Weld County

The state representative for House District 50 has resigned — and it's now up to local Democrats to choose her replacement.

Rochelle Galindo, who was the subject of a recall effort, said she resigned because of new and unspecified allegations against her. KUNC has confirmed that no charges have been filed against her, but Greeley police are investigating a complaint.

Colorado State University political science professor Robert Duffy has been following Colorado elections for more than a decade. He spoke with KUNC's Kyra Buckley about the history and potential future of House District 50.

Weld County Democrats are working to find a new state representative for House District 50 after Rochelle Galindo abruptly resigned on Sunday, citing unspecified criminal allegations that were made against her.

In a short post on Facebook, Galindo said, “The allegations against me are false. That said, they will make my fight against the pending recall effort untenable.”

An old water cliché tells us that “water flows uphill toward money.” It’s an adage born out of people’s frustrations about who benefits when water moves around in the Western U.S., popularized by author Marc Reisner’s 1986 book, “Cadillac Desert.”

Like all persistent folksy sayings, it’s a mix of myth and truth.

But there’s at least one case where it has some validity: the phenomenon known as “buy and dry” along Colorado’s fast-growing, historically agricultural Front Range.

Standing at the edge of the Cache La Poudre River in Fort Collins, Boyd Wright adjusted his sunglasses against the bright sunlight. He pointed to the Fossil Creek ditch, a diversion structure dividing the waterway.

The state of Colorado collected $180 million in taxes from legal marijuana sales in the 2016 fiscal year.

But could the well run dry?

As of July 1, 2017, Nevada is the eighth state to sell recreational marijuana -- and it won’t be the last. California, the sixth largest economy in the world, will start selling pot Jan. 1, 2018.

Weld County was the fourth fastest growing metro area in the nation between 2015 and 2016 according to new data from the U.S. Census bureau. The ranks are based on percentage change, rather than the number of people that the population grew by. For Weld, the population grew by 3.5 percent -- to a total of 294,932 people.

Blink while driving on Highway 34 east of Greeley, Colorado, and you might miss the former Great Plains town of Dearfield.

Abandoned towns from the early 20th century are far from unique on this stretch of plains. Withered storefronts and collapsed false-front homes are common. Boom and bust economics and harsh weather made it tough for turn of the century settlers to succeed long-term.

Few ghost towns, however, have all the elements that make Dearfield’s story so compelling today: larger than life characters, struggles to live off the land, tales of racial integration at the height of the Jim Crow era.