Colorado
What’s Working: Robocalls are declining in Colorado but still number in the millions
Quick links: Comcast layoffs | Local fed workers update | Take the reader poll | More!
Coloradans fare better than most Americans when it comes to pesky robocallers, according to the latest data from YouMail, which has a free call-blocking app.
But at nine calls per capita last month — below the nation’s average of 12.3 — Colorado phones received an estimated 51.6 million robocalls in September. That per capita figure includes babies.
The problem is, said Danny Katz, executive director of Colorado Public Interest Research Group, many of us are getting way more annoying calls. And the number of robocalls in the state has doubled since 2016 despite laws requiring phone companies to adopt technology that authenticates a voice caller’s identity to prevent spoofing and scams.
While the technology doesn’t authenticate text messages, the FCC has other rules banning text messages sent by an autodialer.
The Federal Communications Commission has taken action. In August, the FCC kicked out 1,200 noncompliant voice service companies “effectively disconnecting them from (the) U.S. phone network.”
But in a new analysis of federal data, PIRG found that only 44% of more than 9,000 phone companies had fully installed the technology. Another 18% have it partially installed. And 31% haven’t installed it.
“Unfortunately, protecting consumers is a marathon and every time that we get to the next benchmark, oftentimes the scam artists are thinking, OK, what’s the new technology or new way that we can get around the rules and regulations?” Katz said. “But I do think every benchmark we hit is a higher bar for scam artists to have to pass. Even though it’s not working perfectly yet, I think there’s plenty of us who have seen a decrease in the number of robocalls and spam texts we have gotten over the last few years.”
Katz is talking about the phone companies in compliance, like T-Mobile, Verizon and other familiar consumer mobile services. Verizon has its Spam Alerts and Call Filter tools for landlines and wireless to help users identify suspicious callers and block them. T-Mobile has ScamShield. AT&T has ActiveArmor.
According to the broadband trade association US Telecom, on behalf of AT&T, the number of robocalls is actually going down. Even YouMail’s data shows that numbers have been in decline this year.
Still, “we recognize that illegal robocalls and scams do continue to be a scourge on our networks, which is why carriers have implemented security protocols,” the trade group said in a statement.
More to come on this topic. Are spam calls getting worse, better or have you even noticed? Take the reader poll to help us better understand the impact on Coloradans.
➔ cosun.co/WWrobocalls
Why Comcast is closing its Centennial HQ and laying off 302
Comcast this week told the state’s labor department that it will close its West Division headquarters in Centennial and layoff 302 employees as part of a major restructuring.
In a memo from Sept. 18, company leaders told employees they need to realign the company for growth. And something that’s not growing? Legacy cable TV and broadband businesses.
The company doesn’t even call it cable TV anymore, but rather, “residential connectivity and platforms.” In its second-quarter earnings report, Comcast lost 11% of its domestic video customers in a year, down by 1.4 million to 11.8 million customers. A decade ago, it had 22.3 million video customers.
Over the same decade, its broadband subscribers grew 40% to 31.5 million, as of June. But that is falling, too, and was down 1.6% in June, compared with a year ago, for a loss of 528,000 internet customers.
But Comcast’s revenues are growing, up 2.1% in the second quarter from a year earlier, thanks to its Universal theme parks and its mobile phone service. Net income nearly tripled to $11 billion, though that was largely due to selling its interest in Hulu to Disney for $9.4 billion.
The restructuring gets rid of divisions in order to focus on regions. If that sounds a little confusing, a Comcast spokesperson clarified Thursday that the company has three divisions: Central, West and Northeast.
The Centennial office, located at 9401 E. Panorama Circle, is the West Division headquarters. But all three divisions are closing. The Central division in Atlanta, is laying off 240 employees. The Northeast division in New Hampshire layoff total has not been confirmed.
But regions, which include other offices and Comcast operations in the U.S., will remain.
The city of Centennial is still home to several Comcast facilities, including an older building at 4100 E. Dry Creek. The aging facility, which existed before Centennial was incorporated in 2001, is the local headend where large satellite dishes help distribute video and is the metro Denver home of Comcast Technology Solutions.
Centennial city officials said in a statement that it “feels for those impacted workers,” but also understands “the need for our companies to restructure and recalibrate in order to remain competitive in a challenging economic environment.”
Neil Marciniak, Centennial’s director of Economic Development, said Comcast will still be the city’s largest private employer. Based on 2024 data, Comcast employed 2,500 people in Centennial, he said.
Colorado federal workers unemployment claims up 81% in a week
The federal shutdown continued to impact federal workers in Colorado with the numbers filing for unemployment growing 81% since last week to 1,119 since Oct. 1, according to the state labor department.
That includes folks who took deferred resignation earlier in the year and had their last day Sept. 30. But current employees, who haven’t been paid since the shutdown began, are now 18 days into the shutdown.
Companies are sharing information on what they’re doing to ease the financial burden, including:
Speaking of the government shutdown, here’s how What’s Working readers responded to last week’s poll on how the shutdown has affected your life. Check it out 🡻🡻
Sun economy stories you may have missed
➔ Dark money group that spent big in Colorado’s Democratic primaries approved funding for Vail retreat for state lawmakers, lobbyists. The Colorado Sun has learned that One Main Street Colorado signed off on a request for $25,000 from the Colorado Opportunity Caucus to fund hotel rooms. >> Read story
➔ Michael Bennet, Phil Weiser are amassing millions of dollars for their Democratic gubernatorial primary fight. The candidates had about $4.6 million in combined campaign cash to begin October. >> Read story
➔ Nederland fire erased a third of local businesses and with it 30% of town sales tax revenue. U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, Gov. Jared Polis visited Caribou Village Shopping Center and promised help navigating access to government help >> Read story
➔ Colorado plans to fully digitize paper and analog land records, some dating back to the 1860s, by next year. A $2 fee from every property filing since 2016 has helped fund the state’s $21M effort to preserve paper and analog records for digital eternity >> Read story
➔ Subsidized flights to small Colorado communities will continue during shutdown — for now. Denver International Airport has the most federally subsidized essential air service routes of anywhere in the nation. That includes flights to Cortez, Alamosa and Pueblo. >> Read story
➔ From Brooklyn to Beulah, hippie beginnings to golden years, a retired couple returns to van life. Part of Colorado’s rapidly aging demographic, Dave and Helene Van Manen left their mountain home for a more practical future — on their own terms >> Read story
Other working bits
➔ Dollar General agrees to pay $400,000 fine for pricing inaccuracies. The settlement comes after the state attorney general’s office sent investigators to stores in Milliken and Loveland in 2023 and found that more than 2% of item prices advertised on shelves rang in differently at the cash register. The AG’s office continued to inspect stores all over the state and found that 12 of 18 inspections charged a higher price at the register.
Dollar General, which has 70 stores in Colorado, denied the allegations but agreed to the settlement, which also requires the retailer to do price audits at each store for the next three years, according to terms. >> View settlement
➔ There are 157,819 job openings on state’s job board. But of those, nearly one-third are remote or out of state, according to the state labor department. As of Oct. 15, 45,880 were out of state and 5,522 were remote. The top company posting jobs? Oracle, with 10,153 openings. Registration to the state’s job board, at connectingcolorado.gov, is required for those collecting unemployment checks. >> Hunt for a job
➔ Pueblo recycler named to Cleantech 50 watch list. That’s a notable honor for Driven Plastics, which takes unwanted plastic bags or that shrink wrap that companies excessively use and turns it into an additive to make asphalt roads last longer. For each mile of one lane, the Pueblo manufacturer recycles up to 10 tons of that thin plastic. >> Earlier story
Got some economic news or business bits Coloradans should know? Tell us: cosun.co/heyww
Thanks for sticking with me for this week’s report. As always, share your 2 cents on how the economy is keeping you down or helping you up at cosun.co/heyww. ~ tamara
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Colorado
US Fish and Wildlife backed Colorado plan to get wolves from Canada before new threats to take over program, documents show
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service backed Colorado’s plan to obtain wolves from Canada nearly two years before the federal agency lambasted the move as a violation of its rules, newly obtained documents show.
In a letter dated Feb. 14, 2024, the federal agency told Colorado state wildlife officials they were in the clear to proceed with a plan to source wolves from British Columbia without further permission.
“Because Canadian gray wolves aren’t listed under the Endangered Species Act,” no ESA authorization or federal authorization was needed for the state to capture or import them in the Canadian province, according to the letter sent to Eric Odell, CPW’s wolf conservation program manager.
The letter, obtained by The Colorado Sun from state Parks and Wildlife through an open records request, appears to be part of the permissions the state received before sourcing 15 wolves. The agency also received sign-offs from the British Columbia Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna.
In mid-December, however, the Fish and Wildlife Service pivoted sharply from that position, criticizing the plan and threatening to take control over Colorado’s reintroduction.
In a letter dated Dec. 18, Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik put CPW on alert when he told acting CPW Director Laura Clellan that the agency violated requirements in a federal rule that dictates how CPW manages its reintroduction.
Colorado voters in 2020 directed CPW to reestablish gray wolves west of the Continental Divide, a process that has included bringing wolves from Oregon in 2023 and British Columbia in 2025.
The federal rule Nesvik claims CPW violated is the 10(j). It gives Colorado management flexibility over wolves by classifying them as a nonessential experimental population within the state of Colorado. Nesvik said CPW violated the 10(j) by capturing wolves from Canada instead of the northern Rocky Mountain states of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, eastern Oregon and north-central Utah “with no warning or notice to its own citizens.”
CPW publicly announced sourcing from British Columbia on Sept. 13, 2024, however, and held a meeting with county commissioners in Rio Blanco, Garfield, Pitkin and Eagle counties ahead of the planned releases last January. The agency also issued press releases when the operations began and at the conclusion of operations, and they held a press conference less than 48 hours later.
Nesvik’s December letter doubled down on one he sent CPW on Oct. 10, after Greg Lopez, a former Colorado congressman and 2026 gubernatorial candidate, contacted him claiming the agency violated the Endangered Species Act when it imported wolves from Canada, because they lacked permits proving the federal government authorized the imports.
That letter told CPW to “cease and desist” going back to British Columbia for a second round of wolves, after the agency had obtained the necessary permits to complete the operation. Nesvik’s reasoning was that CPW had no authority to capture wolves from British Columbia because they aren’t part of the northern Rocky Mountain region population.
But as regulations within the 10(j) show, the northern Rocky Mountain population of wolves “is part of a larger metapopulation of wolves that encompasses all of Western Canada.”
And “given the demonstrated resilience and recovery trajectory of the NRM population and limited number of animals that will be captured for translocations,” the agencies that developed the rule – Fish and Wildlife with Colorado Parks and Wildlife – expected “negative impacts to the donor population to be negligible.”
So despite what Nesvik and Lopez claim, “neither identified any specific provision of any law – federal, state or otherwise – that CPW or anyone else supposedly violated by capturing and releasing wolves from British Columbia,” said Tom Delehanty, senior attorney for Earthjustice. “They’ve pointed only to the 10(j) rule, which is purely about post-release wolf management, and applies only in Colorado.”
More experts weigh in
In addition to the 2024 letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service, documents obtained by The Sun include copies of permits given to CPW by the Ministry of British Columbia to export 15 wolves to the United States between Jan. 12 and Jan. 16, 2025.
These permits track everything from live animals and pets to products made from protected wildlife including ivory.
The permit system is the backbone of the regulation of trade in specimens of species included in the three Appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, also called CITES. A CITES permit is the confirmation by an issuing authority that the conditions for authorizing the trade are fulfilled, meaning the trade is legal, sustainable and traceable in accordance with articles contained within the Convention.
Gary Mowad, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent and expert on Endangered Species Act policies, said “obtaining a CITES certificate is unrelated to the 10j rule” and that in his estimation, CPW did violate both the terms of the 10(j) and the memorandum of agreement with the Fish and Wildlife Service, because “the 10(j) specifically limited the populations from where wolves could be obtained, and Canada was not authorized.”
Mike Phillips, a Montana legislator who was instrumental in Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction that began in 1995, thinks “the posturing about a takeover seems like just casually considered bravado from Interior officials.”
And Delahanty says “Nesvik and Lopez are making up legal requirements that don’t exist for political leverage in an effort that serves no one. It’s unclear what FWS hopes to accomplish with its threatening letter,” but if they rescind the memorandum of agreement, “it would cast numerous elements of Colorado’s wolf management program into uncertainty.”
Looking forward
If Fish and Wildlife does as Nesvik’s letter threatens and revokes all of CPW’s authority over grey wolves in its jurisdiction, “the service would assume all gray wolf management activities, including relocation and lethal removal, as determined necessary,” it says.
But Phillips says “if Fish and Wildlife succeeds in the agency’s longstanding goal of delisting gray wolves nationwide,” a proposition that is currently moving through Congress, with U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Pet and Livestock Protection Act bill, the agency couldn’t take over Colorado’s wolf program. That’s because “wolf conservation falls back to Colorado with (its voter-approved) restoration mandate.” And “the species is listed as endangered/nongame under state law,” he adds.
If the feds did take over, Phillips said in an email “USFWS does not have staff for any meaningful boots-on-the-ground work.” Under Fish and Wildlife Service control, future translocations would probably be “a firm nonstarter,” he added, “but that seems to be the case now.”
A big threat should Fish and Wildlife take over is that lethal removal of wolves “in the presence of real or imagined conflicts might be more quickly applied,” Phillips said.
But it would all be tied up in legal constraints, given that gray wolves are still considered an endangered species in Colorado, and requirements of the 10(j) and state law say CPW must advance their recovery.
So for now, it’s wait and see if CPW can answer Fish and Wildlife’s demand that accompanies Nesvik’s latest letter.
Nesvik told the agency they must report “all gray wolf conservation and management activities that occurred from Dec. 12, 2023, until present,” as well as provide a narrative summary and all associated documents describing both the January 2025 British Columbia release and other releases by Jan. 18., or 30 days after the date on his letter. If they don’t, he said, Fish and Wildlife “will pursue all legal remedies,” including “the immediate revocation of all CPW authority over gray wolves in its jurisdiction.”
Shelby Wieman, a spokesperson for Gov. Jared Polis’ office, said Colorado disagrees with the premise of Nesvik’s letter and remains “fully committed to fulfilling the will of Colorado voters and successfully reintroducing the gray wolf population in Colorado.”
And CPW maintains it “has coordinated with USFWS throughout the gray wolf reintroduction effort and has complied with all applicable federal and state laws. This includes translocations in January of 2025 which were planned and performed in consultation with USFWS.”
Colorado
Avalanche To Play Mammoth in 2027 Discover Winter Classic in Salt Lake City | Colorado Avalanche
NEW YORK – The National Hockey League announced today that the Colorado Avalanche will be the visiting team in the 2027 Discover Winter Classic and play the Utah Mammoth at the University of Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City. Additional details for the game, including ticketing information, date and start time, will be announced at a later date.
The 2027 Winter Classic marks the first time the Avalanche will play in the event and will be the fourth ever outdoor game the franchise plays in and the first one they’ll compete as the visiting team. Colorado hosted the Detroit Red Wings at Coors Field in the Stadium Series on Feb. 27, 2016, the Los Angeles Kings for the 2020 Stadium Series at Air Force Academy’s Falcon Stadium on Feb. 15, and the Vegas Golden Knights at Edgewood Tahoe Resort for the NHL Outdoors at Lake Tahoe event on Feb. 20, 2021.
“We’re excited and honored that the League selected us for the Winter Classic,” said Avalanche President of Hockey Operations Joe Sakic. “The Avalanche organization is always proud to be in consideration for marquee events like this. We’re looking forward to being matched up with a great team and represent the Rocky Mountain region in a game that appeals to these two markets in this part of the country.”
The Avalanche are 1-2-0 all-time in outdoor games but captured the most recent one at Lake Tahoe by a 3-2 score.
Colorado has faced the Mammoth six times since their inception ahead of the 2024-25 campaign, and the Avalanche have posted a 4-1-1 record. The club also owns a 2-0-1 record against Utah this season, which includes beating them in the home opener when Nathan MacKinnon became the first player in NHL history to record a game-winning goal against 32 franchises.
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