Scott Franz
Water and Environment ReporterEmail: scott.franz@kunc.org
Scott Franz is the water and environment reporter 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.
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Water users around the west seek billions in federal drought help as Colorado River forecast worsensIt’s not clear yet how the money would be distributed among several states in a river basin where political fights and an impasse over how to share water long term have persisted even during historic drought. -
Earning a spot on the Colorado School of Mines microplastics sampling team on the South Platte River requires careful balancing in waist-deep water and occasionally dodging some very inquisitive Canada Geese. -
Weld County commissioner Scott James said last month bringing data centers to his region would mean more tax dollars, wider roads and maybe even more investments into buildings just like the massive ballroom he was speaking in at Aims Community College in Greeley. -
A federal hydrologist appeared to be momentarily at a loss for words Thursday as he described how dire the latest forecast has gotten for how much water will flow through the Colorado River Basin this summer. -
Widespread drought and fears of a power crisis is forcing the Interior Department to start sending billions of gallons of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir downstream to prop up Lake Powell. -
At 8 a.m. Tuesday, there was only silence and the occasional crunch of rocks as a dozen people in orange vests waited in a moonlike landscape beneath a 350-foot-tall dam near Loveland. -
Invasive species are on the march in the Colorado River, threatening everything from endangered native fish in Arizona to Colorado’s juicy Palisade peaches. -
A collision with a white-tailed jackrabbit was particularly impactful, causing $344,500 in damage. -
Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said in a monthly briefing Tuesday that just 1.4 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That's less than a quarter of what's considered normal. -
Estevan López, New Mexico's water negotiator, said talks resumed March 2, and the upper and lower basin states are using a short-term pitch from Nevada as a starting point.
