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Show A-10 Pence’s Aspen visit brings out supporters, protesters AUSTIN COLBERT/THE ASPEN TIMES Vice President Mike Pence arrives at the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport on Monday. He came to Aspen for a fundraiser and was expected to depart on Tuesday. Dozens of nearby residents appeared to show their support for the vice president or protest his policies. VP, in Colorado for fundraiser, greeted by dozens JASON AUSLANDER The Aspen Times Vice President Mike Pence hosted the well-heeled Monday afternoon at a private club fundraiser in downtown Aspen and is expected to leave Tuesday morning after meeting with a group of Republican governors in town for a meeting. Pence’s Gulfstream V airplane landed at Aspen-Pitkin County Airport about 2 p.m. after he attended a fundraiser for Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner in Windsor near Greeley. He greeted and talked with a group of about 30 supporters at the airport and waved to reporters from The Aspen Times and a Denver news station but did not take questions from the media. Anna Zane, chairwoman of Pitkin County Republicans, was within the group of supporters at the airport and said she appreciates that Aspen draws politicians from both parties. “(Pence) was very gracious and he spoke to every one of us,” she said. “It’s an honor to have the vice president come to town. I don’t know that we’ll ever turn Pitkin County (blue), but we can change some minds.” Roger Nicholson of Snowmass Village said he was “thrilled” to meet Pence and praised the vice president’s politics. “I admire him sticking to his faith and sticking to his principles, and I asked him to please stick with them,” Nicholson said. “And he said, ‘That means so much to me.’” Pence’s motorcade almost immediately left the airport, though he didn’t arrive in downtown Aspen until about 3:15 p.m., when his motorcade came down Main Street, turned right onto Galena Street and parked in the alley behind the Caribou Club, located on Hopkins Avenue. The VIP reception at the club was not originally scheduled to start until 5 p.m., according to an invitation sent out last week. Well-dressed couples who paid $35,000 a pair to attend the reception could be seen entering the club in the mid-afternoon. Bob Jenkins, Pitkin County Republicans vice chair, had said he expected a relatively small crowd of about 25 couples to attend the fundraiser, which will benefit both President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee. Trump will receive $2,700 per person from each $35,000, while the RNC will receive the rest, Jenkins has said. A small group of mainly young women with a rainbow banner that read “Hypocrite” on it protested Pence’s appearance from in front of the Isis Theater across from the Caribou Club entrance. A lone Wed/Thurs/Fri, July 24-26, 2019 The Park Record AUSTIN COLBERT/THE ASPEN TIMES Vice President Mike Pence leaves the Caribou Club in downtown Aspen as supporters wave to him from the street corner on Monday. A contingent of protesters also greeted Pence. man carried a sign that read: “Mike Pence Satan Thanks You” on one side and “Mike Pence Hitler Thanks You” on the other. By the time Pence left the club about 4:45 p.m., a group of pro-Trump fans had gathered across from the women with the rainbow banner, and shouted “Go Trump” as his motorcade passed on Mill Street. Pence’s Suburban slowed down and he waved to the supporters on his way out of downtown. As a congressman, governor of Indiana and as vice president, Pence has repeatedly opposed efforts to legalize gay marriage and other measures meant to improve the lives of members of the gay community. The Caribou Club is owned by two gay men, one of whom did not return a phone message last week seeking comment about his decision to hold the event. Also, efforts to reach members of AspenOut, the group behind Aspen’s Gay Ski Week in January, for comment on the event were not successful Monday. However, the issue appeared to be resonating within the larger, national gay community with online publications like Queerty, Out Magazine and LGBTQNation running articles on the subject. Newsweek, The Denver Post and talkingpointsmemo.com also published pieces emphasizing the gay issue. Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights advocacy group, issued a statement Monday about Pence’s Aspen visit. “Vice President Pence has made a career out of demonizing LGBTQ people and undermining our rights,” said Lucas Acosta, HRC’s national press secretary. “Coloradans deserve to know more about Pence’s opposition to basic hate crime protections and the Equality Act as well as his failure to combat HIV transmissions. “Equality voters will remember Gardner and Pence’s horrific record on LGBTQ issues and will hold them accountable in 2020.” The last time Pence visited Aspen — in December 2017 — neighbors of the home where he stayed in the Owl Creek area hung a rainbow banner on a shared driveway pillar that read “Make America Gay Again” and planted numerous small rainbow flags in the space between the two homes. The Colorado Democratic Party also weighed in on Pence’s appearance at the two Colorado fundraisers, which were both closed to the public. “It’s pretty clear that the GOP knows how unpopular and vulnerable Donald Trump is, which is why they’re sending Vice President Pence and other members of Team Trump for closed-door fundraisers for Sen. Cory Gardner and Republicans instead of a public event,” according to a statement issued Monday. “(Perhaps) these private fundraisers are a sign that they’ve finally given up their desperate attempt to turn our state red.” Pitkin County Sheriff Joe DiSalvo said Monday evening that he still hadn’t been able to track down the name of the Caribou Club member who hosted the event and had made no headway in persuading that person or the Trump campaign to pay for his deputies’ overtime providing security for Pence. “Usually by this time, we’re aware of who’s going to pay,” he said. “I’ve been trying for a week and I still can’t get anyone to tell me who the Caribou Club host is. So far I’ve been ghosted. “I’m concerned we’re gonna get stiffed.” DiSalvo has said he will provide security for free if politicians meet with members of the general public. However, his department charges the hosts of political events to which the public is not invited, and campaigns generally pay up, he has said. He estimated that overtime costs for the numerous deputies who worked security Monday were between $10,000 and $20,000. If the Sheriff’s Office is not reimbursed, Pitkin County will have to foot the bill for the private fundraiser security. Other agencies involved in the security besides the Secret Service and the Sheriff’s Office were Aspen Police, Aspen Fire, Colorado State Patrol, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and the U.S. Forest Service. Pence is scheduled to participate Tuesday morning in a quarterly meeting of the Republican Governors Association, which is taking place in Aspen, according to vppublicschedules.com. He is set to leave Aspen at 9:30 a.m. and fly to Des Moines, Iowa. Core SampleS By Jay Meehan Electoral rehab My melancholy has turned up missing. I felt its absence only this morning. Even my major-depressive-disorder management centers are clueless as to its whereabouts. My sloth, however, appears rooted firmly in place, as healthy as ever. The former makes little, if any, sense. Leading up to this recent void, the perception of impending darkness had seemingly homesteaded all available psychic space. Each nook and cranny held a symptom or two. In the Biblical sense, there was no room at the Inn. One would think that maybe a small semblance of the original cache might turn up due to the vacancy. But, no! Clear skies everywhere. I immediately began re-scrutinizing my normal melancholic fuel centers, as in the Electoral College, cyber intrusion, the lack of democratic process, gerrymandering, the Supreme Court, climate change, racism, Xenophobia and the like. No truants among the usual suspects. All present and accounted for! Admittedly, the Utah Republican conspiracy to render impotent the current Navajo tribal-oriented San Juan County Commission did, in submariner fashion, open its outer doors and fill its tubes, but still, no “blues” worthy of the name. How could that be? Certainly it’s not my faith in the “left” to unite at the polls and send the Nazis packing. Even when word came down that Rudy Giuliani’s cronies had reopened his usual back-door communication channels to the Ukraine, the pall that normally fell over my days refused to blot out the sun. As with Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe, my normal gloom appeared “neat, clean, shaved and sober, and didn’t care who knew it.” My immediate reaction to set things straight and get rid of the blasted smirk slowly spreading across my skewered mug involved, as most things do these days, the internet. But not even the formerly reliable incantation of Trump’s hatefilled greatest hits on YouTube could summon the usual darkness that normally pervades my days. If truth be known, I miss my melancholy. Even the muted horn of Miles Davis that I woke to this morning somehow featured a nuanced subtext of optimism.” When word arrived from Britain that iconic ne’er-dowell Boris Johnson will be taking up residence at #10 Downing Street, my usually active despondency meter didn’t even budge. Blond ambition is taking over our planet and I remain erect. Go figure! How much longer my woe will continue to sport a tux is anybody’s guess. Maybe we could get an office pool going. What’s not to love? Ya got me! If truth be known, I miss my melancholy. Even the muted horn of Miles Davis that I woke to this morning somehow featured a nuanced subtext of optimism. When his solo faded, I pictured him with a wry grin and a je ne sais quoi body language as he slowly back-pedaled from the microphone. Where was his signature glare and seeming disregard for the audience? At least Dylan muttered underneath his breath that nothing is revealed. Much is amiss in my cosmos this day. What’s a guy to do? Engage his fellow man? Walk around with a smile? And what’s next? Are my Dodgers, out of the blue, going to start playing “small ball?” Out of nowhere, are my boys of summer going to acquire the ability to move a runner from second to third with less than two outs with a smartly struck sacrifice bunt? Now, that would be an omen. These portending positives are complete strangers to my inner hallways. Who are they to take it upon themselves to return even a spoonful of my former joy? And while we’re at it, who gave these guys the keys to my limbic system? Or the punch code to my temporal lobe? You don’t think they switched my amygdala with Alex Honnold’s, do ya? Nah! I suppose I could put up flyers in laundromats and post queries in online chat rooms. I mean, it’s not likely that my melancholy could blend into its surroundings forever. Under its threatening black fedora, you might say “hope has left the building.” It’s all about sneers and clenched fists. It’s not like I lost a puppy. I mean, there’s absolutely no way I could continue through the impending presidential campaign without my melancholy to hover like a black cloud over any intrusions of the optimist variety. I can’t go through that again. Hope played nefarious games with my psyche last time around. I need to shed myself of such notions. By the way, although I doubt if it’s a devotee to the goddess Kali, it answers to “ThugBoy.” Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social and political scenes for more than 40 years. Plan to slow Western blazes would clear strips of land Experts say effort would not erase risk of largest fires BRADY MCCOMBS Associated Press The Trump administration is proposing an ambitious plan to slow Western wildfires by bulldozing, mowing or revegetating large swaths of land along 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers) of terrain in the West. The plan that was announced this summer and presented at public open houses, including one in Salt Lake City this week, would create strips of land known “fuel breaks” on about 1,000 square miles of land (2,700 square kilometers) managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in an area known as the Great Basin in parts of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Utah. The estimated cost would be about $55 million to $192 million, a wide range that illustrates the variance in costs for the different types of fuel breaks. Some would completely clear lands, others would mow down vegetation and a third method would replant the area with more fire-resistance vegetation. It would cost another $18 million to $107 million each year to maintain the strips and ensure vegetation doesn’t regrow on the strips of land. Wildfire experts say the program could help slow fires, but it won’t help in the most extreme fires that can jump these strips of land. The breaks could also fragment wildlife habitat. An environmental group calls it an ill-conceived and expensive plan that has no scientific backing to show it will work. A U.S. Geological Survey report issued last year found that fuel breaks could be an important tool to reduce damage caused by wildfires, but the agency cautioned that no scientific studies have been done to prove their effectiveness and that they could alter habitat for sagebrush plants and animal communities. The Bureau of Land Management says it has done about 1,200 assessments of fuel breaks since 2002 and found they help control fires about 80 percent of the time. The strips of land that would be 500 feet or less would be created along highways, rural roads and other areas already disturbed such as right of ways for pipelines, said Marlo Draper, the Bureau of Land Management’s supervisory project manager for the Idaho Great Basin team. They won’t prevent fires, but they should reduce the costs of having to battle major blazes because fuel breaks reduce the intensity, flame length and spread of fires and keep firefighters safe, Draper said. It cost about $373 million over the last decade to fight 21 fires that were larger than 156 square miles (404 square kilometers) on lands managed by the bureau in Utah, Nevada and Idaho, according to a report explaining the proposal. “It gives us a chance to get in front of it and put fires out more quickly,” Draper said. Western wildfires have grown more lethal because of extreme drought and heat associated with climate change and by housing developments encroaching on the most fireprone grasslands and brushy canyons. Many of the ranchers and farmers who once managed those landscapes are gone, leaving terrain thick with vegetation that can explode into flames. The proposal is out for public comment and pending environmental review. If approved, some of the land could be cleared as soon as next year while other projects could take several years, she said. The plan comes after President Trump last December issued an executive order last December calling on the Interior Department to prioritize reducing wildfire risks on public lands. This proposal doesn’t include U.S. National Forest Service lands. Most states have their own separate plans for fire prevention, which sometimes include thinning of forests. These fuel breaks are a useful tool if used along with other wildfire prevention methods that can keep firefighters safer and potentially help out in broad scopes of land because they are long and thin, said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the area fire adviser for University of California Cooperative Extension. They can especially helpful by providing perimeters for prescribed burns. But they must be in the right places and don’t stop fires, she said. David Peterson, an ecology professor at the University of Washington and former federal research scientist, said the plan will likely produce mixed success slowing down fires. But Peterson said the plan will not help with extreme fires that produce embers and flames that jump over these fire breaks. He said the risk of fragmenting important habitat and harming animals like sage grouse is real. The U.S. government must also be committed to the chore of maintaining the areas or the plan won’t help and could open the door for more cheat grass to grow in, which fuels fires. “We are buying into a longterm commitment of funding,” Peterson said. Patrick Donnelly, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Nevada state director, said the plan could break up habitat for sage grouse, deer and the Pygmy rabbit. He said the money would be better spent planting native seed and sagebrush to get rid of non-native plants that make fires worst. “This seems like the Interior is trying to demonstrate they are doing something, and they want something that is impressive to people, like: ‘Look at us, we’ve bulldozed 11,000 miles of desert,’” Donnelly said. “Ultimately, this is a misguided effort.” |