The top elected official in DeKalb County, Ga., attempted to extort campaign contributions from Ciber, a Greenwood Village-based IT consulting company, by threatening one of the company’s local managers, according to a grand jury indictment.

DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis allegedly threatened to damage the reputation of Ciber manager Joanne Wise and cut off county business with the company if they didn’t contribute to his campaign. Ellis is accused of telling Wise that he would notify Ciber’s CEO that she provided poor customer service, which Ellis would cite as the basis for Ciber losing out on additional work with the county.

Ellis, who faces 15 counts of extortion, theft and other charges, said Tuesday night that he was innocent, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

“I do want to make one statement emphatically to the good people of DeKalb County that I’ve done nothing wrong as I’ve said from the very beginning. Done nothing wrong and I would never, ever, ever do anything to violate the public trust,” he said, according to the newspaper.

The indictment, which alleges Ellis used similar tactics on other county vendors, continues a massive public official scandal in the area that has reportedly led to a half dozen suspensions since March.

The AJC reported in February that nearly 40 percent of Ellis’s campaign war chest came from companies that worked, or wanted to work, for the county.

I’ve reached out to a Ciber spokeswoman and will update this post if the company has any comment.

UPDATE 4:55 P.M.: Ciber spokeswoman Betsy Loeff issued the statement below.

Ciber is committed to maintaining the highest standards of ethical conduct, and we remain diligent in ensuring that we comply with all applicable laws and regulations.

Ciber is aware of the investigation and has cooperated with relevant authorities. Given that this matter is ongoing, Ciber believes it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.

Telluride won the heart of Hallmark Channel producers, edging out Cripple Creek, Georgetown, Central City and Silverton in landing the network’s second original primetime series “When Calls the Heart,” which begins filming in the scenic box canyon this summer.

It will be the first time a TV series has been filmed in Telluride and the first narrative TV series in Colorado since 1991. While it’s a coup for Telluride, it’s a win for Colorado too, which landed the series with a new incentive program designed to lure more television and film production to the state.

“We are delighted with Hallmark Channel’s choice of Colorado for its latest series,” said Gov. Hickenlooper in a statement released Tuesday. “With Hallmark Channel’s brand behind it, the show will have a positive economic impact for our state and provide tremendous national exposure for Telluride and all of Colorado.”

The Colorado Office of Film and Television’s director Donald Zuckerman facilitated the deal, armed with new legislation that bolsters the state’s film incentive program.
“While we can’t compete side-by-side with other state incentive programs, we continue to see the benefits of our modest incentive package coupled with Colorado’s talented workforce and extraordinary scenery,” Zuckerman said in a statement.

Based on author Janette Oke’s series, “When Calls the Heart” is the story of a young teacher’s first job in the rural frontier West, set in a 19th century coal town.

Mountain resorts – like Copper Mountain – are tracking toward a potentially record-setting summer as reservations soared in May.

Mountain destinations are tracking toward a record summer, according to the latest survey of lodging properties in 17 mountain communities across the West by Denver’s DestiMetrics, formerly known as the Mountain Travel Research Program.

Occupancy for May climbed 14.6 percent over last May, with revenues increasing 16.6 percent. The boost helps after a slight decline in April. Reservations for June at the end of May were up nearly 6 percent and bookings from June through November are up nearly 7 percent.

“The twin wildcards of economy and weather are working in our favor at this early stage of the summer season,” said Ralf Garrison, DestiMetrics director, in a statement released with the study on Tuesday. “Forecasts for a hot, dry summer provide an inducement for city dwellers to make a trip to the cooler mountains while mountain resorts have continued to expand and enhance their line-up of special events and activities making these ski resorts increasingly appealing in the summer.”

The Rocky Mountain Lodging Report shows a strong start to 2013, with lodging occupancy climbing over 2012 in four of the last five months and room rates increasing every month compared to the same months last year.

The Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association’s statewide monthly survey showed 59.5 percent occupancy through May, compared to 57.8 percent through May 2012. Average daily room rates crept from $126.07 through May 2012 to $130.87 through May 2013.

Rigs continue to sprout in the West

The claim – based on a Battlement Mesa, Colorado study – that people living within a half-mile of an oil or gas well have a 66 percent higher chance of getting cancer is a shocker. It is also completely wrong.

Whether it is bad math, propaganda or simply the the web proliferating an errant calculation is hard to say. It does, however, show one of the problems of the throw-all-the-spagehtti-against-the-wall approach, for while the hysterical cancer claim is vastly overstated, the same study produced some more solid and troubling data on other risks.

And those findings are part of an bigger pattern of studies pointing to air pollution impacts from increased oil and gas development in the West. More on that later.

First to the claim that the Battlement Mesa study, done by researchers at the University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Health, showed that people living within a half-mile of a well had a 66 percent increased risk for cancer.

Where it started is hard to determine, but it sure has made the rounds. It can be found on the Sierra Club – Dallas state chapter’s website and on the site of Water Defense, a New York-based, group opposing drilling and fracking.

Sandra Steingraber, identified as a Ph.D, ecologist and author, used it in a piece on treehugger

At a Boulder County hearing in June on new oil and gas regulations, one resident invoked the 66 percent number and told the commissioners, “You are all nothing more than puppets of the industry.”

So what did the study actually say?

Battlement Mesa is a suburban-style development in Garfield County that is home to 5,000 people and a golf course. Facing a proposal to have 200 wells drilled inside the development the residents sought a health impacts study and the county hired researchers at the state’s school of public health.

Using three years of air quality data collected by Garfield County — the study concludes there were elevated levels of a number of contaminants. Some, such as benzene and diesel exhaust, are carcinogens, while others, including carbonyls and trimethylebenzene, can impair breathing, irritate the eyes and have neurological effects.

So how much of a risk do those chemicals pose? For cancer risk the researchers assumed a 350-day-a-year exposure for 30-years. So basically, no one goes anywhere for 30 years.

Jed Selby has swapped his kayak paddle for a golden shovel. Last week the developer of Buena Vista’s South Main neighborhood broke ground on a 20-room boutique hotel.

Jed Selby, the developer of Buena Vista’s New Urbanist community South Main, last week broke ground on a 20-room boutique hotel on the banks of the Arkansas River.

It’s an all-local affair, with Selby and his wife Kennley building the project with their own South Main Building Company and their in-house vacation rental company will manage the hotel. Funding comes from the local Collegiate Peaks Bank. The hotel was designed by South Main architect Kenny Craft, an advocate of the New Urbanist movement whose buildings reflect both traditional and urban perspectives.

Selby said the hotel will be the first in the Upper Arkansas Valley to offer balconies overlooking the river, where the former professional kayaker has built a whitewater park for kayakers and surfers.
The avid music fan hopes to expand his riverfront music venue and develop South Main’s commercial core as a musical, recreational destination. The long-planned hotel will help anchor the next phase of development for South Main, Selby said.

Top: Firefighters douse hot spots while fighting the Black Forest Fire. Bottom: Workers hose down the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” before the inaugural direct flight from Denver to Tokyo. (Photos by Helen H. Richardson & Joe Amon, The Denver Post)

Mike Provencal woke up at 2 a.m. Friday in Japan and couldn’t go back to sleep.

Call it jet leg or a restless mind, he decided to walk down the street from his hotel by Narita International Airport to a place he knew had an Internet connection.

Awaiting him in his e-mail inbox were two reverse 9-1-1 notifications — the second one sent him spiraling.

His home was under mandatory evacuation due to the Black Forest fire that is ravaging homes and properties north of Colorado Springs. As a veteran United Airlines flight attendant, he wasn’t scheduled to return from his six-day Asia trip until June 17th.

Provencal immediately called his wife.

“She proceeded to tell me all she had done. She had been running around all day. And I told her, ‘You’re a wonderwoman,’” Provencal said.

Having worked in the airline industry for 35 years, Provencal immediately began charting a way back home. He domiciles in Houston, which means that every trip he takes he must first commute by air from Colorado Springs to Houston before beginning his shift.

“I immediately called our scheduling office to figure out how I could get back,” Provencal said. “I was thinking, ‘Maybe I can go from Narita to L.A., then to Houston and then to Colorado Springs.’ I had forgotten that they had just started this new nonstop between Narita and Denver.”

When the flight’s crew sat him next to me on Friday’s return flight, he was visibly shaken.

The new nonstop, daily service between Tokyo and Denver is touted for its economic opportunities, but it is in moments like these that it serves a clear humanitarian purpose — to quickly get people across the globe in moments of crisis.

“When I called her, my wife was trying to maintain composure,” Provencal said. “I felt so bad for going to work. I kept apologizing, but this hadn’t happened yet when I left Houston.”

Sitting on an 11-hour plane ride with no access to the outside world, he didn’t know the condition of his house or how close the fire line is to his neighborhood.

Standing up while the rest of the cabin slept, he offered to get me more ice for my water despite the fact that he was off-duty. He then went and chatted with the flight attendants in the front galley before returning to watch another portion of a movie.

Last year’s Waldo Canyon Fire taught Provencal and his wife several lessons that are paying off now.

“We re-boxed all of our important documents and papers in one central location so we could grab them in an emergency,” Provencal said. “My wife has a specific wall of photographs that are important that she grabs in an evacuation. And luckily she was able to find a kennel in downtown Colorado Springs that would take our dogs.”

His wife’s grown son helped her move out heavy, expensive equipment to his house, but they worry that his neighborhood may be evacuated at some point as well.

The couple is no stranger to Colorado wildfires. In 2001, they were living in a more remote cabin in the woods when the Deer Mountain Fire tore through the area.

“We were gone for a week and had no idea that whole time if our house had survived,” Provencal said.

When asked if all of these fires and close calls make him question where he lives, Provencal said, “Yeah, it does. Once again, here we are back in it…we have learned a lot of lessons over the years.”

Many conservative politicians have been among climate change deniers, but ignoring the science will led to something the GOP dreads even more — big government.

So argued Jim Hansen, who since 1988 has been in the forefront of the issue, first as a NASA scientist and more recently as a free-agent activist, in an interview Thursday.

After an ill-fated, and it could be argued ill-conceived, attempt to pass climate legislation in the first year the the Obama administration there has been little traction on the issue. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is delaying its rules on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and the new Department of Energy energy efficiency standards for appliances are also being delayed.

And that’s okay with Hansen, who says he sees the solution coming in a different form, a carbon tax, and from a different place — the right of the political spectrum.

“It has to be a carbon tax and it really has to come from conservatives,” Hansen said. The reason is that the tax has to be market-based and revenue neutral.

“That money has to be given back to the public on a per capita basis so all legal residents of the country get an equal amount and that way the person who does better than average in limiting their carbon footprint would make money and then everybody in the country becomes an environmentalists whether they want to or not,” Hansen said.

“The fundamental fact is that as long as fossil fuels appear to the public to be the cheapest energy we are going to keep burning them,” Hansen said.”Fossil fuels are not the cheapest energy they only appear to be because they are subsidized.”

California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, have introduced a bill that would create a carbon tax, but that doesn’t make Hansen happy.

“As usual the Democrats are going to take some of the money, 40 percent of it,” Hansen said. “Conservatives have to put ta foot down and say you can’t use this as another excuse to make government bigger. Democrats have a problem they can’t keep their hands off our wallets.”

The reason Hasen is so adamant is by his calculation if the government keeps 40 percent most people will end-up paying more for energy than they get back. “It is important that all the money go to the public, so get this push from below,” he said.

What of the general reluctance from anyone — and we mean just about anyone — on the GOP side of the aisle to take up the issue since Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham abandoned their 2008 efforts to fashion bipartisan legislation?

“If they continue to pretend that human-made climate change is a hoax, eventually you get to the point where nature makes it clear it wasn’t a hoax and then the public demands the government do something and that’s the worst nightmare for conservatives,” Hansen said.

“It would allow the government to take over and do things by fiat, which not in anybody’s interest in my opinion, because the government never, seldom, makes the right choices,” Hansen said. “Let the market make the choices, which is a conservative approach.”

Steamboat ski area. Denver Post file photo.

Colorado’s ski areas hosted 11.4 million skier visits last season, a nearly 4 percent increase over last season’s low showing of 11 million.

The 11.4 million mark, while an increase over the dismal and dry 2011-12 season, is the third slowest season in the last decade and the annual increase falls well below the national spike of 11 percent.

Colorado Ski Country, the trade group that represents 21 of Colorado’s 25 ski areas, reported 6.4 million skier visits in 2012-13, an increase of 3.8 percent or 235,000 skier visits over the 2011-12 ski season. Vail Resorts’ four Colorado ski areas – some of the the busiest in Colorado with Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone and Beaver Creek – saw roughly five million skier visits.

Colorado’s 2012-13 season started slow with weak snow and local skiers opting to stay home. Late December and late spring storms fueled a rebound in visitation. But it wasn’t enough to pull the state closer to the 12 million-skier visit benchmark it reached in 2011, 2008, 2007 and 2006.
Declining skier visits does not necessarily correlate to decreasing revenues, as evidenced by Colorado ski areas that saw increased revenues in the 2011-12 ski season, which saw record declines in visitation.

“We are very pleased with where we ended up for the 2012/13 season and are thrilled to see such a strong recovery trend for both Colorado and the ski nation,” said Colorado Ski country president Melanie Mills in a statement released Thursday. “This season concluded with momentum in our favor as our resorts continue to set the gold standard in the industry for skier experiences.”

TOKYO, JAPAN – JUNE 12, 2013. Adele Tamboli of the Center for Revolutionary Solar Photoconversion(CRSP) in Colorado, Yoshikaki Nakano of the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology(RCAST) in Japan, and Reuben Collins from Colorado School of Mines sit on the energy forum panel on Thursday. (Photo by Kristen Painter / The Denver Post)

Japan, still reeling from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011, is looking to forge strategic international partnerships as it moves toward a more diversified energy base.

The Denver delegation in Tokyo this week recognized this opportunity and put together a three-hour energy forum with Japanese business leaders before signing a research agreement between stakeholders in Colorado and Japan.

“I see this very much as collaboration because (the Japanese) have things to offer us in terms of research developments as well,” said Pam Reichart of Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation.

The five-year agreement is between the Center for Revolutionary Solar Photoconversion (CRSP) in Colorado and the Research Center for Advance Science and Technology (RCAST) in Japan.

“The earthquake and the tsunami…has again changed the world of energy. Because what happened in Japan is rippling around the world,” said Atul Arya, the event’s moderator and senior Vice President of Energy Insight at IHS, a Douglas County-based company.

In 2010, nuclear energy accounted for 29 percent of Japan’s energy. Just two years later in FY 2012, that plummeted to 2 percent. Of the 50 nuclear reactors that Japan once relied on, only two remain in operation.

Makoto Ichikawa of Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. said the company has compensated with oil. Oil imports have increased from 71 to 87 percent.

“As a result, the import costs have been increasing,” Ichikawa said.”Japanese are more involved in gas development in The U.S., Russia and Mozambique.”

Colorado is offering up its expertise in solar, oil and gas extraction and renewables.

The Colorado contingency included representatives from Energy Insight at IHS, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Colorado School of Mines, Colorado Energy Research Collaboratory and Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Last week I interviewed David Hiller, executive director of the Colorado Collaboratory, on what he forecasts for the state’s opportunities with Japan.

“Colorado is one of the world’s leading areas in clean energy innovation…in significant part because NREL is located here, which I think gets much greater respect outside the U.S. than within,” Hiller said. “The U.S. is still sorting through its feelings on clean energy. NREL is recognized around the world as probably the leading clean energy lab.”

While Japan offers its own set of top-notch research institutions, the forum’s panel discussions noted that advances in clean tech cannot sustainable answer the energy demands of an entire nation and the solution is a balanced mix of sources.

“Japan doesn’t have the natural resources, so that becomes a strategic — as well as an economic — issue for them,” Hiller said.

Forum moderator Arya referenced the tectonic shifts happening in the energy industry — including the United States’ onshore oil.

When you look at where the crude oil is coming from, it is coming primarily from three places: Iraq, North America and Brazil,” Arya said. “If I would have told you that five years ago you would’ve laughed at me.”

If Colorado’s energy labs and businesses can make these partnerships last, Arya insisted that “stronger links between Colorado and Japan will be win-win.”

The Japanese contingency outnumbered Coloradans for the first time all week, showing the importance that they place on energy opportunities. Reichert admitted that it is difficult to read participants’ reaction, but the Denver delegation has definitely learned that business relationships take time in Japan.

“I think you just have to take a very long-term view,” Reichert said.

Visit Denver on Wednesday announced its had landed the U.S. Travel Association’s International Pow Wow – or IPW – will return May 19-23, 2018 after last visiting Denver in 1991. The three-day convention hosts 1,000 travel organizers from across the country and 1,200 international travel buyers, all of whom will book roughly $3.5 billion in future U.S. travel.

“There is simply nothing we could do better to showcase all the exciting things that are happening in Denver to more than 1,200 travel buyers from 65 countries around the world than to host IPW. This convention will have a lasting impact on our city, helping us secure more international flights and bring more foreign visitors to Denver,” said Visit Denver chief Richard Scharf in a statement released Wednesday.

Visit Denver will host the U.S. Travel Association’s International Pow Wow at the Colorado Convention Center in May 2018, a coup for Denver tourism boosters.

Scharf said travel studies show IPW hosts can reap $350 million in international tourism business, jumpstarting a host city’s international tourism efforts.

By 2018, visitors will be traveling from Denver International Airport into the city by train, highlighting the sweeping changes Denver has seen since it last hosted the IPW almost three decades earlier.

“The last time IPW was in Denver, we ended with a John Denver concert by the lake in City Park overlooking the skyline and the Rocky Mountains,” Scharf. He said it was too early to announce plans for IPW 2018, but he promised similar events to wow visitors.