The aviation fuel/lead exposure connection 

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Hey there, Colorado, and welcome to another glorious Wednesday — Temperature day.

You know, sometimes it’s good to get an ego check, which is what I had last week when I ventured to the rarified confines of the Governor’s Mansion (erm carriage house) to cover a news conference. I proudly put on my leaving-the-house-to-do-serious-work outfit, packed my I-am-a-serious-reporter-asking-serious-questions-here notebook, glad-handed sources I’ve seen mostly only on video calls for the past several years and found a seat.

Time to do my Big Important Job.

Then, as Gov. Jared Polis walked to the lectern, he paused to plunk Gia, the first dog, down on a seat next to me. I was suddenly in the pup section.

There we were, two terriers in the front row of the Very Important Press Conference, my vision of myself totally deflated, and then the charming little fluffball, no stranger to big events, proceeded to curl up and take a nap. Which was pretty adorable.

The thing about ego checks is sometimes they make you appreciate that you have better company where you are than where you’re striving to be. I will say, though, between the two of us, I think I asked better questions.

We have A LOT of news to get to today, so let’s dive in.

TEMP CHECK

HEALTH

A state analysis of blood lead levels adds fuel to the avgas debate

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has conducted an analysis showing higher-than-average levels of lead in the blood of children living close to airports, but the levels still fall below federal standards.

The analysis has not yet been released officially, but Dr. Ned Calonge, CDPHE’s chief medical officer and an expert on lead screening, provided Westminster City Council members a briefing on the analysis during a study session last month. Calonge said the analysis is being peer-reviewed for future publication.

The findings are sure to intensify a fierce debate over the continued use of leaded aviation fuels at airports. Federal officials are working to phase out the use of lead in aviation fuel, known as avgas, by 2030. But concern over lead pollution from airplane exhaust has caused state and local governments to try to move quicker.

The town of Superior and the Boulder County commissioners earlier this year sued Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport over complaints about practices that could increase lead pollution. Health leaders have spoken out on the issue, and a bill at the state legislature would apply pressure to airports to phase out leaded fuels. The bill is facing opposition from the owners and pilots of small planes, which are the kind that use leaded fuel.

CDPHE’s study looked at existing data on blood lead levels in people under the age of 18 and cross referenced the results by how close the kids lived to one of 12 airports. The study’s results were aggregated for all airports — meaning the study can’t say whether kids living near a specific airport have higher lead levels than kids living near another. The study also did not make any findings about the levels of lead in the environment around the airports, and it didn’t provide any other information about the kids’ health.

The study found that the average blood lead level for kids in Colorado is 2.08 micrograms per deciliter. But, within 3 miles of an airport, that level creeps above average, while it drops below average 4 or more miles away.

Children living within 2 miles of an airport have a blood lead level of 2.19 micrograms per deciliter, and children living within a half-mile have a level of 2.29 micrograms per deciliter, according to the study.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “reference level” for lead — meaning the measure the federal government uses to assess whether a child has a higher-than-normal blood lead level — is 3.5 micrograms per deciliter.

Calonge told Westminster council members that the study’s findings ultimately show that Colorado is succeeding at limiting kids’ exposure to lead. In the 1970s, before lead-based paint and lead in gasoline were banned, pediatric blood lead levels in Colorado averaged above 10 micrograms per deciliter.

“Everything that we have done in lead abatement and in addressing lead issues is working, and we are driving blood lead levels down over time,” Calonge said.

People can also be exposed to lead in the soil, and Calonge said lead-based paint in older homes remains the state’s biggest exposure source.

But his comments didn’t satisfy all Westminster council members. Council member Obi Ezeadi called CDPHE’s analysis a “black box” for trying to assess the risk from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, which sits just north of the city. Other council members raised concerns about what Calonge acknowledged are relatively meager testing rates, which could be hiding more worrisome data.

You can read more about this story in the coming days at ColoradoSun.com.

EQUITY

Colorado’s enormous health gaps

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Colorado’s health care system, like many states’ across the country, has profound racial and ethnic inequities, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund.

The nonprofit think tank last week released an analysis of racial and ethnic health gaps in the United States. The report found that Colorado’s health care system is among the best in the country for people who are white, ranking seventh out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. But the state ranked 21st for people who are Hispanic and 15th for people who are Black.

The report ranked Colorado’s health care system better than average overall, but found the state has more severe racial and ethnic disparities than those in other states in the Rocky Mountain region.

The Commonwealth Fund has for years ranked state health care systems using a range of data points on health outcomes, health care access, quality and utilization. Colorado’s health disparities are especially clear in one of those stats: premature deaths from avoidable causes.

Using data from 2020 and 2021, the report authors found that the rate for people who are white in Colorado is 247 deaths per 100,000 population. The rate for people who are Native American or Alaska Natives is more than twice as high at 566.7 deaths per 100,000 people. The rates for people who are Black or Hispanic are also higher, at 471.2 and 355.5 deaths per 100,000 people, respectively.

Doctors who spoke to Colorado Public Radio for its story on the report said they were not surprised by the findings but said health disparities in Colorado have also improved somewhat from previous years.

“I think that we still have not addressed the root of the cause or the social issues from the beginning,” Dr. Sixto Giusti Torres, the director of the Hispanic Transplant Program at UCHealth, told CPR.

You can read the full Commonwealth Fund report — and download more detailed state fact sheets — here.

MORE HEALTH NEWS

• How rural Colorado’s “cowboy up” culture has led to high suicide rates. Isolation, loneliness, stress from debt or drought or pests or predators — they all contribute to the agriculture industry’s shockingly high suicide rate in Colorado. But so, too, does a culture that can make it difficult to communicate when you are struggling or to talk with others who might be. Making inroads into that stigma was part of the goal of a two-day workshop in February in Mancos called Buck the Trend. As Jennifer Brown reports, the workshop’s participants are now trying to take the lessons they learned there back to help their communities.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Three deaths in one week left Grand County reeling. In the span of four days, three people with ties to Grand County died — one in a car crash, one in a skiing accident and one by suicide. The deceased ranged in age and where precisely they lived. But the deaths had a profound impact on the county, and caused the county’s already strained mental health services racing to keep up. Tracy Ross writes about how they did it.
  — The Colorado Sun

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CLIMATE

Potential double flare for solar power

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Colorado was once a leader in connecting individual rooftops and community solar gardens to the grid in support of building a renewable energy economy, solar advocates say, but the state fell behind as others wrote more efficient laws or offered enticing incentives.

Two new developments could help push Colorado back toward the top of clean energy lists, those advocates say. Here’s a quick recap:

Colorado’s Energy Office on Monday won a $156 million grant from the federal “Solar for All” program, meant to create low-cost loans and other incentives for low-income families to acquire rooftop solar power. The incentives could also go to multifamily low-income apartment buildings for new solar arrays.

Some of the same people who helped pursue that big federal gift also helped write a bill in the current legislative session that would try to revive Colorado’s lagging community solar programs.

With a community solar garden, a nonprofit or for-profit developer creates an array of a few megawatts on open space within a community. Resident subscribers get a monthly discount off their energy bill, and the developer connects to the grid and sells the energy to Xcel or the local power company. Various assistance programs can provide the subscriptions free or at a discount to income-qualified residents.

“Other markets across the country are bringing on upwards of 100 to 200 megawatts a year of community solar,” said Kevin Cray, senior regional director for policy and government affairs with the Coalition for Community Solar Access. “Colorado, which has the longest standing program, has brought on about 170 megawatts over the last 12 years, so about 14 megawatts a year. I think there have been some systemic issues with the program that have really limited its success.”

The bill would reserve more community garden spaces for low-income subscribers, lock in higher discounts for those who qualify, simplify signups and more. We’ll have more about the two-pronged push for small solar projects later this week at ColoradoSun.com.

PARKS

Rocky wants to increase camping fees — are you OK with that?

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June nights in classic rooms at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park are going for about $350 at the moment. So what would you pay for a classic Rocky Mountain National Park campsite with a view of Longs Peak?

Is $45 a night OK with you? And $55 for one of the new electrical hookup sites at the rebuilt Moraine Park Campground?

Park officials want to raise the nightly camping fee by $10 for the 2025 season in four campgrounds, and are seeking public comments on the proposed $45 rate in the next few weeks. Individual parks have more rights to keep most of their fees onsite to fund more improvements, and RMNP is promising the increase would keep up rehab momentum at the biggest campgrounds.

Moraine Park’s overhaul, which includes more accessible campsites, getting camp pads away from wetlands, new water pipelines and more, is actually being paid for by the Great American Outdoors Act, spokesperson Kyle Patterson notes. Local camping fees, meanwhile, have been used for improvements like replacing all garbage and recycling containers with bear-proof models.

“The park has also gone from zero food storage lockers to 352 in our campgrounds,” Patterson said.

RMNP is accepting online comments on the camping fee increase through May 23 at https://parkplanning.nps.gov/RMNP_FrontcountryCampground_Fees_2024.

Snail mail comments can be sent to Rocky Mountain National Park, Office of the Superintendent,1000 US Highway 36, Estes Park, CO 80517.

MORE CLIMATE NEWS

• Xcel’s costly charger plans cut back by PUC. Xcel had ambitious and expensive plans to create its own charging network for EVs, Mark Jaffe reports. But the Public Utilities Commission pushed back, saying EV networks appear to be developing well on their own without the full Xcel plan that would have been charged to consumers through rate increases.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Firefighting to save Colorado history. Brian Flynn isn’t just a firefighter — he’s one of three fire and fuels archaeologists for the Bureau of Land Management in Colorado. As wildfires increase in frequency and intensity due to climate change, artifacts identified by BLM land surveys are at higher risk of being damaged or lost. When fires aren’t burning, the archaeologists survey the land for pieces of history, while assessing the risks that fire and mitigation tactics pose to these artifacts.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Maybe those archaeology sites need a fighting beaver corps. When wildfire researchers fly over burned areas, they notice oases of green amid the destruction. They’re usually the work of beavers, which create wetlands that slow super fires, Bay Stephens reports. How to better harness their busy work in the West is the next challenge.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Thornton back begging Larimer County for a key permit. Thornton’s growth without more water is stuck at 147,000 residents, and the city needs permission from Larimer County to build the first 10 miles of a water pipeline to secure its Poudre River rights. But Larimer residents who hated it the first time haven’t warmed up much this time around, Michael Booth reports.
  — The Colorado Sun

CHART OF THE WEEK

Colorado officials last week issued a public health order to try to control rising cases of syphilis in the state — especially cases of what is known as congenital syphilis, when babies are infected in utero.

The Sun’s Jennifer Brown first wrote about this issue way back in 2018, when syphilis cases had already seen a significant jump from the early 2000s. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse.

The 1,084 cases identified in 2018 ballooned to 3,266 cases last year, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. (These are cases found at any stage in the multistage disease, meaning they could be either active or latent infections.)

Cases of congenital syphilis have risen, as well. When Jennifer wrote about the issue in 2018, the state was alarmed by five cases of congenital syphilis identified in 2017. Last year, Colorado had 50 cases of congenital syphilis, and there have been at least 25 so far this year, meaning we could potentially see close to 100 cases in 2024.

You can dig into CDPHE’s syphilis data more on the health agency’s website.

HEAT MAP

CLIMATE

• California cruising on wind, water and solar. A Stanford professor tracks more and more days where 100% of Golden State energy needs come from renewable sources.
  — The Cool Down
• How do solar farm neighbors really feel? People within three miles of a solar development are surprisingly positive, but the megafarms cause more bad feelings.
  — Inside Climate News
• The National Park Service has its own housing crisis. Sierra magazine looks at the challenges of finding close by quarters for federal employees.
  — Sierra
• Democrats decide they don’t like Elon Musk’s Teslas. Potential buyer turnoffs from Musk’s toxic X/Twitter postings have hurt the big EV maker at a time it’s suffering other losses.
  — Wall Street Journal 

HEALTH

• VA prosthetics scandal deepens. An official at the VA hospital in Aurora improperly canceled 1,000 orders for prosthetic limbs, hearing aids and other devices that veterans were waiting on and weren’t told were being canceled.
  — The Denver Post
• Children’s Hospital takes an L in court. A federal judge ruled against Children’s Hospital Colorado in a case over the U.S. Defense Department’s decision to change its military health insurance reimbursement scheme.
  — The Gazette
• Nurses protest the use of artificial intelligence in health care. Nurses for Kaiser Permanente in California protested the health systems use of AI technology, saying it could replace nurses’ judgment with robots’.
  — Becker’s
• How an abortion case could affect emergency health care. The U.S. Supreme Court today heard a case about emergency abortions, and the result could impact one of the nation’s bedrock laws for emergency medical access.
  — NPR

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Hey, unlike Gia, you stayed awake all the way until the end! (Hopefully.) In fairness, my canine nemesis is over 100 in dog years. Betcha I won’t still be attending press conferences when I’m that old.

Have a great week and we’ll see you back here next Wednesday.

— John & Michael

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.