Archive

  • Locations: News Published

    Hetty Van Kesteren: Indonesia native loving life in Carbondale

    Considering her diminutive stature, Hetty Van Kesteren’s joyful and easy laugh can seem out of context until you grasp the emphasis in her statement “I have found my place in life.” Born in Jakarta on the Indonesian island of Java, Hetty is the epitome of a person who has lived a multi-cultural life. When she was a child, Indonesia was a Dutch colony, used for its oil, spices and sugar plantations. Both of her grandfathers came to Indonesia from The Netherlands and married Indonesian women. She grew up with 11 brothers and sisters, and her father managed a medical opium company. Indonesian labor was cheap, and Hetty grew up with servants who lived on the outskirts of town in “gedecks” — poorly constructed housing with dirt floors. “We spoke Dutch at home, Indonesian to the servants, and learned Oxford English in school. The natives were Hindu, but my family was Catholic so I went to Catholic school,” Hetty told The Sopris Sun. read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    Jaywalker “Big Bus” heads back to the reservation

    For the past five years, the Carbondale-based Jaywalker Solutions Program has been taking program clients—men in early recovery from the disease of addiction—to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota to do volunteer service work. The project is a partnership with Pine Ridge-based organization Re-Member, whose name is a play on words addressing both the need to remember the history of what occurred in the past to Indian people and, in the words of Re-Member Director, Ted Skantze, “to put back together what’s broken.” read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    C’dale, RE-1 resurrect 2007 housing plan

    The Carbondale Board of Trustees and the Roaring Fork School District board agreed this week that work should continue on the eight-year-old plan to build a housing project on what is now a well-used soccer field in between the Third Street Center and the Bridges High School building (formerly Carbondale Middle School). Exactly how that is to be accomplished, however, remains something of an open question. read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    Marble Distilling shoots for February opening

    The Marble Distilling building at 150 Main St. may appear almost finished, at least when viewed from the street, but as co-owner Connie Baker ruefully told the Sopris Sun recently, “We’re delayed, for sure.” Problems with everything from the delivery of concrete to delays in the manufacturing of the tanks for the distillery’s eco-friendly and ground-breaking WETS, or “water-energy thermal storage” reclamation system, have resulted in sufficient tardiness that “we are shooting for the end of February right now.” She had initially hoped for a December completion date back in June, when construction had only just begun. The delays, she continued, were due to “typical construction stuff, nothing major,” such as engineering complexities with regard to the WETS system, which was designed and developed with the help of a $25,000 grant from the Community Office of Resource Efficiency (CORE). read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    WRNF releases FEIS

    Conservationists, ranchers, recreationists, elected officials and others were elated at this week’s decision to limit future natural gas exploration and production in the White River National Forest, although the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and draft Record of Decision (ROD) will not have any impact on existing leases that would allow drilling south of Carbondale on the Thompson Divide. read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    “Green rush” is over, industry keeps shaking out

    When the so-called “green rush” of marijuana businesses began several years ago, Carbondale at one time boasted 13 pot shops selling to customers throughout the middle portion of the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond, when one counted tourists and customers from other parts of the Western Slope. Today, that town’s roster of pot related businesses has dwindled to a total of nine. That list, according to Town Clerk Cathy Derby, includes: • Three “recreational” pot shops, which do not require doctor’s prescription for sales (with one application pending), and one medical marijuana dispensary where a doctor’s prescription is required; • Three cultivation operations or “grows” (with one application pending); • One outfit making “marijuana-infused products” or MIPs, also known as edibles; • And one testing facility, for testing for contamination and other aspects of the process of growing, cooking with and selling pot to the public. “It’s kind of like … the green rush is over,” said Derby, referring to the thinning-out process that has cut into what once was seen as a massively expansive growth industry. read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    Trustees OK child care center, OK budget

    Carbondale is about to become the new home of the Faith Lutheran Church Child Care Center, which is moving from a previous location in Glenwood Springs to a new site at the juncture of Eighth Street, Merrill Avenue and the Rio Grande Trail, a short distance to the northwest of Town Hall. The center is approved for 15 children initially with the understanding that the number of kids could go as high as 28 starting in the center’s second year of operations. The special use permit approved by the trustees gives the child care center a three-year operating permit. The structure, at 788 Merrill Ave., is a house built in 1885 that is owned by Carbondale resident Bill Roberts and the Roberts Land & Cattle Co, and has been used as an office since the 1980s, according to application documents presented at the Dec. 9 meeting of the board of trustees. Although technically licensed as a child care center, because it will be an all-day operation, the facility is to be called the Faith Lutheran Pre-school. Pre-schools, under state law, can only offer half-day care for children, according to the application documents. read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    KDNK GM hangs on to job following ouster bid

    Steve Skinner, the general manager at KDNK, Carbondale’s community access radio station, held onto his job this week despite an attempt to oust him over his refusal to sign a set of “directives” aimed at tightening oversight of his duties by the station’s board of directors. The decision to keep Skinner on the job came after a tense three-hour special meeting on Dec. 1 at the station, during which at least three members of the board, President Mark McLain, Treasurer Susan Darrow and member Bob Schultz (who was not at the meeting but sent in a written statement of his feelings), indicated that Skinner’s 11-year reign over the station had run its course and should be ended. Skinner, in his own defense, stated at one point, “I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t been accused of doing anything wrong.” read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    Price tag for shopping center: $9.7 million

    The new owners of the Crystal Village Plaza shopping center in Carbondale paid approximately $9.7 million for the property, which covers a little under five acres of land at the intersection of Highway 133 and Main Street. The plaza, which is called the TKG St. Peters Shopping Center in documents on file at the Garfield County Courthouse in Glenwood Springs, was purchased on Sept. 13 from the Carbondale Square LLC partnership, according to the county assessor’s office. And at least for now, the new owners, The Kroenke Group out of Missouri, have no immediate plans for development on the site, according to a spokesman, Mike Tamblyn of Denver. “At the moment, it’s business as usual,” Tamblyn told The Sopris Sun on Tuesday. read more →
  • Locations: News Published

    Wexner fight not over, new group plans appeal

    Organizers say they are likely to appeal the recent denial of at least one of three protests filed over a controversial land swap between the federal Bureau of Land Management and an Aspen couple, Leslie and Abigail Wexner, involving land at the base of Mt. Sopris near Carbondale. The appeal, according to area resident Anne Rickenbaugh, would be based on arguments that the BLM undervalued the public lands included in the exchange, by calculating the public lands’ value according to appraisal standards that assumed public ownership, instead of appraisals based on private-land values. “They didn’t apply the free-market standards at all,” said Rickenbaugh, “even though they could have.” Rickenbaugh is the board secretary of the Colorado Wild Public Lands, Inc. (CWPL), a relatively new organization which has members throughout the Roaring Fork Valley, which filed one of the protests over the land swap. read more →