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The O. Zone: Please consider supporting more local news, signing up for alerts

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October 9, 2024, 2:54 pm

The two questions I get the most from Real Vail readers are can you please cover a particular local issue, and is there a way for me to know when you publish an article or opinion piece I might be interested in?

The answer to the second question is now a resounding yes. Seventeen years into the RealVail.com experience, I finally used some of your donations to pay a tech person (I have zero skills in that arena) to set up a “Sign up for News Alerts” link, where you can type in your address and receive an email when I post a major article.

That means I won’t ping you every time I post a press release in Real Vail’s Community Content section. I also won’t sell your email address or otherwise try to capitalize on your information.

The O Zone by David O. Williams
David O. Williams

The answer to the first question is a little more complicated. I have one advertiser on RealVail.com, and while I’m highly appreciative of Vail Health’s support over the years (and believe strongly in their behavioral-health mission), it’s not enough revenue to pay for a great deal of local coverage. Basically, it covers hosting and site maintenance costs.

I make most of my revenue selling freelance stories to other publications, which requires a more regional or national focus to my reporting, because I don’t have a relationship with any local news outlets anymore (with the exception of twice-a-year Vail Valley Magazine).

I’m hoping to change that dynamic somewhat by adding a pop-up promoting a Fund Real Vail link, which will hopefully bring in enough revenue to allow me to dig into local issues that either aren’t being covered by our local newspaper of record or need to be covered in a different way.

For instance, I was able to land a recent story on Eagle County Sheriff James van Beek reading a book by “Pizzagate” alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec on the Colorado Times Recorder website based on the Front Range – a site that then allows full reposting on RealVail.com.

When the sheriff – the sole elected Republican in Eagle County – pulled out of the reading, that prompted a follow-up story in the Vail Daily, which triggered a mention in the conservative-leaning Washington Times newspaper founded by the Unification Church’s Rev. Sun Myung Moon. That’s right, the Moonie paper. That article was mostly about teen TV star turned Christian actor and children’s book author Kirk Cameron of “Growing Pains” fame.

My point is I was paid to write those articles because our sheriff, who in the past has sought the national spotlight on political issues, walked right into a controversy that a Colorado Front Range political publication found compelling. But three other stories I’ve written recently on the sheriff didn’t have the same kind of statewide or national juice. Still, they’re all stories that matter.

The first was on how the sheriff’s department was handling a series of social media threats at Battle Mountain High School, where my son is a senior, followed by a deeper dive into whether the sheriff has ever used the state’s red-flag law – something he previously went on FOX News to oppose – and how other local law enforcement agencies have utilized that law. This is relevant given the arrest of a local juvenile in association with at least one of the threats.

Finally, I wrote about how the sheriff is trying to hire back a former county attorney as his department’s legal counsel independent of the county attorney who normally fills that role. The commissioners are now weighing the legality of such an arrangement.

These are stories that I was not able to sell to any of my usual freelance outlets but are critical issues for Eagle County residents who care about how their government works and how public safety is being handled at our schools and throughout our county. I basically didn’t get paid to report on and write about these issues; nor has the Vail Daily followed up yet.

Before I cite some other coverage on RealVail.com that you may have missed elsewhere, the Vail Daily and other outlets cover plenty of other critical topics that don’t make it onto my site. They have staff reporters paid full-time wages to attend meetings and dig through records, and I wish they had the resources to dig into even more of what’s going on behind the scenes locally.

Also, I’m a registered Democrat and a transparently progressive journalist who has interviewed countless conservative Republicans over the years and presented their points of view on an endless array of policy issues. But make no mistake about which way I lean, especially in the era of Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called the independent press the enemy of the people and promises retribution against journalists, media companies and many others who oppose him if he’s reelected on Nov. 5.

The Vail Daily, on the other hand, has stopped doing endorsements (in part out of fear of political violence) and is now focusing its opinion page primarily on local issues, as if the national undermining of trust in government institutions hasn’t trickled down to the local level. RealVail.com will continue to endorse candidates this election cycle (stay tuned).

I recently wrote about Vail Daily columnist Richard Carnes getting the axe after 20 years for writing about political violence, and why silencing that discussion is not the way to end the trend. And I’ve covered all the local state legislative races and several of the Colorado U.S. congressional races starting with the question of who won the 2020 presidential election.

If you don’t trust elected secretaries of state and county clerks to run free and fair elections, and you somehow still think Trump really won in 2020 (when in some cases you actually won in the same election), then why are you running to be part of that government? To blow it up from the inside and go to jail for nine years like Tina Peters? Real Vail recently revealed that Peters’ pillow patron Mike Lindell just did a little email fishing right here in Eagle County.

If you don’t think government can be part of the solution in disasters ranging from a global pandemic to climate-change-fueled hurricanes, then why do you want to run things? It’s clearly not to save lives and ease people’s suffering.

That, to me, is what the Jan. 6 question is all still about. If you don’t believe in the peaceful transfer of power and want to be a dictator on day one and suspend the U.S. Constitution, then you are anti-democratic and un-American. How you feel about tax policy, health care or anything else doesn’t really matter at that point, and the only way sane voters should ever consider supporting you is if you loudly decry such nonsense and reject those candidates at the polls.

Take, for example, state House District 26, where incumbent Meghan Lukens is being challenged by J6 attendee Nathan Butler, which Real Vail covered in February, followed by the only Q&A I’ve seen so far in the race. Same dynamic in the state Senate District 5 race, which includes part of Eagle County and features Democrat Cole Buerger of Glenwood Springs taking on Republican state Rep. Marc Catlin, who voted to thank J6 attendees. This ongoing insanity is being sane-washed by mainstream Republicans, and it needs to end with this election.

I traveled to Basalt (way outside the district) to talk to Republican state Rep. Gabe Evans, who’s challenging incumbent U.S. Rep. Yadira Caraveo in the most competitive congressional race in the state – CD8 on the Front Range. Evans is backed by Trump and clearly J6 adjacent.

As for our own CD3, infamously abandoned by Lauren Boebert after her narrow 546-vote victory in 2022 (weirdly, her Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch of Aspen, doesn’t claim he actually won), I got Frisch and many opponents on both sides of the aisle on the record on a number of issues before June’s primary. The Republican winner still refuses to talk to me.

Now let’s talk Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump presidency written by dozens of former Trump administration loyalists. It would strip away basic freedoms for Americans on everything from health care to the environment, radically change how we manage the public lands surrounding our towns, and I first wrote about it in a takedown of Beaver Creek’s annual Freedom Conference in August of 2023.

More recently I got Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on the record on Project 2025 at an event in Vail, where he also gave his most definitive statement to date in opposition to Utah’s massive expansion of oil trains through Eagle County – a topic I’ve written extensively about for years.

Similarly, in an exclusive phone interview, I got Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on the record on Project 2025and his plans to officially weigh in on Eagle County’s oil-train lawsuit as it heads to a hearing this month before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But did you know (you did not unless you regularly read RealVail.com) that 75% of those oil trains are coming our wayregardless of whether the Trump-stacked SCOTUS reverses the lower court decision (they will) in favor of Eagle County that sent the oil-train project back to the environmental drawing board?

Some other Real Vail exclusives you didn’t see covered locally. I traveled to Salt Lake City for the National Governors Association meeting where Utah Gov. Spencer Cox passed the leadership baton to Polis, actor Matthew McConaughey sat on a panel, and Volodymyr Zelensky was a surprise guest. On the way home I drove through the post-apocalyptic hellscape that is Utah’s Uinta Basin oil-drilling hotspot – a global climate bomb just upwind (and rail) from us.

One way to keep those oil trains off the banks of our local rivers would be quiet, clean passenger rail from Glenwood to Leadville connecting to our local airport, transit centers and gondolas (while taking pressure off Interstate 70) – a subject I will continue to explore in depth. I will also keep closely following water issues and public lands policy.

There will always be local issues I feel compelled to write about. I started RealVail.com as more of a repository for my freelance work in one central location than a stand-alone news site but then realized that, given the cratering state of local news across the state and country, there are holes in coverage that will always need filling.

For instance, prior to June’s primary election, when it looked highly unlikely the dysfunctional Eagle County Republican Party — now led by a man who falsely, repeatedly and without a shred of evidence insists Democrats cheat in elections — would be able to field a credible candidate, I got the two remaining Democrats in the District 2 county commissioners race to at least answer a few questions.

Had I known how little coverage the race that actually wound up deciding the seat would get (Tom Boyd won and is unopposed), I would have done a full-blown Q&A on far more issues. My bad. Still, that’s not the kind of story I can sell outside the valley, so if it’s something you would have valued, please consider a donation to RealVail.com, signing up for news alerts, and dropping me a line at davido(@)realvail.com to suggest some topics for me to dig into. Thanks.

Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please consider a donation if you value this content, and also sign up for free news alerts.

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David O. Williams

Managing Editor at RealVail
David O. Williams is the editor and co-founder of RealVail.com and has had his awarding-winning work (see About Us) published in more than 75 newspapers and magazines around the world, including 5280 Magazine, American Way Magazine (American Airlines), the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska), the Anchorage Daily Press (Alaska), Aspen Daily News, Aspen Journalism, the Aspen Times, Beaver Creek Magazine, the Boulder Daily Camera, the Casper Star Tribune (Wyoming), the Chicago Tribune, Colorado Central Magazine, the Colorado Independent (formerly Colorado Confidential), Colorado Newsline, Colorado Politics (formerly the Colorado Statesman), Colorado Public News, the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Colorado Springs Independent, the Colorado Statesman (now Colorado Politics), the Colorado Times Recorder, the Cortez Journal, the Craig Daily Press, the Curry Coastal Pilot (Oregon), the Daily Trail (Vail), the Del Norte Triplicate (California), the Denver Daily News, the Denver Gazette, the Denver Post, the Durango Herald, the Eagle Valley Enterprise, the Eastside Journal (Bellevue, Washington), ESPN.com, Explore Big Sky (Mont.), the Fort Morgan Times (Colorado), the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the Greeley Tribune, the Huffington Post, the King County Journal (Seattle, Washington), the Kingman Daily Miner (Arizona), KUNC.org (northern Colorado), LA Weekly, the Las Vegas Sun, the Leadville Herald-Democrat, the London Daily Mirror, the Moab Times Independent (Utah), the Montgomery Journal (Maryland), the Montrose Daily Press, The New York Times, the Parent’s Handbook, Peaks Magazine (now Epic Life), People Magazine, Powder Magazine, the Pueblo Chieftain, PT Magazine, the Rio Blanco Herald Times (Colorado), Rocky Mountain Golf Magazine, the Rocky Mountain News, RouteFifty.com (formerly Government Executive State and Local), the Salt Lake Tribune, SKI Magazine, Ski Area Management, SKIING Magazine, the Sky-Hi News, the Steamboat Pilot & Today, the Sterling Journal Advocate (Colorado), the Summit Daily News, United Hemispheres (United Airlines), Vail/Beaver Creek Magazine, Vail en Español, Vail Health Magazine, Vail Valley Magazine, the Vail Daily, the Vail Trail, Westword (Denver), Writers on the Range and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Williams is also the founder, publisher and editor of RealVail.com and RockyMountainPost.com.