Mark Kiszla fans
Re: “40 years of Mark Kiszla,” Oct. 15 sports coverage
I sometimes “glance” at the other sports writers’ columns, but I always READ Mark Kiszla’s.
— Larry McLaughlin, Aurora
Reading the retrospective on Mark Kiszla’s 40 years with The Denver Post brought back so many great memories. My family moved to Denver in 1963. My dad was a huge sports fan and a newspaper junky, and we always took The Post and the Rocky Mountain News. I remember my kid brother playing football with Dave Logan at Wheat Ridge High School, and going to games at Folsom Field in Boulder and Bronco games in the winter when it was so cold you couldn’t feel your feet, hands or face.
As a young adult, I remember the only season tickets available back then were in the notoriously rowdy South stands at Mile High. I remember going to Nuggets games in the ’70s and wondering if then-coach Larry Brown would be wearing his velvet bell-bottom suit or his bell-bottom bib overalls. I remember making Orange Crush pie in honor of the Bronco’s defense and those heady years in the ’90s with back-to-back Super Bowls.
Now there are new memories in the making with the Nuggets, Avs and Buffs. Through the last four decades of Denver sports, I have always found Mark Kiszla’s columns to be well-written, interesting and usually spot-on. He takes a lot of heat and makes me laugh out loud when he prints the snarkiest reader comments in “Kickin’ It with Kiz.”
Great coverage of his 40th anniversary with the paper. And Kiz, job well done. Thanks for the memories.
— Cathy White, Montrose
About our borders …
Re: “Colorado’s fentanyl problem is getting worse. We need to fight back.” Oct. 15 commentary
Matt Stoneberger points out that the fentanyl problem is a “multinational manufacturing and trafficking enterprise” and that the “typical chain is that raw materials are shipped from overseas sources, generally China, to cartel-operated manufacturing sites in Mexico”… after which “it is smuggled across the border and then distributed … throughout the U.S.”
He then goes on to say that more dollars are needed to “work in providing law enforcement and community health organizations with the tools they need to fight back and save lives.” He doesn’t, however, mention addressing the source of the problem by securing the border to limit or eliminate the smuggling of dangerous drugs across the border or sanctioning China and Mexico that are abetting it.
I understand that there is already enough fentanyl in the country to kill every living person in the United States, but more ingress should be limited and hopefully prevented. Yes, government at all levels needs to address this, and all federal legislators, representatives and senators, across all the states and the nation must call for the Biden administration to enforce all immigration laws and secure the border to protect the country’s populace. This will also address the potential problem of terrorists slipping undetected into the country but not that of terrorists that may already be here.
— Steve Lloyd, Cheyenne, Wyo.
Protect book choice
Re: “Colorado libraries: Challenges to books, programs increasing,” Oct. 15 news story
Elizabeth Hernandez wrote a well-researched article in last Sunday’s Post.
Parents concerned with the choices their child is making for reading material should use their time to share the reading of that material with the child. Heather Zadina of Wellington has the right idea: Patrons of libraries should be able to choose their reading materials.
— Priscilla Rice, Centennial
Students are products of their teachers
Re: “Universities must stand against extremism,” Oct. 15 commentary
In his article, Eric J. Gertler rightfully chastises university leaders, faculty, and students for their response to the tragic events in the Middle East. However, he does not seem able to connect the dots. These students, who have “lost sight of the values that have moved the world forward,” are, in fact, the product of their leadership and the teaching of their instructors.
This is particularly ironic, as these institutions and students proudly proclaim to the rest of the world their moral superiority regarding racial inequality, language diversity, the evils of colonialism, and LGBTQ+ rights.
— Francis Wardle, Denver
Grocery store customers deserve choice … and clerks
At one time I only shopped at King Soopers — back when they did a marvelous job of being a grocer who supplied the community with lots of variety in a great environment with good help. I enjoyed it.
Now they want to control the food chain, not just supply foods from long time and new manufacturers. With their own (lower quality) label constantly expanding, they advance their ability to control and dominate the products. Choices of brands have gone down, and thus, the quality is down. In addition, the staffing is down. If they eliminate Safeway’s competition, we will have the equivalent of the company store.
King Soopers may be vying with Costco/Target/Walmart, but they’ve thrown away their hard-earned reputation as a great grocer providing the best variety of brands. They have lost this customer. The last time I was in, they had only one cashier (and six self-serve with only one other staff) with five or six customers waiting to check out.
Don’t take Safeway away from us; we need competition, and we need better choices on all levels of food production. Beware, if Safeway is absorbed, prices will go higher, and you can say goodbye to the labels you’ve come to rely on for great quality — and those manufacturers will lay off workers.
— Sharon Routt, Louisville
The only answer is more housing
Re: “Denver needs more rental assistance,” Oct. 14 commentary
Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez and Elina Rodriguez want to slow the flow of Denverites into homelessness by increasing rental assistance. I have no doubt that Gonzales-Gutierrez and Rodriguez sincerely want to do good, but good intentions do not equal good results. Rental assistance has never achieved good results anywhere it has been tried, and that’s for the simple reason that more dollars chasing the same supply of rental housing causes rent inflation. Rental assistance is a self-defeating zero-sum game.
The price of housing is high because there’s not nearly enough housing supply to meet the demand. So, what’s really needed to bring down the price of housing is a huge increase in the supply of housing. But why isn’t enough new housing being built to meet the demand? The culprit is numerous government-imposed barriers to building new housing. The government-imposed barriers are primarily land use regulations, which include zoning, lot size restrictions, house size restrictions, height restrictions, occupancy limits, and so on.
The choice is simple: Either make housing affordable by knocking down the government-imposed barriers to build new housing or keep the barriers and suffer high housing costs and people being displaced from their homes. The obvious choice is to knock down the barriers.
— Chuck Wright, Westminster
Airport should be a better neighbor
Re: “RMMA announces full shift to unleaded by 2027,” Oct. 4 news story
Nearby residents mostly welcomed the news that Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (RMMA) was shifting to unleaded fuel. Any action that this public facility, owned and operated by Jefferson County, takes that will reduce the harm from the pounds of lead dumped every year as microparticulate over the homes and schools of nearby residential communities is a step in the right direction.
Save Our Skies Alliance and other grassroots organizations have long advocated for the airport to take this action. Dr. Sammy Zahran, a professor at CSU, published some of the most definitive findings on the impact of lead emissions from piston-engine aircraft. The results showed that children who lived or went to school near California’s Reid-Hillview airport in Santa Clara County had elevated blood lead levels. Santa Clara took just four months to ban sales of all leaded fuel in January 2022.
RMMA Director Paul Anslow claimed in a public statement that, “the neighbors had no impact on our decisions.” It is disheartening to think that five years of effort, including a petition signed by over 1,700 residents in 2021 and a letter, signed by over 30 pediatric medical professionals in 2022 pleading with Jeffco Commissioners to cease the sale of leaded fuel, played no role here.
FAA regulations require that airports consider the impact on local communities when they expand operations, as RMMA has in the past five years. So far, they have ignored those rules and nearly doubled their traffic in that time. Lead is just one of many environmental and health issues associated with this facility. I had hoped that RMMA was planning to be a better neighbor.
— Charlene Willey, Westminster
Commissioners, not book czars
Re: “Japanese graphic novels causing concern about library offerings,” Oct. 19 news story
So Garfield County Commissioner Tom Jankovsky has not read the books, does not know if a word he used, pedophilic (sic), is even a word, acknowledged he does not have the authority and was advised by the county attorney that he has no legal standing to ban books in the library. Yet he still decided he had to stick his nose in to “direct” the library to ban books.
And GOP politicians wonder why comedians make fun of them and voters ignore them. Maybe they should read books rather than ban them.
— Agust Gudmundsson, Castle Rock
Orediggers deserve more space
Re: “Mines rolls with No. 1 spot in sight,” Oct. 15 sports story
Considering that the Colorado School of Mines football record is now 7-0 overall and 5-0 in the RMAC, I would have expected The Denver Post to have given them more recognition than a small space on page 10 of the Sunday Sports section. All our unpaid Colorado university students who play sports are doing so while keeping up with challenging coursework. I would just like to see all universities get fair and equal recognition, especially when the CSM football team is in the position of being No. 1 in the nation.
— Janet Johnson, Golden
Fossil fuels sustain human life
Re: “Regents ponder fossil fuel divestment,” Oct. 16 news story
Over the past 125 years, the earth’s population has gone from 1.6 billion people to 8.1 billion; by 2050 it is estimated to be 9.8 billion. The world has gone from no electricity, no cars, and no airplanes to where we are now, totally reliant on fossil fuels to sustain our lives.
I am not a climate change denier. Humans have caused massive environmental change (not just climate change) in the last 125 years, resulting in a much higher standard of living, depletion of minerals, and damage to the earth – the good, bad, and ugly.
Today about 60% of electricity and 80% of all energy comes from fossil fuel. Today our modern integrated society literally cannot survive without fossil fuels. It is time to face reality. Fossil fuels are human life itself in our modern world. Demanding an end to fossil fuels with no viable replacement does not accomplish anything.
Until we develop and then transition to energy sources that cause less damage and depletion, we must support fossil fuel production and use; our lives depend on it. Our world leaders and academia need to stop the hyperbole, educate the public, and develop an evolutionary energy plan that will allow 9.8 billion people to live on the planet by 2050 while at the same time not destroying the earth.
— Daniel G. Zang, Lakewood
Vote for transparency
As another election nears, there has been a lot of press coverage about the conflict within the ranks of the Republican Party at the national level. This is certainly understandable.
My only disagreement is your lack of criticism of a two-party system that is simply not diverse enough to accommodate different viewpoints and, more importantly, how the two-party system so effectively takes the path of resistance by protecting itself before serving the public. At the risk of being rude, I just think there is too much sucking up instead of challenging the party line.
This is important at every level of government. I urge my fellow citizens to consider the importance of government transparency before they cast their ballots. There has to be a reasonable balance between personal privacy and citizen oversight of government affairs.
— Timothy D. Allport, Arvada
Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
