What better week to talk about the weather, near and far away, eh Temperature readers?
While we hunker down tonight flipping between the baseball playoffs and scary footage of Hurricane Milton approaching Tampa Bay, we’ve also got evening screen doors open after seemingly weeks of 80-degree Front Range autumn afternoons. This all must make for a pretty weird moisture-situation map for the U.S., right?
Correct.
Here’s the latest version of one of our favorite visceral looks at the state of U.S. climate conditions, the drought monitor map:
Yes, gushers of hurricane-driven water have washed away all yellow/orange drought spots in the southeastern U.S., creating horrendously destructive flooding along the way. Meanwhile, what started out as a decent water year for 2024 in the West has dried up into expanding orange blocks on the Front Range.
It is your reminder that ongoing climate change makes this map more volatile. The snowmaking guns at Colorado’s ski areas are starting up, but they’ll be shooting mist onto some pretty warm ground for a while. Weather reports are increasingly a commentary on public policy. We’ll try to keep you up on the facts.
On to the news … thanks for joining us.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
CLIMATE
Ballot issue won’t answer existential questions about RTD
38 million
Number of annual rider boardings RTD has lost since 2015
Their ridership has fallen nearly 40%. Fares are paying for only 5% of the budget. The downtown that your entire model pointed buses and trains to is emptying out of workers. Some riders on near-empty buses are being subsidized at $35 a pop.
And every time there’s a train breakdown or a bus driver calls in sick, passengers have nothing better to do with their waiting time than make those mistakes go viral from their cellphones.
Whether the problems are societal shifts or self-inflicted, you gotta admit it ain’t easy being RTD.
The agency has a sprawling mandate, to provide public transit for 3 million residents over all or parts of eight counties, with an obligation to serve low-income and disabled customers with no options as well as impatient suburban commuters with any number of alternatives.
On this fall 2024 ballot, metro area voters are being asked to address only a tiny slice of those big issues. The 7A question asks voters to let RTD keep all of its future sales tax revenues, rather than being forced by TABOR limits to rebate portions of it when revenue exceeds the growth caps. Depending on the year, the vote would let RTD hang onto a few million up to $60 million of RTD’s annual billion-dollar budget.
Yet it may be a good test of public sentiment about transit in general. Only a few percent of metro area residents actually use RTD in a given year, but a majority are being asked to endorse RTD’s direction through the 7A ballot measure.
In 2025 and 2026, the agency faces new challenges. There is strong sentiment in the legislature and the governor’s office for more statewide oversight of the metro-focused agency, whether by altering how RTD’s board is selected or by steering RTD spending on new transit lines.
A big bet by RTD and the state Department of Transportation on the future of public transportation, Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT, gets underway in earnest in 2025 as the East Colfax project tears up lanes and public parking on a busy avenue in favor of more frequent bus service. RTD and CDOT are also moving forward on BRT on the Diagonal Highway, aka Colorado 119 between Boulder and Longmont. CDOT is exploring whether to expand BRT to heavily traveled Federal and Colorado boulevards.
RTD could see access to new capital for building out long-sought transit spokes from Denver to Boulder and Longmont, and deeper into north Adams County. But that money, through new fees imposed by the 2024 legislature, will also come with strings on how RTD can use the grants.
Clean air advocates want public transportation to contribute more to solving the northern Front Range’s worsening ozone air pollution, with EPA mandates to lower emissions now considered “severe.” RTD and other agencies have tried fare-free summer months, and RTD has also made the free rides for youth program a year-round offer.
Front Range Passenger Rail wants to extend commuter rail service from Fort Collins to Pueblo, and would need a public sales tax vote in the next couple of years to raise money. Rail advocates would need to work with RTD to integrate rail services, but also promise improvements on what RTD has been doing.
Meanwhile, RTD’s other public image challenges continue, with ongoing safety perceptions and social issues of RTD stops and properties remaining a gathering point for people who are homeless. Metro mental health providers are cutting back on co-responder programs that helped RTD and other public agencies cope with conflicts that can scare off commuters.
So, perhaps the RTD 7A issue this November isn’t so simple after all. Read more about the measure in today’s ColoradoSun.com and stay tuned for the results.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
CLIMATE
Feds help “repower” an innovative Alamosa solar farm
You think your home renovations are pricey these days.
The federal government is extending a $16.6 million loan and a $1 million grant to the owner of a 35 MW solar farm in the San Luis Valley, meant to upgrade the once-innovative array and boost Colorado’s renewable energy production.
The solar farm near Alamosa used concentrating technology to increase the power available relative to the area of the panels. When Whetstone Energy bought the solar array in 2022, the company said it intended “to refurbish the facility by replacing the existing high concentrating systems with a standard photovoltaic system that may also include an energy storage system.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the big award for Whetstone last week as part of its Rural Energy for America Program (REAP — get it? U.S. agencies continue to innovate in insufferable acronyms). When rebuilt, the solar farm could power nearly 8,000 homes, the USDA announcement said.
The Biden administration periodically touts new spending from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, both of which had significant new subsidies for renewable energy projects. The names of Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, both Democrats, and Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert were attached to the grant announcement.
Whetstone didn’t return calls on the grant, but United Power, which is rapidly expanding its renewable portfolio after breaking away from Tri-State Generation, touted its energy purchase contract with the farm.
“This project is a great fit for United Power’s innovative energy plan, as we build a portfolio of clean power sources for our members,” United Power chief energy resource officer Dean Hubbuck said in an email. “Additionally, refurbishing and modernizing an existing solar field will help to extend the life of a proven energy production facility. Whetstone Power’s investment today will benefit United Power members for years to come.”
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE CLIMATE NEWS
HEALTH
Kaiser patients get Rose, P/SL as hospital options
3,750
The number of babies delivered in 2023 at Intermountain Health St. Joseph Hospital in Denver
Kaiser Permanente in Colorado is adding two Denver hospitals, baby-factory Rose Medical Center and Presbyterian St. Luke’s in Uptown, to its hospital services network, further shifting the ground under the state’s hospital groups.
Rose, the most popular birthing hospital in Colorado, and P/SL are owned by HCA HealthOne, one of the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chains. Kaiser’s Colorado patients already have access to in-network hospital services at HealthOne’s metro hospitals like Medical Center of Aurora, Sky Ridge and others.
“Expanding our relationship with these reputable health organizations is part of our long-term strategy to offer our current and future members … more choice and access to high-quality care where you live and work,” Kaiser wrote in a message to members this week.
Kaiser Permanente’s release says metro area patients, in the hundreds of thousands for the HMO, will still have access to Intermountain Health‘s St. Joseph, Good Samaritan, and recently moved Lutheran hospitals. But Intermountain Health officials told The Denver Post that doctors and their patients would be moving away from those hospitals in coming months as Kaiser Permanente emphasizes new links with Common Spirit’s St. Anthony hospitals and the expanded HealthOne alliance.
Under Kaiser Permanente’s model, insured patients see individual medical providers employed within Kaiser’s system and use primary care medical offices owned by Kaiser, but use hospitals owned by others for overnight care, births and surgery. Kaiser doctors typically provide care in those hospitals for Kaiser members, meaning the two systems are heavily integrated.
Kaiser hasn’t provided much insight into the negotiations behind the shift — it had long been associated with many of the hospitals now owned by Intermountain, with some Kaiser clinics located adjacent to them. But the shift comes as Intermountain builds its presence in the insurance market, through a carrier called Select Health, as well as a clinically integrated network in partnership with UCHealth.
The ripple effects could be dramatic. As we told you in this newsletter earlier this year, Rose dethroned St. Joe’s a few years ago as the state’s No. 1 hospital for births. Last year, St. Joe’s fell to fourth in the state for births, also sitting behind the University of Colorado Hospital and Denver Health.
Shifting Kaiser’s patients from St. Joe’s to Rose would further widen the gap and leave a big dent in one of St. Joe’s main sources of revenue. (P/SL, which is right across the street from St. Joe’s, also delivers babies but ranked only 18th last year.)
We’ll keep following along as this plays out in the months and years ahead. The HealthOne hospitals won’t be in-network for Kaiser members until 2025, while Kaiser’s contract with Intermountain runs for more than a year beyond that.
Section by Michael Booth | Reporter
MORE HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
Where have all the babies gone? To Custer County, apparently.
Speaking of babies and where they are born, Colorado’s fertility rate is plunging.
If you read Erica Breunlin’s excellent piece from earlier this year on Denver’s baby bust, you already knew that. (And if you HAVEN’T read it, stop what you’re doing right now and click this link.)
As Erica reported, Denver saw the second-largest decline in births among the 100 most populous counties in the country from 2021 to 2022. But Denver also stood out at home, too. The county saw the state’s biggest percentage decline in its fertility rate between the 2000s and the 2020s, according to a Temp analysis of data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Compared to the 2000s, today there are roughly 35 fewer babies born each year in Denver per 1,000 women of child-bearing age.
Colorado hit a statewide fertility peak in the 2000s, a decade during which the fertility rate averaged nearly 69 births per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. So far, the rate in the 2020s is averaging roughly 52 births. That’s a 25% decline.
But some counties have defied this trend, none more so than Custer County in southern Colorado. In the 2000s, Custer averaged 45 births per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. The rate is now up to 74 births — a 66% increase.
Do you have insight into the reasons behind the great Custer County baby boom? Hit us up at newsletters@coloradosun.com.
Section by John Ingold | Reporter
Thanks for sticking with us for a wide-ranging survey of The Temperature in all its meanings. Hold some good thoughts for your Florida friends, and we’ll check back in next week.
— Michael & John
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