Colorado

The ‘Colorado Rebound’ nears | CALDARA

Published

2 years ago

January 14, 2024

Jon Caldara

Never since the passage of our Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in 1992 have I been more optimistic about the possibility of Coloradans winning back the lost personal and economic freedoms stolen by the government leviathan.

And no, I have not been ingesting the state’s newly deregulated psychedelic mushrooms.

I make this observation after taking an honest inventory of the political condition of our state as I have worked in Colorado politics for well more than three decades.

As I wrote last week, the Colorado GOP is a lost cause for the next several years. This is a painful but necessary process, like an addict going through the hell of withdrawal, to realign candidates to the new political truths of the state.

Though difficult to swallow, conservatives will need to come to terms with electoral reality.

Colorado is a pro-choice, if not downright pro-abortion, state. Saving the unborn will have to come from the demand side, changing the hearts of pregnant women, not the supply-side of banning the procedure.

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Colorado is a pro-cannabis state. That genie isn’t going back in its bottle. Colorado is a pro-LGB (lesbian, gay, bisexual) state. Colorado is an environmentalist state. Colorado will never vote for former President Donald Trump.

These are difficult realities for some. And though not permanent, nothing in politics is, they will not change precipitously.

But in her bones Colorado is not pro-tax, pro-regulation, pro-crime or pro-woke.

The current leftist regime powers are severely out of touch with voters. And it’s harder to blame conservative boogey monsters for all the ills of the state when they haven’t been in power in decades.

Coloradans will want economically conservative, yet socially accepting candidates. Over time, and after more painful election cycles, like 2024 will be, new Republican-ish candidates, perhaps unafilliated, are going to figure this out.

It will be easier for Republicans to dump their social, moralistic and Trumpy baggage than it will be for progressives to dump their economically devastating, command-and-control mission.

Colorado’s economy will be the driver for the “Colorado Rebound” in years to come.

The worst way to lose is slowly, giving time for people to acclimate to the decline. California is the example of this. The economic policies that plague California started in the 1960s and grew slowly and increasingly after.

Only now, some 60 years later, are the devastating impacts obviously crippling Cali: an effective income tax of 14% for the state’s most productive; energy prices and brown-outs spiraling out of control; and, talk of a wealth tax are just some of the reasons for the grand California exodus.

California is dying of a slow-moving, metastasizing economic cancer caused by governmental overreach. And even now most voters there don’t realize the patient is terminal. The cancer has grown gradually over generations, making it opaque.

Colorado faces a similar fate, but what took California six decades is happening in one decade here. It’s not just great-grandparents here saying, “I remember when…” Young people will remember an economically vibrant, safe and clean Colorado.

The economic destruction being caused by the current progressive establishment will soon begin to be felt in earnest, though it will still take many years to feel its full force. Policies take a long time to achieve the full brunt of their consequences.

Denver’s minimum wage of $18.29; the first year of the state’s Family Medical Leave and Insurance (FAMLI) program’s payouts; costly unreachable energy mandates; the regulatory murders of the oil and gas, ranching, farming and mining industries — these are just a few of the reasons Colorado will economically leapfrog California into an economic wasteland, losing quickly.

We are already witnessing how Colorado is becoming repellent to investment. For several decades, Colorado was the “go-to” place for people fleeing California, New York and Illinois, making our population explode.

That Colorado rush is over. People are still fleeing those failed big-government states, but, according to the demographics, they’re not moving to Colorado nearly as much. We’re basically treading water population wise.

When Colorado isn’t the place people want to come, you know things are going bad. And, fortunately, going bad fast.

In the future (6 to 10 years) voters will be desperate for palatable economic conservatives to undo the harm inflicted by progressives.

The question is whether conservative donors are willing to fund the long, boring work between now and then to make winning possible, but that’s a topic for another column.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.

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Water managers getting a birds-eye view of Colorado’s historically bad snowpack

Published

6 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room

Water managers getting a birds-eye view of Colorado’s historically bad snowpack

DENVER — This winter and spring have produced Colorado’s worst snowpack on record, often measured via weather stations throughout the high country known as SNOpack TELemetry or SNOTEL stations.

Over the last few years, a new kind of complimentary measurement has been taking off — literally.

What started as a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab research project became Airborne Snow Observations (ASO), a company that flies small planes over the mountains to measure the snowpack. Starting in 2015, a joint effort with the state began to deploy the technology and put it to work.

Denver7 got a look at the technology last year.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE: Airborne lasers are measuring Colorado’s snowpack, and the technology is taking off

The planes use light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems to measure the depth of the snowpack across an entire basin, as well as spectrometers that measure how reflective the snow is to determine how fast it is melting.

“The holistic perspective is an important one,” ASO Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Deems said. “And by that I mean not just the full basin perspective on the snowpack, but how that snowpack evolves with our changing forests, the subsurface hydrology, soil moisture and groundwater. All of this adds up to what our managers and what we ultimately see in our rivers, behind our dams and in our reservoirs and in our taps.”

Through the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement (CASM) program, ASO works with more than 100 water management partners ranging from small irrigation districts to large utilities like Denver Water. Deems said the more nuanced data helps those groups decide how to manage reservoirs or water restrictions.

Deems, who lives in Carbondale, said ASO’s flights cover 16 watersheds in Colorado.

“The full basin perspective is really showing us that there’s parts of the watershed that have more snow than others, and that information can really help managers on the ground anticipate what parts of their watershed or what diversion structures or what reservoirs are going to have better inflow versus other parts of the basin,” Deems explained. “That granularity can really help them out come operations time, now.

“The less [water] you have, the more you need to know about it,” he added.

Broader perspective ‘actually even more dire’

Deems said this year, ASO had to move flights up earlier than usual because the snowpack peaked early and began to rapidly melt. He said ASO did 18 survey flights in just one week in March.

ASO Inc.

Watersheds across Colorado saw much less snowpack in 2026 compared to 2025.

Data from those flights show the huge drop off in snowpack this year compared to last.

Watch the full story in the video player below.

Water managers getting a birds-eye view of CO’s historically bad snowpack

“In some cases, the full basin perspective is actually even more dire than what we’re seeing from the [SNOTEL] station network this time of year,” Deems said. “With early melt, those stations are still protected in their little forest pockets and aren’t melting as fast as the more open areas. So we’re seeing perhaps faster declines in the snowpack, and less overall than the stations would indicate in some areas.”

“In other basins, we’re seeing that there’s still a good bit of high elevation snow up there, similar to last year. So not that last year was a huge runoff year, but in some parts of the watersheds, not quite as dire,” he added.

The airborne observation technology is gaining more continuity in the state, with the CASM network expanding.

“And then just last year, a brand new program within the Colorado Water Conservation Board really takes that stakeholder-led effort and creates a state program,” Deems explained. “Having that background of a lot of years of working with these data in different parts of the state really helps with that confidence moving forward, so that folks know how to apply it and how to look to these data in times of crisis, like right now.”

Denver7 | Your Voice: Get in touch with Ryan Fish

Denver7’s Ryan Fish covers stories that have an impact in all of Colorado’s communities, but specializes in covering artificial intelligence, technology, aviation and space. If you’d like to get in touch with Ryan, fill out the form below to send him an email.

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Toyota Game Recap: 4/16/2026 | Colorado Avalanche

Published

18 hours ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room

Toyota Game Recap: 4/16/2026 | Colorado Avalanche

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Colorado

Thursday Rockpile: The Rockies’ mixed ABS Challenge results

Published

1 day ago

April 16, 2026

Press Room

Thursday Rockpile: The Rockies’ mixed ABS Challenge results

After having spent years experimenting in limited capacities and controlled environments, MLB officially rolled out the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System for the 2026 season.

The allure of analyzing the entirely new type of data that ABS challenges present has been hard to resist. To be able to draw any useful conclusions, though, we all collectively needed to wait for the sample size to get to a somewhat meaningful size. On Tuesday, official ABS challenges in regular season MLB games crossed the one thousand mark. That big round number would seem to be a reasonable minimum mark to start looking at the data.

At start of play Wednesday, here’s where the league wide basics stood:

Overall success rate on challenges has been 54% so far, with a notable difference between those initiated by hitters (47%) vs. those from fielders (60%).
Almost all fielder reviews have been initiated by catchers, with only 21 of the 554 having come from pitchers.
Teams so far have very different tendencies for when to challenge: The range of challenge attempts extends from the Minnesota Twins at 58 all the way down to the Boston Red Sox at only 20.
Teams are spreading their challenges around: No individual batter has initiated more challenges than José Caballero of the Yankees with a mere seven.

How have the Rockies specifically fared with this new system given their pre-season preparations?

The answer to that is vastly different between their batters and their fielders.

Before Wednesday’s game, the Rockies batters had challenged 21 pitches and only succeeded on eight of those for an obviously poor 38% success rate.

Baseball Savant has put together a new metric called Runs vs. Expected which attempts to create a digestible overall run value for a team based on the challenges they attempted, their success rate, and the challenges they did not attempt but could have been expected to based on average trends. Essentially, the idea is to spit out an estimate of how many runs have been gained via ABS challenges compared to what an average team would be expected to have in the same circumstances.

The Rockies overall challenge win rate is not the lowest; however, their poor win rate combined with having initiated the fourth highest number of challenges means that Baseball Savant ranks the Rockies batters dead last in terms of Runs vs. Expected.

Baseball Savant

Like most teams, the Rockies are spreading their challenges around — the only hitter on the team who has challenged more than three times is Hunter Goodman. As a batter, Goodman has a won one challenge and lost four for a success rate of 20% in a very small sample size.

The fielding side is a very different picture. The Rockies have initiated 27 challenges and won 19 of them for a sparkling 70% success rate.

Using the same Runs vs. Expected abstracted stat from Baseball Savant as examined above for their batters, the Rockies rank fourth in the league for fielder initiated challenges. They are tied with the Kansas City Royals and rank behind only the Miami Marlins, Seattle Mariners, and Minnesota Twins.

A table featuring data on fielder initiated ABS challenges from all 30 MLB teams as of April 15th. It is sorted by the highest Runs vs. Expected (Minnesota Twins at 2.2) down to the lowest (Los Angeles Angels at -1.4).

Baseball Savant

Both of the Rockies catchers have a success rate of over 70% and rank within the top ten in the league in total challenges won. The teams overall average is brought down slightly by José Quintana’s single failed attempt, but the tandem of Hunter Goodman and Brett Sullivan both been very good at utilizing this system.

Most players and teams strategies for how best to use this system in practice vs. in theory are still evolving. It will probably be a few seasons before these numbers start to really stabilize and we learn what the norms are. But, at first glance, the Rockies are in an interesting spot.

Their batters are doing far worse than average but their catchers (when not batting) are doing far better than average. They can go one of three ways given this:

Put coaching resources into trying to improve their hitters success rate.
Limit the circumstances in which they want to let their hitters challenge, thus saving more challenges for their fielders.
Wait for more data before jumping to conclusions.

Any path forward is fine, so long as it’s not one that limits Brett Sullivan and Hunter Goodman while behind the plate as they both seem to be pretty darn good at this so far.

Triple-A: Albuquerque Isotopes 4, Oklahoma City Comets 3

A home run from Nicky Lopez and a big four hit day for Vimael Machín was pretty much all the offense the Isotopes needed to best the Comets. Keegan Thompson threw a solid 4.2 innings of two run ball before handing it off to the bullpen which shut down the Comets until a shaky 1.1 innings from Seth Halvorsen who allowed their final run in the ninth.

Double-A: Hartford Yard Goats 11, Richmond Flying Squirrels 13

On a warm night in Hartford the bats were scorching. Bryant Betancourt was four for six including a homer, Skyler Messinger was two for three with a double and two walks, and Zach Kokoska (who came in for Benny Montgomery after he hurt his leg on a play against the right field wall) was two for four with a walk and a home run. On the mound it was a tough night for both the starter Jake Brooks and closer Cade Denton as each of them allowed five runs.

High-A: Spokane Indians 6, Vancouver Canadians 14

The Spokane lineup managed to score six runs despite no individual batter having more than two hits and Max Belyeu’s triple being their only extra base hit. A true team effort! On the mound it was, sadly, a similarly collective effort in terms of every pitcher contributing to the mountain of runs allowed. Yujanyer Herrera (five runs in 2.1 innings) and Justin Loer (four runs in 0.2 relief innings) bore the brunt of the damage from the Canadians’ bats.

Low-A: Fresno Grizzlies 9, Ontario Tower Buzzers 16

Wednesday was a night that Jhon Medina likely wishes to forget after having allowed eight earned runs in 0.2 relief innings after Marcos Herrera was pulled for the fourth after 77 pitches. On the hitting side, things went better, as Fresno hitters earned nine walks en route to those nine runs. In terms of standout performers, Jack O’Dowd hit the lone home run for the Grizzlies but Tanner Thach reached base three times including once on a double.

How to Judge the 2026 Colorado Rockies fairly | Mile High Sports

Drew Creasman digs into how best to evaluate a Rockies team that is expected to lose a lot. It’s a similar premise to an article I wrote before the season looking for a metric to judge the team by, but Creasman lays out the case for a measure that allows checking in more regularly and directly corresponds to how fun the team is to watch.

Broncos owners made Russell Wilson go away. It’s time they make Kris Bryant go away, too. | The Denver Post ($)

Sean Keeler makes a case for something that is probably familiar with Rockies fans: Now is the time to work out a restructured contract with Kris Bryant that officially sees him removed from the team. Keeler draws parallels between what could become of the current situation with Bryant and how the Bronco’s saw almost immediate success after parting ways with Russel Wilson.

Colorado School Breaks College Softball Winning Streak Record | Westworld

Benito L. Kelty puts the spotlight on the Colorado Christian University softball team who are currently amidst a 38-game winning streak. This is the record within the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference that they play in and it is possible that they could soon be challenging for the overall NCAA record of 55 consecutive wins. This is a local sports story absolutely worth keeping an eye on even if not directly tied to baseball.