10 years ago
• A split Loveland City Council voted to move forward an election for a fracking moratorium, however, there was disagreement over the date the election should be. The City Council had previously set July 29, 2014, as the election date, though four councilors wanted it about a month earlier, on June 24, which was the date of a primary election. Meanwhile, resident Larry Sarner, agreed to drop his pending court appeal on the petition signatures if the city moved the election date to June 24 and Protect Our Loveland, the group that collected the signatures, was willing to drop its appeal against the city for delaying the vote only if the city kept the July 29 date. The council had until May 6 to firm up the date in order to meet election deadlines.
• Danny Meyer, a successful jazz musician in New York who went through school in Loveland, returned to Loveland to teach classes and discuss his career. The child of musicians, he started playing the piano at an early age and then, after hearing the saxophone, picked up the woodwind instrument and was hooked.”The saxophone is a very cool instrument because in a way it’s like speaking or singing,” he said. After leaving Colorado to begin performing in other cities, he landed gigs recording music with Beyonce, Chairlift, Julia Holter and Dev Hynes.
• Three Loveland teams qualified for the Odyssey of the Mind’s world competition in Ames, Iowa. At the state creative problem-solving competition, teams from Coyote Ridge Elementary School, Namaqua Elementary School and New Vision Charter School all landed spots at the world contest.
• Gov. John Hickenlooper announced that Deputy District Attorney Joshua Blake Lehman was appointed to serve as Larimer County Court judge, replacing Robert Rand, who resigned after being censured for inappropriate behavior on the bench.
• The city of Loveland was preparing to spend its fourth Safe Routes to School grant, $112,533, on replacing about 1,200 feet sidewalks near Garfield Elementary School. Officials said that the sidewalk issues ranged from gaps to extremely narrow sections and missing curb ramps in those sections. “What we’re trying to accomplish is a full connection within two blocks of the school on at least one side of the road,” said public works staff engineer Shelley Aschenbrenner.
• Verboten Brewing, then a 15-month old microbrewery, took home two medals from the World Beer Cup, an international competition conducted every two years. The event featured 1,173 entries from 379 breweries representing 58 countries. Verboten won a silver medal for its Pure Imagination in the oatmeal stout category and a bronze for its Bourbon Barrel Aged Mountain Man imperial rye ale in the wood and barrel aged strong beer class, which had 111 entries. “There were breweries from all over the world winning medals, so it was pretty awesome to get two,” said a co-owner and head brewer at Verboten. He added that only 20 or so breweries won more than one medal.
• Mariana Butte Golf Course reopened the remaining three holes that had remained closed after massive flooding in September 2013. Golfers, for the prior seven months, had been playing limited holes at a discounted rate. The river holes opened six weeks earlier than planned due to the work of a grounds crew and several volunteers. Officials said the recovery effort for the course cost between $160,000 and $180,000, all from an enterprise fund that is generated by course revenue, and included replacing three sand traps that were destroyed, laying 45,000 square feet of new sod, reseeding 5 acres, replacing three irrigation controller stations, removing 6,000 cubic yards of silt and sediment and building 350 feet of new cart path.
• The Loveland City Council approved $1.5 million in fee waivers for an affordable housing project; developers were planning to build 224 units in north Loveland just west of the Walmart Supercenter on U.S. 287. Officials said the recession, the High Park fire and the 2013 flood had led to a surge of renters in Loveland, which had one of the lowest vacancy rates in the state at 2.7%.
• Loveland police were looking for a possible police impersonator who had stopped a vehicle in downtown Loveland using red and blue flashing lights and wearing a police-style uniform. The victim reported the incident, which felt odd to him, and police determined that no legitimate officer initiated the stop. This followed several police impersonation cases that had been reported in the Denver area.
• Walter and Twila Hayward of Loveland were celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary on April 19, 2014, having married in 1944. The couple met in Kansas, married in Fort Benning, Ga., and moved to Loveland in 1969, raising two children. They also had five grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren. The Haywards said they reached their milestone through a lot of commitment, compatibility, communication and caring.
• Artist Michael Ryan was preparing to display his designs on plywood windows of the historic Feed and Grain building in downtown Loveland. Officials were looking for creative ways to exhibit art near the historic building to keep the Feed and Grain at the forefront of people’s minds as construction had begun on apartment units in the Artspace program and organizers were raising money to stabilize and restore the interior of the historic building. “This is just a cool way to use the space over there while they’re doing renovation, to keep people’s eyes on it,” said Ryan.
25 years ago
• The Colorado Department of Education awarded a three-year, $169,000 balanced literacy grant to Winona Elementary School, which officials were planning to use to raise reading and writing proficiency.
• Members of the Loveland City Council agreed to ask voters to allow the city to keep all excess revenues collected under the Taxpayers Bill of Rights for the following five years. Seven council members at a study session showed consensus to go to voters and did not support refunding the $1.9 million in excess money collected in 1998.
• The wish list for a new fairgrounds complex to be built on 243 acres in east Loveland included a wide-open paved area to use for radio-controlled airplanes, digital livestock scales, safer stalls for horses and improved acoustics after a public meeting that about 30 people attended at the McMillen Building in Loveland. A Larimer County task force was working to design the fairgrounds complex and look at costs and financing options.
• A 15-year-old Loveland boy was sentenced to one year in a youth detention center for his involvement in a vandalism that resulted in $31,000 in damage to Conrad Ball Middle School and Mary Blair Elementary School. He had pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary and criminal mischief. A 14-year-old also pleaded guilty to the same charges in the vandalism but had not been sentenced.
• City traffic engineers were deciding whether to build a roundabout at First Street and Wilson Avenue or to install a traffic signal, replacing a four-way stop. The city engineer said that he believed that roundabouts were safer, more efficient ways of moving traffic. Officials said that residents seemed to be split down the middle in their support for each option. The roundabout would cost $220,000, while a traffic signal would cost $120,000, but officials said the cheaper option would require more maintenance and lead to more injury accidents.
• The Larimer County commissioners agreed to ask voters to let the county “de-Bruce,” or keep excess tax money collected above the limits set by the Tax Payers Bill of Rights.
• Loveland police were working to determine the extent of a theft ring that hit the Loveland outlet mall, leading to the arrest of four New York residents on charges of felony theft. Police said they found $6,700 worth of clothing believed to be stolen from the Loveland outlet mall in a rented van plus another $10,000 worth of clothes believed stolen from the outlets at Castle Rock in a rented hotel room. Police believe the thieves were part of a national ring paid to travel to cities and steal.
• Colorado wildlife officials killed a plan to relocated prairie dogs from a Louisville development to Lon Hagler Wildlife Area west of Loveland, saying that neighborhood opposition and new state legislation requiring county commissioner approval made the plan too difficult to implement.
• The Loveland City Council was preparing to authorize Mayor Kathy Gilliland to send a letter to the Larimer County commissioners to confirm that the city would team up with the county to build a joint police and courts building. Most of the council believed that the joint project was the cheapest option and would relieve chronic crowding at existing facilities, but one council member planned to vote against the letter, believing that a new police station was not necessary.
• Crews were revamping the parking lot at Orchards Shopping Center, changing the “confusing” double east-west lanes to a single two-way street. The city required the change as the shopping center was growing, including the addition of a 25,000-square-foot Office Depot that was to open on June 1, replacing the 9,000-square-foot Orchards Theater that was demolished the year prior.
50 years ago
• Loveland postal employees were staying on duty April 15 until 11:59 p.m. to assist residents who waited until the last minute to mail their tax returns, ensuring an April 15 postmark. Postmaster Henry Porter pointed out that, under the same setup the previous year, the post office had customers even down to the final minutes.
• The foreman of the Loveland electrical department reported that electricity demand dropped about 4% in March of 1974 following a 15.37% jump from 1972 to 1973. He pointed out that in 1973, the Lego factory was still in operation, and it was not in 1974 and that Hewlett-Packard had also dropped its usage. While those accounted for the drop, the foreman said he did think residents, too, were cutting down on their use of electricity.
• The Larimer County Humane Society and the city of Loveland were at an impasse on how much the city should pay for use of the shelter. The city approved $2,000, but the Humane Society rejected the offer and asked for double, $4,000. The society was getting ready to open a new shelter on April 22, but the president of the Humane Society said Loveland would not be able to use the facility until a financial agreement was signed.
• A spring snow delayed a scheduled Saturday morning Easter egg hunt on the fields north of the Lego plant, but the sun came out and the hunt was held on Easter Sunday. Hundreds of youngsters and their parents waded through the muddy fields to find eggs hidden in patches of snow and clusters of soggy grass.
• The Larimer County Jail’s chief of security showed a postcard that he had received from a former prisoner who had been charged with assault on a police officer. Writing from Durango, where he had prospects for a job, the former inmate thanked the jail head and his staff for how they treated him while he was in jail. The man wrote that his incarceration “changed my idea of what peace officers are doing and what kind of people they are.”
• The Thompson School District approved an extended day proposal for Loveland High School for the next year with juniors and seniors attending school on an earlier schedule than sophomores as a short-term method to deal with crowded classrooms. Juniors and seniors would be in school 7:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and sophomores from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. with the full enrollment overlapping only three periods of the day. Enrollment for the 1974-75 school year was expected to be 1,569 students.
• Construction Inc. of Frederick was chosen to build the new Ivy Stockwell Elementary School for $819,398, out of seven companies that bid on the project. Though it was the lowest submitted bid, the price was $37,000 higher than Superintendent C.E. Stansberry predicted because the cost of oil-related products had tripled in price. Completion date for the school was set for Feb. 15, 1975.
• The Loveland Ambulance Service had requested Loveland City Council approve an alternating system where emergency calls to the Loveland Police Department would rotate between Loveland and Cox ambulance services, but a tie vote of the City Council meant that the measure failed. Both the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office and the Colorado State Patrol employed a rotating system. The Loveland council had sent the measure to the Loveland Hospital Board of Directors, which recommended that Cox be considered the official ambulance service. Some councilors said they felt the council needed to accept the recommendation of the hospital district, while others said the decision to funnel all calls to one service was to deny equal opportunity to free enterprise. The city manager confirmed that the policy was for dispatch to send all calls to Cox unless the patient requested another service.
• The Larimer County commissioners voted to purchase 280 punch card voting devices at a cost of $120 each, a new setup that was to be used for the first time in the September primaries and was expected to be more efficient and cut down on lengthy waits to cast a ballot.
120 years ago
• The state boiler inspector visited Loveland in his annual rounds of the state, and declared that “The boilers of this town are the cleanest and in the best condition of any place — a point which speaks volumes for the purity and excellence of the water used,” the April 14, 1904, issue of the Loveland Reporter stated.
• A public notice about lawn watering in the April 14, 1904, Loveland newspaper said lawn sprinkling was prohibited between the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., or during a fire. And to use a lawn sprinkler without a license was a violation of the town ordinance.
• “A crowd of ignorant and ill-behaved hoodlums outraged all decency at the home of Lyman Porter last evening for a half hour,” the April 14, 1904, issue of the Loveland Reporter said. “They were of the lowest element — and were even indecent.” The report provided no details.
