epgarbage

Trustee Cenac is very anti-government involvement in constituents' problems, which is interesting, since she takes up one of the precious six seats on the town board, which is ostensibly a local government entity, organized to protect and serve the local taxpayers. If you go back through any noise ordinance discussion over the past six years, you will find, without fail, when she buzzes in to talk (and she never feels uncompelled to share this laissez faire opinion), that she constantly and consistently lectures the audience on where they choose to live determining whether they have any right to complain. This is known as victim blaming - If you are raped, it is because of the way you dress, if your business is vandalized by a customer bent on destruction, it is because your windows aren't strong enough to withstand getting hit with a large rock, and, God forbid, if you can't tolerate 14 straight hours of 100+ decibel noise, it is because your ears are pansies and you pic...

Random guy #1: You need to put up a slide that lists all the items for approval on the consent agenda. Town board: Brilliant idea. Despite the fact that only three people attend the board meetings in person, and perhaps, if we're lucky, another 8-10 occasionally watch parts of it online, and these items are in such small type nobody in the audience or watching online can read anything on the slide, and no one besides you, random guy, cares about this in any way, since staff has already determined these approvals are a mere formality, we will implement your suggestion immediately and without pushback, and make it a permanent feature of every meeting henceforth into the next century and beyond. Random guy #2: Could you release the sales tax figures to the public on the day you receive them? Town board: Are you out of your effing mind? No effing way. This is the hill we will die on. You will never, ever see that number until we are good and ready. What are you, a communi...

But a movie theater recently closed in Estes Park. Also three restaurants and a gift shop, but those aren't as important as a movie theater.

Maybe it's the neighbors you keep, but I can't imagine this kid as a bald, shirtless, shoeless high-speed driver careening through Rocky Mountain National Park. This Wayde WASP was the fugitive keeping me awake last night, wondering when he was going to smash through my door and slice my head off? I would have been more worried about any of the other kids surrounding him in his yearbook, especially the woman to his left, voted most likely to already have an OnlyFans account... Update: From this morning, north of High Drive and south of Larkspur, photo credit Shirley Sterling And this was his brother

Meanwhile, the number of articles written in the Trail-Gazette about Molly B restaurant closing: A big fat zero. Sharon Seeley and Jenna MacGregor are white. Dawn Wilson is white. Mike Romero is retiring. The movie theater gets four articles and counting about CLOSING. Not about running a successful business, about CLOSING. The Lees are Asian. When they needed help, Mike R. spiked the article. Do the math.

Probably similar to Nicolas Maduro agreeing to hold elections in Venezuela that were "free and fair". The non-commute of not driving to Estes Park from Fort Collins once a week to assign 400 stories to Dawn Wilson was probably killing him. Who will hold up the Stanley's Nut Sack now that Mike's prominent chin will not be available? Will he move to Hungary and start heading Viktor Orban's propaganda machine?

Also, structural fire reported along Fall River Road. Estes Park needs some elected leadership to step up and start taking a leadership role.

Less time than it takes to make a baby. I wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong with our interviewing process, or, dare I suggest it, with the Estes Park citizenry currently occupying important "leadership" posts responsible for making these hiring decisions?

Our long national nightmare is almost over. (Or do you think there's going to be a third-act plot twist or wow finish?) Hi All I figured the papers have early deadlines like we do for the holiday of the 4th. Here is the movies and newsletter info for the theaters for this week and next starting July 5-112024 Happy 4th to everyone. This one is my favorite holiday. I would love to hear what your favorite holiday is. As heartbreaking as it is. We have set the closing date for the Reel Mountain Theatre for August 30th and decided not to renew the lease at the Stanley Village- location of the Reel Mountain Theatre with Wheeler Properties. Wheeler properties and Greg Wheeler has been very kind to us they have worked with us the whole time during COVID and now to try and help us save this movie theatre. But, realestate and rent has to be paid. We are just simply not being in enough revenue to pay all the expenses. I have tried to save the theatre, I have tried to lower uti...

"Treasures from the Vault" is the theme of the July 2024 series of free programs hosted by the Estes Park Archives at 240 Moraine Avenue. Every week, we will examine another recently acquired postcard or pamphlet or booklet or book related to early Estes Park history, including a first-edition (London) Isabella Bird "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains" and a first-edition S. Anna Gordon "Camping in Colorado" which both became available to readers in book form in October 1879, a rare early postcard or advertising insert from 1905 that pushes back W.G. Edward's management of the "Rustic" (now the H-Bar-G Ranch) to two years earlier than the H-Bar-G website would have you believe, and a fascinating comical "Longs Peak Inn" postcard from 1947, one year after Mrs. Enos Mills retired and sold the near 75-year-old establishment to Fellton Enterprises. The programs begin every Saturday evening at 7:00 p.m., to avoid parking charg...

The Sweet Granada (the word translates directly to "pomegranate", but refers more broadly to a city and region in southern Spain, or in the case of what follows, an adjacent Spanish Revival-style theatre named the "Granada") in Emporia, Kansas, was recently named America's second-best candy shop by USA Today. The Chamber of Commerce in Emporia is not demanding a recount, although they are puzzled by the outcome, given that, in the weeks leading up to the announcement, Sweet Granada (although its official name is "The Sweet Granada", sticking with this formality immediately brings up (for me, at least) unintended resonance with Atom Egoyan's decidedly non-upbeat film "The Sweet Hereafter", so the article is not an absolute henceforth) was constantly, solidly in first place on the leaderboard, updated daily, then found themselves playing second fiddle when a winner was announced following a dark period of seven days when no rankings were p...

I'm sure we could set aside a pika statue for you, or maybe a saddle with your name on it. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/18/pastor-ex-trump-adviser-resigns-sexual-abuse The guy was abusing an unrelated 12-year-old girl while he was living in this girl's house with his wife. It sure sounds like something you would not be honored for, right, everyone who defends the W.T. Parke pika statue and the George Hix memorial in town? Right, trustees who continue to look the other way when this horrific behavior and the fact that we HONOR it in town is brought up?

Good or bad, something incredibly significant is about to unfold.

If you need a good laugh, return to this article PRN. Admission: I have zero sympathy for everyone quoted in this story, including but not limited to the bridal party, scam owner, and stiffed employees - If you are dumb enough to trust any salon in Estes to be around in six months to honor any commitment, especially those involving keeping track of money already spent or hours already worked, your photo is probably used to illustrate various dictionary terms of derision or moisture behind the ears. https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/former-employees-brides-claim-glow-bridal-estes-park-owner-scammed-them/

So the Lazy B was here five years? I had forgotten them after the Elkhorn Lodge debacle. Five consecutive years? Except for the Reel Mountain Theatre, no business has said a longer farewell, with zero community involvement or investment or interest in this protracted goodbye and fare thee well, as the Lazy B. It is right there in their name. The performance was lazy, the food was lousy, the whole idea behind resurrecting something from the 1960s and thinking people still had any nostalgia for that era, itself a Bonanza and Wagon Train-manufactured nostalgia for the 1860s, when people routinely died of typhoid and dysentery, was both lazy and crazy. How it held on for five years (five consecutive years? Weren't there some interruptions while the performers hocked their instruments and had to take jobs in the circus?) is a testament to finding/bleeding someone possessed of both inordinante amounts of money and stupidity, never an easy combination to locate. There was the char...

And more noise and construction means more riled up elk. But of course, FLAP fanatics, there is no correlation between increased noise, increased road construction and increased elk attacks, just as there is no correlation between increased road construction and decreased sales tax. You can all return to your Nexflix binging. Nothing to see here. Why would we want to control our elk population, when we can use it to destroy our aspen and terrorize our residents? Especially since the Trail-Gazette has placed an embargo on unpleasant news.

One day before everyone else. And it's always free. You want the news before everyone else? You want answers while the other suckers are sitting on their thumbs? Come to epgarbage.blogspot.com

Ian Fleming. Jimmy Stewart. Whoever, the bumbling James Bond guy.

Christy Crosser, who is tied like an umbilical cord to the town, has given her opinion. Bow down, everyone, and worship at the altar of your overlord. Ms. Crosser has just informed the town that she sat in the audience during the recent study session. Bully for her. So did I. This gives us, apparently, a bulletproof pulpit to say or make up whatever we want to in support of whichever side we are on. I will grant that she is the parking ambassador, and that she is in direct contact with more people about parking than I am. I would hope that were the case, or why is she being paid to be a parking ambassador? I happened to sit close to her in the audience, within viewing distance, and noted the she was always shaking her head in pleasure when someone she supported spoke on the topic of road construction and the impact or lack of impact on businesses, and shaking her head in disdain when something she disagreed with was presented. This is obviously her right, but it makes me ...

without adding anything new. No wonder journalism and newspapers are dying. Here are two really tiny things that are new: I already figured based on his previous addresses and his girlfriend's numerous videos from Marine-type activities that he was in the military. My question is (and at least the Colorado Springs Gazette could pretend to investigate this or start stumbling towards an answer, instead of just regurgitating Kyle Patterson's three paragraphs) - Is he still in the millitary? Could we enlist some of the military to assist in the search? And then the Daily Mail across the pond, bless them, produces a wonderful clickbait headline by somehow indicating the text he sent to his friend from the top of Longs Peak was somehow "chilling". What part of telling someone you've arrived at the top of a mountain is chilling? Go back to the previous entry to see how skeptical I am of even this straightforward text being real or true, but regardless, the o...

How do we know that was accurate, or truthful? How do we know he wasn't planning to disappear? Here we go expending thousands of dollars again on search efforts directed towards the very places we should be looking, IF HE IS TO BE BELIEVED, and not on the very places we SHOULD actually be looking if we stopped taking everything unprepared or unreliable witnesses provide us at face value. Last night wasn't particularly cold, so he could have survived everything but a significant injury. If we haven't found him by tomorrow, on the pretty straightforward non-technical routes people take to get up and down Longs Peak, he is not there, and we need to call off the search efforts, unless the family wants to participate/pay, because he is either dead or dissembled into thin air. Search Efforts For Missing Man On Longs Peak In Rocky Mountain National Park Today, May 13, Rocky Mountain National Park rangers began search efforts for Lucas Macaj, 23, of Colorado Spring...

The stench known as Taranis (aka Taranis Ore Ass Rex) located on Conifer Drive is up to their "pump and dump" tricks again. Whenever you see an over-the-counter penny stock traded in America with supposed mineral riches somewhere in distant Canada, you can bet your bottom dollar (as Taranis hopes you do) there is nothing in the ground at either site. Taranis is headquartered [sic, if you define a modem and a Walmart printer as HQ] in Estes Park (lucky us), not exactly a hotbed of mining expertise, but if a retired guy has been chased out of three other communities and wants to work his scam out of Carriage Hills, who are we to interfere? The various exotic descriptives ("Thor", "Thunder Zone", "The Tusk") for the supposed exploration site are written for the layman or the teenage video game enthusiast, with some actual or made-up technical terminology (porphyry, epithermal) thrown in, all of which pretty much translates to "bullshit, bu...

Let's go back 10+ years ago, to March 2014, when Kirby Nelson-Hazelton was a Visit Estes Park staff member, Scott Webermeier was on the board of directors, and Elizabeth Fogarty had been selected yet had still not replaced the retiring Peggy Campbell as CEO. Even back then, the CEO was pulling in over $100K per year. Scott Webermeier, who left the school board under something of a cloud in 2003, and failed a re-election attempt in 2007 (this all relates to Richard Kastendieck, the superintendent of Estes Park School District R-3, who was convicted of embezzling more than $60,000 from the district) was a big Fogarty supporter, and was not a big fan of some of the other school board members who witnessed his interactions with Kastendieck. These folks not only remained in Estes Park, but began running for various board positions in other fields. This is all water under the bridge, but the rift in the current Estes Park political scene relates to which side you were on in 2003, w...

The connection for this, as far as the seemingly out of nowhere mention of Estes Park, may be this in that Amber, the woman with the dead unicorn tattoo, is associated by address to the Rettenbergers, living near Fish Creek, but either Weld Country isn't really that interested in finding her, or they know more about Estes Park than they are telling. Although Kirby H. demanded to be missing, and was last seen getting a skull tattoo, she is five years younger than Amber, and resides in a different neighborhood. Why Amber has what appears to be conglabata covering her chin is unclear, although meth is a wonderful dermatologic sculptor.

Trustee Kirby H., the Estes Park town board member who is modeling her career after the character Tracy Flick in "Election", has asked for a special session tonight (Tuesday, April 30) to challenge the recent appointment of newly-elected mayor Gary Hall to the Platte River Power Authority (PRPA) board. "This is an outrage", Kirby proclaimed, pullling out a pocket notebook and flipping to a page where she had written the word "outrage" in blue and yellow magic markers, heavily underlined in green. "I have lived in this community since 2014, and served on every committee, including the Yogurt Rehab Committee, that was available for me to serve on, and while I am happy to mouth the words "I would be happy to serve wherever" that is definitely not what I believe or deserve, which is that I deserve to replace Gary Hall on the PRPA board. I want to make it abundantly clear that, while I served on the Platte River Power Authority board in a pu...

It's the end of April, and Estes Park is going to suffer through another weekend of paltry tourists, snow-covered sidewalks, and the abandoned road construction nightmare. Half the town is without power, and while that is not necessarily the town's fault (underground lines, anyone?), it might have been smarter to spend our $5.4 million and counting on something other than a two-year project involving tearing up the entire downtown with the goal of restoring it slightly differently. Luckily, the Safeway was still open at last check this morning, and while all of their day-old product will go to Crossroads, whose patrons eat way better than those working to earn a salary, at least your favorite off-brand tuna and chocolate-chip cookies from Mexico are on special ($3.79 rather than $3.99), if you are a Safeway Club member and have a digital coupon and go through self-checkout and donate $2 to Crossroads. Four months of 2024 are nearly past, and the sales tax numbers are going...

Last night, as the new mayor demonstrated (volubly) he is not the old mayor, and Patrick wept while Wendy said her good-byes stone-faced, empathy for anyone not sharing at least 50% of her Viking DNA rapped tightly under a layer of cold till the end, the newly elected non-incumbents got a lesson of how things are going to be run over the next two years, courtesy of Kirby H. throwing a snit about what she wanted and what she deserved and how she will be happy to serve wherever she is appointed but she deserved to be appointed to Visit Estes Park. She will naturally contend that Bill B., as a newby, should not get what he wants, and, let's be honest, VEP is going to do whatever they want regardless of how many trustees fake monitor them, even if all six trustees were appointed as voting members, so the vote was meaningless, but set the stage for every future significant vote, and that outcome is 4-3. Grumblings will start among the three about why Marie C. is such a turncoat, but ...

43% voter turnout during a mayoral election cycle is pathetic, although useful when recalls are undertaken in the next two years (less total votes = less signatures needed to recall). The town needs to look into changing things to increase citizen participation, because at the present time, it couldn't be easier as far as mailing out ballots so the amount of work required to participate is minimal. My guess, without talking to people who didn't vote, is that the results were pretty much already known, the two venues for learning more about the candidates (the hopelessly biased and completely useless LWV forum and the incredibly biased and now toothless Trail-Gazette editoral board interviews) teach the unfamiliar or undecided absolutely nothing about the candidates, and the town realizes nothing will change when the staff runs the town instead of the trustees running the staff through the town administrator. The results for mayor versus trustees are, per usual, schizophreni...

mayor - gary hall trustees - frank lancaster, bill (2 year term), mark, cindy 1% sales tax - yes zoning input from neighbors - no

So the Arizona flim-flam nonsense joke-package non-profit proposal to give John Cullen back his spotlight fell through? Peruse a few posts prior to see how silly the whole thing was from the beginning, completely opaque and nonsensical and inexplicable and exactly similar to the following sentence: "Carol Burnett agreed yesterday to link Spotify to her power of attorney bookcover made from yak cartilage". Yet the press lapped it all up like Sam Bankman-Fried before the 25-year prison sentence. So the second installment of this nonsense is now a Colorado bond-licensing and car-repair conglomerate (two guys bent over laughing each other, or something) stepping up to the plate to give John Cullen more of what he wants. The Stanley is not for sale, was not for sale, and as long as John Cullen is in charge, will just be a running gag, or gag-order, or who the eff knows because here is how you actually sell something: List it for sale, and someone buys it. Until that hap...

The growing desire of our aging Estes Park population to yield all decision-making control to our local government and town staff becomes more apparent with every election. Estes Park has one of the highest sales tax rates on foods and other essentials in the state of Colorado, it is such a pleasure to travel to other communities where food items are not subject to sales tax. But whatever, once you vote something in as promise it is "temporary", it becomes easier and easire to make it permanent, because Estes Park residents are less educated and more subservient than their coevals in surrounding communities. There was a glimmer of hope in the most recent phone poll of 200 residents (4% margin of error) in that, despite the overwhelming campaign mounted against the town citizens by the contractors, realtors, and trustees as far as who belongs atop the pyramid, the current percentage of shooting the citizen-driven ordinance into space is less dire than some might have predic...

Ballots have been mailed, some people have already received theirs, so on Friday, with everyone snowed in, we called 200 registered voters in the town of Estes Park at random, based on a list or current registered voters provided by the Larimer County Clerk. The question was simple: Name two of the seven candidates for town trustee in the April 2024 election you are most likely to vote for, and two of the seven candidates for town trustee you are most likely NOT to vote for. Results below, with a 6% margin of error - these results do not indicate who will win (although the top two vote getters will almost certainly win, as the top four get a full or partial term) or who will lose (although the top two finishers in most likely to not succeed category carry high negatives, so these "weights around the neck" will have to be canceled out by a large contingent of buoyant supporters). These results just indicate who is ahead at this time, and who has some obstacles to overcome. ...

Last weekend, we polled 200 random Estes Park residents by phone, asking one simple question: In the upcoming April 2024 election, will you vote for Barbara MacAlpine or Gary Hall? Results below, with a 5% margin of error (we called people from the list of registered voters provided by the county, we have every confidence they live within town limits, and absolutely no guarantee they will actually vote when ballots arrive. We did not allow for "undecided", we forced them to pick one or the other, or at least who they were leaning towards. If they refused to answer even this, they were excluded from the poll and replaced with the next respondent). Personally, I am disappointed, in that Gary Hall was at the helm of the IT department when our pretend hospital was attacked by ransomware hackers and caved in immediately to their demands, so I imagine more of this "What, Me Worry?" governance approach, which is definitely not Barbara MacAlpine's "hands on ...

I'm guessing we'll hear some real remorse coming out of the mouths of our town trustees and town adminstrator(s) and town staff in about 10 nevers. Who runs this town? The answer at the top of the organizational chart is "a few old white guys, some of whom are probably verging on dementia, plus the big talking mounthful in charge of the Transportation Advisory Board". But, hee-hee, ha-ha, it's all funny when you waste millions of taxpayers dollars and look good doing it, right, Kirby? Trustees, town administrator, town staff, town newspaper of record, town citizens: Next Tuesday, a group of concerned citizens is going to congregate outside the town hall at 7:00 p.m., and wail and moan and blow whistles and light firecrackers and carry on loudly, knowing that the town has no enforceable noise ordinance and doesn't see continuous uninterrupted noise of 90 decibels or higher as something that could be monitored, enforced, or controlled. We are quite awar...