Greetings readers, and welcome to that time of the year when I think about downloading a birdsong app to learn all the names of my neighborhood chirpers. (Narrator: she didn’t, she won’t.)
In other words, it sounds like spring out there.
I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between a finch and a chickadee, a wren and a warbler. But I still try to tune in to the treetops on my morning dog walk, listening for the squeaky fence bird, the Honda brakes bird, the you-should-probably-get-that-checked-out bird, the Amazon Prime truck reverse hum bird (or that’s just an Amazon Prime truck in reverse).
So I can’t really tell you what birds hang out along my local stretch of the Coal Creek trail (except for a rafter of turkeys that I’ve watched parade around for the past year), but I do appreciate their tiny construction site sounding symphony every morning.
Hear that? It’s the rest of the Temperature! Let’s get to it.
Reporter
TEMP CHECK
LAWN EQUIPMENT
Gas-powered mowers have to go this summer, as Regulation 29 kicks in
Walk into any Front Range hardware store right now and you’ll see the signs of spring. Outdoor grills clustered around the doors. Hedge trimmers, lawn mowers and leaf blowers staged front and center.
If you live on the Front Range, spring might seem even “greener” than usual. The number of companies pushing battery-powered lawn equipment — over their gas-powered counterparts — now includes household names like Husqvarna, Makita, Milwaukee and DeWalt, while newer companies like Chevron-owned EGO are taking up more floorspace at the local Lowe’s.
Some of it has to do with changing technology. Electric lawn equipment is quieter, fume-free and doesn’t rattle joints like its gas-powered counterparts.
“The transition has been going on a lot longer than people realize,” David Sabados, spokesperson for the Regional Air Quality Council, told The Colorado Sun, noting that the RAQC has been working on electrification efforts for about two decades.
The original mowers came with cords, not batteries, and “most people prefer a battery for the obvious reason of not running over a cord,” Sabados said. “And battery technology has come a long way. It has really, really seen this acceleration over the past few years. It’s become a lot lighter, smaller, cheaper and longer lasting.”
Batteries for commercial grade equipment are finally catching up to the residential equipment, which has been gaining traction for the past few years, he added.
And it couldn’t come a season too soon.
Beginning this summer, gas-powered lawn equipment is banned on state property from June 1-Aug. 31. Same goes for all public entities — city, county and federally owned properties, and schools — in the nine Front Range cities in the EPA’s ozone non-attainment area.
It’s the first year the state will implement Regulation 29, a statewide air quality rule that attempts to cut the emissions from small-engined lawn care equipment. That’s your mowers, trimmers, blowers, cutters, splitters, pruners and power washers.
“Even though they’re small machines, they produce a large amount of really harmful pollution,” said Kirsten Schatz, advocate for the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, or CoPIRG. “It’s counterintuitive, the handheld tools are even more polluting, pound for pound, than the bigger mowers. And all of this stuff is even more polluting than the cars and trucks we drive.”
Overall, lawn and garden equipment is lower on the ozone contributor list than oil and gas, vehicles, construction sites and agriculture. But it’s also a low-hanging fruit in the big, branchy tree that makes up the Front Range’s perpetual ozone problem.
Regulation 29 was adopted in February 2024, after years of debate in the state legislature, where bills to ban gas-powered lawn equipment have been planted, pruned, propagated and repotted for years. In other words, versions of the new rule appeared during the legislative session since 2022.
While the regulation will only apply to commercial landscaping on public properties, Sabados said that the RAQC will propose expanded regulations later this year.
“Starting with local governments makes sense. They’ll go first and show this can happen,” he said.
Converting commercial users would account for about 80% of the lawn-powered pollution, anyway, Schatz said, so it makes sense to start with them.
Today, CoPIRG is partnering with 11 retailers and manufacturers of electric lawn equipment to demo the latest in snow and leaf blowers and zero turn mowers.
“It’s like doing anything new. Especially in the commercial space, people have been doing this work day in and day out for years,” said Schatz. “They know how to use and maintain engines. They know how to fill up a gas tank and mix the oil. So there’s just a learning curve around using batteries. I think sometimes people get stuck on that.”
The event invites landscapers to come kick tires and crank some chainsaws. Or, at least, flip a few switches to “on.”
“I think we’ve got momentum,” Schatz said. “The bottom line is it’s pretty absurd — it just doesn’t make sense — to put our breathing and our hearing at risk from doing yard work. We have better options.”
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
HEALTH
HIV prevention at risk as Colorado cases climb
A Denver nonprofit that provides HIV prevention and treatment to thousands of people stands to lose as much as $1.14 million in federal funding if, as threatened, the Trump administration closes or cuts the CDC’s division of HIV prevention.
Mass layoffs at the federal Department of Health and Human Services began Tuesday, including teams that led HIV surveillance and research. It’s unclear at this point whether the division is at risk of closing, or whether it might move to another agency.
Any loss of funding could devastate the work of Vivent Health, which has 2,000 patients who attend medical appointments in Denver. The nonprofit works with people who have HIV or are at risk of contracting the virus transmitted through unsafe sexual practices and injecting drugs.
If the federal division is gutted, Denver would be one of the most impacted cities in the country, said Matt Pagnatti, Vivent’s director of state and local government relations. Colorado had 15,414 people living with HIV in 2023, according to the most recent statistics from the state health department. The state sees 400-500 new diagnoses per year, a number that has increased since the pandemic.
HIV is preventable, thanks to a drug called PReP, and treatable, thanks to a combination of daily medications that can suppress the virus to the point it is “undetectable” in the bloodstream. Vivent provides medication management in its east Denver medical offices and pharmacy, and has an outreach team visiting homeless encampments to offer clean needles and information about PReP.
Cutting HIV prevention would not save the government money in the long run, Pagnatti said. A new case of HIV costs an average of $500,000 in lifetime medical expenses — far more than it costs to provide preventive medication.
“This administration talks a lot about trying to tackle waste, fraud and abuse, and claim that is their ultimate goal, but these types of cuts are ultimately very wasteful,” Pagnatti said. Disrupting funding “is only going to result in more cases of HIV and that is going to be fiscally irresponsible as well as the impact on people’s lives.
“It doesn’t make any sense no matter how you try to spin it.”
Section by Jennifer Brown | Reporter
HEAT MAP
MORE CLIMATE AND HEALTH NEWS
CHART OF THE WEEK
2018 stunk, according to a dataset of odor complaints made to the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment.
That dataset was analyzed by a team of Colorado researchers led by Priyanka deSouza, assistant professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado Denver, dug into a decade’s worth of DDPHE data to figure out where the city’s stinkiest facilities are, and where people are most likely to feel their effects. The results were published in a recent report.
What researchers found was that “less privileged” census block groups were more likely to contain a malodorous facility, but that most complaints didn’t come from those areas.
“Most complaints were received in gentrifying areas, like RiNo” deSouza said. “And now a big question is: why that is the case?”
DeSouza has some hypotheses.
It could be that people moving into the city are “just not used to these smells yet, and could find them more jarring than longterm residents,” she said.
The complaint discrepancy could also be due to historical inaction, leading people in the more pungent neighborhoods feeling “like their voices won’t be heard,” she said. “They may just be frustrated.”
DeSouza wants to build on this study to explore who is filing the complaints, and how Denver can empower everyone to use their odor ordinance as intended.
“Municipalities typically don’t have much say in overall air pollution planning, that typically happens at the state level,” deSouza said. “But odor is one of the things that municipalities can control.”
In Denver, more than five complaints from separate households over a 30-day period will trigger “nuisance provisions,” according to Gregg Thomas, director at DDPHE. That could mean a review of operations, or developing an odor control plan.
Certain industries are automatically required to submit odor control plans, like pet food manufacturing (the Purina factory was a big target of complaints), asphalt manufacturing, petroleum refining and marijuana growing.
As of 2023, 265 facilities had been required to submit odor control plans to DDPHE — 257 were “marijuana-related.” Eight were non-marijuana-related, according to the report.
“I think we need to figure out how people are thinking and using this odor complaint mechanism and ensuring that people actually take it seriously,” deSouza said. “They should understand the weight that their complaints have.”
Section by Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
Thanks for being here this fine midmorning. Now go outside, listen deeply, take a big breath in and report any strange odors.
— Parker & John & Jen
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