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News from Boulder, Colorado and Boulder Channel 1 News editors To advertise please call 303-447-8531
Boulder County: Traffic nightmares in SE county
Oct 11th
Alternate routes, modes suggested
Boulder County, Colo. – People traveling throughout the southeast part of Boulder County next week are advised to use alternate routes or modes of transportation.
Baseline Road will be closed west of 95th Street from Oct. 15-24 so that Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the City of Lafayette can replace the railroad crossing at that location.
That project is in addition to the Boulder County Transportation Department’s reconstruction of the intersection at 76th Street and South Boulder Road and the Colorado Department of Transportation’s ongoing reconstruction/widening of Highway 7/Arapahoe Road from 75th Street west to Cherryvale Road.
The three projects will be underway simultaneously beginning Monday, Oct. 15. Additionally, water line work is being done on Baseline Road near Platt Middle School.
The Boulder County project at 76th and South Boulder Road is replacing the roadway at the intersection. One westbound through lane on South Boulder Road and both eastbound lanes will remain open; 76th is closed to through traffic. This work is expected to be completed by Nov. 2.
Recommended alternative routes/detours:
- Louisville and southern Lafayette residents should use South Boulder Road
- Central Lafayette and southern Erie residents should use Highway 7
- Northern Lafayette and Erie residents should use Isabelle/Valmont roads, Lookout Road or Highway 52
Recommended alternative modes:
- Use RTD bus service
- JUMP from Erie/Lafayette Park-n-Ride along Highway 7/Arapahoe Road
- DASH from Lafayette/Lafayette Park-n-Ride along South Boulder Road
- BV from Superior/Louisville Park-n-Ride
- Carpool
- Shift commute time to earlier/later to avoid rush hour congestion
For more information, please contact the Boulder County Transportation Department at 303-441-3900 or transportation@bouldercounty.org.
Out of town on Election Day? You have options.
Oct 11th
Boulder County, Colo. – Planning to be out of town on Election Day? The Boulder County Clerk and Recorder’s Office offers several options for travelers, overseas military, college students and others who can’t vote in person on Tuesday, Nov. 6:
- Vote by mail-in ballot. If you aren’t signed up to vote by mail-in ballot, it’s not too late. Visit www.BoulderCountyVotes.org soon to request one. Then vote and return it to a drop-off site or Boulder County Clerk & Recorder’s office by 7 p.m. on Election Day.
- Vote at an early voting location. If you’d prefer not to receive a mail-in ballot but won’t be in town to head to your polling place on Election Day, early voting is a great option. Early voting begins Monday, Oct. 22, at our Boulder and Longmont branch offices. Additional early voting locationswill open Oct. 29 in Boulder, Lafayette and Longmont. Early voting runs through Friday, Nov. 2.
- Request an overseas/military ballot. If you’ll be out of the country altogether, you can still request a ballot and receive it via snail mail or email – but contact us soon, because mailing a ballot overseas takes extra time. These voters have until Nov. 14 to return their ballots as long as they’re postmarked no later than Nov. 6.
Visit www.BoulderCountyVotes.org to learn more about these options, or call 303-413-7740 for more information. You can also visit one of three Boulder County Clerk & Recorder’s Office branches: 1750 33rd St. in Boulder; 529 Coffman St. in Longmont; or 722 Main St. in Louisville. Office hours are 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Boulder County voters can also visit www.BoulderCountyVotes.org for ballot content and to learn more about local elections.
Key Dates for the 2012 General Election:
- Week of Oct. 15: Ballots will be sent to voters who have requested a mail ballot for the general election or signed up as permanent mail-in voters.
- Monday, Oct. 22: Early voting begins. Locations and hours are available at www.BoulderCountyVotes.org.
- Tuesday, Nov. 6: Election Day. Polling locations will be open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. All ballots must be in the hands of the Boulder County Clerk & Recorder’s Office by 7 p.m.
CU-Boulder wins $1.4 million NSF award for climate change, water sustainability study
Oct 10th
The grant, part of the National Science Foundation-U.S. Department of Agriculture Water Sustainability Climate Program, was awarded to Assistant Professor Noah Molotch of the geography department. Molotch and his team will be identifying thresholds, or “tipping points,” of change in land use, forest management and climate that may compromise the sustainability of the policies and procedures that dictate the timing and quality of water diverted from Colorado’s West Slope to the Front Range.
Molotch said that in Colorado and semi-arid regions around the world, trans-basin water diversions that redirect water from areas of surplus to areas of demand are based on policy agreements and infrastructure operations made under climatic and land use conditions that may differ considerably from conditions in the near future. Measurements over the past 50 years, for example, suggest a broad-scale reduction in snowpack water storage in the western U.S. because of regional warming temperatures, a trend due in part to a shift from snowfall to rainfall, he said.
In addition, land-cover changes associated with population growth, fire suppression and mountain pine beetle outbreaks have altered the hydrology of mid-mountain ecosystems in the West, said Molotch, who also is a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. CU is teaming up with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder on the NSF-funded project.
The NSF award comes on the heels of a May 2012 agreement between water managers in Summit and Grand counties on Colorado’s West Slope and in the Denver area on how best to share water from the Colorado River basin. “This is a great example of communities that historically battled for water resources coming to the table in a good faith effort to find solutions to water allocation issues,” said Molotch. “These groups have no pretenses about the potential impacts of climate change and realize we can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand on this issue.”
Collaborators on the project include Patrick Bourgeron and Mark Williams, fellows at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, and David Gochis, Kathleen Miller and David Yates of NCAR.
A study led by Molotch published Sept. 10 in Nature Geoscience tied forest “greenness” in the western United States to fluctuating year-to-year snowpack. The study indicated mid-elevation mountain ecosystems — where people increasing are building second homes and participating in a myriad of outdoor recreational activities — are most sensitive to rising temperatures and changes in precipitation and snowmelt.
“We found that mid-elevation forests show a dramatic sensitivity to snow that fell the previous winter in terms of accumulation and subsequent melt,” said Molotch, also a fellow at INSTAAR. “If snowpack declines, forests become more stressed, which can lead to ecological changes that include alterations in the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species as well as vulnerability to perturbations like fire and beetle kill.”
As part of the new award, Molotch and his team will evaluate regional climate models in the mountain West developed at NCAR in an attempt to make temperature, precipitation and snowpack projections “more robust,” Molotch said. While the efficiency of water in trans-basin diversion projects in the western U.S. has in the past been enhanced by the natural storage of moisture in mountain snowpack that allowed for a slow, steady delivery of water into the system, warming temperatures are already causing this beneficial “drip effect” to be greatly reduced, he said.
If the winter temperatures are hovering around 15 degrees Fahrenheit and the climate warms by a few degrees, for example, there will be negligible impact on snowpack, Molotch said. But if temperatures hover near freezing, slight temperature increases can trigger earlier snowmelt, and precipitation that used to be in the form of snow turns to rain, significantly affecting trans-basin water diversion activities.
“One of the most interesting aspects of this project to me is the changes we are seeing in the ‘wildland-urban interface,’ particularly in Colorado,” he said. “There is some irony that Front Range people who have built second homes in Summit County, for example, may actually start to have an effect on the water they have relied on to be piped through the Continental Divide to the Denver area.”
In addition to providing land and water resource decision makers with projections on how future water supply and demand will change in the future, the NSF-funded project will provide a unique educational experience for graduate students, Molotch said.
“We have climate change, snowpack, changes in land use, all feeding into the pipeline that is bringing water to Colorado’s Front Range,” he said. “As the two main stressors, climate change and land use increase, there is the possibility of pushing the systems into an unsustainable state.”