Guest Columns

It’s taken four years for the municipal revenue picture to turn around but 2012 ended with encouraging results — 47 percent of respondents to an annual Colorado Municipal League survey report increased revenue in 2012 over the previous year. Back in 2009, 46 percent reported a decline in revenue from the previous year. This encouraging news is contained in the 2013 CML State of our Cities and Towns Report — CML’s annual municipal health check-up. Revenue increases vary throughout the state.

The state of Colorado is like nowhere else in the world. Coloradans feel strongly about our environment, community, and economic growth. It’s personal to us. So when we hear concerns about hydraulic fracturing — a tightly regulated technology used to enhance oil and natural gas development — in our state, we understand.

January (1st) marks the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, by America’s greatest President, Abraham Lincoln. Make no mistake, and ignore criticism to the contrary — this one act by Lincoln (combined with winning the Civil War, of course) had more to do with the elimination of America’s Original Sin of Slavery than any other in history, including passage of the 13th Amendment.

Only a fool bothers to write about guns in America. However polarized Congress may be today, firearms define a public fault line where passions bubble furiously along both sides of the divide. It’s nearly impossible to propose a middle course that doesn’t invite vituperative attacks from both gun nuts and their opponents. But, after the recent slaughter of schoolchildren in Connecticut, only the latest of many similar incidents reaching far back beyond Columbine, I am willing to play the fool. To remain silent would be, to some degree, to become complicit in the next massacre of innocents.