Restoring Denver’s downtown

Visitors are the economic lifeblood of downtown Denver. The Downtown Denver Partnership’s monthly High Frequency Data Update data shows that visitors contribute 2 to 4 times as much pedestrian traffic as downtown employees and residents.

If the city seriously wants to re-vitalize our downtown streets and economy, we need to make it easy, safe, clean and fun for visitors to come downtown to shop, eat and enjoy our sports and cultural events and pay the sales tax that Denver’s budget badly needs.

Unfortunately, we seem to have our priorities backwards. Our transportation policies discourage private autos in favor of bikes and scooters. Our public transportation is not adequately policed to ban unruly and misbehaving riders. And our 16th Street Mall reconstruction project, with its dirt, noise and confusion, is now 12 months behind schedule and will not be completed until late Fall 2025 — 28 long months from now.

How do we get the city to shift its focus from indulging and enabling the addicted and dysfunctional to protecting and encouraging the suburban and out-of-state visitors who fuel downtown Denver’s economic engine?

David Roberts

Denver

Propane potentially hazardous

Marni Jameson’s article, “So Your Next BBQ Doesn’t Fizzle, Clean Your Grill”, contains some very bad advice: “If your grill runs on propane, check to see if the tank is empty. Keep one or two full tanks on hand, rotate and refill them when empty.”

On July 17, 2021 while preparing to grill a steak, I experienced a BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor EXPLOSION.). It blew the roof off the East side of my house, turned my house into a fireball and blew two pieces of metal shrapnel over 200 feet down the hill. Had that happened with only one cylinder, think what damage two cylinders would have caused. Propane cylinders can be used safely but are potentially hazardous. On March 11, 2023, three people were killed in a BLEVE in Georgia.

After our fire, the only fragment of the propane cylinder ever recovered was the collar or handle of the propane cylinder. This cylinder that was sold to me at an Amerigas exchange had two dates upon it: 08 02, which was the date of manufacture and 05 16, the date of recertification. It was a two time loser. It was sold to me at a supermarket exchange on July 9, 2021. Legally, it should have been recertified in 08/14 and then five years later in 08/19.

I would advise anyone with a propane grill, not only to clean their grill regularly but also to check for leaks using a spray bottle of soapy water before lighting the grill. Before accepting a cylinder at an exchange, check the date of manufacture on the collar of the cylinder. Don’t accept any cylinder over 17 years old or in bad condition. As I found out the hard way, once the grill is lit, the die is cast and there is no safe way to turn off the cylinder. Keep in mind that homeowner’s insurance has limited coverage for damage to adjacent homes. $100,000 doesn’t go very far these days.

Joel C. Boulder

Littleton

This is a travesty

You have to hand it to the abortion industrial complex. They certainly are effective and proficient at one thing — gaslighting Colorado women and the Colorado medical community.

Abortion activists gaslight all women who doubt their decision regarding abortion. Rather than acknowledge the complex and often conflicting emotions surrounding an abortion decision, they insist that abortion is simply “healthcare” and nobody regrets their decision to abort their baby. They rely primarily on the findings from the Turnaway Study which compared women’s thoughts about abortion after either completing their abortion or being denied an abortion because of gestational limits.

They never acknowledge that the study was susceptible to significant bias. It is well established that women who regret their abortion decision disproportionately drop out of abortion surveys. There is a high likelihood that the resultant survey oversampled the minority of women who felt good about their abortion decision.

Even if you discount the risk of bias, the abortion industry focuses on the findings for the 17% of the participants who completed the 5-year study. They like to quote the statistic that 95% of these women felt that “abortion was the right decision” at 5 years.

What they don’t publicize is that within one week of being denied an abortion, 35% of women no longer wanted an abortion — attesting to the level of ambivalence women have after their abortion decision. Furthermore, 98% of women who were denied an abortion and subsequently parented their child, no longer wished they had an abortion at 5 years.

The fact that women change their mind about abortion has been heart-wrenchingly illustrated by the many brave women who changed their mind in the middle of the two-drug medication abortion procedure and testified before the Colorado Assembly earlier in the year. They believed they had made a tragic mistake and wanted to do everything they could to save their baby.

They sought out medical options to increase the odds of a continuing pregnancy and found information pertaining to the Abortion Pill Reversal Network. They were told about the research that supported the administration of high dose natural progesterone to mitigate the abortifacient effects of mifepristone. These women chose to pursue the protocol to successfully carry their now wanted babies to term. Their happiness was palpable during their testimony.

Now the abortion industrial complex has taken the gaslighting to a new level. They are promoting the idea that there is no scientific basis to administer progesterone to “reverse” a medication abortion. They inadvertently betrayed their true motivations in written testimony to the Medical Board. They were fearful that acknowledging that women change their minds about their abortion and pursue abortion pill reversal will add to “abortion stigma”. They demonstrate little compassion for the woman who desperately wants to save her wanted pregnancy and are more concerned about how the procedure will impact their preferred abortion rights narrative.

Sadly, on August 17, the Medical Board voted to go along with this deception based on ideological, rather than scientific grounds. They were under immense political pressure to declare abortion pill reversal unprofessional conduct and they complied. This is a travesty.

There will be many families in Colorado who will lose a beloved child because of this decision. The people of Colorado need to wake up to the radical agenda of the abortion industrial complex.

Thomas J. Perille, M.D.

Englewood

The Downtown Denver skyline and Mile High Stadium

the Denver Gazette file