Jennifer Askey: Bears: Boulder must prepare for all likelihoods

Recently we read that Anchorage authorities have killed four black bears that were foraging in a homeless camp on the outskirts of that city. Asheville, NC, is seeing problems as well. Boulder’s Urban Wildlife Management Plan provides specific guidance for residents on how to store trash and reduce bear and mountain lion attractants. There are significant fines for noncompliance. Yet nearly every tent set up along our creek paths and greenways is surrounded by food trash and garbage. Certainly the occupants of those tents are storing food inside as well.

Here is my question: How are city managers addressing the likelihood that someone camping along one of our numerous creeks is going to be injured or killed by a bear searching for food?

Jennifer Askey, Boulder

John Baur: Editorials: Maybe next time board will be more measured

Wow! If there was any doubt about where our editorial board stands within the political spectrum under the direction of the new opinion editor, Gary Garrison, that doubt was laid to rest emphatically with the Supreme Court comments published on July 10. Among the views of the board that I gleaned from that piece are the following:

• Abortion issues should rest with the unelected Supreme Court rather than be decided by elected state representatives.
• Although a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll suggests, according to the National Review, that as many as 72% of all Americans favor some restrictions on abortion, it is “white evangelicals and conservative Republicans” who are imposing their will on the rest of the country.
• Unelected EPA staff should decide the future of fossil fuels rather than elected congressional representatives.
• The Supreme Court should be implementing the “public will” rather than determining the constitutionality of existing and proposed laws.
• Police are not to be trusted.
• Our Founding Fathers’ prescriptions for governing this country, arguably the most equitable, prosperous and generous country in the history of humanity, are unworthy because of the race and gender of those founders.

It is always my hope when a new opinion editor arrives at the Camera, that future conversations in this public forum will be more measured and less one-sided than in the past. Oh well. Maybe next time.

John Baur, Boulder

Steve Rohrbach: Editorials: Opinion page does not belong in sports

Now that the Daily Camera has a new opinion page editor, can’t we move the editorial page back to where it always has been, instead of being hidden at the back of the sports section? I’m not sure how that ever made sense to start with, but clearly, it no longer does.

Steve Rohrbach, Lyons

Ann Scott: Wolves: Colorado should protect animal under Endangered Species act

Wolves are being killed indiscriminately in the northern Rockies. Today, hunters in Montana can sit just outside of Yellowstone and use baits and recorded calls to lure wolves out of the protected area. They can kill as many as 10 wolves each. In Idaho, private contractors have been hired by the state to trap and shoot nearly all the wolves in the state.

As a Coloradan, I voted in 2020 for the reintroduction of wolves, and I knew at the time it was a controversial subject, but it can be done right. Among other things, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission is directed to develop a plan to reintroduce and manage gray wolves no later than December 2023, hold statewide meetings, obtain public input and provide fair compensation for livestock issues.

I encourage the states in the northern Rockies to follow the example of Colorado and I urge President Biden and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to relist wolves under the Endangered Species Act in the northern Rockies.

Ann Scott, Boulder

Colleen Ostlund: Millennium Hotel: Solution isn’t in destruction of historic building

Headlines on July 9th discussing the project of student housing development were very telling of how, once again, we keep taking and dumping all things old to then take more resources to make something new.

Couldn’t the old Millennium Hotel be converted into something and retrofitted to create some kind of living space with all the bathrooms, bedrooms and rooms already there? Where is all that going into the Earth?

There has to be a better way, a more ecologically fit way to stop all the waste.

Colleen Ostlund, Boulder