This Week in History

10 years ago

• At a forum on homelessness sponsored by the Namaqua Unitarian Universalist Congregation, House of Neighborly Service Director Glorie Magrum said when she had joined the HNS staff six years earlier, the agency served a homeless population of about 150 people. By 2011 it had risen to 500.

• The Christian music festival Heaven Fest announced plans to move to The Ranch in Loveland for its 2011 show, and had potential to be the biggest event ever held there. The 2010 Heaven Fest had drawn almost 27,000 people to Longmont’s Union Reservoir, and a bigger crowd was expected in 2011. The Ranch’s biggest single day at that point was a crowd of 27,000 on the Saturday of the 2010 Larimer County Fair.

• After an absence of more than a decade, Golden Corral announced plans to return to Loveland to offer a familyfriendly buffet and grill dining option with a restaurant to be built near Eisenhower Boulevard and Sculptor Drive.

• Loveland Police Chief Luke Hecker stepped outside his house to retrieve his Sunday morning newspaper and discovered a blanket on his front lawn with the 55 ceramic gnomes that had been stolen from the volunteer police Explorers. Police said they would continue to investigate who had stolen the gnomes and how they ended up in the chief’s yard.

• Windsor developer Martin Linn brought plans for a 190-acre aviation business park to Loveland City Council for approval. Airpark of the Rockies would also need Fort Collins City Council approval. The president of Allegiant Air, then the only scheduled commercial service at the Loveland-fort Collins airport, said his company would invest in the airport redevelopment projects if they carried benefits for both Allegiant and the airport. The Loveland City Council gave the plans its approval.

• The Healthy Beginnings program at Mckee Medical Center marked 20 years of serving Loveland women by helping uninsured and underinsured women get the care and education they needed to have a healthy baby. It had served more than 10,000 women since 1991.

• Loveland Classical Schools announced plans to open its K-12 charter school at Faith Evangelical Church, with plans to more than double the building’s size by fall to serve students.

• A District Court judge ruled Loveland’s closed medical marijuana dispensaries would stay closed. “The plaintiffs have failed to establish they have a fundamental right to remain in business,” the judge said after hearing closing arguments in the case. The Colorado amendment that gave residents the right to use marijuana for treatment of medical conditions did not give them the right to access particular sources of medical marijuana or a convenient place to get it, he said.

• Larimer County commissioners decided to hire a polling consultant to gather information from citizens to help decide whether to ask voters to extend the jail operations sales tax, which was set to start phasing out in 2013 and end in 2014.

• The former Cloverleaf Kennel Club dog track was set for demolition as Centerra developer Mcwhinney began screening companies for what it called it a deconstruction project since it would ask the contractor to recycle or reuse the materials that went into the buildings when the track was built in 1955. The track had been closed since 2008.

• “Once you get within about five miles of it, the Fort St. Vrain Generating Plant is hard to miss, an out-of-place behemoth dwarfing the nearby farmhouses, silos and trees,” started a story about the plant that had been Colorado first and only commercial nuclear plant. Built in the 1960s west of Platteville, it was shut down by Public Service Company of Colorado in 1989, then recommissioned as a natural-gas powered electricity plant. In light of the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, some long-time residents in the Fort St. Vrain area said the nearby nuclear plant had not concerned them much. “They gave us all these little radios, alert radios, in case they did need to send out an alert,” one man remembered.

• The city of Fort Collins was seeking a grant to help preserve two structures at the Bobcat Ridge Natural Area. The

chicken shed and barn dated to the 1880s. A homestead cabin at the natural area already had been preserved and was being used for history lessons and programs.

• Truscott Elementary School started a community garden on a city-owned vacant lot near the school. Produce grown there would go to Truscott students and their families, and any excess sold at an onsite farmers market, organizers said.

• Loveland Mayor Cecil Gutierrez said one of the successes of the past year had been a $108,000 federal grant for a city-school district collaboration on the Safe Routes to Schools program. The grant had been renewed for a second year, the mayor announced. “We have some data that tell us that behavior is changing. More kids are walking to school, and more kids are riding their bikes,” he said. Also at the City Councilschool board joint meeting, Council or kent so lt said he wanted to see the two agencies collaborate to alleviate the growing poverty rate among Loveland families. He said elementary teachers had told him some of the best ways to improve the lives of low-income families were summer school, and getting kids to the library and Chilson Center. He asked: “What can we do to make that happen?”

• A study by the Food Bank for Larimer County and Feeding America said 40,220 residents — 14% of the county population — did not have enough to eat. Food Bank executive director Amy Pezzani said creation of primary jobs, with subsequent higher wages, would be the best way to shift the trend.

25 YEARS AGO

• The struggling Lake Loveland Inn was scheduled to be auctioned off on April 24, 1996, by First National Bank of Longmont for payments owed. Owners of the lakeside restaurant on West Eisenhower Boulevard said they were confident they could come up with the funds. “It’s a super location. It’s a super building. And we’ve got super service. We just need to get the confidence of the people of Loveland back,” co-owner Garry

Floyd said. He said the troubles began when construction costs ran higher than expected when building the $1.3 million restaurant, leading to a delayed opening, then a premature opening with poor service that left a bad taste in customers’ mouths.

• City attorney Greg Tempel resigned, citing politics and a lack of time with his family for the decision. His predecessor in the job, Mike Shultz, said he also thought the city attorney’s job in Loveland was too political. “We ended up spending a lot of time watching our backside and playing a lot of political games,” Shultz said, adding he would not take the job back “for five minutes for a million dollars.”

•About 150 people, mainly

business owners, attend- ed a meeting to discuss the future of Eisenhower Boulevard. The city engineer told them that an expected population of 48,000 in Loveland by the year 2000 meant there would be more housing, more jobs and more traffic in the city. “We need to decide what we want to live with,” he said.

• Liability issues meant students at Big Thompson Elementary School were having to take recess in shifts on the small lower playground at the school. The upper playground was owned by Sylvan Dale Ranch and a trust from Arizona, and had been used by the school with no problems, but lawyers for the school district ordered the playground closed until liability issues could be worked out.

• Residents told Larimer County commissioners that they loved county parks and felt the county should keep control of them rather than turning management over to the Colorado Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation. Commissioners were considering turning over management of Carter Lake, Horsetooth Reservoir, Flatiron Reservoir, Pinewood Reservoir and Horsetooth Mountain Park.

• Loveland City Council approved new community design guidelines as well as a new definition for encouraging development to fill in the city center and taper off on the edges of town. The guidelines were intended to give direction to developers.

• The Thompson School District’s Master Plan Committee discussed timetables and options for building new schools, including going to voters with a bond election to raise money to build a new middle school, high school and support building. Other ideas included switching some elementary schools to year-round education while converting one elementary to a middle school, or asking voters only for money for major maintenance while switching to year-round education at all grade levels.

• The Estes Park Town Board approved a plan for timed parking in the downtown area in the summer of 1996, aimed at increasing turnover for tourist convenience. The timed lots were meant to discourage store employees from taking up prime parking spots all day.

50 YEARS AGO

• Loveland got its second telephone prefix when 669 was added. Previously the 667 prefix was the only one used in the city. “We have all gotten into the habit of giving our phone numbers as 7178, of instance, in my case,” Lee Marshall, manager of the Loveland office of Mountain Bell Telephone said. “It now has to be 6677178. Otherwise, it could lead to wrong numbers.” The local office also got new equipment to allow it to handle more incoming calls.

• Great Western Sugar Co. personnel held a fix-up and paint-up blitz to repair homes for migrant workers in the Loveland and Berthoud area.

• Larimer County commissioners asked the county welfare director to give them a report on adoption procedures in response to public queries about why it took such a long time to complete adoptions. The director said it sometimes took a year to place a child for adoption.

• The Loveland Environmental Commission prepared to launch monthly aluminum and newspaper collection in the city, hoping to promote the recycling of solid waste. The group planned to sell aluminum it collected and donate the proceeds to the Loveland Park Board for purchase of seedlings for city parks.

• Amos Allard of Loveland was reelected Fourth District Democratic Party chairman during a state Democratic meeting.

• Larimer and Weld counties expressed opposition to legislation that would include part of Larimer County in the Regional Transportation District and would force Weld County to remain in RTD. Loveland Mayor Jean Gaines testified before the state legislature that the added tax burden was not acceptable to Loveland and that the city administration believed the area should do its own transportation planning and join the larger system in the future if it saw a benefit to it.

• The prevention of Loveland and Fort Collins merging together needed to be a top priority of the Loveland Environmental Commission a member of the Colorado Environmental Commission said. He suggested creating greenbelt areas between the two cities to prevent them from growing together and said the two cities should develop a comprehensive plan. The state commission was a temporary group, set to be disbanded in 1972.

• The Epsilon Sigma Alpha group announced plans to build a convention center and world offices in Loveland on the west side of Taft Avenue near 28th Street.

• The Larimer County Fair Board adopted a budget of $19,599 for the 1971 fair and rodeo, an increase of about $2,000 over 1970, and added 25 cents to the cost of rodeo admission, raising grandstand seats to $2.50, general admission to $1.75 and children’s admission to 75 cents.

120 YEARS AGO

• “The Methodists are hugely tickled over the plans for the new church — all who have seen them pronouncing them fine in all ways,” the March 21, 1901, issue of the Loveland Reporter said. “In about a month the work of tearing down the building now in use will commence — and work pushed as rapidly as possible upon the new structure.”