Rocky Mountain Voice

As I sit quietly this morning, rather than a nursery rhyme, a children’s tale keeps illuminating my imagination: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with three injuries weighing upon my soul. Yesterday marked one year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Today marks twenty-five years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And here at home, my wife, Sherrie, has spent more than 300 days bedridden. While being treated for glioblastoma, she was dropped on her head during hospital care, suffering injuries that left her unable to walk. One injury is political and cultural. One is national and collective. One is deeply personal. Each has brought pain. Each has produced loss. And each places the same question before the human soul: When we cannot choose what happens to us, how will we choose what happens within us?

Colorado wanted more control over its share of federal pandemic aid before the money hit its federal spending deadlines. So in 2024, the state moved it. It pulled hundreds of millions in American Rescue Plan money back out of four state programs, three of them tied to housing and homelessness, and replaced it with state general funds, so it could spend the federal dollars elsewhere before the deadlines ran out. Then the Department of Local Affairs set those funds up in the state’s accounting system as if they were still federal. Every time the department spent a state dollar out of the four programs, the system automatically booked a federal reimbursement that was never coming. By the end of the fiscal year the department had recorded $158.5 million in federal money owed to Colorado that did not exist. The Statewide Single Audit for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, released in February by the Office of the State Auditor, classifies the error as a material weakness, the most serious level of internal control failure an auditor can assign. It is one of three material weaknesses the audit pins on a single department.

A year ago, Evergreen High School was the scene of chaos and fear. Today, the Colorado school has two new members of its community — two dogs whose presence has become part of the daily rhythm of the school, offering students and staff something they desperately needed after a shooting shattered their sense of safety.

GREELEY, Colo. — The Weld County Board of Commissioners voted 5-0 Wednesday to approve a proposed data center that could become the largest in Colorado. The roughly 41-acre data center is planned for the former Carestream Health site in an unincorporated area of Weld County near Windsor. The New York-based company Global AI is proposing the project.

On the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death, I asked my iPhone three questions: How old was Charlie Kirk when he was assassinated? How old was Charlie Kirk when he was murdered? How old was Charlie Kirk when he died? The first two of these questions stumped Google. Rather than respond with Kirk’s age at his death, Google’s response was: Charlie Kirk—date of death Sept. 10, 2025. Only on question number three did Google respond: Charlie Kirk—31 years old.