Friday, December 12, 2008

Mountain Town News


By ALLEN BEST - MTN TOWN NEWS SERVICE

Crested Butte looks to save its sheds

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. -- Part of the charm of Crested Butte is its gaily painted Victorian storefronts. But that's the show-business part. To get a better sense of Crested Butte's grimy past you need to walk the alleyways and visit the empty lots, where a great many coal bins, outhouses and sheds, many of them graying and rotting, can be seen.

To ensure the manifestations of yesteryear remain, the town is now looking at incentives and penalties for property owners. The goal is to ensure the old buildings aren't deliberately torn down, and that some efforts are made to keep them standing.

"I think one of the things about Crested Butte that's special is the outbuildings," building official Bob Gillie recently told the town council. "Those buildings, like the coal sheds, say a lot about the history of Crested Butte."

Council members, reports the Crested Butte News, are leery of over-reaching in their efforts to preserve the past. But they are also reminded that some other communities, such as Telluride, now wish more relics of the past had been preserved, and are keen on applying those lessons to Crested Butte.

Fuming resumes about I-70 congestion

SILVER PLUME, Colo. -- Without even looking out the door, you can tell it's ski season in Colorado. The complaints are rising once again about the congestion on Interstate 70 between Denver and Summit County.

"Visualize tail lights," says Rob Witwer, a retiring state legislator in Colorado. Writing in The Denver Post, he says it's questionable whether Colorado could mount a credible bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2018 given existing conditions. "Do we really believe the International Olympic Committee would favor a location with such an overburdened infrastructure?" he asks.

On a snowy weekend, with traffic backed up for miles to the twin bores through the Continental Divide called Eisenhower and Johnson, there's no end of blame to go around. Breckenridge resident Bill Doig blames cars without good snow tires. "Ticket and fine heavily the bozos who slide around on bald and inadequate rubber," he fumes in a letter published in the Summit Daily News.

Michael Penny, the Frisco town manager, tells the Rocky Mountain News of plans to make traffic information available on changeable signs at resort lift stations and by text messages to cell phones. The purpose, he says, is to allow skiers to decide to ski until traffic improves, or perhaps leave early to beat the rush back to Denver.

Are high-speed trains the answer? The Rocky Mountain Rail Authority is about halfway through its study of potential trains for both the I-70 and I-25 corridors in Colorado. A lot of different options remain on the table.

New Durango library achieves gold standard

DURANGO, Colo. -- After 101 years, Durango has a new library. It's larger, with more places to read, and thanks to windows and skylights, much brighter, reports the Durango Telegraph. As well, the building has green credentials, scoring enough points under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification system to score gold, the third highest of four levels.

Climate change may need to chill out

LAKE LOUISE, Alberta -- Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions has been called the greatest challenge of our times. But at least in Canada, it will have to wait.

"We will not aggravate an already weakened economy in the name of environmental progress," said Jim Prentice, minister of environment for the Canadian government.

Prentice spoke at a forum held in Lake Louise in conjunction with the World Cup ski races. The theme this year, as last, was climate change, and Prentice acknowledged climate change is the "pre-eminent environmental issue of our time." What is needed, he said, is an "acceptable balance between measurable environmental progress and steady economic growth and prosperity."

The Rocky Mountain Outlook says that former California Gov. Pete Wilson also spoke at the forum, and he said that California's front-edge politics regarding energy use have gone too far. "There is a need for a kind of realism to be expressed, but California is not waiting," Wilson said.

Wilson advocates nuclear power and is dubious of carbon-sequestering technology, which would allow continued use of abundant coal resources. Sequestering of carbon, however, has so far defied efforts to do it in any broad, large-scale way.

Marlo Raynolds, executive director of the Pembina Institute, a climate-action group active in Canada, told reporters that a carbon tax is badly needed. Former U.S. President Al Gore, in an interview in Newsweek, is calling for the same thing, to be balanced by a reduction in payroll taxes.




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