Mountain biking? No dog for you
If you wonder why many locals are opposed to unleashed dogs on trails, dog owners themselves often demonstrate why.
Take, for instance, the two douche bags who were riding mountain bikes on U.S. Forest Service Trail 925A this weekend with their unleashed springer spaniel.
The dog, which got ahead of its owner, jumped up on a horse and went after the horse’s legs, causing the frightened animal to buck off its rider.
The rider, a woman from Erie, was injured in the fall.
The dog’s irresponsible owner, who was riding with a buddy, went into CYA mode and not only failed to help the injured woman, but also refused to give her his name, leaving her to fend for herself on the trail.
It’s a canine hit-and-run — and that’s exactly how it should be treated. Wherever these two men are, one should face criminal and civil penalties for failing to keep his animal under sight and voice control, as required by law, and for running away rather than staying at the scene of the accident. The other should face penalties for being an accessory.
In the meantime, we should tweak our ordinances to ban mountain bikers from bringing dogs with them on their rides. There’s no way someone whose attention is on his ride can also pay sufficient heed to the behavior of his dog.
This much is certain: people who let dogs run off-leash are absolutely 100 percent responsible for the actions of their animals — and the painful consequences.
Ending Xcel’s end run
Kudos to certain Boulder City Council members, like Macon Cowles and Lisa Morzel, who led the outcry this week against the idea of keeping negotiations and proposed agreements with Xcel confidential.
As they correctly assert, discussions about a deal on how Boulder is going to get its energy for the next two decades deserves full, thorough and open public airing, not a back-room pact made by staff and trotted out at the last minute for city council’s rubber stamp.
We understand the need for secrecy in the private sector when business deals are being discussed. But when one of the parties is a public entity, it should become the public’s business, unless it meets one of the exceptions to the state’s public meetings and open records laws.
Yes, Xcel broke down and did the right thing a day or two later, releasing some of the details of its proposal in a press release, but its initial reaction was to meet privately with council members instead of speaking openly in a public meeting.
The concept of clean and renewable energy is near and dear to this community’s heart, and thankfully some of our elected representatives blew the whistle on this attempt at subterfuge.
Loss of a Ledger
We were cruising Longmont recently and realized we couldn’t find the good ol’ Longmont Ledger. So we poked around a bit and found that — shocker — it had been discontinued.
This weekly newspaper was launched in 2009 by the Daily Camera as a way to insert itself into the territory of the Longmont Times-Call — and its advertisers. The word is that the Camera appropriated the Ledger name (from a previous newspaper that served Longmont for many years) after it was discovered that the Camera’s original choice, the Longmont Weekly, was already taken by, ahem, the Times-Call. As any good newspaper would, the Times-Call defended its turf with its own weekly rag, and an old-fashioned weekly newspaper war was on.
But now that the Camera and its corporate master, MediaNews Group, have swallowed up the Times-Call and its holdings, there was no need for both weeklies. So — poof! — they decided to axe the Ledger and keep the Longmont Weekly, where you can increasingly expect to find a lot of the same “shared” content that you read in the Denver Post, Daily Camera, Colorado Daily, Times-Call, Colorado Hometown News … shall we go on?
Don’t worry, you can still find original, distinctive content about your county in the independent publication you are now holding — or scrolling through online.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
