Denver, CO
From Denver to Dublin: Aer Lingus looks to tap into business ties, Irish heritage with nonstop flights
After years of considering Denver, Aer Lingus, Ireland’s flagship airline, will launch its inaugural flight from Denver International Airport to Dublin on May 17.
A group of Aer Lingus representatives met and mingled Monday morning with local business and civic leaders, tourism officials and Ireland natives excited for the start of direct flights from the Mile High City to the Emerald Isle.
“It’s 116 days until heels up. Not that we’re counting,” said Yvonne Muldoon, director of sales for Aer Lingus.
Flights from Denver to Dublin will depart four days a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. To start, the service will be seasonal, running from May to Oct. 29. Jim Bochneak, the airline’s regional sales manager for the western U.S., said the season could be extended, depending on the kind of support there is in Denver.
After attending the Denver Travel Show at the Colorado Convention Center over the weekend, Bochneak and Muldoon believe the support for service to Dublin is strong.
“We are genuinely overwhelmed with the support,” Muldoon said.
Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles are the three Aer Lingus routes on the West Coast. In all, the airline offers 21 nonstop routes from the U.S. to Dublin. Some of the European cities Aer Lingus connects to are Edinburgh, London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Amsterdam and Barcelona.
Aer Lingus will add Minneapolis-St. Paul to its routes beginning April 29.
Other European cities where passengers can travel nonstop from Denver are: London; Paris; Zurich; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Munich and Frankfurt, Germany.
Aer Lingus takes its time to make a business case for adding new routes, Muldoon said. “I believe Denver to Dublin has been under review for over six years.”
After the pandemic, Denver really started to rise on the list of opportunities, Muldoon said. It is an untapped market where interest is high in traveling on to Europe. She said whether the service is extended past October will depend on the volume of business.
“I’m over from the head office. I wanted to get a feel for what the demand was on the ground, speak to the local community and just get a feel for what the support is like,” Muldoon said. “It’s been phenomenal.”
The first flight from Denver to Dublin, which will take 9.5 hours, is nearly full, Muldoon said. The airline will fly the Airbus A330, a wide-body aircraft.
Both business and tourism representatives said service from Denver to Dublin will be a big benefit.
“It’s a huge opportunity because a lot of U.S. companies have a corporate presence in Ireland and the Dublin area,” said Maggie Fouquet, president and CEO of the International Business Circle in Denver.
All nonstop flights from Ireland to the U.S are pre-cleared by U.S. Customs and Immigration Services at the Dublin and Shannon airports. “That’s a big time-saver,” Fouquet said.
A big benefit for Bill Graebel’s company, Denver-based Graebel’s Relocation Services Worldwide, is that one of its offices is about 40 miles north of the Dublin airport. Graebel said it will be much more efficient flying into Dublin, rather than going through Heathrow Airport in London or flying to New York, Boston or Chicago to return to Denver.
“I think it will be good for tourism in the area” as well, Graebel said.
And tourists from Ireland will likely appreciate direct flights to Colorado so they explore the West, Graebel added.
Muldoon said Aer Lingus will work with tourist boards in Colorado to pitch the state to people in Ireland. Tim Wolfe, director of the Colorado Tourism Office, said the state’s efforts to attract tourists from Ireland has been underway and the Denver-to-Dublin air service will increase the momentum.
“Any time that you add a link to an international destination, that’s huge for both our residents but also four guests and visitors that come to Colorado,” Wolfe said.
Susan Morrice is part of the Irish diaspora in Colorado that Aer Lingus hopes to tap. She has lived in the Denver area for 40 years and travels four or five times a year back to her home country, but she can’t wait to fly nonstop to Dublin. Patricia Fitzpatrick, who lives in Ireland, works with Morrice and flies to Denver seven or eight times a year, is likewise eager for the new service.
“I don’t like going to London. It’s another day’s travel,” Fitzpatrick said. “This is perfect.”
Fitzpatrick and Morrice think Colorado should sell its skiing to lure more Irish tourists. “They need to tell the Irish that the skiing here is actually better than in Europe,” Morrice said.
“And it lasts longer,” Fitzpatrick said.
Will the two be on the inaugural flight?
“We need to look into it,” Morrice said. “If we’re not on that first one, which we could be, we’ll be on the second.”
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Denver, CO
How To Watch Miami Heat-Denver Nuggets, Lineups, Injury Report, Betting Lines
Game time: 7 pm., ET
Where: Ball Arena, Denver
TV: FanDuel Sports Network
Betting line: Heat +3.5
VITALS: The Heat and Nuggets meet for the first of two matchups this regular season. Last season, Denver swept the series, 2-0, and has currently won eight straight against Miami. The Heat are 34-40 all-time versus the Nuggets during the regular season, including 20-16 in home
games and 14-24 in road games.
PROJECTED STARTERS
HEAT
G Terry Rozier
G Tyler Herro
C Bam Adebayo
F Jimmy Butler
F Nikola Jovic
NUGGETS
F Michael Porter Jr.
F Peyton Watson
C Nikola Jokic
G Christian Braun
G Russell Westbrook
INJUY REPORT
HEAT
Josh Christopher: Out – G League
Kevin Love: Out – Personal
Jaime Jaquez: Questionable – Conditioning
Keshad Jones: Out – G League
NUGGETS
Jamal Murray: Questionable – Concussion
DaRon Holmes III: Out – Achilles
PJ Hall: Out – G League
Aaron Gordon: Out – Calf
Vlatko Cancar: Out – Ankle
QUOTABLE
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra on giving Haywood Highsmith more minutes than Nikola Jovic in the second half against the Phoenix Suns: “H had given us good minutes in that first half, and we were looking to do something just to change the energy of these third quarters. It had nothing to do with Niko,” Spoelstra said. “It was more about their lineup and how they can get you scrambling.”
“
Shandel Richardson is the publisher of Miami Heat On SI. He can be reached at shandelrich@gmail.com
Follow our coverage on Facebook
X: @ShandelRich
Denver, CO
“Prolific thief” pleads guilty to making millions illegally through Denver construction and investment schemes
A 40-year-old man who stole money from families in Denver that he said he would do construction projects for was sentenced to 23 years in prison on Thursday. The sentencing followed a guilty plea by Kyle Arienta for the construction crimes as well as several other offenses, including burglaries at homes in several different Denver neighborhoods where he was caught on camera. The Denver District Attorney’s Office called him a “prolific thief” who “often preyed” on friends and acquaintances.
Arienta pleaded guilty on Thursday, right before his sentencing on charges of securities fraud, theft, burglary and violating the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act, according to the Denver District Attorney’s Office. He had been indicted by a grand jury 11 months ago.
Three families who were seeking the construction work were victimized by Arienta. He stole slightly more than $1 million from them, the DA’s office says. After agreeing to work with Arienta, the families said the work had hardly started before Arienta abandoned the projects.
The burglaries took place a year ago in the following neighborhoods:
– Crestmoor
– Hilltop
– Washington Park
-Belcaro
The DA’s office says Arienta also stole about $1.7 million in all from people he knew through an investment scheme. The office says he “violated the trust of his clients and friends” by convincing them to invest money into faked construction projects.
As part of his sentence, Arienta agreed to pay $3.3 million in restitution to his victims.
Denver, CO
Denver will speed up compost bin delivery next year — while cutting back on recycling pickup
Denver will deliver green compost bins to every solid waste customer who wants one by the end of March, city officials said in announcing an acceleration of their often-maligned rollout.
The citywide expansion of composting service had been expected to take until the end of 2025. But to hit the moved-up deadline — and limit the greenhouse gas emissions of its trucks — Denver will cut back on collecting recyclable items from customers’ purple bins. Recycling pickup will go from weekly to every other week starting Jan. 6.
The frequency of large-item pickup services will also be reduced from once every four weeks to once every nine weeks next year, the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure announced Thursday.
The coming changes won’t impact the base prices charged by the city. Pay-as-you-throw trash collection service will still be priced based on the size of the black trash bins each customer uses — ranging from $9 to $21 per month. The city has been providing $9 quarterly credits to customers who are still waiting for compost services. Those credits will end in April, according to DOTI.
The city pivoted to a fee-based trash service and weekly recycling pickups at the beginning of 2023 as it also began making compost pickup a standard free service. Based on observations since then, city officials expressed hope that the tweaks would improve reliability and help the city better meet its landfill diversion and greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.
“What we’ve learned over the years is (that) we are dramatically underusing our recycling bins each week. We are actually increasing our impact on the environment by running that much recycling (pickup) without that much demand,” Mayor Mike Johnston said in an interview. “We can use the people and the trucks to run those weekly compost routes all over the city.”
When the City Council approved the city’s transition of trash collection services to a program funded by fees on residential customers, one of the selling points was a doubling of recycling collection frequency from every other week to weekly.
But the added work put a strain on an understaffed waste collection department immediately, requiring the city to contract with a third-party hauler to provide those weekly pickups in some neighborhoods through 2026. Customers have been frustrated at times with missed pickups of different services.
In May, officials told a council committee that city collectors and contractors were completing 94% of their routes every week through that point in the year, down from 95% in 2023. That completion rate has slipped further since, according to DOTI leadership.
“These adjustments in our collection schedules will allow us to improve customer service, creating greater reliability in our collection services and improving route completion rates for trash, compost and recycling,” DOTI executive director Amy Ford said in a DOTI news release. “In other words, we pick up your solid waste the day we tell you we are going to pick it up. Today we are at 90%, and we are striving to be at 95%.”
DOTI will be sending letters to 67,000 solid waste customers next month asking them which size compost bin they would like, the release says.
Those customers live in the city’s waste collection districts 1, 6, 7 and 9, which generally cover some northwest, central, east and southeast neighborhoods. They will then have until Jan. 10 to opt into the service and receive their compost bins as part of a first round of deliveries early next year.
There are 180,000 solid waste customers in the city. Bins have been provided in four of Denver’s nine collection districts so far, with rollouts still in progress in District 3, which covers northeastern neighborhoods including Park Hill and Central Park, according to DOTI’s release.
Denverites can dispose of food scraps and yard waste in their compost bins, reducing the amount of waste that otherwise would go to the city’s landfill and emit greenhouse gases like methane as it decomposes. With composting, those items are turned into a nutrient-rich soil additive.
DOTI said the initial wave of requested green-bin deliveries would be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Johnston was more specific during his interview, setting March 15 as the likely completion date for the ramped-up rollout.
The data Johnston and other city officials are using to inform decisions suggest that 50% of a household’s weekly waste is compostable, 25% is recyclable and the final 25% is landfill trash, he said.
DOTI said running large-item pickup on a once-every-four-weeks basis was a factor adding to the city’s waste stream by encouraging people to trash items they might otherwise be able to offload through alternative means.
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Updated (at 3:43 p.m. on Nov. 7, 2024): Due to an error by a reporter, this story originally misreported one of the neighborhoods that is currently receiving compost bins.
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