Angel of Shavano Recycling spent 15 years sifting through Chaffee County’s trash collecting its treasures — plastics, cardboard, paper, newspaper, tin and aluminum. But slim profits and bad behavior by customers led the owner, Mickey Barry, to close the gates on the four free community recycling sites. “In the recycling industry the drop sites have […]
Salida
Posted inBusiness, News, Outdoors, Transportation
Transportation board kills plan for trains to return to Colorado’s dormant Tennessee Pass
The Surface Transportation Board on Thursday rejected a plan by a rail operator to revive train traffic on Colorado’s mountainous Tennessee Pass Line. Colorado Midland & Pacific Railway Company — a new division of Texas-based Rio Grande Pacific Corp. — asked the transportation board on Dec. 31, 2020 for streamlined approval of its plan to […]
Posted inBusiness, News, Newsletters, Outsider, Transportation
Potential operator of trains on Colorado’s Tennessee Pass promises rail line wouldn’t transport crude oil
Colorado Midland & Pacific Railroad, which is vying to run trains across the long-dormant Tennessee Pass Line between Cañon City and Gypsum, promises it will never transport crude oil, coal or hazardous materials on the line. The nascent railroad operator’s plan to return trains to the line that has been idle since 1997 riled residents […]
Posted inBusiness, Economy, Environment, Transportation
New plans for rail traffic over Colorado’s Tennessee Pass spark protest from grain-hauling competitor
The Rio Grande Pacific Corp., based in Fort Worth, Texas, has the lease to run trains on the long-dormant lines between Cañon City and Dotsero. But it will be many years before passenger cars and tankers filled with the freight-mover’s crude oil traverse Tennessee Pass — and not just because costs to fix the line […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, Growth, News, Politics and Government
Chaffee County calls for more time, study of contentious Nestlé water-bottling plan
Chaffee County’s commissioners want more analysis of a plan by Nestlé Waters North America to pump as much as 65 million gallons of water a year from the Upper Arkansas River Valley for bottling in Denver. After several meetings in the last two months featuring hours of public input — virtually all of it opposing […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, Growth, News, Transportation
Trains could return to Colorado’s Tennessee Pass, rumble through Leadville under pair of proposals
It’s been 23 years since trains rumbled through the tunnel atop Tennessee Pass. That could change as interest in the dormant Tennessee Pass Line between Cañon City and Dotsero grows. A fledgling railway project in Utah’s Uinta Basin and a billionaire New York City developer with thousands of acres of wheat and an existing rail […]
Posted inBusiness, Coloradans, COVID, Outdoors
Planning for drought has made Colorado whitewater rafting companies ready to weather coronavirus
Whitewater rafting is a staple of Colorado tourism and summertime activities. In 2019, the economic impact of rafting statewide rafting measured $188 million, the second highest in the industry’s history, Colorado River Outfitters Association reported. But business relying on runoff can be a tricky game. There is always the spectre of winter droughts hanging overhead, […]
Posted inEducation, Growth
Colorado’s housing crisis has gotten so bad that small towns are now building people homes
SILVER CLIFF – The vacant lot along First, Second and Third streets is lined by wooden stakes that delineate the Bobcat Subdivision, a site for affordable housing in this southern Colorado town. Eventually, this area could be filled with more than a dozen homes with stunning views of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. This […]
Posted inBusiness, Energy, Environment, Growth, Outdoors
Are Colorado’s oil and gas and recreation industries all that different? Economists say no — and we need to protect them both
When the mines closed and the railroad left town in the 1980s, “pretty much everyone in Salida was unemployed,” Mayor P.T. Wood remembers. And when the West Slope oil and gas industry took a nosedive in 2014, sales tax revenue in Fruita plummeted 90%. Both communities have filled at least part of the void left […]