News

• Coming Up Next, Telluride
• Telluride Dance Collective Moves the Masses

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Coming Up Next, Telluride

The Telluride Town Council will meet Tuesday with a recommendation from the Ethics Commission, energy mitigation measures and several administrative items on the agenda.

In this installment of Coming Up Next, Telluride, Communications Manager Lindsey Mills shares what to expect.

Julia Caulfield (JC): Town Council is meeting on Tuesday with, let’s be honest, a mostly administrative meeting on the whole.

Lindsey Mills (LM): It’s going to be the last one of the year. We’re about to roll into budget season. We start with our community survey results at the end of this month, right before the Fourth of July.

You do have one more opportunity to submit your response to the 2026 Town of Telluride Community Survey. Go to bit.ly/totsurvey26.

These results will then be presented at the end of the month, at the next council meeting, and they begin all of our goals and objectives setting, which go on to inform all of the things that go into the budget for 2027.

If there’s something you care about, something you can’t get to council to talk about, this is the way to make your voice heard.

These results are put online every year. This is our third year of this survey and it really does define how council decides on what their priorities are for 2027.

JC: That is big and important, not a topic specifically for Tuesday’s meeting, but we are going to start off Tuesday with two work sessions. What is happening here?

LM: The Ethics Commission reviewed an incident that occurred at the beginning of the year and has given council direction to potentially consider establishing a code of conduct.

Right now, the ethics code doesn’t include a specific code of conduct for Town Council, but council will consider whether that is appropriate and a necessary path forward.

JC: Then the second work session has to do with energy mitigation. What’s happening here?

LM: The Telluride Energy Mitigation Program, otherwise known as TEMP, does include some offset fees for new construction. This is an overview of those calculations and the fees and a determination if there should be changes to them.

JC: Then before lunch, we have the manager’s report and the like. Is there anything in there that folks might be interested in?

LM: I always encourage people to read the manager’s report. It is full of information about what’s going on in every single department. We’ll also be looking at an overview of the floodplain review and variance process, which has been a big deal in our planning and building department as of late. Our director will be on to talk about that process and everything moving forward there.

JC: Then we break for lunch, and when council gets back, genuinely, it’s mostly administrative business for the rest of the afternoon. Is there anything that you think listeners might be interested in, things of note that are taking place in the afternoon?

LM: The big piece is that 1 o’clock hour, right when council gets back from lunch, public comment takes place. So right at 1 o’clock, every single council meeting. This is your opportunity to come talk about things that are not necessarily on the agenda. You can join by Zoom. You can join in person. You can also submit public comment to [email protected] anytime. But this is a really good opportunity for folks to comment on things that are not on the agenda.

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Telluride Dance Collective Moves the Masses

For 10 years, the Telluride Dance Collective has brought dance to the masses through its Mass Movement production. This year, the show is returning to its roots, featuring more than 30 dancers of all ages in a performance designed to celebrate and inspire.

Mass Movement will take place at 7 p.m. Friday, June 12, at the Palm Theatre. Tickets are available at telluridepalm.com or at the door.

Kelsey Trottier, executive director of the Dance Collective and one of the choreographers for this year’s show, stopped by the Purple House on Pine to share more.

Story begins at 4:00.

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Community Conversation Looks Beyond the Buzz

Some of the most important conversations can also be the most difficult. The Wilkinson Public Library is offering a space to help make those discussions a little easier.

As festival season gets underway, the library, in collaboration with Tri-County Health Network, Communities That Care Coalition, Raices Sin Frontera, San Miguel County Public Health and the Telluride Regional Medical Center, will host another event in its Community Conversation series.

This week’s gathering, “Beyond the Buzz: Reimagining Festival Culture with Care & Awareness,” will explore how community members can enjoy festivals while making safe choices and maintaining their health and well-being.

The event will include a community raffle and a mocktail mix-off.

The community conversation will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 9, at the Wilkinson Public Library. Dinner and child care will be provided.

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Polis Signs Funeral Home Transparency Bill

Gov. Jared Polis signed a bipartisan bill into law Friday that restores public access to funeral home inspection reports. Access to the reports was removed in 2024.

The measure also increases penalties for the crime of abusing a corpse.

Lawmakers have spent years working to restore trust in Colorado’s funeral home industry following several scandals involving mishandled remains, including the case of Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose.

The funeral home’s operators were sentenced to federal prison in 2023 after pleading guilty to illegally selling body parts without the consent of families of the deceased for nearly a decade.

The new law takes effect in August.

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Federal Officials Eye Short-Term Colorado River Deal

The federal government expects to have a short-term agreement for management of the Colorado River later this summer.

The seven states that rely on the river have spent the last several years working on a plan to determine how water-use cuts will be distributed as climate change continues to reduce river flows.

The states have missed several deadlines over the past year to present a plan, with the new water management year set to begin in October.

Acting Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Scott Cameron spoke Thursday at a conference at the University of Colorado Boulder. He said the bureau has been working with the states for months, but with the water management year approaching, time is running short to reach an agreement.

“We’d have loved to have a 20-year deal, or a 30-year deal,” Cameron said. “But frankly we haven’t even been able to get seven states to agree on what a two-year deal would look like. So we’re using a 10-year framework that the department would use to issue operational guidelines at two-year intervals.”

Cameron said poor water-supply conditions this year have forced the bureau to make difficult decisions. He acknowledged some of those decisions have frustrated stakeholders, including a plan to release millions of gallons of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to supplement Lake Powell.