It started with a man named Cisco DeVries. As chief of staff to the mayor of Berkeley, Calif., DeVries was looking for a way to enable more people to update their homes with renewable energy and save money on their utility bills. He came up with an idea: finance upgrades through the city and attach the debt to the property taxes of participating homeowners.

In 1987, there were 192 drug offenders in Colorado prisons. Today, there are more than 4,000, with drug offenders making up more than a third of the state’s prison population.

The City of Longmont is stuck between a rock and a hard place. More specifically, it’s stuck between its policy of trying to coexist with urban wildlife and federal regulations regarding airport safety.

It’s every writer’s dream. You write the best book you can, sell it to the publishing company of your dreams and quit the day job to pen fiction all day. For Australian writer Anna Campbell, this dream is her reality.

The 7th annual Mark Vann Foundation Holiday Benefit Concert will be held on Saturday, Dec. 5, at Boulder Theater, and Island attire is encouraged. This year’s concert will feature Great American Taxi and Friends, Fuforquestra, Keith Mosley of String Cheese Incident, Elephant Revival, Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth, and the Black Swan Singers. There will be a few surprises and special guests, as well.

RSVP — Retired Senior Volunteer Program — has been providing free safety-net services to elders in Boulder County since 1972, utilizing the time and skills of more than 1,000 volunteers. The goal of the program is to help the elderly, as well as disabled adults, live more independent, secure and comfortable lives, as well as to reduce the isolation that darkens the days of people who can no longer get out to socialize.

Perhaps it’s time to retire the term “domestic violence.” It seems that some folks still believe it’s somehow different than regular, ordinary old violence.

Since at least the ’60s, American Indian leaders have asked the rest of the country to refrain from stealing their ways of life, but their pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears. Well-meaning people — mostly liberals who’ve rejected the religions of their own cultures — continue to cherry-pick Native spirituality with results that range from humorous to absurd to insulting. And now a new adjective can be added to that list: deadly.

We have become a planet of human insects, each of us trained to perform a particular task, driving to work in long lines that stretch for miles along the highway like ants marching single file. Though collectively humanity possesses more know-how than at any time in human history, that knowledge is spread so thinly that nearly all of us depend on the rest of society for our survival. Our skills these days are too often limited to the tasks required by our professions — writing computer code, running an x-ray machine, researching the population dynamics of the pygmy loris — and have little to do with actual living.

Municipal elections are supposed to be quiet, nonpartisan events that revolve around things like city council seats, libraries, and maybe the tile in the locker rooms at the local recreation center.