The frequency of frequently. Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, June 3rd. I'm your host, Shea Castle. And this is the Frequency. A weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. This episode is brought to you by the Regional Air Quality Council. This summer, go wild for front-range air quality. Take simple steps for better air, to help reduce ground-level ozone pollution and to protect your health. Taking public transit, carpooling, and combining trips, riding your bike, working from home, and going electric all help us breathe easier in the warm and sunny summer months. Know when it matters most by signing up for ozone alerts from the Regional Air Quality Council. Learn more at SimpleStepsbetterAir.org. We've got another all-headline edition for you today. On Friday, the Mountaineer's Tyler Hickman takes us to skate school in Netherland. You truly do not want to miss this. It is Tyler's best story so far. Next week, we're visiting an art class in a South Boulder community. I am so grateful to finally be featuring some youth voices on the podcast. Mark your calendars. It's a fun one. Let's get to it. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of NCAR's Supercomputing Center. The ruling comes as the Trump administration attempts to dismantle the crucial hub of climate monitoring and weather research based in Boulder. The National Center for Atmospheric Research has been in the crosshairs of the president for so-called climate alarmism. NCAR is under the purview of the National Science Foundation, or NSF. In February, NSF announced the Supercomputing Center would be transferred to new, unnamed operators. This week, senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson granted a temporary injunction against the transfer. In the ruling, Judge Jackson noted the move may have been retaliatory for Colorado's detention of Tina Peters. Peters was imprisoned after tampering with voting machines in Mesa County. She was released from prison this week after Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted her nine-year sentence. Jackson also noted the decision to move the supercomputing system seemed to ignore the NSF's own rules for public comment. Quote, NSF's flagrant disregard of its own mechanism for receiving and considering stakeholder and public feedback further illustrates the arbitrary and capricious nature of the agency's decision, Jackson wrote. Read more from Axios Boulder at the link in our show notes. Two Boulder residents are suing the city over its use of automatic license plate reader cameras, or ALPRs. Boulder employs 31 cameras across the city. The data is gathered and managed by Flock, a company that has drawn increasing scrutiny in recent years for its cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The cameras are continuously gathering images of cars and drivers. Every time a vehicle passes a camera, a photo is captured and fed into Flock's searchable database. That amounts to a warrantless search, the lawsuit alleges. Plaintiffs Will Freeman and Gwen Steele are being represented by Denver law firm Newman McNulty. They are seeking class action status, arguing that every resident and person who travels through Boulder is also being subjected to dragnet surveillance. The lawsuit also alleges Boulder's flot cameras capture data on individuals outside of motor vehicles, such as race and ethnicity, gender and clothing. That's something Andrew Gentry warned us about in his February interview with The Frequency. There's a massive amount of information being collected by these cameras, including facial recognition, including race recognition, including gauge recognition. There's a ton of information that most people don't know is being collected every single time you pass one of these cameras. Gentry is a cybersecurity professional based in Golden and founder of Eyes Off Colorado. Hear more from Gentry in our May 22nd re-release of that interview. Freeman is the founder of DeFlock, an open source project mapping the location of Flock cameras and advocating for stronger protections. Freeman is also suing for access to images of his own personal vehicle captured by Flock. The City of Boulder declined to release those records to him, the lawsuit alleges. Boulder is in the process of selecting a new provider of ALPR technology. A competitive bidding process was launched in March. A vendor is expected to be announced later this month. The City of Boulder could be facing a second lawsuit over an informal vote related to its airport. In April, Boulder City Council directed staff to keep accepting money from the Federal Aviation Administration for the maintenance and upkeep of Boulder Municipal Airport. The direction was given via an informal vote known as a nod of five. Nods of five are routinely used by City Council to communicate general policy direction to staff. Unlike formal roll call votes, they do not require a public hearing or advance notice, though such actions are often listed on an agenda released in advance of the meeting. In mid-May, a legal memo was released by Airport Neighborhood Campaign, a group of residents advocating for the airport to be redeveloped into housing and services. The group retained Denver law firm Ireland, Stapleton, Pryor, and PASCO to write the memo. The memo states the April Not of 5 may have violated Colorado's open meeting laws, which require official government action to be noticed in advance and occur at meetings open to the public. The NOT of 5 in question happened during a study session that was broadcast virtually, with no opportunity for public comment or in-person attendance. After the memo's release, Boulder City Council announced its intention to hold a public hearing on the matter. That hearing has not yet been scheduled. Read more from the Daily Camera and Boulder Reporting Lab at the links in our show notes. Lafayette is hosting an informational meeting about its cemetery, which has been closed to casket burials since November, after the discovery of unplotted human remains and controversy over unmarked graves. The meeting will be Wednesday, June 10th, from 6.30 to 8 p.m. at the Lafayette Public Library, 775 West Baseline Road. We've been reporting on this issue for months. Listen to our coverage at boulderfrequency.com. Boulder County has extended and expanded direct cash assistance for low-income families with young children. The commissioners spent $4.2 million on the program, which will give $600 per month to families to spend as they please. That is double the $300 they were receiving before the bump. Qualified families earn less than 30% of area median income and have children under the age of four. In 2026 in Boulder County, a family of four with a combined income under $45,000 would be considered eligible. The funds come from interest on federal COVID recovery dollars Boulder County received under the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, according to a press release. NIWAT has been cleared to vote on incorporation this November. The vote will be the first in a process toward becoming a home rule municipality, giving NIWAT more authority to write its own laws and elect its own governing bodies. If approved, the incorporation vote would be followed by the drafting and adoption of a charter. Superior and Erie both became home rule municipalities in recent years, as they seek more control over budgets and local decision making. The Left Hand Valley Courier has been following the entire Naiwat process. The nonprofit community newspaper is truly your best source of information for this. Visit LHVC.com to learn more. Now, Erie is asking residents about a potential tax on lodging. If you live in Erie, take the survey at surveymonkey.com/slash r slash Erie Lodging or follow the link in our show notes. If you've driven through Boulders University Hill recently, you may have noticed a familiar sight that's been missing for a few years. A banner stretching across Broadway begging motorists not to honk. That sign heralds the return of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. More specifically, the festival's return to its outdoor Mary Rapon Theater. The Rapon underwent a $105 million renovation that moved the Shakespearefest inside for two years. The festival opened last week and runs through August 2nd. Catch productions of Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Shakespeare in Love, and Friends Roman's Countrymen. Full details at cupresents.org/slash Shakespeare-Festival. As always, thanks for listening. Before you go, here's one more thing. Why'd you say that? It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music. Do you not think that's like running? It is hard to run, it is painful to run, you don't particularly enjoy it, but you love running. And you get good at it and you get better at it, and you speak to the runners, and they love running. Most people drop out of that pursuit because it was hard. I think that the people that you know that run, uh, this is a uh highly uh biased selection of the population that fell in love with it.