It’s time to lift the public health orders immediately and allow our children to return to school full time, open our restaurants and businesses 100%, and resume normal social gatherings. The state government and the Routt County Public Health Commission have continued to rely on case counts to justify onerous restrictions on schools, businesses, and recreation operations. While this approach made sense in the early stages of the pandemic, when there was limited data about COVID-19, we now have plenty of data and trend analysis that shows hospitalization rates and mortality rates within the state and Routt County are low and very manageable – o.o1% each for those who have been tested. https://www.covid19routtcounty.com/

The Republican Party is the pioneer of environmentalism, with President Theodore Roosevelt as the founding father. The Party affirms the moral obligation to be good stewards of our natural resources and the environment, at local, state, and national levels – as our environments are intertwined and reliant on each other. As senator, Cory Gardner worked hard to secure the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act, which uses revenues from energy development to provide $1.9 billion per year for five years to provide maintenance for facilities and infrastructure in our national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, recreation areas, and American Indian schools. The law also will use about $900 million per year in royalties from offshore oil and natural gas to permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund to invest in conservation and recreation opportunities.  Source: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/legal/great-american-outdoors-act.htm

Our children are our future and their education must be honest, safe, moral, and civic-minded. K-12 education must not only focus on reading, writing, arithmetic, and science necessary to compete in the job market, it must also focus on the proud heritage of America, our U.S. Constitution, and the our civic duty to control government and secure our liberties.

The economy of Routt County is diverse with a healthy mix of recreational outdoor activities, hospitality, restaurants, agriculture, and energy. The latter industry is critically important but is in grave danger due to government regulations replacing coal, oil, and natural gas with more expensive “renewable” energy alternatives. This replacement is costing tens of thousands of jobs in northwest Colorado and will have a huge negative impact on our communities as these industries and jobs leave the area.