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Polis can’t bully cities into making housing more affordable

Re: “Housing laws: Most cities make ‘good faith’ efforts to comply, state says,” Oct. 8 news story

Gov. Jared Polis is starting to sound more and more like President Trump!

His plan to punish those cities that don’t agree with his “more, more, more” housing policy is just petty Trump-like vengeance.

And it’s a Trump-like diversion from the underlying failure of this policy. In simple terms, this “growth first” policy never had a solid basis in the housing market for the Denver area.

Any decent look would have shown that the long-term demand is far too great to expect prices to magically come down and stay down.

Thus, the intelligent policy would have been to acknowledge this fact and also that adding too many people will destroy our quality of life. Instead, require a significant portion of new housing to be permanently affordable, and to force new business development to pay for housing for workers whose jobs would not pay enough to meet the market prices.

That would have provided more affordable housing while preserving some of Colorado’s quality of life. But apparently, it is not in accord with Polis’ “bully the market” mindset.

Steve Pomerance, Boulder

Let’s compare Maria Corina Machado to Trump

Re: “Opposition leader wins Peace Prize,” Oct. 11 news story

The symmetry could hardly be more appropriate: the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a Venezuelan woman fighting for the democratic rights of her people while our president feels slighted by the Nobel committee as he and his Republican colleagues work systematically to dismantle our American democracy.

Maria Corina Machado lives in hiding as she voices opposition to autocrats while on the streets of our cities heavily armed agents and soldiers wear masks as they carry out what even they must perceive as a legally questionable mission. The ironies write themselves (Putin advocates for Trump as a champion of peace) while our citizenry is forced to imagine a Venezuelan scenario here at home.

Dan Welte, Highlands Ranch

DIA officials should pay back their ticket costs

Re: “Ethics board clears DIA leader over flight costs ‘appalled’ by conference,” Oct. 7 news story

Bravo to The Post for bringing the article of the DIA Infamous Nine to the community. Once again, the DIA officials stepped on their common sense thought process. It is easy to spend money when it is not yours. Very easy. Stakeholders, the taxpayers are there to pay the bills. No problem. Until the investigation by The Post brought the wrong to light.

What would be the right thing to do is for each of the Infamous Nine to take out their check books and reimburse the taxpayers the difference between their business class and first class tickets and what the price was for coach class and reimburse the taxpayers. While the County and City of Denver are going through deep cuts in funds and services, you have nine “officials” enjoying the good life.

Infamous Nine, do things right and do the right thing.

Jay Weinstein, Denver

The dangers of physician-assisted suicide — normalization

Re: “Here’s how we prevent every youth suicide,” Oct. 10 commentary

I appreciate Dr. Reinecke’s insight into the key factors that trigger, and the key approaches that ameliorate, the youth suicide crisis in America.  However, he skirts around one issue. He notes that “suicide becomes a solution, an option, a source of relief.”  He fails to draw a line between the growing acceptance of assisted suicide in Colorado and other states, and the epidemic of youth suicide nationally.

When stories of people ending their lives through assisted suicide are glorified in the media and in our daily conversations, we send the message that suicide is indeed a rationale, and perhaps even a preferred, answer to our physical and/or existential suffering. This is a very dangerous perspective that has deadly reverberations in our vulnerable youth.

Tom Perille, Englewood

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Colorado needs nuclear energy to address emissions cost-effectively

Re: “Is nuclear power becoming cool in Colorado?” Oct. 13 news story

Judith Kohler’s October 13 article, “Is nuclear power becoming cool in Colorado?” highlights an important moment for our state. As Colorado transitions away from coal, it’s time to recognize that nuclear power is essential to providing clean, 24/7, reliable and affordable power to our state.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) now under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) use passive safety systems that can cool themselves without human intervention or external power, making them safer. Their compact, factory-built design shortens construction times, limits financing risk, and lowers overall costs — the very issues that plagued earlier plants like Fort St. Vrain.

While wind and solar should be a part of the clean energy mix, we need to be careful about becoming like California, which currently generates 57% from renewables, but has energy prices 40-50% above the national average, and still must import 20-30% of its power from neighboring states.

Contrary to Dennis Wamsted’s assertions in the article, advanced nuclear energy is no longer “on paper.” Both China and Russia have operating SMRs and more in the pipeline. The NRC has formally licensed two of NuScale’s designs, and is reviewing a number of others on an expedited timeline. TerraPower (led by Bill Gates) has broken ground on an SMR in Wyoming and is exploring additional sites in Utah. Kairos has started construction on a reactor in Tennessee. This is all happening now, and Colorado should be a part of this next generation of nuclear energy.

Melinda Alankar, Littleton

Publicly funded schools cannot be religious-based

Taxpayers in Pueblo’s School District 49, and across Colorado, should be alarmed by the newly announced partnership between an Education ReEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services and Riverstone Academy, which proudly identifies itself as Colorado’s first “Christian” public elementary school.

At first glance, the arrangement may sound like an innovative approach to education. But peel back the layers, and a far more troubling picture emerges. Public funds — your tax dollars — are now being funneled into a school that explicitly identifies with a religious denomination. That’s not “choice.” That’s an erosion of the constitutional wall separating church and state — one that protects both religion and government from dangerous entanglement.

Even more disturbing, District 49’s own superintendent, Peter Hilts, recently admitted during a public board meeting that fees charged to families are treated as district “revenue” and can be spent “wherever” leadership decides. When taxpayer and parent money can be redirected at will — and when public funds are used to advance religious education — the potential for abuse skyrockets.

This isn’t about faith. It’s about accountability and the rule of law. The Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue case cited to justify this partnership does not give public entities carte blanche to fund religion. Colorado’s Constitution is crystal clear: no public money shall aid any church or sectarian purpose.

If this precedent stands, Colorado will have opened the door to publicly funded religious governance, the very danger our founders warned against.

Ryan A Brown, Colorado Springs

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The Lower Basin is doing our part for the Colorado River

Re: “California and Arizona’s water negotiators wrong to target Colorado,” Oct. 12 editorial

The editorial misrepresented both facts and intent.

In a perfect encapsulation of the us-vs-them mentality pervading the Colorado River Basin, my recent quote in the Los Angeles Times calling for all of the Basin States to abandon legal hardlines for a compromise solution was reinterpreted by the Post’s Editorial Board as “over-the-top hyperbole” and “accus[ing] the upper basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico of clinging to ‘their most aggressive and rigid dreamland legal positions.’”

As tempting as it is to look outward rather than inward for the solution to dwindling runoff and storage in the Colorado River Basin, that approach leads only to failure.

California, Arizona, and Nevada (the Lower Basin States) have not been sitting idly by in the face of this historic drought. Over the past two decades, collective Lower Basin actions have raised the elevation of Lake Mead by nearly 190 feet. From 2023 through the end of 2026, we are projected to cut water use by a staggering 7.5 million acre-feet, more than double the Upper Basin’s annual use.

Going forward, we have proposed annual cuts to the Lower Basin that dwarf current commitments, with those reductions expanding to the Upper Basin only if hydrology worsens. In all the proposals discussed so far, the Lower Basin has offered to take on 85% or more of the needed cuts.

Lower Basin representatives are also acting to protect the farms and families we represent, who make up three-quarters of the Basin’s residents. We cannot accept a solution in which the Upper Basin does not meaningfully participate.

We are running out of time. New Colorado River rules must be adopted before 2026. The key issue is how all seven Basin States will share in the cuts necessary to live with less water.

Scapegoating downstream may feel satisfying, but it solves nothing. The only way forward is through compromise and cooperation — not falsehoods and finger-pointing.

JB Hamby, El Centro, Calif.

Editor’s note: Hamby is Chairman of the Colorado River Board of California.

Supreme Court hearing is another case of Colorado targeting Christians

Re: “Fighting Colorado for the free speech I need and my clients deserve in my office,” Oct. 12 commentary

In her commentary, Christian counselor Kaley Chiles wrote, “My calling is simple: to listen with compassion to my clients and to walk with them through their struggles.” But, as she rightly contends,  the State of Colorado has passed a law legally forbidding her to help her clients.

There was a time when Chiles would have been commended for her service. To its credit,  the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear her case.

In Colorado, Christian proprietors have been repeatedly targeted for exercising their free exercise of religion. Why then should it be surprising that Chiles has been targeted for refusing to “parrot a government-approved viewpoint” that inveighs against her religious beliefs? Isn’t it the Christian faith, after all, that is under siege in Colorado?

Brian Stuckey, Denver

Re: “Conversion therapy: Justices seem skeptical of ban in Colorado case,” Oct. 8 news story

The Supreme Court oral arguments focused a lot on the free speech of the therapist versus the harm done to the youth client. I am an 83-year-old gay man, who got married and had two children before I came out at 43 to overcome my severe depression. I had been programmed by my Catholic priest confessor to deny my sexuality so that I even believed it myself.

The free speech argument supposes that it is a friendly conversation between two more or less equal people, not the situation of a confused, afraid adolescent and a trained, verbally adroit adult. That is on top of a social context that is strongly biased — or the parents wouldn’t be bringing their child to the therapist in the first place. The free speech argument stinks.

John D. Ferguson, Denver

Political appointees are to blame for EPA slide away from science

Re: “EPA’s roll back of greenhouse gas finding will only endanger communities like mine in Adams County,” Oct. 12 commentary

Your urging to the Environmental Protection Aagency is no better than standing at the grave of your favorite scientist and urging them to awake! Science began falling prey to political appointees in the early 2000’s, when the division between the two political parties began to heat up to the melting point we see today.

The science that protects us from the cancer we may get 30 years later is fragile and easily upended by political appointees’ non-caring decisions. Ignoring simple science leaves us asking when will the next major waterborne disease outbreaks occur like in Gideon, Missouri, and Alamosa, Colorado? People died in both cases.

Ignoring more complex science leaves us with hundreds of years of neurologic damage to our children by leaving lead pipe in the ground. The EPA is aggressively ignoring the apex of scientific complexity: climate change, which involves all fields of science and is an existential threat to people we will never meet. Political appointees are actively quashing and eliminating these experts. Putting this in perspective, political appointees are performing the last body slam to an almost dead body of science at EPA. We might as well be asking Sauron (Lord of the Rings) for peace. They have abandoned empathy for power.

Robert Clement, Littleton

Thank you for volunteering for medical studies

Re: “Man is a scientific unicorn who’s dodging Alzheimer’s,” Oct. 12 news story

Thank you to Doug Whitney and others like him who volunteer to be studied for years and submit to physical tests. He is helping and giving and I thank God that he is willing. He is also a Naval veteran. A hero in so many areas.

Deanna R Walworth, Brighton

Where is Trump’s outrage for violence in Mississippi?

Re: “Homecoming celebrations turn deadly; eight are killed in separate shootings,” Oct. 12 news story

Trump claims to be the president who advocates for law and order. But an article published in The Denver Post: “Homecoming celebrations turn deadly, eight are killed in separate shootings” covered that in Mississippi, on separate sides of the state, high school homecoming celebrations ended in gunfire with at least eight people dead, including one pregnant woman, twenty more wounded and four in critical condition being flown to hospitals.

Sure sounds like a situation for Trump to call in the National Guard and maybe the military to quell the violence. But wait, this is Mississippi, a state that supported him and everyone knows violence and lawlessness only occur in cities like Chicago, Washington D.C. and Portland, Oregon, cities that did not support him. Apparently, when Trump took his oath of office, he did not understand it included all Americans and all states. He seems to feel he has right to seek revenge on all who did not support him, even though they are probably the majority.

Steve Nash, Centennial

Build the Burnham Yards stadium, and hurry

Re: “Penner talks early stages of stadium design,” Oct. 11 sports story

In October of 1964, I caught my first live Bronco game sitting in the temporary east stands at the old Bears Stadium. It was my first and coach Jack Faulkner’s last – the fans rolled out a large ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ sign in the second half as we were losing again – and I fell in love with the team. Been through a couple stadium moves since and hope to see the first game at Burnham Yards before I wing it. My request to ownership is don’t dawdle. I’ll be 91 in 2031, and I fear my beer is going flat.

Harry Puncec, Lakewood

Office of the Independent Monitor is doing good work for Denver

Re: “Audit: Police oversight office does too much work in secret,” Sept. 23 news story

The role of the Office of the Independent Monitor is difficult and often misunderstood. Unfortunately, headlines and articles like the Denver Post’s, “Denver’s police oversight office does too much work in secret, audit finds,” do little to improve public understanding of the complex legal environment the OIM operates in or the challenges they have already overcome in building a nationally recognized oversight model.

The Citizen Oversight Board was established to serve as an independent body charged with evaluating the effectiveness of the Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM). With access to the confidential materials the OIM handles, we conduct rigorous assessments and publish our findings in annual reports. We take this responsibility seriously and consistently urge the OIM to leverage every available resource to deliver updates that are accessible, relevant, and informative to the public.

Over the past two decades, the ordinances guiding the Office of the Independent Monitor (OIM) have been revised multiple times to strengthen its capacity to serve the public effectively. We welcome the opportunity this audit report presents to evaluate whether additional changes to the ordinance are warranted.

However, sensationalized headlines do little to advance meaningful reform. They undermine the progress Denver has made in building a robust oversight framework and fail to foster a deeper public understanding of the complex environment in which the OIM operates.

Julia Richman, Denver

Editor’s note: Richman is chairman of Denver’s Citizen Oversight Board, which oversees the Office of the Independent Monitor.

Why are we chasing the mythical Antifa again?

Right-wing sources claimed that members of “Antifa” were in the crowd that stormed the Capitol on January 6. Since then, over 1,200 people have been arrested and charged for their part in the insurrection including The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers but no one identified as “Antifa” was arrested.  Was this because it was a left-wing conspiracy, or were MAGA folks looking for a Yeti?

Over the past 4+ years, no “Antifa” sightings have occurred – no FBI or ICE arrests, no word about their leaders; their organization, their funding, their internal communications, their secret handshake, etc.

Now the babble about them is back.

Like a Yeti, when the first Antifa member is caught and confesses, let’s have a press event and expose the “entire”  structure of the organization.

Until then, common sense says we are chasing a Yeti …

Curt Anderson, Broomfield

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No on 310: Protect small businesses in Denver

Re: “Bloomberg gives $1.5M to help save flavored-tobacco ban,” Oct. 9 news story

As ballots begin arriving in mailboxes, small business owners like me are standing up to a New York billionaire who has poured $1.6 million into keeping Denver’s flavored tobacco ban in place. This brings the total to more than $2 million raised to influence the outcome of Referendum 310, funding a wave of misleading ads aimed at confusing voters.

This measure gives Denver voters the opportunity to restore local control and allow the sale of flavored vape products to adults 21 and older. It is not about kids — it is already illegal to sell these products to anyone under 21. What’s really at stake is fairness for responsible small businesses and whether Denver keeps $13 million a year in local revenue that currently funds critical services like preschool, K-12, and public safety.

The No on 310 campaign is powered by Colorado-based small business owners who believe that local decisions should be made by local voters, not out-of-state billionaires. These are family-run stores that have served their communities for years and now find themselves fighting to survive against a massive, well-funded campaign that doesn’t understand our city or our economy.

Voting No on 310 protects small businesses, saves local jobs, and ensures that $13 million stays here in Denver — supporting the schools, safety, and community services we all rely on. This is about standing up for local families, local workers, and the right for responsible adults to make their own decisions.

Kristen Hensel, Denver

Editor’s note: Hensel owns Rusty’s Vape and Smoke Shop.

Yes on 310: Fight tobacco industry

In reference to ballot measure 310, the vaping ban, one needs to recognize that the addictive qualities of nicotine are only surpassed by cocaine and heroin. So ignore the subterfuge being generated by the tobacco/vaping industry.

The bottom line is that vaped nicotine produces a better revenue profile over time than cigarettes because vaping doesn’t kill off its addicts. Of course, the “industry” wants to get as many people “hooked” on nicotine as they can. Regrettably, many people will be paying for this addiction for their entire lives — much to the delight of the industry.

Please vote “Yes” on 310 to retain the ban on vaping products in Denver.

Guy Wroble, Denver

Zoning and the essence of Lakewood

Re: “Housing crunch: 2 suburbs, 2 paths,” Oct. 5 news story

The zoning issue that is engulfing Lakewood is a clash of ideas about what Lakewood should become.  Many see a change to higher density as necessary to make the city vibrant and affordable, while others view density as obliterating the essence of Lakewood, that is, open space and trees — what people moved to Lakewood for.

With the proposed zoning plan, which drastically reduces the sizes of residential lots (to as small as 1,500 square feet), the city council is pitting a population that wants to live in Lakewood and buy an affordable home against people who already live there and bought specifically for larger lots.

In a sense, the new zoning is a taking.  An existing homeowner can still do what he wants but he has no control over adjacent properties, the size and density of which were guaranteed when he bought.  Also, there is no assurance of affordability once a developer is in the picture, and the city of Lakewood has no accounting of how many affordable units have been built, at least the number has not been made public when asked in council meetings.

The burden of infrastructure — more water taps, sewage lines, and roadways — has not been figured into the densification projection (check out the traffic on Wadsworth Boulevard now).

We are told that the change will be gradual, with no bulldozers showing up en masse on January 1st. Cut to the story of the frog who does not realize he is cooking in the pot that gradually warms to boiling.

C. Greenman, Lakewood

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