Hazlehurst's Blog

We’ve become a Regulation Nation, like it or not

28. December 2012

Monday mornings aren’t much fun, as every employed person knows. The tasks you decided not to tackle Friday afternoon are suddenly urgent, your boss is full of manic energy, your co-workers are sullen and unsympathetic, and you wonder why the president doesn’t declare Monday a national holiday. You long for something to break the monotony. [...]

City sitting in neutral, not sure of next direction

28. December 2012

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Colorado Springs in the 1950s wasn’t much like today’s straight-laced, rule-bound, bureaucratic city, especially if you were an adventurous teenager. Did you want to go to a downtown bar and have a couple of beers after high school? No problem, even if the bar owner, the beat cop and everyone else in the bar knew [...]

Councilors hem, haw – do nothing

14. December 2012

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Remember the old adage, attributed variously to Otto von Bismarck and to a 19th-century Illinois legislator? “I have come to the conclusion that the making of laws is like the making of sausages—the less you know about the process the more you respect the result.” That quotation seemed apt yesterday afternoon during a particularly dismal [...]

Finding a way to understand government budgets

14. December 2012

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As winter deepens, an older man’s fancy turns to — the Poincaré conjecture. Most readers will, I’m sure, be familiar with the classic problem in topology first posed by Henri de Poincaré in 1908. It states: Every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. So absurdly simple! And yet, it baffled mathematicians for [...]

Legislative secret: Past experience helps Democrats

7. December 2012

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When voters approved term limits for Colorado state legislators, the electorate pretty much split along party lines. Republicans loved the idea (get rid of all those professional politicians!) and Democrats didn’t (we’ll lose institutional memory and be at the mercy of cunning lobbyists!). A majority of unaffiliated voters agreed with the GOPsters, and term limits [...]

Blog: CSU will have no choice but to shut down Drake

3. December 2012

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By John Hazlehurst and Amy Gillentine What’s going on with Drake, Neumann Systems Group, Colorado Springs Utilities and the Sierra Club? Is it possible that CSU will be forced to abandon the Neumann project and close the Drake power plant in response to a potential lawsuit from the Sierra Club? We think so – and [...]

Ideas for downtown’s future won’t happen too fast

30. November 2012

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Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? Francois Villon, 1461. That’s the final line of Villon’s “Ballade des dames du temps jadis,” an elegaic meditation upon the transience of beauty. Pre-Raphaelite poet/artist/girlfriend collector Dante Gabriel Rossetti translated it as “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” The translation is particularly apt and impressive since Rossetti invented the [...]

Stage appears set for Anschutz purchase of Gazette

21. November 2012

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He owns hotels, railroads, newspapers, sports teams, arenas, movie theaters and ticket brokers. He has interests in at least 150 companies. His family foundation, created in 1964, has more than $2 billion in assets. He gave $100 million to the University of Colorado Medical Campus, which was renamed to recognize his generosity. His net worth [...]

City Clerk’s redistricting decision firm and solid

15. November 2012

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The neighborhood activists and earnest community builders who thought they could substitute their own redistricting plans for those proposed by City Clerk Sarah Johnson might have not bothered to do so had they downloaded “Steel Magnolias” from Netflix. Johnson is one of those polite, soft-spoken southern women who have no problem making decisions, and no [...]

This election could be the Baby Boomers’ swan song

9. November 2012

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Eighteen years ago, as I sat on the City Council dais with eight other petty elected officials, one of the City Hall regulars came forward to speak on whatever issue was before us at the time. We were used to him, and to the dozen or so aging know-it-alls who had nothing better to do [...]

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