Scott Franz
Reporter, Capitol CoverageScott Franz is a government watchdog reporter and photographer from Steamboat Springs. He spent the last seven years covering politics and government for the Steamboat Pilot & Today, a daily newspaper in northwest Colorado. His reporting in Steamboat stopped a police station from being built in a city park, saved a historic barn from being destroyed and helped a small town pastor quickly find a kidney donor. His favorite workday in Steamboat was Tuesday, when he could spend many of his mornings skiing untracked powder and his evenings covering city council meetings. Scott received his journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is an outdoorsman who spends at least 20 nights a year in a tent. He spoke his first word, 'outside', as a toddler in Edmonds, Washington. Scott visits the Great Sand Dunes, his favorite Colorado backpacking destination, twice a year. Scott's reporting is part of Capitol Coverage, a collaborative public policy reporting project, providing news and analysis to communities across Colorado for more than a decade. Fifteen public radio stations participate in Capitol Coverage from throughout Colorado.
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Pressure to reach a deal is building. Forecasts for the water supply from the Colorado River continue to grow worse as snowpack lags far behind normal across the West. And negotiators from the basins have said there are "sticking points" that remain in the negotiations in recent weeks that even marathon talks have failed to resolve. -
On the eve of the high-stakes summit, negotiators from both the upper and lower river basins are not sounding confident they can reach an agreement with less than three weeks to go before a Feb. 14 deadline. -
Four days of negotiations in a Salt Lake City conference room earlier this month did not appear to have sparked a breakthrough. -
The announcement from Parks and Wildlife on Wednesday came three months after the Trump administration blocked Colorado's original plan to capture a second batch of wolves in British Columbia and fly them to the state. -
Steamboat Springs author and adventurer Eugene Buchanan has lived near the banks of the Yampa River long enough to notice it's rhythms and moods are often mirrored by the residents in his northwest Colorado ski town. -
Facing the prospect of a pause in additional wolves, wolf advocates say Colorado should add new protections for its existing population of less than 50 wolves. -
The Upper Arkansas Basin in the central part of the state is currently the driest, with about 49% of the normal snowpack. -
As some communities in far northwest Colorado discuss hosting a temporary nuclear waste storage facility, western leaders are reaffirming they want a say. -
SB25-077 would have given governments more time to respond to records requests from the public and businesses while exempting journalists from the delays. The bill's sponsors said governments were being "inundated" with records requests and needed relief with longer deadlines to respond to them. -
State regulators say the legislature removed the public’s access to funeral home inspection reports last year in the same bill they passed to tighten regulations on the industry. This came in the wake of several scandals involving fake ashes and mishandled remains.
