“This dinner was for lifties, ski instructors and service workers who have come into Aspen from Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Peru and other faraway places,” said chapel minister Nicholas Vesey, who led a raucous caroling session after a turkey dinner with all the fixings. “We wanted to give them a good Christmas.”
Category: Social justice
Posted inIn search of community
Regionalism evolves as a uniting force from Aspen to Parachute
This community is contiguous but divided, homogenous but diverse, connected yet fractured. This community is complex and often at odds with itself over its past, its present and especially its future. It contains microcommunities delineated by overlaps and separations, yet strongly influenced socioeconomically by Aspen and Snowmass.
Posted inSocial justice
More than two-thirds of Aspen’s occupied homes are deed-restricted
Among the 3,278 full-time occupied units in Aspen, 70% are deed-restricted as of July, for a total of 2,303. This represents about 39% of the city’s total units. Aspen has the highest number of deed-restricted units out of the 43 communities surveyed and the second-highest proportion of deed-restricted units after the 1,266 deed-restricted units in Breckenridge accounting for 73% of that community’s full-time households.
Posted inLocal Public Data
With 99% of cases finalized, Pitkin County property values increase 72% with reappraisal
Pitkin County commissioners, sitting as the Board of Equalization on Wednesday, approved the updated property valuations after more than 4,700 protests were filed in the spring. The cumulative value of all Pitkin County properties reached $74 billion before the hearing process was conducted throughout the summer. This was up from $42 billion in 2022. After the hearings, the cumulative value is down to $72.4 billion (an average of $4 million per property).
Posted inSocial justice
PitCo aims to increase childhood vaccination as Colorado immunization rates drop
Pitkin County schools tend to have high rates of compliance. Aspen School District’s three public schools have compliance rates between 98.7% and 99.8%, compared with a statewide average of 91.9% of students in the K-12 age group.
Posted inSocial justice
Organizing mobile-home owners as investors gobble up parks
What Sullivan and his neighbors worry about — corporate ownership takeover, creeping unaffordability, the potential for the park to be displaced by redevelopment — is happening at an accelerating rate, both in the Roaring Fork Valley and across Colorado, prompting stronger policy prescriptions from elected officials and community leaders.
Posted inHistory
Ute removal policy comes to a head in the 1887 ‘Colorow War’
. “It was not desirable to let these civilians encounter the Indians. We were holding the crowd back on the south side of the Gunnison, until the Indians had passed 13 miles distant. In three days, the rich land of the Uncompahgre was all occupied, towns were being laid out and lots being sold at high prices.”
Posted inHistory
Tensions erupt in violent retribution at Meeker’s Indian agency
On the afternoon of Sept. 29, 1879, after Quinkent and Meeker had lunch together, a group of warriors fresh from the ongoing Milk Creek battlefront stormed the agency. The employees at the agency returned fire but were brutally overcome, while the women and children ran and hid before being taken captive.
Posted inHistory
At Milk Creek, Northern Utes defend their territory
Through their own scouts, the Utes got word of the U.S. cavalry mobilizing to the north at Fort Steele near Rawlins. When the contingent of troops started marching toward them, the Utes, many of whom were aware of what happened at Sand Creek 15 years earlier, assumed the worst — and they prepared.
Posted inSocial justice
Bill aims to address water quality at mobile home parks
Water quality in mobile home parks is an environmental-justice issue for the Latino community.