what he had to do to send everyone home. He crushed the first pitch he saw.

And everyone ran to their cars to turn on the heat.

The development group that plans to turn a set of empty fields known as Fehringer Ranch into 2 million square feet of office, retail and residential space told a group of angry homeowners last week that the debate about whether the land should be open space is in the past; the question now is the mix of uses it will support.

If you’ve been to Summit or Grand counties lately, you’ve seen the effects of the largest and most catastrophic pine beetle infestation in decades.

As the Rocky Mountain News recently reported, “Every large, mature lodgepole pine forest in Colorado and southern Wyoming will be dead within three to five years,” based on projections from the U.S. Forest Service. The Rocky further reported that the outbreak, which began in 1996, has infested 1.5 million acres of trees, culminating in an unbelievable 500,000 additional acres in 2007 alone.

Homeowners near the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield are not convinced that repositioning the concert stage and adding landscaping will mean less music filling their ears on summer evenings.

But Botanic Gardens officials say changing the stage’s alignment — from facing almost directly north toward Chatfield Bluffs homes to facing northeast toward the intersection of C-470 and Wadsworth — should go a long way toward reducing the noise level for area homeowners.