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Volume 7, Number 41 | November 19, 2015
Whole lotta Shaka goin’ on
John Klish drove in from Grand Junction for Aloha Mountain Cyclery’s third Shaka Cross race of the season at North Face Park on Sunday. Shaka Cross is a cyclocross-style race, which is a mixture of grass, pavement and dirt surfaces, featuring obstacles and dismounts that require shouldering the bike on a closed course of one to two miles. The series has attracted about 55 competitors for each race, coming from several Western Slope towns and the Front Range. The Turkey Day races close the series on Nov. 26. Registration starts at 7:30 a.m., with the first race at 9:30 a.m. For details, go to alohamountaincyclery.com. Photo by Lynn Burton
Trustees go forward on energy tax, pull back on recreation tax By John Colson Sopris Sun Staff Writer
T
he Carbondale Board of Trustees (BOT), at a work session on Tuesday, moved forward with a plan to impose a tax on energy use by town residents, but turned away from a proposed new sales tax aimed at providing funds for projects involving parks, the arts, recreation and trail connections.
Energy-use tax The so-called “energy use fee,” which would be tied to the use of electricity and
natural gas in residential property around town, is seen as a way to both encourage energy conservation by town residents and to provide funding for the town’s ongoing efforts to reduce its “carbon footprint” by installing alternative-energy technology on public buildings, businesses and homes. At a work session with the BOT, Erica Sparhawk of CLEER (Clean Energy Economy for the Region), which consults with the town on energy issues, noted that use rates for electricity and natural gas have fallen in Carbondale in recent years. Sparhawk said that electricity use has
declined six percent, and natural gas use has gone down by three percent, which she termed “very positive news,” although she stressed in a phone interview with The Sopris Sun that those figures are still considered preliminary and that she is working with area utilities to pin the numbers down more definitively. The town government, in cooperation with CLEER and with CORE (Community Office of Resource Efficiency) is working on the details of the proposed energy-use tax, and is hoping to put the idea before the town’s voters next April, at the same time as
local voters will elect members to the BOT. According to Sparhawk’s presentation to the BOT on Tuesday, the tax, or fee, would amount to something like $5 to $7 per month on an average residential utility bill in Carbondale. She is still working on the figures for commercial utility bills, which she said are much more difficult to average out and identify. But in general, she said, the fee would come to “more like $25-$40 per month” added to the utility bills. The overall effort, according to KatherENERGY TAX page 7