Denver News Blog

​Erik Osborn, the disgraced developer who has a December 7 trial date in Denver District Court, failed to show up for a hearing yesterday.

The Denver District Attorney's office sent this brief note to some of the complainants in what has grown into two separate criminal cases against Erik Osborn, including "Dealing Doug" Moreland, who got involved in Osborn's One Lincoln Place project, and Michelle Brokaw, a one-time partner in 1800 Glenarm: "Mr. Osborn failed to appear for court this morning. A warrant has issued for his arrest, no bond."

A judge had earlier reduced Osborn's bond, allowing him to live in California, where he'd been working as a "contractor." Location, location, location: Osborn's home there is close to the beach... and not far from the border.

​Representative Wes McKinley is sitting in a bar in Denver, but his mind is hundreds of miles away -- on the rangeland of southeastern Colorado, that stunning swathe of cactus and canyons and ranches that have been in families for generations. The land that the U.S. Army would like to conquer and use for training, adding to the 238,000 acres it already occupies at Pinon Canyon.

For five years, ranchers and other residents of the area have been fighting the Army at every turn -- but the Army has far more monetary ammo, as well as the support of politicians, including gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis and Representative Doug Lamborn, whose district includes nearby Fort Carson.

Charlie Brown wants to put medical-marijuana businesses on a tighter leash.

​Today, Councilman Charlie Brown is presenting his proposal for regulating the city's medical marijuana dispensaries to the Denver City Council's Safety committee. We live blogged the meeting. To read the account in chronological order, start at the bottom item below.

10:50 a.m.Councilman Linkhart calls up four industry representatives who've been invited to speak: an attorney who represents several dispensaries; Matt Brown, of the Colorado Patients and Providers Coalition, who says he's been getting dispensaries ready for regulations; former state legislator Bob Hagedorn and attorney Rob Corry.

"Marijuana for medical purposes is legal in Colorado," says the attorney. "We want to be treated like legitimate businesses. These businesses are more than just people slinging marijuana."

Thank you, whispers one woman in the audience.

"Legitimate businesses should not be treated like criminal enterprises," he continues, to applause. "We'll comply with every lawful ordinance."

But just what those ordinances will be are clearly going to be a matter of much discussion in the weeks to come.

​Fort Collins, Pueblo and Loveland have joined the ranks of Colorado cities with moratoriums on additional medical marijuana dispensaries -- although their actions yesterday were more limited than the hysterical "emergency" designation on the day's hearings had implied. Fort Collins wound up approving just a three-month pause, Pueblo went for four months and Loveland for eight.

But then, their votes followed Attorney General John Suthers's Monday decision that dispensaries can be taxed -- and the sooner the moratoriums end, the quicker towns can fill their coffers.

​City Council rep Charlie Brown has taken the lead on corralling medical marijuana dispensaries in Denver. And he's taking the task seriously -- so seriously that, last week, he took his cowboy hat and traveled to Los Angeles (using campaign funds, not taxpayer dollars) to check out that city's booming dispensary scene.

Think McCloud, hunting down bad bud rather than bad guys.

​Welcome to cannabis Colorado.

This weekend, at a gathering of publishers from across the country, all the talk was about Colorado and pot -- and they weren't just asking if I was carrying. No, they wanted to know about the booming business in medical-marijuana dispensaries in this state -- and the equally booming municipal monkey business of trying to regulate those dispensaries.

​"It's a Norman Rockwell scene," Ted Haggard told the reporters gathered outside his Colorado Spring home last night, where the New Life Church founder and disgraced minister was about to start his first, off-the-record prayer meeting. "It's a 'Kumbaya' moment."

A Norman Rockwell scene? Only if when he was done drawing Boy Scouts and barbers, the iconic chronicler of Americana dialed up male nude models such as Mike Jones, the Denver escort that Ted Haggard would call when he had a taste for meth and men.

​Forget John Hancock: Next time you're asked to sign a petition, you can just put down your Michael Hancock. Someone -- and it definitely wasn't Denver city councilman Michael Hancock -- did just that when presented with a petition pushing a ballot measure that would change the Denver City Charter to give sheriff's deputies greater arrest powers.

Should that measure ever pass, the deputies may want to first handcuff FieldWorks, the Washington, D.C.-based company they paid to handle the petition drive, which did such a lousy job that only 22,058 of the almost 60,000 signatures were deemed valid.

​The Army wants to take over more of the ranchland around Pinon Canyon -- but it's not accounting adequately for the 238,000 acres it already has, taken 25 years ago in the largest land grab in the country's history.

On September 8, Judge Richard Matsch ruled that the Army's 2007 environmental review of operations at the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, where it trains troops about four months a year, was inadequate to justify increasing operations to 365 days a year. When the Army created the PCMS in the 1980s, an environmental review had determined that the semiarid land couldn't accommodate perpetual use for training, Matsch noted, and sent the Army back to the drawing board.

On Monday, November 9, the Army appealed Matsch's ruling.

​When I last talked with former Congressman Tom Tancredo -- about marijuana, of all things, which he'd like to see legalized, even though he's never so much as attempted to inhale -- he was just back from an October Constitution Party event in Phoenix, where he'd been urged to run for president on the ticket of what had started in 1992 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party, and is now on the ballot in 43 states.

But Tancredo had another idea: Why not run for Senate against John McCain in his own state, as a way to remind him of the Republican Party's roots (and perhaps snag a few headlines in the process)? Just one problem: Tancredo lives in Colorado, and has always lived in Colorado.

Which is a major hurdle if you're thinking of running for office in Arizona, but will come in very handy if he decides to run for governor of Colorado, as the Draft Tom Tancredo for Governor Facebook page (with a dedicated web site in the works) is urging.

​Timing is everything. On Thursday, Senator Michael Bennet voted against Lindsey Graham's amendment that would have barred the Obama administration from trying anyone accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks in federal district courts, instead using military commissions at Guantanamo.

And Bennet wasn't alone: Graham's proposal was tabled by a vote of 54-45. But immediately afterward, the National Republican Senatorial Committee took aim at Colorado's newest senator, firing off a missive titled "Bennet Votes Against Barring Captured Terrorists from Coming to Colorado."

​The 2010 election is less than a year away, and judging from this past Tuesday's vote, things are going to get plenty messy. But here in Colorado, we're still cleaning up after the dirty dealings of 2006.

The gubernatorial race was particularly bad, with 527s and party operatives pushing the candidacy of Republican Bob Beauprez and going hard against Democrat Bill Ritter. The use of a drunken-driving death against the former Denver District Attorney was a particularly egregious twisting of the facts, although that controversy disappeared when the ad was pulled. But the questions about another ad, this one involving info on an illegal alien that came from a restricted federal database, go on and on.

Now, those questions go all the way to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

​What's happened to the liberal mecca of Boulder? First, cops put a lid -- and some pants -- on plans to resurrect the Halloween Mall Crawl, as well as the Naked Pumpkin Run. And now the city's looking at strictly regulating medical marijuana dispensaries -- if it doesn't ban them altogether.

At 6 p.m. today, the Boulder Planning Board will draft a proposal to send on to Boulder City Council. Among the possible moves: setting a limit on the number of dispensaries allowed in the city (there are now about twenty), limiting where and when dispensaries can operate, adopting a moratorium on any new dispensaries -- or requiring a sales-tax license that would be impossible for dispensaries to get.

This is Boulder?

​There's nothing mellow about medical marijuana in Colorado.

In a wacky emergency session yesterday, the Colorado Board of Health tossed out its definition of "caregiver" to comply with a recent Court of Appeals decision, postponing the adoption of any new herbiage verbiage until December 16. In the meantime, Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown will unveil proposed regulations for medical marijuana dispensaries in this city on November 18.

But while politicians and bureaucrats blow smoke over the legal definition of Amendment 20, the medical-marijuana business in this state continues to boom, with new dispensaries coming in every day.

​The state isn't letting any grass grow under its feet -- and may be looking at prohibiting grass growing in your basement.

The Colorado Board of Health has scheduled an Emergency Rulemaking Hearing for 10:30 a.m. today, to discuss -- and possibly eliminate -- its definition of "significant responsibility for managing the well-being of a patient." The state of emergency was created by last week's Court of Appeals interpretation of "primary caregiver," a definition left purposely vague in Amendment 20, which was passed by voters back in 2000. But according to the Court of Appeals, a caregiver must do more than simply provide medical marijuana to a patient -- marijuana that may have been grown in a sympathetic person's basement, as in the People v. Clendenin case that led to the ruling.

For more info on the emergency hearing, click here.

​Marilyn Musgrave's political career rose from the dead last week, as the former Colorado congresswoman and current director of the Susan B. Anthony List's Votes Have Consequences project campaigned for the election of Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate running for the 23rd Congressional seat left vacant when Republican John McHugh became Secretary of the Army.

Pushing for a third-party candidate rather than the woman nominated by the Republican Party might seem an odd choice for Musgrave (not to mention an organization named after a pioneering feminist). But as Musgrave points out in this column, the goal is to elect the right women.

And Republican state Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava was not the right woman, she insists. Too liberal, says Musgrave, who's joined with Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson and other Republican stars who are backing Hoffman in tomorrow's special election.

​Pam and Ricardo Martinez met on a United Farm Workers picket line in California. Now, almost forty years later, they share a life, a family, a passion for social justice and Padres y Jovenes Unidos, the Denver nonprofit they co-founded in 1991 -- as well as another big national honor.

The Advancement Project, a Washington, D.C.-based civil-rights think tank, honored the organization yesterday for its work rewriting the Denver Public Schools discipline code, a six-year project designed to end the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track that was sending a disproportionate number of minority kids out of the school system and into the juvenile justice system.

​Sheriff's deputies have run into a roadblock in their push to get an initiative on the Denver ballot: the Denver Elections Division has determined that more than half of the almost 60,000 signatures on initiative petitions were invalid.

The deputies need 41,666 valid signatures to put the measure, which would amend the city charter to give them more power to arrest (and collect bigger paychecks), on a special February ballot; the deputies have until November 12 to fix the problem.

In the meantime, though, the obstacle in the deputies' patch could detour Jeff Peckman, who was hoping to piggyback his own ballot measure, intended to establish an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission, onto the deputies's special election. But right now, it looks like ET could have to go home...at least for another nine months.

​"Rocky Mountain High" is getting quite a work-out as national media outlets run stories on the booming medical marijuana business in Colorado. With both city and state officials talking about reining in the industry with new regulations, I put calls into both Governor Bill Ritter and Mayor John Hickenlooper on Monday, asking for their thoughts on this new, really green, really growing field.

I'm still waiting to hear back from the governor's office. But Hickenlooper, who first came to the public's attention as the ebullient owner of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., which specializes in pouring out legal substances, called back quickly with this:

"The voters in Denver overwhelmingly don't want to see marijuana be illegal," he said, referring both to the original 2000 vote that legalized medical marijuana in the state, and the 2005 and 2007 Denver ballot measures legalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana and setting up the Denver Marijuana Policy Review Panel. "A lot of the smartest people we know have great concerns about suddenly removing all limits. That's what the issue is going to distill down to. What are the appropriate limits?"

Especially when you're living in a town that's already labeled the Mile High City? Expect this topic to remain the toke of the town over the next few weeks.

​Colorado's parks, recreational areas and open space are subsidized by the Colorado Lottery, which over the past fifteen years has sent millions of dollars to Great Outdoors Colorado. Community colleges are slated to be supported by another form of gambling: Last November, Coloradans voted to expand gaming at casinos in three mountain towns to 24/7 schedules, adding games and upping the maximum bet to $100 -- all because they were sold on the proceeds going to community colleges.

Now, as city and state politicians debate regulations that could rein in the medical marijuana industry, another strain of the argument is pushing for legalizing marijuana altogether. But don't stop there: Legalize it, tax it -- and then earmark the proceeds for our financially strapped higher education system.

Put the higher back in higher education.

​The news is full of real stories about real people in need. People who can't find jobs, people who can't pay their mortgages, people who can't feed their families. Not high on the list of the truly needy: People who want to feed their hunger for fame.

But still, Cheri Foster and her daughter, Tamara Failla, have established what they call the "first-ever" Fort Collins Care Movement, according to the Fort Collins Coloradoan. And who have they chosen to as the initial recipient of their caring? Richard and Mayumi Heene and their children.

​Colorado is not all about balloon boys and terrorists -- unless you count fat babies and health insurance companies.

Senator Michael Bennet has been getting a lot of face time lately, speechifying about our broken healthcare system. And in his most recent speech, he may have finally given the debate its public face. Actually, two faces: those of Alex Lange and Aislin Bates

The 'Goldilocks Rule' should not apply when it comes to giving Coloradans the health care they need," he pronounced in a Senate speech Wednesday, citing the two Colorado children who'd been denied coverage because of their weight. Alex, a breast-fed baby in Grand Junction, was denied because he was too chubby; Aislin, a two-year-old in Erie, was too skinny. Two kids, two companies, the same decision: No.

​It's been three weeks since we first posted news of our search for a medical-marijuana reviewer. Within five minutes of that posting, we had our first application for this extremely part-time job. Within ten minutes, our first media inquiry. And the applications and media calls keep coming.

This morning -- while on hold with CBS, which called me just after 4 a.m., then postponed the interview because another segment ran long (breaking news? A Balloon Boy update?) -- I fished another fifty applications out of our spam filter. This latest wave was apparently inspired by an AP story sent out this week; the responses are coming in from around the globe -- from applicants and media outlets alike. The BBC. And Irish talk show. Unfortunately, we closed off applications last week, after we'd collected more than 200 of them. (Channel 9 neglected to note that when it ran a piece Tuesday night; my apologies to the extremely erudite poster who lamented missing the deadline at the end of the comments section.)

But the story just keeps growing.

​Before the Balloon Boy story blew up around the globe, Colorado's Najibullah Zazi was reportedly getting ready to blow up New York City. Our hometown terrorist is now being held without bail in New York on charges of conspiring to detonate explosives in the United States; his father has a December 7 trial date in U.S. District Court in Denver on charges of lying to federal investigators.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama visited the Manhattan FBI office that led the investigation, and praised the agents for their work. But the job's not done yet: New York Senator Chuck Schumer is calling for a nationwide "awareness" program on sales of peroxide, which Zazi picked up in bulk at an Aurora beauty-supply company. He told the clerk that he had a lot of girlfriends in need of hair care -- but concentrated peroxide can also be used to make a liquid bomb known as TATP, and plans for the device were allegedly found on Zazi's computer.

It could have been the ultimate blonde bombshell...

​Ryan Frazier made a smart move, even though his announcement last Thursday that he was switching from a run for the U.S. Senate to go for the 7th Congressional District seat currently occupied by Ed Perlmutter was completely overshadowed by a certain silver balloon.

But someone took notice: The Colorado Democratic Party, which quickly sent out a release headlined "Democratic Party States Ryan Frazier Stoops To Blatant Political Opportunism:"

​Even Balloon Boy couldn't knock our hunt for a medical-marijuana reviewer out of the national news. Yesterday, NPR's Sunday show ran a piece about our quest, resulting in still more applications coming in from across the country. But sorry, folks: We're looking for a Colorado resident, someone who can identify not just particular strains, but deal with the state-specific peculiarities of what's rapidly becoming Colorado's s greenest business.

The medical marijuana industry is already booming here -- and after today, it could explode. That's because the White House is finally releasing new federal guidelines that solidify what Barack Obama promised as a candidate: a reversal of the Bush administration's tough stance against users and suppliers in the states that have legalized medical marijuana.

​Okay, so Falcon Heene was never in the balloon. But why wasn't he in school yesterday?

That's a question for Rico Munn, who's done good work during his two years as executive director of the Department of Regulatory Affairs, and yesterday was appointed by Governor Bill Ritter to head the Colorado Department of Higher Education. The education slot, vacated in August by former Congressman David Skaggs, is a good fit for Munn, a lawyer who served on the state Board of Education for five years, representing the 1st Congressional District. (I once moderated an education panel that included Munn, and he was definitely the best part of the program.)

​Ryan Frazier is trading in a clunker in favor of a much sleeker vehicle. Six months after the two-term Aurora City Councilman announced that he was running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, he's pulling out of that race and making a fast course correction for the 7th Congressional District instead.

The charismatic Frazier will make that announcement this morning at Brighton Ford, the only family-owned auto dealership in Colorado that refused to participate in the federal government's "cash for clunkers" program.

​ When we learned that Joe Rogan, former host of Fear Factor, had moved to metro Denver, we offered up our top ten list of very scary things for newcomers to Colorado. Number 4? Animal Encounters:

"As houses sprawl across formerly uninhabited areas, the animals that used to live where your patio is now are fighting back. Keep your eyes open and your pepper spray at hand to fend off everything from bear attacks and elk migrations across the freeway to coyotes in your doggie dish."

The day that list (repeated below) appeared, an elk attacked a woman in her Evergreen driveway. On Monday, a mule deer gored a 63-year-old woman in Florissant. And even Rogan's home outside of Boulder has come under attack: Something -- likely a mountain lion -- made off with one of the family's dogs, the comedian tells us.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

​Jeff Peckman has had a tough month: First, David Letterman's all-too-earthly horn-dog behavior made big news -- and bit into the value of a clip from Letterman's June 10, 2008 UFO interview with Peckman that's prominently featured on the campaign web page for the Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission.

That's the concept Peckman's pushing with a Denver ballot measure that would create a commission to teach Denverites how to welcome aliens -- not illegals from south of the border, but those coming from much, much further away. And Peckman, who turned in his petitions to the Denver Election Commission on September 4, recently discovered that he's 1,000 signatures short of the almost 4,000 legit names needed to make the next ballot.

So now he's devoting himself full-time to collecting the remainder. He'd thought about touting the cause at a post-show panel following Curious Theatre's Yankee Tavern, which features a conspiracy theorist, but the theater's non-profit status wouldn't allow petitioning. But Peckman, who also pushed the "Safety Through Peace" proposal, pushes on. "We have to do it," he says. "The future of the galaxy really depends on it."

And what are you doing today?