Posts tagged interest
City has lifted some seasonal raptor closures early
Jul 27th
This year marked another successful season for raptors nesting on OSMP. Four Peregrine Falcon pairs nesting in the mountain backdrop produced ten fledglings, making it the most productive year for this species since monitoring began. Unfortunately, Golden Eagle productivity on OSMP was low, as it was all around Boulder County. Of particular interest to OSMP, in terms of ground-nesting birds, was the influx of Cassin’s Sparrows to the grasslands. Staff detected approximately 30 Cassin’s Sparrows during seasonal monitoring. Cassin’s Sparrows are more common in southeast Colorado and it is possible that ongoing drought conditions in that area are forcing them north and west.
The City of Boulder has been monitoring raptor nesting and roosting areas since 1984. It has become an important part of protecting the species in the area. In 2011, OSMP volunteers logged more than 600 hours monitoring cliff-nesting raptor sites. They are an integral part of the success of this program. OSMP relies heavily on the public to respect the closures. The cooperation of visitors to these areas is greatly appreciated.
Boulder Xcel deal falls apart: condition ends talks about possible wind deal
Jul 15th
Several weeks of intensive and committed negotiations with Xcel Energy about the possibility of a wind purchase plan with Boulder ended this week, when Xcel refused to drop a condition that City Council agree to put a 20-year franchise on the ballot in November, without a corresponding wind agreement.
Xcel wanted City Council to put both the franchise paired with a wind deal and the franchise by itself on the ballot. City staff had been working with Xcel to develop a proposal for council that could have included the franchise if it were paired with the increase in renewable energy that was associated with the possible wind agreement.
City staff advised Xcel multiple times that council support for a standalone franchise was unlikely. During each of these conversations, the utility’s representatives indicated they wanted to keep negotiating and take that issue “under advisement” later. On Tuesday, July 12, Xcel communicated a final determination that it would not agree to a wind deal at all if the standalone franchise was not a part of the proposal to council.
The city’s energy future goals include stable rates, more local control and a decreased carbon footprint. While the franchise paired with significantly increased renewable wind energy would have moved toward some of these goals, the franchise by itself does not.
Since then, Xcel Energy has continued to provide electricity to homes and businesses in the city without a franchise agreement, as required by state law. The city, meanwhile, has worked to define the community’s goals for its energy future and analyze a variety of paths for achieving them. One of these has been the possible creation of a municipally owned power utility.
In late May, Xcel outlined a proposal that could help the community achieve some of its goals without creating its own utility. The proposal involved the city paying increased initial costs associated with the construction of a new wind farm in eastern Colorado. The turbines would have put 200 megawatts of new wind power onto the state’s grid. Boulder, in return for its investment, would purchase the Renewable Energy Credits. While the city was interested in exploring a wind agreement, both the staff team and council members had significant concerns about the proposal. Among them was the level of financial risk the city would assume in this venture. Representatives of the city, Xcel Energy and wind developer NextEra Energy Resources began negotiations in hopes of resolving these concerns.
Many of the questions were addressed; however, Xcel’s insistence on a standalone franchise ballot option has brought the discussions to an end.
“The City of Boulder understands why Xcel Energy wants a 20-year franchise agreement, and it is possible that council and voters might have approved that, if such an agreement came with a well-negotiated wind purchase plan,” said City Manager Jane Brautigam. “But we know that a franchise by itself would tie the city to a long-term energy future that remains largely dependent on investments in coal and a business model that prevents local communities from making decisions about their own energy futures. This runs contrary to the goals Boulder wants to achieve.”
City Attorney Tom Carr said the city appreciates Xcel and NextEra’s interest and work on the proposal, but that successful passage of this option, given the utility’s demand, was unlikely.
“We spent many hours at the table, and it was clear that all the parties were committed to trying to reach a mutually acceptable agreement,” Carr said. “I thank everyone for their participation, but sometimes there are problems for which there are no solutions. This appears to be an obstacle we could not overcome.”
Carr plans to provide a written update on the status of the wind negotiations as part of a memo that council members will receive prior to their July 19 meeting. He will also give a brief verbal presentation on July 19 under a section of the meeting called Matters from the City Attorney, which typically occurs near the end of the evening. A public hearing on other energy options will proceed as planned. Because the staff team does not believe that it can make a good faith recommendation that council consider a standalone franchise, and because Xcel has said it will not move forward without one, the wind proposal will not be a part of that hearing.
The full memo to council will be available at http://www.boulderenergyfuture.com before Tuesday’s council meeting. Additional information and previous memos are available at that same website now.
AMERICA’S DEADLIEST WAR ALSO IS MOST MEMORIALIZED, CU-BOULDER PROFESSOR SAYS
Jun 20th
South Carolina militiamen fired the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and over the next four years more than 10,000 military engagements between the North and South took place. In the end more than 600,000 soldiers died.
“The Civil War was our most destructive war, it claimed the most lives, and it was on our territory,” said Professor Kenneth Foote of the University of Colorado Boulder’s geography department. “And when it comes to memorials and monuments, the Civil War is by far our most memorialized of the nation’s wars.”
In general, public memorials are created to act as a reminder of a tragic event or because an event has an important moral or ethical lesson that needs to be preserved, says Foote.
“I think there is a lesson from Civil War memorials that carries through to the present day because the Civil War was this very divisive event in the 19th century over slavery — and the destruction caused by it — though later some battlefields also became points of reconciliation,” Foote said.
And in the case of the Civil War, many people in America still feel a personal connection to the war.
“When it comes to the Civil War, even today probably a majority of Americans had some family member involved, and so there is still, even after these many generations, a pretty direct family connection for many people,” Foote said. “The other major factor is that it involved the issue of slavery in the United States.”
Gettysburg is one of the most visited and recognized Civil War sites. It also is one of the most decorated battlefields in the world, according to Foote. Virtually every corps, army, division, brigade, regiment, company and battery that served at Gettysburg has erected a memorial, he said.
“Almost all of the major Civil War battlefields are marked very extensively and some of them have become more important — like Gettysburg or Vicksburg — because they mark critical turning points in the war,” Foote said.
Civil War monument and memorial styles have changed over the years, Foote says, and are very much a function of the time when they were built. For example, the Civil War statue located in front of the Boulder County Courthouse on Pearl Street was created at the end of its era, Foote says.
“This would be very similar to the ones that were put up in the 1860s and 1870s,” he said. “When this went up in about 1914, the style of representation was beginning to fade away to more abstract public art.”
When it comes to the North and the South honoring their dead, Foote said the styles of the memorials changed over time as the war’s wounds healed.
“Initially, many of the memorials started off as very partisan, so Northern memorials celebrated the heroics of Northern forces, while it was common in the South to see memorials that were built as a protest,” Foote said. “One of the most common statues in the South was of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a general, but also was the founder of the Klu Klux Klan.”
Overall, Foote says the Civil War will always represent an important point in the history of our nation, and the memorials are part of that history.
“There were still some great divides that aren’t possible to ignore, but people gradually came together over the meaning and it was worked out oftentimes with these memorials and monuments,” Foote said.
Foote became interested in studying memorial sites during a 1980s visit to Salem, Mass. While there, he was surprised to find at that time no memorial site or markers associated with the Salem witch trials, a significant chapter in early U.S. colonial history and in Salem’s history. He has visited hundreds of sites that have been scarred by war battles or other incidents of violence or tragedy in the United States and abroad, and is the author of the book “Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy.”
To view a video featuring Foote talking about Civil War memorials visit http://www.colorado.edu/news and click on the story headline.