25 minute read
SPORTS
Fort Lupton’s Chavez aims for college ball
BY STEVE SMITH SSMITH@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM
AURORA – Fort Lupton’s senior catcher Zavian Chavez stood in the wind alongside his team’s dugout after a 12-6 loss at Aurora Central High School on May 11.
He’s one of seven seniors – Isaac Rodriguez, Christian Lechleitner, Manny Sandoval, Romero Garcia, Dominic Chavez and Hunter Harris are the others – who will graduate later this month.
“We were doing well. But then, I feel like we always lose at the end,” Chavez said. “We have a great team here. It’s been a great career here. Sometimes, the outcomes don’t come. I feel like how I play, I come out and ready to play every game.”
Chavez hit two home runs and drove in 13 runs for FLHS this season while batting .452. He also had a perfect fi elding percentage behind the plate.
“I’ve learned to keep on going and not quit,” Chavez said. “If the other team is talking, just keep doing you. Play for the team. But if the other team is talking, you shut them up by showing them. I learned to stay calm, humble and keep going.” Chavez said that part of the game was hard to learn at fi rst.
“I just wanted to go out there and talk back. But at the same time, it was making me play worse,” Chavez said. “I was in my head talking the whole time. And now that I’m listening, it makes me want to play better. I’m more relaxed.”
Given his position on the fi eld, it’s easy to hear everything from everybody.
“I’m behind the plate, so I hear pretty much everything from the fans and the players,” Chavez said. “Usually, I tell the players to let them talk and you do you. You shut them up by playing well.”
FLHS has had three baseball coaches in the last two seasons, including two since the fi rst of this year.
“It’s hard getting chemistry from the coaches, knowing how they coach,” he said. “Getting used to their program is the only hard thing about it. We have good coaches. We just haven’t shown it yet. The game is the same, no matter which coach it is. You play how they coach.”
Chavez has his eyes on college baseball. One such place that interests him is North Dakota at Bottineau.
“I’m interested. I want to play college ball,” Chavez said. “The only thing that’s stopping me is I don’t know what to study. I’m scared about leaving Colorado. That seems kind of far. I’ve never been anywhere else. It’d be a new adventure.
“And maybe I can go out there and play my hardest.”
Congratulations to the Graduating Class of 2022
26 South 6th Avenue BRIGHTON 303-654-9700
Fort Lupton’s Jesse Ceretto backs away from an inside pitch during an at-bat against Aurora Central High School May 11. ACHS ral-
lied for a 12-6 win. PHOTO BY STEVE SMITH
SPORTS BRIEFS
Football
Joey O’Connor is the new football coach at Horizon High School. O’Connor had been the coach at Fort Lupton High School.
Girls basketball
Former Frederick High School girls basketball coach Brett Andersen is the new girls basketball coach at Fort Morgan High School.
College softball
Fort Lupton native and former Brighton High School player Sarah Tiffany earned a spot on the second-team, all-Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletic Association team this spring. She led Fort Hays (Kan.) State in batting (.352) and in slugging percentage (.483). She fi nished the season with 10 doubles, three home runs and 25 RBIs.
Umpires needed
The city of Fort Lupton is looking for umpires for its youth baseball program.
Training will be available Saturday, May 14, Games run from June 1 to July 15. The pay is $25 to $35 per game.
Email Skeanaaina@fortluptonco.
SEE BRIEFS, P11
Congratulations,
CLASS OF 2022!
Fort Lupton HS
Fort Lupton’s Chavez aims for college ball Track and fi eld LONGMONT -- Fort Lupton’s Payton Falhauber fi nished 44th in the girls high jump at the St. Vrain Hoka Invitational at Longmont High School May 13. Her best height was 4 feet 4 inches.
Track and fi eld
LONGMONT -- Frederick’s Gracie Wilts was eighth in the girls high jump at the St. Vrain HOKA Invitational May 13 at Logmont High School. Her top height was 4 feet 10 1/2 inches,
The boys 4-by-800-meter relay team (Garrett Colvin, Quinn McNeill, Alexander Carrillo and Chase Svela) was eighth in a time of 8:33.89.
Baseball
Thompson Valley beat Frederick 12-5 in the fi rst game of a home-andhome series May 10 in Frederick.
Zach McVay had three hits and drove in three runs for TVHS. Javier Flores had three hits and drove in a pair of runs.
No stats were available for FHS.
TVHS completed the series sweep in Loveland May 12 by a score of 18-8. Cruz Zamudio led the Warriors with three hits and three RBIs.
Fort Morgan beat the Warriors 8-3 on the Mustangs’ fi eld May 14. Frank Ortega and Briggs Wheatley had base hits and two RBIs for Fort Morgan. Bodie Wheatley had two hits and drove in a run.
No stats were available for FHS.
Girls golf
LOVELAND -- Frederick took seventh place in the team standings at the Longs Peak League meet May 12 at the Olde Course.
Zoe Millard was the team medalist with her score of 106. Makayla Miller had a 111, and Danica Dennis fi nished with a 122.
BRIEFS
gov or call 720-466-6165.
Jacobs Fore golf tournament
The city of Fort Lupton and Jacobs are co-sponsoring a benefi t golf tournament Friday, June 10, at Coyote Creek Golf Course. Registration starts at 7, and the tournament’s shotgun start is at 8.
The four-person scramble tournament features prizes for the fi rstplace team, hole contests and raffl es. Proceeds benefi t the Fort Lupton Recreation Center teen programs and the Fort Lupton clubhouse of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Weld County.
Email JacobsForeYouth@jacobs. com.
~ Henry David Thoreau
CONGRATULATIONS, GRADS!
After years of hard work, countless late nights and collecting a closet full of school colors — you did it! We’re proud to support students pursuing and achieving their dreams, on campus and beyond.
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Congratulations Graduates!
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Every Day is a New Beginning. All the best to the Class of 2022!
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BY SHANNON NAJMABADI AND JESSE PAUL THE COLORADO SUN
A contentious effort to set stiffer construction standards for homes built in wildfi re-prone parts of Colorado was abandoned as the 2022 lawmaking term came to a close with too many other proposals on the legislature’s to-do list.
As the General Assembly neared its end, Republicans in the Colorado Senate threatened to halt the entire legislative process in protest if the policy — which was backed by Gov. Jared Polis and was negotiated in private for weeks — was advanced. With dozens of bills still left to be debated, Democrats backed off the proposal that came in the wake of the 2021 Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfi re in Colorado history.
“We got close,” said Sen. Chris Hansen, a Denver Democrat who was pushing for the policy. “Just didn’t get the right confi guration.”
He plans to try again next legislative session, which begins in January 2023, after what offi cials say will be a dangerous summer for wildfi re.
The Democratic majority in the legislature had to leave a lot of legislation on the cutting room fl oor as time ran out and Republicans stalled the legislative process.
The “minority is using the only tool they have — which is obstruction,” said state Rep. Chris Kennedy, a Lakewood Democrat.
The fi re proposal would have created a board tasked with developing statewide building standards for the wildland-urban interface, the area where development and nature meet. It immediately prompted controversy when it was introduced as a proposed amendment to House Bill 1012, a wildfi re mitigation measure.
Senate Minority Leader Chris Holbert, a Douglas County Republican, threatened to halt the lawmaking process in protest by reading bills at length. A dozen senators clustered on the fl oor, had a tense exchange and then retreated to Senate President Steve Fenberg’s offi ce to try to resolve the situation.
“To have that substantial of an amendment, it’s about twice the length of the bill itself,” Holbert said, after lawmakers emerged. “I just think it’s inappropriate that that be sprung on us at the last minute.”
The amendment was withdrawn.
Local or state control?
The idea behind the proposal was to ask people living in wildfi re-prone parts of the state to help address Colorado’s fi re vulnerability. The legislature has spent tens of millions of dollars on fi re mitigation, response and recovery in recent years, which some see as fi scally unsustainable.
The state has experienced its four largest and most destructive fi res in the past two years and state offi cials recently warned that Colorado could be headed toward its worst wildfi re summer in modern history.
“Improved building codes lead to less fi re risk and ultimately less damage,” Hansen said. “They have the advantage of lowering insurance costs for homeowners. From the state budget perspective, the less damage that’s done, the better for the state budget.”
Adopting a statewide building code could also have given Colorado a leg up in applying for federal grant funding. The lack of a statewide building code cost Colorado 20 of 100 points in recent bids for $74 million in FEMA grant money.
But the amendment’s drafting and introduction quickly frustrated opponents of statewide building codes, who saw the proposal as a last-minute attempt to force a broad spectrum of communities to comply with a top-down policy. Particularly irksome to some critics is that Polis’ offi ce pushed the amendment despite recently touting his preference for local control over a statewide approach on other issues, including a failed proposed statewide ban of fl avored tobacco and nicotine products.
“He’s mercurial when it comes to local control,” said House Minority Leader Hugh McKean, a Loveland Republican. “If it’s energy policy, they want state control. If it’s …
Area emergency personnel who fought the Marshall Fire called the scene apocalyptic with fl ames 40 feet high and embers fl ying everywhere in 100 mph winds. COURTESY PHOTO
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State Senate committee rejects measure, moving issue back to local control
BY JESSE PAUL AND SHANNON NAJMABADI THE COLORADO SUN
A heavily lobbied, bipartisan effort to ban the sale of fl avored tobacco and nicotine products, including menthol cigarettes, in Colorado was rejected by a state Senate committee on May 10, punting the issue back to cities and counties.
The Senate Appropriations Committee voted 5-2 to reject House Bill 1064, with Democratic Sens. Robert Rodriguez and Rachel Zenzinger joining the three Republicans on the committee in voting against the measure.
The legislation, which was aimed at reducing teen tobacco and nicotine use, faced slim odds of becoming law due to opposition from Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who said that he would prefer the issue to be regulated at the local level. The bill also was projected to siphon some $25 million annually from Polis’ fl edgling free preschool program, a Polis campaign promise which is funded through taxes on tobacco and nicotine products.
The demise of House Bill 1064 comes about 36 hours before Colorado’s 2022 legislative session ends. It also comes after the Biden administration last month announced it would be trying to ban menthol cigarettes and fl avored cigars.
“Smoking in schools have been going on since before I was born,” Rodriguez said before voting “no” on the bill. “And I don’t know if this is going to stop that.”
A number of cities and towns in Colorado have passed fl avored nicotine and tobacco bans, but several mayors have requested state action because they say a patchwork of policies wouldn’t be effective.
“It is not a prohibitive enough barrier if our youth are simply able to travel across Denver’s border to the nearest convenience store and obtain fl avored tobacco products,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, who vetoed a fl avored tobacco ban in the Mile High City last year, wrote in a letter explaining his thinking.
State Rep. Kyle Mullica, a Federal Heights Democrat who was a prime sponsor of the bill, said the measure’s demise was “incredibly disappointing” and that he would continue to push for a ban on fl avored tobacco and nicotine products.
“We ran House Bill 1064 because we wanted to fi ght for the health of our communities and kids,” he said. “The science and data is on our side. This is an epidemic our state is facing.”
He said the well-funded tobacco industry was, at least in part, responsible for the bill’s failure.
They had “business on the line,” he said. “But when we look at policy down here, I don’t know how we don’t put the health of our kids fi rst.”
Altria and another tobacco giant, Reynolds American, respectively spent $149,000 and $173,000 on lobbying in Colorado from July 2021 through the end of March.
The national nonprofi t Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which was leading the charge to pass the bill, spent nearly $181,000 on lobbying through the end of March. It had 25 lobbyists and lobbying fi rms working on the measure.
JCPH has been encouraged by the slow but steady progress in declining tobacco and vape use across the state. But some evidence suggests the county may have experi-
enced an uptick in use during the pandemic. SHUTTERSTOCK IMAGE
This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.
tobacco, for instance, then that’s a responsibility they don’t want to take on so then they shunt it to local control.”
The amendment would have created a 17-member board tasked with adopting by mid-2024 statewide standards to reduce fi re risk for people and property in the state. The board would have then periodically updated the codes, issued rules on how to enforce them and set fees or other charges to defray the anticipated costs of enacting them.
It’s unclear what parts of the state the stricter standards would apply to. The new board would have determined what buildings and what “lands” were subject to the new code; cities or counties could have chosen to adopt stronger standards or petitioned the board for an exemption.
The proposal was based on recent recommendations from a Colorado Fire Commission subcommittee, which is made up of at least two county commissioners. Polis last year directed the group to look into building and land use planning policies the state could adopt to ward off fi re damage.
Polis and other proponents of the amendment believed they’d devised a statewide policy with enough fl exibility to appease local-control advocates.
It was “designed specifi cally with Colorado’s local-control needs in mind,” Polis’ spokeswoman Melissa Dworkin said in a statement.
But despite the memory of the Marshall Fire, and the backing of Polis and the state fi re commission subcommittee, the proposal still crumbled — demonstrating how polarizing the issue of state building codes remains in Colorado, a home-rule state with a strong local control ethos.
While some local governments in Colorado have adopted their own wildfi re mitigation programs, the state remains one of eight in the nation without some kind of minimum building code, nonpartisan Joint Budget Committee staff said in a 2021 budget briefi ng.
Added costs tied to the codes — whether for construction or enforcement — were a sticking point for opponents, especially amid supply chain woes, infl ation and a statewide housing shortage.
Some local o cials support idea of statewide code
Still, advocates for a building code hope that attitudes are changing as fi re seasons grow longer and more destructive in the drought-stricken West.
Local offi cials whose communities were burned by the Marshall fi re, for example, expressed support for a wildfi re-prevention building code in recent hearings. The December 2021 fi re burned more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County, many of them near open space.
Ashley Stolzmann, the mayor of Louisville, one of the cities hardest hit by the Marshall fi re, said she thought the proposal was “wonderful.”
Underinsurance and lack of private-sector funding meant the state was acting as a backstop for rebuilding efforts, leaving them with a fi nancial incentive to pass the proposal, she said.
Louisville resident Tawnya Somauroo, whose home burned in the Marshall Fire, told lawmakers she was frustrated at the prospect that her neighborhood would rebuild only to end up as vulnerable to fi re as before.
“It’s bad enough to lose your home in an urban-mega fi re,” she said. “But knowing that you (are rebuilding) in a neighborhood that is going to be set up to burn again catastrophically and exactly the same way if another fi re comes along — that keeps me up at night.”
Mike Morgan, director of the Division of Fire Prevention and Control and a member of the state Fire Commission, said that offi cials try not to “reinvent the wheel” — as other states have models that could be exported — but they wanted a solution that recognized the uniqueness of Colorado.
“While that is a break from the norm if you will — of the way we’ve done things in the past — we can’t keep doing the same things over and over and expecting different outcomes either,” he said.
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This story is from The Colorado Sun, a journalist-owned news outlet based in Denver and covering the state. For more, and to support The Colorado Sun, visit coloradosun.com. The Colorado Sun is a partner in the Colorado News Conservancy, owner of Colorado Community Media.
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“One thing that’s clear is if you had the fi rst two shots, get the third,” he said. “There’s some data from Israel that that fourth shot helps, at least for a while.”
COVID is ‘mixed bag’ in Colorado
The latest COVID-19 data in Colorado is a decidedly mixed bag.
COVID-19 hospitalizations rose to 110 last week — up 33 since midApril. But that’s 1,500 fewer than the highest level recorded in the omicron wave.
The positivity rate for COVID-19 test is staying above the key 5 percent threshold as public health offi cials closely watch. As of Thursday, the positive test rate was 6.3 percent, according to state data. It’s been above 6 percent for the last week and doubled since mid-March. But it’s fi ve times lower than January’s omicron wave peak.
Wastewater surveillance data showed a pronounced spike in virus detected in mid-April and another smaller rise at the end of last month.
“So much of what happens next in this pandemic depends on the next variant or variants,” which is why continuing to encourage Coloradans to get vaccinated and boosted is key, Samet added. “If we had one (variant) with a high degree of immune escape, that is vaccine acquired protection is not great against the variant, that would be a problem.”
Are we fl ying blind?
Other public health experts worry Colorado and the U.S. may be fl ying blind. Many governments dropped non-pharmaceutical interventions like masking and contact tracing, while not beefi ng up surveillance enough to give warning of a potential coming surge, said May Chu, an epidemiologist and clinical professor, also at the Colorado School of Public Health.
“I think the trend away from contact tracing, from not promoting vaccination and boosters and the promotion of at home-testing, whose results are not seen by public health,” because most are not reported to health departments, “all point to an uneasy second half of the year,” Chu said.
“We are far from being ‘endemic,’ the point where the pandemic has become predictable, Chu said. “New variants are rising and most of the world is blind to that.”
Two omicron subvariants, which have emerged since the start of the year account for nearly all of Colorado’s cases, after fi rst delta, then the original omicron variant swamped the state. In the most recent data posted to the state dashboard, the BA.2 subvariant makes up 74 percent and BA.2.12.1 comprises 14 percent. But that’s as of the week of April 10, so that data hasn’t been updated in nearly a month, according to the state’s dashboard.
Billions in funding for further COVID-19 prevention and protection is stalled in Congress. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis in March urged Congress to approve more money “to secure enough booster vaccine doses for all Americans and invest in variant-specifi c vaccines or a pan-COVID vaccine.”
It would protect against a range of variants should the science and data demonstrate the need, he said.
Wide disparities in vaccinations in Colorado
Though vaccination has grown steadily in Colorado since vaccines fi rst started to become available late in 2020, the pandemic’s fi rst year, there’s wide variability across the state and across populations.
One group has lagged consistently behind when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines: Hispanics. Just 40 percent of that population has been vaccinated with at least one dose, according to the state’s dashboard. State models suggest the actual number may be higher, 48 percent.
Either way it’s measured, that trails all other groups for which the state has recorded information including white Coloradans (78 percent), as well as Black or African-American (66 percent), Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacifi c Islander (69 percent), American Indian or Alaska Native (73 percent) residents.
“I am still seeing fi rst and second vaccines. We are leaving my community behind,” said Julissa Soto, an independent health equity consultant who works with the state. Soto said she and others have helped vaccinate some 15,000 Latinos since last fall, but would like the numbers to be much higher. “Everyone is talking about the fourth booster and my community still struggles to get their fi rst and second dose.”
Where the gaps are
Gaps persist as well, comparing the state’s urban, suburban and rural counties.
More than 80 percent of those residents 5 and up have gotten two doses in Denver, several metro counties, and some mountain counties.
The fi gure is better than 70 percent for other large Front Range counties: Jefferson, Douglas, Arapahoe, Adams and Larimer counties.
For El Paso County it’s 67 percent, Pueblo County is at 61 percent and Mesa County, on the western slope, is at 54 percent.
Fewer than 50 percent of residents are vaccinated in many sparsely populated rural Colorado counties. In Kiowa, Rio Blanco, Cheyenne, Washington and Dolores counties the rate is below 40 percent.
The spotty coverage leaves under-vaccinated areas especially vulnerable to future outbreaks.
Even where vaccination rates are higher, vaccine effectiveness wanes over time and almost half of all Coloradans have yet to get a booster dose, on top of the fi rst two shots.
Chu also worries about another virus taking off in the coming months: the fl u. She said Colorado has essentially not had to battle much infl uenza for two fl u seasons now, because COVID-19 precautions also limited the spread of the fl u. But “that could rise sharply this year,” she said.
Chu said work is underway to develop a “global platform” to monitor exposure to COVID-19 and other diseases of public health concern, “but this has many moving pieces. We cannot let our guard up just yet.”
This story is from Colorado Public Radio, a nonprofi t news source. Used by permission. For more, and to support CPR News, visit cpr.org.
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TRIVIA
1. GEOGRAPHY: Which country in Africa is the largest in land area? 2. MUSIC: What was the original name of the punk rock band Green Day? 3. U.S. PRESIDENTS: Which president formally declared the executive mansion to be the White House? 4. ART: In which major city would you fi nd the Tate Modern museum? 5. MYTHOLOGY: What is the name of the Greek goddess of revenge? 6. U.S. STATES: Which state is the only one that doesn’t have a mandatory seat belt law? 7. MOVIES: What is the Dude’s favorite drink in “The Big Lebowski”? 8. FOOD & DRINK: What is albumen? 9. MEDICAL: What is a more common name for a transient ischemic attack?
10. ANIMAL KINGDOM:
What is an ibex?
Answers
1. Algeria
2. Sweet Children
3. Theodore Roosevelt
4. London, England
5. Nemesis
6. New Hampshire
7. White Russian
8. Egg white
9. Mini-stroke
10. A wild goat
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