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LOCAL
Fort Lupton City Council, acting as the city’s marijuana Local licensing authority, unanimously approved retail and medical marijuana licenses for Centaurus Farms.
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MARIJUANA
issue with the drive-through portion of the business and “he doesn’t want it because it’s in his neighborhood,” according to staff notes. Planning Director Todd Hodges told the authority this sort of business is a “use by right” in commercial and industrial zoned districts.
Zoning for the land is industrial, and Hodges said “at some point” the zoning “would transition.” The applicant also has to go through the city’s land-use process, Hodges told the authority.
Resident Dawn Massey wondered if the operation included growing. Stieber-Hubbard said the city doesn’t have a grow ordinance and that the license didn’t include that provision.
Committee appointees
Council appointed members to the new ad hoc committee to help develop a design for expansion of the city’s recreation center.
Members are Amy Adkins, Judy Ceretto, Marlene Stieber, Claud Hanes, Valerie Blackston, Monty Schuman and Julie Holm.
The guidelines said one candidate (Ceretto) could come from the Senior Advisory Committee, one could come from the Culture, Parks, Recreation and Museum Committee (Adkins) and two could come from mayoral appointments and council approval. So far, only Stieber has gone through that process.
Hanes and Blackston are serving council members, and Schuman and Holm, who work at the recreation center, are city liaisons.
In other business
Council voted to continue three public hearings during its June 20 meeting. All three votes were unanimous.
The reasons for the delays were the same — a lack of a quorum on the city’s planning commission during earlier scheduled hearings.
One of the hearings concerned a special use permit for Champion Xpress Car Wash. The others were for rezoning and the fi nal platting and development plans for the Flats at Lupton Village. The new date for all three hearings is July 5.
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Mark Boettcher of Thornton watches while teammate Wayne Franklin of Broomfi eld tries to land his beanbag in the hole at Riverdale Regional Park in 2022, part of the county’s
cornhole tournament. The tournament returns to the park July 3 this year. FILE PHOTO
Plenty to do all weekend long to celebrate Independence Day
STAFF REPORT
Independence Day celebrations can’t be kept to one city or even one day in Adams County, with events scheduled all weekend and at parks and venues across the northern Denver metro area.
Fort Lupton
Fort Lupton is the fi rst out of the gate, hosting its Independence Day celebration from 4-8 p.m. July 2 at the Community Center Park, located at the Fort Lupton Recreation Center, with music food and fun.
Fort Lupton native Kimi Most, nominated for Female Vocalist and Songwriter of the Year at the 2016 Rocky Mountain Country Music Awards, will be the featured act.
Now working out of Nashville, Most has released two singles, “Ride Together, Die Together” and “Happy Birthday to Me” and a 2020 EP “Lighting.” She’s opened for national touring artists, including Natasha Bedingfi eld, Casey Donahew, Courtyard Hounds, Deana Carter, and Patrick Droney.
The city is also hosting an allages ropes course, a kids fun zone with bounce houses, carnival rides and the Fort Lupton Fire Department’s water slide.
The event also boasts food trucks and a beer garden — with proceeds from sales benefi ting Fort Lupton’s Hope at Miracle House — as well as a shaved ice truck.
Community fi reworks will be set off at dark from the Coyote Creek Golf Course.
Adams County Stars and Stripes
Adams County’s annual Stars and Stripes event kicks off at 4 p.m. July 3 at the Riverdale Regional Park, 9755 Henderson Road, Brighton.
The county’s popular Stars and Stripes 5K race for runners, walkers or riders returns after its debut last year. Both adult and youth sections are scheduled to take off at 7:30 a.m. and registration is $30 for adults, $20 for youth. Registration includes a T-shirt, multiple water stops and a post-race goodie bag. All proceeds will benefi t Warrior Now in its mission to help veterans across Adams County and the state of Colorado.
The daylong cornhole tournament. which benefi ts nonprofi t A Precious Child, returns. Registration is $50 per two-person team. Each team plays a minimum four games in round robin format, with the top 32 teams competing for cash prizes in a double elimination bracket.
The tournament will be played by offi cial ACL rules found at IplayCornhole.com. Players should download and sign into the ScoreHolio app to register.
The county’s Stars and Stripes Celebration proper runs from 4-10 p.m. at Riverdale Regional Park with food and beer vendors serving at 4 p.m. and live entertainment with The Junebugs and special guest Caitlyn Ochsner, beginning at 6 p.m. The night will end with musical fi reworks at 9:30 p.m.
Parking at Riverdale Regional Park is free for all the events.
For the safety and comfort of pets, animals should not be brought into the park and remember that most fi reworks are illegal in Adams County. Call the Adams County Regional Park at 303-6378000 or visit the county website, www.adcogov.org, for more information.
County offi ces will be closed on July 4.
Music on the 4th in Brighton
The City of Brighton’s annual Fourth of July festival will be returning to Carmichael Park at 650 E. Southern St. at 5 p.m. July 4. The evening will feature live entertainment, starting with DJ TidalWave, followed by a headliner performance at 7 p.m. by Sisters of Rock. Once the concert concludes, attendees have the opportunity to view one of the largest fi rework displays in the region.
Commerce City 4th Fest and the Rapids
Commerce City’s July 4 festivities focus on soccer as much as fi reworks.
The city’s 4thFest is free and open to the general public.
The Colorado Rapids and Commerce City will host a family festival at 5 p.m. at DICK’S Sporting Goods
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Take steps toward financial freedom
It’s almost Independence Day, when we celebrate our liberties. But there’s another freedom you’ll want to think of – and that’s financial freedom. How can you achieve it?
There’s no shortcut. You will need to save and invest throughout your career. Put in as much as you can afford to your 401(k) and other investments. And whenever you get a bonus or tax refund, try to invest some of it. You should also consider what percentage of growth-oriented investments make sense to hold in your portfolio.
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It will take a concerted effort to reach your financial independence – but, like all freedoms, it offers immense benefits.
This article was written by Edward Jones for use by your local Edward Jones Financial Advisor.
www.edwardjones.com Member SIPC
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Will electricity supplies keep pace with the warming climate?
This late-June coolish spell in Colorado is unusual. The trend is toward hot and hotter. Denver in June matched a record set just a few years ago for the earliest time to hit 100 degrees. Grand Junction last year set an all-time record of 107. What if the heat rises to 116 degrees, such as baked Portland a year ago? Could Xcel Energy deliver the electricity needed to chill the air?
It can in 2022, the company says, but it has less confi dence for 2023 and 2024 after it shuts down a coal plant. Xcel frets about disruption to supply chains necessary to add renewable generation.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Colorado’s second-largest electrical supplier, also foresees supply-chain issues as it replaces coal-fi red generation with renewables. It has extended the deadline for bids from developers of wind, solar, and storage projects by more than two months, to Sept. 16.
Colorado has hit a bump in its energy transition. The climate sends ever-louder signals that we must quit polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. After a sluggish response, Colorado has been hurrying to pivot. Now, infl ation and other problems threaten to gum up the switch.
The glitch is signifi cant enough that Eric Blank, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission chair, asked Xcel representatives at a June 17 meeting whether it might be wise to keep Comanche I, the aging coal plant in Pueblo, operating beyond its scheduled retirement at the end of 2022.
“It kills me to even ask this question,” said Blank, a former developer of wind and solar energy projects.
In northwestern New Mexico, the aging San Juan Generating Station has been allowed to puff several months past its planned retirement because of problems in getting a new solar farm online. Even so, the utility predicts rolling blackouts, as has happened in other states.
No blackouts have been predicted in Colorado. Xcel has a healthy reserve margin of 18%.
But even if Xcel wanted to keep Comanche 1 operating beyond 2022, it lacks the permits to do so, company representatives told PUC commissioners at a June 17 meeting devoted to “resource adequacy.”
In addition to the supply chain disruptions, Xcel failed to adequately foresee demand growth. Residential demand was expected to decline as people returned to offi ces after the COVID shutdown. They have, but less than expected. Too, demand from Xcel’s wholesale customers - it provides power for Holy Cross Energy but also some other utilities - has grown more than projected.
“We can’t go into the summer of 2023 with less than 10% reserve margins,” said Blank. “We just can’t.”
Old technology, though, isn’t always a sure-fi re answer. Coal plants routinely must shut down for maintenance.
Then there are the fi ascos. Problems have repeatedly idled Comanche 3, the state’s youngest and largest coal plant, during its 12 years. Cabin Creek, Xcel’s trusty pumped-storage hydro project at Georgetown, has also been down.
The electrical grid now being assembled will be more diverse, dispersed, and fl exible. Many homes will have storage, the batteries of electric vehicles will be integrated into the grid, and demand will be shaved and then shaped to better correspond with supplies. Megan Gilman, a PUC commissioner from Edwards, pointed out that this strategy could be a key response to tightening margins between supplies and demands. Xcel has had a small-scale peak-shaving program but will soon submit plans for expanded demand management.
Meanwhile, it gets hotter and
hotter. Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist, says Colorado’s seven of the nine warmest years on record have occurred since 2012. We GUEST haven’t had a year cooler than the 20th century average since 1992. COLUMN Air conditioning has become the new normal for high-end real estate offerings even in Winter Park, elevation 9,000 feet. It’s not just the heat. There’s also the matter of smoke, as more intense wildfi res grow larger and expand across the calendar, too. For weeks, sometimes months on end, opening the windows is no option. Allen Best Colorado’s record temperature of 115 degrees was set in 2019 near Lamar, in southeastern Colorado. Nobody yet has made public modeling of the potential for that kind of heat in Front Range cities, where 90% of Coloradans live. Last year the deaths of 339 people were attributed to heat in the Phoenix area, where nighttime temperatures sometimes stay above 90. Power outages in Texas during February 2022 were blamed — mostly without merit — on wind farms. Nobody in Colorado wants to see any plausible excuse to blame renewables. The best way to avoid that is to keep the air conditioners running.
Allen Best writes about these and other topics in greater depth at BigPivots.com.
The fi ve most sought-after words in amateur golf are, “That’s good, pick it up.” We say that to our playing partner when the putt that is left is considered short enough to call it “good.” Sometimes the length of the putt left to make comes into question, especially when someone is not playing so well that day and their friends show a little mercy on them. Luckily, I have been the one receiving that mercy lately.
There are times when the player actually needing to make the putt decides that they have had enough already and do one of two things: They either pick it up themselves or they take a casual approach and putt it toward the hole, indicating that he or she felt that it was good and the last attempt at the putt was close enough for the gimme.
There may be gimmes in amateur golf or even in the PGA during match play, but when it comes to life, most times we aren’t fi nished yet. We still have work to do, projects to fi nish, contributions to make, our family and friends to love. No, we are still a long way from being fi nished yet. No matter where we started, the detours we have taken, the long roads we have journeyed, and even the many mistakes we have made, there is still time to get it right and fi nish what was once started by us, in
us, or for us.
There’s a great song by Brandon Heath called “Wait and See.” And in this song, he sings the lyrics, “He’s not fi nished with me yet,” as he refers to God’s plan and purpose for his life. And if we listen to the song or even just fi nd the lyrics, I encourage us to refl ect on what those lyrics could mean in our own life. I remember speaking with my great aunt over the past few years as she was approaching 90, and she would say that she wished somedays that the Lord would just take her. And I would remind her that, “He’s not fi nished with you yet.”
My great aunt was living in an assisted living facility, and really didn’t have a lot of mobility left in her tired legs. As residents came and went, she became saddened by their departure. It was during one of those calls where she just wanted to go to heaven and be with my great uncle. So, I said it to her again, “He’s not fi nished with you yet.”
During our call the following week, my great aunt’s tonality was one of optimism and happiness. A new resident had moved in, and she didn’t have any family left to visit her. My great aunt befriended her and even though struggled with her own mobility, she made it a point to spend time and listen to her new friend’s life story and journey. They went to the dining hall together, and each time I would call her, she would tell me more about her new friend and the life she led.
My great aunt and uncle lived with awesome faith and purpose. He served our country for 20 years in the Air Force and had been stationed around the world at different times. Most times she moved with him and supported him. She felt serving God and her husband was her greatest purpose. And now, nearing 90, she found a new purpose. It might seem like a small purpose compared to what is happening in the world, but at nearly 90 years of age, “He wasn’t fi nished with her yet.”
That’s where we come in. “That’s good, pick it up,” may work in golf, but we are not fi nished yet. And whether big or small, we all have something positive to contribute to this world, to our community, and to our family and friends. I would love to hear what you still have to do at mnorton@xinnix. com, and when we realize there is plenty more to do, it really will be a better than good life.
We are not fi nished yet
WINNING WORDS
Michael Norton
Michael Norton is the grateful president of XINNIX, a personal and professional coach, and a consultant, trainer, encourager and motivator to businesses of all sizes.
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