The Temperature | Year of the E-Bike finishes big

1 year ago 414

When you are 8 years old and the Sears Toughskins are digging at your kneecaps and you’re standing at the bus stop in the middle of the woods a half-mile from home at 25 below zero, not sure if you’ve missed the bus or which mean face Wendy Tysver will give you when you walk in late to class, the idea of good things happening in adult life seems very, very unlikely.

So I wouldn’t have believed you back then if you’d told me someday the world would spend an entire week talking about Pop-Tarts and football.

Miracles, and a new appreciation for blueberry frosted, do happen. And the Pistons stopped their losing streak at 28. Things seem too good right now. No doubt something horrible will happen, like Lululemon bringing back the Toughskins.

In the meantime, let’s just bless the sweet New Year vibes and start with some good news.

CLIMATE

Colorado enthusiasm for e-bikes rolls on

Michelle Winchell, who lives and works near downtown Colorado Springs, enjoys PikeRide’s electric bikes to traverse the city’s hills with less physical exertion, noting the convenience of hubs to find bikes with ease. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

92%

Portion of low-income e-bike vouchers actually cashed

Colorado going cuckoo for e-bikes sped through the end of the year and into the New Year, as state officials pointed to some remarkable results for 2023 vouchers and towns like Manitou Springs prepared for new voucher launches.

Colorado’s $9 million voucher giveaway had surprisingly high redemption rates, meaning the people who got lucky in the lottery actually bought bikes and used the instant rebates of $500 or $1,100. While Colorado Energy Office officials expected a 65% redemption rate based on the experiences of other states and cities, Coloradans cashed the vouchers at 87% rates, and 92% for the $1,100 low income voucher.

Officials were also pleased at equity outcomes, with 90% of rebate recipients reporting low income and 20% coming from rural areas, a higher ratio than the state’s 14% rural population.

Ten days before the end of the year, Colorado had distributed 4,520 rebates in 54 counties (out of 64 total), for a bottom line of $5.4 million in aid.

Local communities have been rolling out their own e-bike vouchers, sometimes paid for by a separate state grant program. Manitou Springs is offering 100 first-come vouchers starting today, with $700 vouchers for 70 low-income residents and $500 vouchers for 30 moderate-income residents. (Most programs define low-income as 80% or less of the area median income.)

Denver has also given away thousands of e-bike vouchers, and after periodic sellouts for its every-other-month 2023 voucher releases, the program will return in 2024.

State officials don’t want people shut out from rebates to despair for 2024, so they are putting 400 people who applied but missed out onto a special waitlist. As unredeemed vouchers expire, those wait-listed folks will be first in line for the second chance. Otherwise, Colorado’s program is on pause for now, as officials wait to see how many more outstanding vouchers are used and what’s left of the original $9 million fund.

The energy office said it would take $1.8 million from the local government e-bike funds to open up another round of statewide applications in February.

But wait, there’s more, e-bike boosters say. Even if you get shut out of all state and local rebates, a new e-bike tax credit kicks in April 1. Any resident buying an e-bike will get $450 in tax credits as a point-of-sale price cut, as long as they buy a qualified model from an approved retailer.

No more 10-cent plastic fees, because no more plastic bags

Plastic grocery, zipper and doggie bags. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The last of the legal plastic bags and Styrofoam takeout containers will be trickling from Colorado retail outlets in coming days. But don’t let the sight of fresh groceries in a crackling new plastic bag fool you: You can no longer pay your 10-cent guilty fee and use the bags at a major store. They are now banned across the state. Styrofoam or polystyrene clamshells, too. There’s a new recycling and reuse sheriff in town, as of Jan. 1.

Colorado tried to cushion the blow for 2023 by allowing plastic bags for the full year, but demanding retailers charge the 10-cent fee. Enough is enough, the original law said — 2024 is time for real change.

Retailers can still put your items in new paper bags, but those will usually come with a 10-cent fee, indefinitely. The goal is still to push consumers toward remembering their reusable containers.

Some takeout restaurants are starting to move to washable and reusable plastic containers, as we wrote about late in 2023. Look for that trend to continue.

CoPIRG hailed the plastics ban as one of a number of promising environmental and consumer laws taking effect in 2024. The Colorado consumer advocacy group said, “Coloradans went through 4.6 million bags and 1.2 million polystyrene cups every day before the pandemic.”

And if you want to learn more about why so many are eager to get plastic bags out of the whole waste/reuse system, take our December recycling quiz and learn from our answer pages. We here at The Temperature have a New Year’s resolution to do better on batteries.

MORE CLIMATE NEWS

The New York real estate scion buying up much of Colorado. Stefan Soloviev is a New York real estate billionaire who appears to have left a big chunk of his heart on the Eastern Plains and the farming country of the Southwest. He’s been buying up enormous farms and ranches, not to mention the railroads that connect them to grain markets, and says he wants to return power and profits to local farmers. Jason Blevins profiles a unique farm-country entrepreneur. — The Colorado Sun Colorado wolves are safe despite latest attacks on livestock. Colorado wildlife officials who monitor the growing number of wolves in the state are not authorizing wolf kills at the northern Colorado ranch where livestock depredations have been a consistent problem, Tracy Ross reports. At least one rancher wants to know what the protective rules will be.
— The Colorado Sun Thinning to block wildfires helps the birds and the bees. A more-than-decadelong effort to thin Front Range forests to reduce fire danger has brought more bees, more flowers and increased resilience to climate change, new research shows, William Allstetter writes. The raw number and the diversity of bees and plants exploded a few years after ponderosa pine forests were restored to a “pre-European” state, researchers from Colorado State and Utah State universities found.
— The Colorado Sun Historic effort to get tribes their water pact dues. For tribal nations in the Colorado River Basin, repairing a century of exclusion is a crucial step in planning for the river’s future. A new proposal could grant them a permanent seat at the table, Shannon Mullane reports.
— The Colorado Sun

HEALTH

Why the state didn’t block the UCHealth-Parkview merger

Parkview Medical Center in Pueblo. (Parker Seibold for KFF Health News)

“It’s about aiming for a certain geographic footprint for the system overall.”

— Health care analyst Allan Baumgarten

As we reported this morning, UCHealth’s merger with Parkview Health System in Pueblo, finalized last month, helps cement the former’s dominant position in the Colorado hospital market.

UCHealth now has a significant presence in every large city along the Front Range, something no other hospital system in the state can boast. As health care analyst Allan Baumgarten explained in today’s story, this gives UCHealth massive bargaining power when it comes to negotiations with insurers and other payers.

“It’s about aiming for a certain geographic footprint for the system overall in terms of being a must-have hospital to payers who are working with employers in that part of the state,” Baumgarten said.

Already, UCHealth was neck-and-neck with HealthONE as the largest hospital system in the Denver metro area in terms of net patient revenue. When looking statewide, no other system comes close — in a recent financial disclosure filed with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, UCHealth reported nearly $7 billion in operating revenue and more than $800 million in profit for the fiscal year that ended in June 2023.

And that was before the Parkview merger, which should add more than $500 million to UCHealth’s operating revenue total. (It may not add to the profit figure right away, though, as Parkview had been operating at a loss.)

So, given this dominant position — and given research that shows hospital consolidation often leads to higher prices — why did Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser give his OK to the merger? Because Colorado law really doesn’t give him authority to determine whether a merger will hurt competition or consumers.

As we have reported previously, Colorado’s Hospital Transfer Act limits the AG’s analysis to only two questions: Whether the merger “will result in a material change in the charitable purposes to which the assets of the hospital have been dedicated,” and whether the merger “will result in a termination of the Attorney General’s jurisdiction over those assets.”

In this merger, the answer to both is an obvious no. UCHealth and Parkview are nonprofits set up to act as hospitals. That won’t change after the merger.

As UCHealth president and CEO Elizabeth Concordia said at a ceremony in Pueblo last month to mark the merger: “We’ve always had one priority and that’s to take care of patients. You should all take great comfort in that cultural alignment we’ve had, and we are unwavering to that.”

In terms of the second question, both systems are based in Colorado, so their assets will remain under the AG’s jurisdiction post-merger.

The law does allow the AG to assess whether a merger will result in “reductions in the availability and accessibility of health care services in the communities served by the hospital.” But that requirement is fairly easily satisfied by, you know, not making massive changes to the hospital being acquired.

In his analysis, Weiser found that UCHealth had agreed to safeguards that would ensure Parkview “will at a minimum effectively operate post-transaction as it has pre-transaction.” For instance, UCHealth has pledged to make an effort to expand services offered at Parkview, and has also agreed to discontinue or reduce lines of service only after consulting with Parkview’s board, which will be made up mostly of people from Pueblo and will continue to have a say over day-to-day operations of the hospital.

Most of the public comment the AG’s office received was in support of the merger, with many hoping that a merger with UCHealth would help maintain Parkview’s presence in the community by preventing it from going broke.

“These safeguards will preserve the core elements of (Parkview’s) charitable purposes within the UCHealth system,” Weiser concluded, “and ensure there will be no material reduction in the availability or accessibility of health care services as a result of the transaction.”

So now comes the part where they have to make good on these promises.

MORE HEALTH NEWS

Denver’s migrant influx soars to the highest per capita in the nation as the city cleans up an encampment. Denver officials today will begin closing an encampment of asylum-seeking migrants mostly from Venezuela that has cropped up west of the city’s downtown. As Jennifer Brown reports, the city plans to move those living in the camp to indoor shelters and is also working to offer migrants rental assistance for apartments. But all of this is only a short-term solution, which is why Democrats in Colorado’s congressional delegation are demanding the federal government pay for more emergency shelter.
— The Colorado Sun Gun rights groups sue Colorado over the state’s ban on “ghost guns,” which lack serial numbers. In the effort to combat gun violence, which, as we have previously written, is a major public health issue, so-called ghost guns pose a significant problem. Colorado lawmakers last year passed a bill to ban them. But now that the law has taken effect, it is facing a legal challenge.
— The Associated Press

Jan. 2, 2024 snowpack as percentage of 30-year average in Colorado’s major river basins. Shorter version: Not great. (Source: Natural Resources Conservation Service)

We had some fun skiing over the school-holiday weeks, but then we weren’t trying for fresh, deep powder in the farthest back bowls, either. Those who were have so far been disappointed in Colorado. And Colorado River water watchers can’t be pleased, either. The daily-updated snowpack monitors in the state’s most important river basins are lagging far behind the 30-year average, and there are no fresh storm dumps in sight for the next few days. That 55% in the Rio Grande Basin has ominous implications for efforts by farmers and conservators in the San Luis Valley to recharge depleted aquifers and sort out a saner agricultural future.

CLIMATE

How to feel a sense of wonder in the New Year. These incredible images from deep space help put 2024 in perspective..
— Scientific American U.S. fracking blunts impact of Red Sea oil shipping mess. Americans are pumping so much oil and gas, the old Middle East shocks are long gone..
— WSJ Will people do the right thing even if they don’t care about climate change? A researcher argues gloom and doom is not the only possible message.
— NYT High Country News picks for big ‘23 environment stories. They call it the list that made them “green with envy” for the year.
— HCN

HEALTH

Colorado Medicaid could soon start covering … groceries? The state Medicaid department is asking the federal government for permission to provide expanded help to members to purchase high-quality food, part of a growing “food is medicine” movement.
— The Denver Post🔑 Guns to galleries. Colorado Springs-based RAWtools, which turns surrendered firearms into garden tools, now also has an art show of sculptures made from former gun parts.
— The Gazette New kids on the public health block. San Juan Basin Public Health is officially no more, and in its place is a new public health department for La Plata County, as well as one in neighboring Archuleta County.
— The Durango Herald, The Pagosa Daily Post When you’re the medical mystery you often see written about. Out of nowhere, journalist Tom Scocca began experiencing strange symptoms, including extreme muscle weakness. What he couldn’t figure out was why.
— New York magazine

Thanks for starting your New Year with us, and send us your ideas for climate and health issues you’d like to see explained in 2024. We’ll do our best. Life’s a challenge, but winning is always a possibility; as the Detroit Pistons would say, that’s why they play the games. Side note: If the 3-30 Pistons win out, they’ll finish 52–30 and be sitting sweet for the playoffs. Think about it.

— Michael & John