This week has seen restaurants open to indoor dining and public schools closed to in-person learning, but that scenario won’t last much longer.
The board of health’s decision Monday to put Pitkin County under Red level restrictions confines restaurants in Aspen, Redstone, Snowmass Village and other locales to outdoor dining and takeout meals only, starting Sunday.
Yet the Aspen School District isn’t bound to the same color-code restrictions that businesses follow. The district instead makes its operating decisions based on consultations with county health officials and virus trends among students and staff.
“For the most part, we are seeing a huge amount of quarantining but almost nobody gets sick while in quarantine,” Superintendent David Baugh said Tuesday. “And we don’t feel like here it’s being transmitted in the schools.”
What some officials are characterizing as an attack on Aspen’s critical infrastructure during the busiest week of the year will leave city residents and businesses without heat or hot water for most of Monday and possibly into Tuesday.
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Politically speaking, Pitkin County commissioners and Garfield County commissioners rarely see eye-to-eye.
But relations between the boards at either end of the Roaring Fork Valley have reached new lows since August when a Garfield County commissioner denounced Pitkin County as “disrespectful, arrogant, gutless and selfish.”
So, on Tuesday, at what was likely his last official meeting after 12 years on the board, Pitkin County Commissioner George Newman had some parting advice for his colleagues when it comes to Garfield County commissioners: forget ‘em.
To make his point, Newman told a joke about a businessman staying at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem who watches an older man kneel and pray at the Wailing Wall every morning for four days. Finally, he approaches the man and asks him what he’s praying for.
Not only did members of the Pitkin County Board of Health decide not to move into Red level restrictions Thursday, they voted to increase the maximum number of people allowed at private, informal gatherings in the county from five to 10.