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Ballots have been mailed to most Aspen residents who will elect their next mayor and fill two city council seats in the municipal election on Tuesday, March 2. There are eight candidates running for the two open council seats. Incumbent Mayor Torre is running for a second, two-year term and faces a single challenger, artist Lee Mulcahy. 

A Learjet 31 took off before daybreak from Helena Regional Airport in Montana, carrying six Veterans Affairs medical providers and 250 doses of historic cargo cradled in a plug-in cooler designed to minimize breakage.

Even in a state where 80-mph speed limits are normal, ground transportation across long distances is risky for the Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine, which must be used within 12 hours of thawing.

You have to go back more than a century to find another time Coloradans faced a statewide crisis as big and deadly as the current COVID-19 pandemic. But experts who studied the state’s response to the Spanish flu of 1918 say history is not repeating itself when it comes to how state lawmakers are responding to the latest outbreak.

Today, visitors to the Capitol building must wear masks and have their temperatures taken, and lawmakers sit between plexiglass dividers.

And the basement cafeteria — usually packed with lobbyists — sits empty, roped off with yellow caution tape.

The Biden administration reopened enrollment for the Affordable Care Act this week. But enrollment details aren't the same everywhere.

Most states are part of the federal health insurance exchange through the ACA. That means most uninsured people can now sign up on HealthCare.gov through May 15.

But some Mountain West states have their own exchanges, and their own ways to sign up.

Marilyn Bartlett might be the closest thing health policy has to a folk hero. A certified public accountant who barely tops 5 feet, Bartlett bears zero resemblance to Paul Bunyan. But she did take an ax to Montana’s hospital prices in 2016, stopping the state’s employee health plan from bleeding money.

“Marilyn is not a physically imposing person,” said Montana Board of Investments Executive Director Dan Villa, who worked closely with Bartlett in state government. “She is a blend of your favorite aunt, an accounting savant and a little bit of July Fourth fireworks.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis urged lawmakers Wednesday to take quick action on a $1 billion-plus stimulus plan, lower taxes to jump-start the economy and rally the state after a year that saw the coronavirus claim the lives of nearly 5,700 residents, three of the largest wildfires in state history and protests over police brutality and racial injustice.

As highly contagious coronavirus variants spread, health experts in the Mountain West and beyond are urging people to upgrade and double up their masks.

A quarter-mile section of Carbondale’s Rio Grande trail will be lined with farolitos, or small paper lanterns, this weekend as part of “Light The Night With Love.” The inaugural event features public art installations stretching from DeRail Park to the Latinx Folk Art Garden, and proceeds from tickets purchased as part of the “HeART Walk” go to the American Heart Association.

2020 census results were supposed to come out in December, as mandated by the Constitution. The Census Bureau recently announced plans to release the first-round of results by April 30. Local and state governments and agencies, businesses, nonprofits and researchers rely on this data to get information, access funds and make big decisions.

When the pandemic hit, health officials in Montana’s Beaverhead County had barely begun to fill a hole left by the 2017 closure of the local public assistance office, mental health clinic, chemical dependency center and job placement office after the state’s last budget shortfall.

On a sunny Saturday this month, Ruth Hatfield was sitting with a friend’s dog on a sidewalk bench in downtown Grand Junction. Back home in Snowmass Village, 120 miles away through winding Rocky Mountain roadways, local officials had just shut down indoor restaurant dining as COVID-19 cases reached some of the highest levels in Colorado.

Aspen’s Baldwin Gallery opens a new exhibition next week called “A Third of the Night” by LA-based artist Enrique Martínez Celaya. Martínez Celaya’s been a fixture in the Aspen arts scene over the years, and is known for his involvement with Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and exhibitions at the Baldwin Gallery. He’ll be back in Aspen when the Baldwin Gallery debuts his newest collection of paintings and sculpture on Friday, Feb. 12, and said it’s a kind of homecoming. It will also be his only exhibition in the United States this year.

Bingo is back in the dining room. In-person visits have returned, too, though with masks and plexiglass. The Haven Assisted Living Facility’s residents are even planning a field trip for a private movie screening once they’ve all gotten their second round of COVID-19 vaccines.

Such changes are small but meaningful to residents in the Hayden, Colorado, long-term care home, and they’re due mostly to the arrival of the vaccine.

Florida, Colorado and several New England states are moving ahead with efforts to import prescription drugs from Canada, a politically popular strategy greenlighted last year by President Donald Trump.

But it’s unclear whether the Biden administration will proceed with Trump’s plan for states and the federal government to help Americans obtain lower-priced medications from Canada.

The rate of new COVID-19 cases in Pitkin County has dropped sharply over the course of the past two weeks. That number is steadily declining from a peak on Jan. 15, when the county’s two-week incidence rate was the highest in the state by a significant margin. 

With the ongoing drought in Pitkin, Eagle and Garfield counties and across most of the West, growing food and raising livestock is becoming more difficult. At the same time, the pandemic is exacerbating inequalities in the Roaring Fork Valley and many locals are still out of work, making it hard to access fresh, healthy food. 

Aspen Public Radio Executive Director Tammy Terwelp will be departing Aspen’s public radio station to lead Community Radio for Northern Colorado (CRNC) - The Colorado Sound and NPR station KUNC in Greeley, Colo. Her last day with Aspen Public Radio will be Fri., March 12.

As hospitals nationwide struggle with the latest COVID-19 surge, it’s not so much beds or ventilators in short supply. It’s the people to care for the sick.

Yet a large, highly skilled workforce of foreign-educated doctors, nurses and other health practitioners is going largely untapped due to licensing and credentialing barriers. According to the Migration Policy Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., some 165,000 foreign-trained immigrants in the U.S. hold degrees in health-related fields but are unemployed or underemployed in the midst of the health crisis.

Increasingly bleak forecasts for the Colorado River have for the first time put into action elements of the 2019 upper basin drought contingency plan.