SPEAKER_01 0:00

B B H C The Frequency. Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, March 4th. I'm your host, Shay Castle. And this is the Frequency. A weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. This podcast is made possible by listeners and local businesses. You can sponsor an episode of The Frequency. Reach our growing audience of highly engaged listeners. Email boulderfrequency at gmail.com. Today, we've got a little amouse bouche of news, events, and culture for you on this All Headlines edition. Let's get to it. More than 100 firefighters responded to a blaze at Boulders, Chautauqua on Saturday, February 28th. The Bluebell fire burned one and a half acres and forced hundreds of evacuations from the trails and nearby Chautauqua cottages. No injuries were reported, and the fire was contained that same day, according to Boulder Fire Chief Mike Calderazo. XL Energy posted nearly $1 billion in profit in 2025. According to a new report from the Colorado Sun, the $903 million in operating profit came despite a $295 million settlement paid to victims of the Marshall Fire, caused in part by a downed XL power line. The financial report comes as Excel seeks to increase electricity rates and natural gas bills for Coloradans by $365 million and $190 million, respectively. Read more from the Colorado Sun at the link in our show notes. Three student journalists were cleared of all charges by CU Boulder for covering a protest against military contractor Lockheed Martin at a campus job fair. The students were initially barred from campus and faced code of conduct charges for their coverage of the October demonstration by students for justice in Palestine. All three were found not guilty and notified January 22nd, according to a reporting from the Daily Camera. The October 2025 protest is the third such event in which the university pursued disciplinary action against students or student journalists engaged in demonstrations supporting Palestine. Advocates say CU has shown a disturbing pattern of threatening students' First Amendment rights and not following their own due process before banning students from campus, which for some has meant losing access to housing, classes, and jobs.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

The protest at CU was just so gentle. Like students were holding hands and wearing t-shirts and not necessarily even in the face of the representative of Lockheed Martin, like one of the world's biggest weapons manufacturers, who claimed that they were afraid of the student protest and left the career fair. And so they did reverse those campus bans, but just that that immediate immediate resort to it and the the weeks of suffering that students experience as a result of those bans, it's really harmful. And that is just uh an approach that we're seeing a lot of institutions take in this day and age because it's easier for them to wield their power to exclude these individual students than it is for them to respond to an entity like Lockheed Martin that might, you know, be able to donate lots of money to the university and engage in like lucrative partnerships with the university.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

That was Zoha Khalili, senior managing attorney for the Palestine Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal support and connections to people facing backlash for their pro-Palestine beliefs and activism. The fund is not providing legal representation to any CU students who have been punished by the university, but the organization did author an open letter to the university about their disciplinary actions. Find that linked in our show notes. Read the full story about the student journalist from the Daily Camera, and listen to my full interview with Zoha at patreon.com slash boulder frequency pod. Erie has appointed an interim town manager after the former manager was abruptly let go last month. Meredith Muth will take over for Malcolm Fleming while Erie searches for a permanent replacement. Erie's mayor addressed Fleming's controversial removal in a message directly to the public, writing, quote, We are committed to finding a town manager who will ensure that growth pays its own way and preserves the character of the community we love. The search for a new town manager is expected to take four to six months. A watered-down version of a bill to limit law enforcement's use of flock license plate readers has been approved by Colorado's Senate Judiciary Committee.

SPEAKER_03 5:22

That's where we see conversations happening about the justification of flock and the sharing of data with agencies like ICE or Homeland Security or other federal agencies that may or may not deserve the data of our citizens' locations everywhere they go. There have been Supreme Court decisions in the past that say tracking somebody's continuous GPS location is not constitutional. However, these law cameras paint almost exactly the same picture, and in a lot of cases provide a lot more than even just that. If we start installing loopholes to the Fourth Amendment, that those rights will slowly start to evaporate if we don't stand up and say something about it.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

That's Golden Based cybersecurity professional Andrew Gentry discussing one of the many concerns he has about Flock. A group Gentry founded, Eyes Off Colorado, is hosting a March 7th demonstration against the mass surveillance company across the front range. From 10 to 2, participants will be gathering at Flock cameras to raise awareness about their prevalence and the company's controversial practices. Listen to a report about how Flock is being used locally on the February 18th episode of The Frequency. My full interview with Andrew is up on our Patreon at patreon.com/slash boulder frequency pod.

SPEAKER_04 6:43

I know we're trying to be sustainable in boulder and you know caring for the environment, but sometimes I feel like it makes me feel unsafe sometimes when there's like no lighting at night. For example, the winter period, you're like, I don't really want to go on the walk because I'm not sure I'm gonna be safe, and I don't want to go on a run early because I'm not sure I'm gonna be safe. There's a thing line, like I really would like if while we're trying to be sustainable, we're also trying to make people feel safe. Every other thing I was like, oh, but Boulder's amazing, boulder's amazing. I was like, it's just this little thing. If that can be sorted out, it would just be profit.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

That's CU Boulder, PhD student, Temi Oloran Shogo, a participant and voicing boulder. The participatory feedback project aimed to inform an update of the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan, the draft of which was just released yesterday. It's now open for public comment through April 6th. Uh what is the comprehensive plan? I'll let Voicing Boulder's creator Chris Carruth handle that.

SPEAKER_09 7:50

It's a tenure plan that comes out and it it steers um new city codes and ordinances and basically where the city puts uh time and attention.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Thanks to Chris for that succinct summary. I've been reporting on the comprehensive plan for over a decade, and I still struggle to communicate exactly what it's about. I usually say it's Boulder's Bible, essentially shaping how Boulder will look and feel for the next 20 years. It guides decision making about transportation, bike paths, where and how many homes and businesses get built, open space policies. That said, it can be a little daunting to get into. It's a more than 150-page document with dense terms like land use and sub-area community planning. Voicing Boulder was one of a handful of projects spearheaded by the city's Office of Arts and Culture. The idea was to take feedback out of the realm of government vocabulary and written documents and into the real world, the way people really experience the city, which is, of course, what the comprehensive plan itself is meant to do. Here's Chris again.

SPEAKER_09 8:49

It's very different, and it's meant to be different by design than let me just come to a city meeting and fill out like a form, like traditional methods of gaining feedback against surveys, forms, town halls. I think they've hit that floor. And these kinds of artistic projects provide a different kind of a ceiling, a different way of engaging the citizen citizenry. And the same breath with people walking around their neighborhood, so many photos of things that would seem like how is this going to feed into a city plan? But someone's taking a photo of a memorial for a lost pet, or someone's taking a photo of a makeshift doggy bag um kind of container. Like, hey, take one of these instead of just leaving the droppings on the floor. Like what's said underneath the surface is this is what makes a community.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

If you're still unclear on what the comp plan is or why you should care about it, head to a boulderfuture.org to learn more. You can attend an open house for the comp plan Tuesday, March 10th, from 4 30 to 7 30 p.m. at Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street in Boulder. Listen to the full interviews with Chris and Temmie at patreon.com slash boulder frequency pod.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

I'm gonna be one of those old ladies with a like I'm gonna sound like I smoked all my life. But I didn't. I just lived. Okay. The enunciation of fire. We watched flames write scripture against a trembling sky, stars dimmed, their silence stunned by smoke in late autumn air. A sudden thalm of light, a whole town waking to an early dawn. Still, it's the sound that will haunt us. By mourning, only what's left to name a metal carcass, collapsed walls, the skeletal ash of memory, husks of our own making. Here in the mountains, we know the double edge of flame, its benediction and its devouring, how it warms the child but burns the home. As the smoke thins, a ghostly gray benediction. We gather bare of difference, hands wet with the work of tending. We too must learn to answer the question of fire. Can we take its burning and rise, rise again?

SPEAKER_01 11:16

That's Karen Ovenen, Netherlands' new and first poet laureate. Karen is reading her poem about the October fire that destroyed Caribou Village Shopping Center, taking with it 20 businesses and one-third of the town's sales tax revenue. Karen is on the cover of this month's Caribou Current, hitting newsstands tomorrow. That issue also features a QA with Nico Case, a story about the best chocolate chip cookie in Colorado, and a list of films you have to see before Sundance gets here in January 2027. We're celebrating the release of our second edition with a party at our world headquarters on Thursday, March 5th, the same day the paper comes out. Find information about time and location in our show notes. Lafayette's Bensui of A Place for Owls will be performing live. Hear one of that band's songs at the end of our episode. Speaking of the Caribou Current, huge gratitude to Frequency Listener Nicholas Luchenka. He stopped by the Current offices last month to pick up some copies of our very first issue. He is also the very first podcast listener I've heard from that I didn't already know. You have no idea what a boost that was to me and to the whole Caribou Current team, Nick. Thank you so much. Also, shout out to Frequency Listener Rebecca Johnson, who sent in the clip you heard last week of Ryan Doozer speaking at the Boulder Bike Ride for Alex Predi last month. If you've got interesting audio from around town or related to current events, send it to boulderfrequency at gmail.com. Thanks to everyone who made this episode possible. Soha, Dan, Andrew, Chris, Temmie, Rebecca, Nick, Karen, and the team at Caribou Current. And thanks to you for listening. We'll see you next week when we'll finally be getting a little bit more sunshine. That's right. This weekend is the beginning of daylight savings time. Before you go, here's one more thing.

SPEAKER_08 13:08

I really should slow down. But I feel better when I'm hell for leather. All my friends have doubts. I don't bother treading water.