Happy Wednesday, Boulder. I hope you’re well.

Today, our restaurant and art connoisseur Jessica Mordacq writes about the need for a mid-sized performance space in Boulder. Though Boulder Theater and the Fox Theatre are both mid-sized, their rental rates are out of reach for aspiring performers who need live venues in order to grow.

“We have a lot of organizations that can’t grow because they don’t have venues to perform in,” said Jan Burton, board member of Create Boulder, a nonprofit that provides opportunities for local arts organizations to connect and grow their communities.

Also, the city met about prairie dogs last night. A lightning rod in Boulder, city staff are trying to balance the rodents’ place in the food chain while managing their spread onto lands where they’re unwanted.

Have a terrific day.

— Tim, reporter

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What to know today

  • Cloudy and chilly: In the 30s today and tomorrow with clouds overhead. No moisture for the next week, if you have faith in weather forecasts.
  • Prairie dogs expanding their reach: Last night, the City of Boulder hosted a virtual meeting updating residents on local happenings with prairie dogs. A rodent with ardent fans and passionate detractors, prairie dogs require planning and patience, as often they make their way onto land that humans would like to use for other means.
    • Prairie dogs added more than 5,000 acres to their domain this past year — the most ever recorded on OSMP land. Recent drought has created more sparsely vegetated land that is the dogs’ desired habitat.
    • The city is trying to manage prairie dogs as humanely as possible, pairing with the Humane Society to relocate when there are other plots available to put the moved animals. One of the struggles with relocations, however, are rabbits. Turns out bunnies enjoy traps set for the dogs. But once the prairie dogs are moved, things are more successful. Previous receiving properties — where they put the relocated prairie dogs — are showing thriving colonies with many pups in tow.
    • On some properties, prairie dogs left on their own. This happened when the city was able to grow enough vegetation on the land that the rodents no longer felt at home. Cover crops, as talked about at the Soil Revolution conference, are being used to accomplish this goal. Some of those crops mentioned were pumpkins, peas and sorghum.
    • Many removed prairie dogs are from agricultural land, where the dogs, paired with cattle, increase the risk of desertification. To reclaim those lands once the dogs are gone, the city first applies soil amendments, like compost, and then tries to loosen compacted soils so it will receive seeds. Then irrigation hopefully sprouts those seeds.
    • Some prairie dogs were killed as they moved into areas where relocation would’ve been too arduous or impossible. One of those was the Boulder Reservoir dam. Burrows and dams don’t mix.
    • The city is not just moving or killing prairie dogs, however. It provided the rodents with plague vaccines on 275 acres of city land to combat the sickness that routinely decimates prairie dog colonies. The vaccines serve them, and us. Though the chance of spread from prairie dogs to humans is low, nobody wants a plague.
    • If you have questions about the city’s prairie dog management, you can still submit questions to osmpinput@bouldercolorado.gov until Dec. 20.
  • Colorado’s Division of Insurance asks private insurers to extend help for Marshall Fire victims: With the anniversary of the Marshall Fire approaching, so too is the end of an important piece of insurance coverage for some. Additional Living Expenses insurance, or ALE, helps homeowners cover the cost of living while they’re trying to rebuild or find a new place to live. Some homeowner policies only provide 12 months of ALE. The DOI is asking that insurers extend that coverage to 24 months to total loss survivors. (HB 22-1111, signed into law in June 2022, requires insurers to offer a minimum 24 months to collect ALE with two extensions of six months.)
    • “Earlier this year, we asked the companies to do more, to step up and make things easier for the Marshall Fire survivors. And to their credit, most companies met our asks,” said Colorado Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway. “As the rebuilding process has just started for so many, extending ALE coverage is critical in letting people know they can continue to have a roof over their heads.”
    • “As we all know, most Marshall Fire survivors are still trying to put their lives back together,” reads an open letter from the DOI to insurers. “Extending ALE up to 24 months will let them rest easier as their homes and lives are rebuilt.” The DOI said the request “is completely in the spirit of HB 22-1111” and the support the legislation received at the state legislature. 
  • Loads of money available for the arts: A holistic community is one that recognizes art as an essential. The problem with art, however, is there’s not always a whole lot of money to be made in the endeavor. The City of Boulder is looking to fill that gap for various organizations that bring some creativity to our town. In 2023, the Boulder Arts Commission is giving out $1,475,000 for the local arts.
    • For those who think their organization or project might qualify for financial assistance, a Zoom meeting will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 14 to delve into information about the funding. RSVP Lauren Click, clickl@bouldercolorado.gov, for meeting access information.
  • Fresh Thymes Eatery is shutting down. “It is with great sorry and difficulty that we have made the decision to shut down the Fresh Thymes Eatery,” a social media post by owner Christine Ruch reads. “Our doors will be closing after Saturday, December 17th.” The gluten-free restaurant on 30th Street in Boulder opened in 2013. Ruch blamed Covid-related challenges and “an increasingly difficult environment for small businesses in Boulder.”
    • This past summer, Ruch opened a sister restaurant, Bodega, next door to her original eatery. “We don’t have all the answers right now, but we know that, although challenging and sorrowful, this ending of the Fresh Thymes Eatery is also the beginning of something beautiful. Come next year, we plan to focus on the Bodega and everything we’re passionate about.”
  • CU scientists investigating aerosols and flushing: Most people know that when you flush, while everything visible disappears down a series of pipes, some nearly invisible water droplets rise into the room. But when CU researchers shined lasers and used high-speed cameras on a flushing toilet, they found that aerosols didn’t rise, but instead erupted from the bowl with each flush. Some traveled up to the ceiling.
    • “If it’s something you can’t see, it’s easy to pretend it doesn’t exist. But once you see these videos, you’re never going to think about a toilet flush the same way again,” said John Crimaldi, lead author on the study and professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering. “By making dramatic visual images of this process, our study can play an important role in public health messaging.”
    • The particulates rising into the restroom can carry E. Coli, C. difficile, noroviruses and adenoviruses. Covid-19 is also present in human waste, though its unclear whether it can be spread through problematic flushing.
    • A takeaway is we probably need to reconsider our toilet design so the bathroom air isn’t saturated with what should be in our sewers.

Go deeper

The push to build Boulder’s first community arts hub has new momentum

By Jessica Mordacq

In the arts community in Boulder, it is a known problem that has seen little momentum for a solution: The city has almost no mid-sized performance spaces that seat between 250 and a thousand people and are affordable for local artists.

“We have a lot of organizations that can’t grow because they don’t have venues to perform in,” said Jan Burton, board member of Create Boulder, a nonprofit that provides opportunities for local arts organizations to connect and grow their communities. Artists who can’t afford to perform publicly, she said, often don’t get as much community support or funding.

Though the Boulder Theater and the Fox Theatre are mid-sized, their rental fees exceed what many local artists and nonprofit arts organizations can afford. The Fox Theatre charges $6,500 for a night.

Now, a new push has emerged to build the city’s first performing arts center to solve that and other related challenges at a time when local arts are still struggling from the pandemic. 

“Many arts organizations are at 60 to 70% of pre-Covid attendance and donations,” said Burton, a former Boulder City Councilmember. “They’re still just hanging on by their fingernails.” 

This is not the first time arts advocates have raised this issue — a performing arts center for local artists has been a conversation in Boulder for decades, said Nick Forster, a Create Boulder board member. Forster was part of a 1994 campaign committee that helped draft a ballot measure to increase the Boulder hotel room tax and use some of the proceeds to buy the Boulder Theater, restore it, and convert its parking lot into a conference center and meeting space.

“It was going to be a community-minded facility, rather than a for-profit enterprise,” Forster said. The measure failed. “Boulder has not supported the arts in a way that is commensurate with its capability and its reputation,” he added.

Continue reading…

Through Dec. 31, the Colorado Media Project and NewsMatch will each match your new monthly donation to BRL 12X or DOUBLE your one-time gift, up to $1,000. This means your gift can fund triple as much vital journalism for Boulder County and help us continue to build a great local newsroom. Give today to triple your impact!

BRL picks

⛏️ A decade of alpinism: At 7 p.m. on Thursday, Neptune Mountaineering presents Tom Livingstone, a renowned climber who will talk about the “why” of climbing. “Why spend weeks traveling to remote mountainous regions of the planet, then spend days questing up unclimbed walls? What do we find up there?” The event is free, but you should register beforehand.

🙊 Comedy at License No. 1: Every Thursday, the speakeasy style bar under the Boulderado hosts two comedy shows, one at 7:30 p.m. and another at 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 and audience members must be 21 with an ID.

📽️ Wildlife photography discussion: On Dec. 15 at 5:30 p.m. the Museum of Boulder will host a discussion on wildlife photography with guest speaker Kristi Odom, a well-awarded photographer who focuses on photography as a means to protect the earth’s wildlife. The event is free, and is in partnership with the Colorado Pika Project.

Covid in Boulder County: Dec. 14, 2022

  • 28 patients hospitalized with Covid. ⬇️ Down from a high of 30 last week, according to the Boulder County health department.
  • Boulder remains in the high community level for Covid per CDC guidelines, which indicates transmission is high.
  • Data update: We’re suspending our reports on case counts for another week or so. Instead, we’ll be reporting county data on the number of people hospitalized with Covid-19. That data can be found here. You can find a chart of the trend in Covid by age group here.

What else we’re reading

  • The pandemic impacted students’ math skills in a big way. Colorado teachers are trying to figure out how to make up for that lost time. One method is “just-in-time” learning, which accelerates students’ work so they’re processing many concepts all at once.
    • “You didn’t really pay attention,” said freshman Ray Bolanowski, of virtual math during the pandemic years. “You kind of just did like the bare minimum so you wouldn’t get in trouble and then you’d just, like, go back to sleep.”

ICYMI

Tim Drugan was a climate and environment reporter for Boulder Reporting Lab.