It’s a tale of two very different baby-makings.
When boreal toads started reproducing in the wild this year in the Gunnison County high country, Colorado wildlife officials celebrated with everything short of a missile-launch baby reveal. After all, they’d spent years hauling tadpoles uphill in tanker backpacks in hope of restarting wild-born populations of the endangered toads. News that mom and dad were expecting warty offspring was a big win.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, to a late-night news release quietly revealing that the wild-born offspring of another successful species reintroduction will apparently be captured and trucked in secret to an unknown Colorado location, after getting a good talking-to about their behavior.
Wolf puppies, in northern Colorado at least, are not equal to golden retriever puppies. Or even equal to boreal toad tadpoles, if you compare two stories by our Jen Brown side-by-side. Gov. Jared Polis himself literally opened the cage on wolf reintroduction in late 2023, and the state had shared a private citizen’s video of this season’s puppies doing some puppy frolic.
But the gray wolves have been killing livestock in Grand County. Whether it’s a big number of killings in the relative scheme of things is being debated every month at the wildlife commission. But state officials apparently had enough of the complaints, and are moving the pack that had the puppies to what they hope will be a lower-profile location.
All of it is a good reminder that one person’s endangered species is another person’s good-riddance nuisance. We never voted on the toads, who might win elections by bigger majorities than wolves because they eat flies, not baby cows and lambs. What a robust endangered species act program requires is adults in the room who can filter criticism through science and rational perspective.
Godspeed to the randy toads, but Colorado may not be there yet with the wolves.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
ENVIRONMENT
Voting to take the “forever” out of PFAS
$61 million
Portion of the $80 million South Adams water treatment plant coming from a federal grant
It’s a lingering quirk of Colorado taxpayer rights that South Adams County Water and Sanitation District has most of the money to pay for a vital $80 million upgrade to water treatment, but not yet the right to actually spend all of it.
So the water and sanitation district covering 70,000 residents of Commerce City and south Adams County must ask voters to approve a “de-Brucing” measure this fall. Such votes could become commonplace in coming years as local water treatment agencies need to spend federal and state grants to clean up lingering PFAS “forever chemicals” contamination in their supplies.
South Adams broke ground in April on a new plant that should eliminate the area’s problem with both PFAS and dioxane contamination in some wells. The industrial area has suffered from runoff from firefighting and solvent chemicals from local fire departments and industry.
The district won a $61 million federal infrastructure grant for most of the plant’s cost, a key amount that is exempt from requiring a vote.
South Adams plans to make up the rest with a loan from a state revolving fund and other sources, including state, local or nonprofit grants. But the voter-passed Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR, limits growth in spending by government entities throughout Colorado, and South Adams needs to “de-Bruce” to allow some of the extra spending.
Douglas Bruce was the driving force behind the spending limits passed in 1992.
South Adams was one of the clean water providers facing some dire choices as EPA and state officials assessed public health threats from “forever chemicals” in the past few years. The district had shut off certain tainted supply wells to avoid using water with too much PFAS and a solvent called 1,4-dioxane.
In 2022, district officials said they’d be paying Denver Water $2.75 million that year for enough supply to dilute tainted local wells.
“Because of the district’s proactive and aggressive approach to treating for emerging contaminants like PFAS, it already meets the new EPA standards, even though they do not go into effect for five more years,” the district said in a release at the groundbreaking.
“Unfortunately, our community has been disproportionately impacted by environmental challenges,” and a de-Brucing vote would open up “financial resources that can help us continue to provide the high-quality water our ratepayers deserve,” an agency official said.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set aside $9 billion for water agencies around the nation to root out PFAS contamination. But that number is probably just a start. The EPA estimates 6% to 10% of 66,000 public drinking water systems nationally must take action to get under strict new PFAS caps. With even a small city needing $50 million to $100 million for a water treatment plant, that money goes quickly.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
HEALTH
Colorado’s great mosquito bust
In what is normally his busiest time of the year, scientist Greg Ebel is feeling something odd this year. He’s … relaxed?
“It’s been fairly uneventful for the first time in four years,” he said.
Ebel is a professor of microbiology, immunology and pathology at Colorado State University. His wheelhouse is what are known as vector-borne diseases — in particular diseases transmitted by mosquitoes. For years, he has studied West Nile virus and tracked its patterns through a network of traps in the northern Front Range that search for West Nile’s blood-sucking chauffeurs, mosquitoes from the Culex genus.
Last year, traps across the state overflowed with Culex mosquitoes, contributing to the worst West Nile season in decades in Colorado — the worst last year in the entire country. When the season ended, Ebel and other mosquito experts in Colorado worried the giant horde of mosquitoes would over-winter and pop out in spring ready to keep the diseased party going.
But, as we told you last week, that hasn’t happened. Instead, Colorado’s West Nile season has been well below average. In data available as of last week, there’s been only 13 cases of West Nile reported in the state, with only seven hospitalizations and no deaths.
Ebel said he’s seeing similarly low case numbers among the birds that his lab tests for the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program. And his traps are also mostly bare of Culex mosquitoes.
“I can’t really give you a great answer to why that is,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The weather may have something to do with it — this summer has been much hotter and drier than last year’s unusually wet and cool season. But because of how the state manages its water supply, there should still be plenty of water for mosquitoes to lay their eggs in.
Ebel said it’s possible the virus-carrying mosquitoes, gathered in such large numbers, caught a virus themselves.
In his research, he’s noticed that the percentage of mosquitoes carrying West Nile has remained about the same. So that means the virus is still out there, spreading. It’s just there’s not enough mosquitoes around to spread it to that many people.
“There are likely many factors that play into it,” he said.
But, rather than be frustrated by this mystery, Ebel is taking it as a learning opportunity. In trying to better understand West Nile virus, even in a down year, 2024 is a datapoint.
“I have to admit that I was very surprised that it was as low as it is this year,” he said. “So I guess what that tells us is that the early-season (mosquito) population is not coupled to last year’s late-season population.”
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
MORE HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
Where does the wind blow best? Maybe look at where they’re trying to capture it.
This map of existing wind farms shows where the breezes are easy, certainly. Colorado, Kansas and Texas are no surprise, and North Dakota fulfills its drafty reputation. I hadn’t expected the turbine crowds on the Minnesota-Iowa border, though, so that was a revelation.
The map isn’t just a reflection of meteorology, though. It also highlights which states are taking the most aggressive stances against coal-fired power plants, and where states and utilities have taken the most advantage of federal and local renewable energy incentives. Other states have more theoretical wind resources than Colorado, but years ago Colorado set ambitious goals to rid 80% of greenhouse gas emissions from its power sector by 2030. That created a burst of wind energy development in the 2000s and 2010s.
Momentum in renewables has shifted to large solar farms for the moment. We’ll keep an eye out for a useful dot map reflecting (absorbing?) the national locations of solar growth.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
Thanks for joining us in a packed news week. If you’ve got an appetite for more, and we usually do, join us next Wednesday evening for a free online check-in on a very bad ozone season. We’ve got state Air Pollution Control Division chief Michael Ogletree and Regional Air Quality Council leader Mike Silverstein answering a ton of questions about why toxic ozone was so high in metro Denver this year, and whether Colorado is working fast enough to do more about it. Your reader questions will be prominent in the discussion. So reserve time at 6 p.m. Wednesday, or watch later on our YouTube channel, signing up here.
Cheers!
— Michael & John
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