Pueblo 2A special election: Will voters opt to leave Black Hills?
For the special election on May 6, city of Pueblo residents are weighing in on Ballot Initiative 2A — a question asking whether the city should cancel its franchise agreement and "acquire the generation, transmission and distribution assets" of Black Hills, if "determined feasible."
A similar election took place on May 5, 2020. Then, voters were asked if the city should cancel the agreement to authorize the formation and operation of a publicly-owned electric utility through the Pueblo Board of Water Works.
The 2020 question was resoundingly rejected by voters: over 75% voted against the measure. Will 2025 be any different? It's up to voters to decide.
Pueblo City Council President Mark Aliff speaks in opposition to Blacks Hills Energy rate increases on June 11, 2024.
What are the arguments for and against 2A in 2025?
Opponents of 2A have pointed to a pair of Black Hills Energy-commissioned studies conducted by the Brattle Group that conclude it is too costly for the city of Pueblo to purchase all Black Hills assets within the city and also too expensive for the city to form a regional co-op with other communities paying Black Hills' electric rates. A city-commissioned study also concluded that a city-only utility is not feasible.
Proponents of 2A have ruled out the possibility of the city purchasing assets alone, but have not ruled out the chance of garnering regional or statewide support to explore all possibilities. Those supporting 2A in 2025 are distraught by Black Hills' recent rate increase and a study demonstrating that — even before the rate increase — Black Hills customers were paying higher rates than anyone else in the state.
A 24 hour ballot drop off box outside the Colorado State Fairgrounds on Prairie Avenue.
How and where to vote on 2A in Pueblo
Ballots featuring Ballot Initiative 2A were mailed to active voters starting April 14. It's too late to return a ballot by mail, so those seeking to vote in the election must turn in their ballot at a designated drop-off location by 7 p.m. on May 6. Drop-off locations within the city of Pueblo include the following locations:
Pueblo County Election Office: 201 W. 8th St., on the east side of the building
Pueblo County Courthouse: 215 W. 10th St., on the west side of the building
Colorado State Fair: 950 S. Prairie Ave., outside gate along Prairie Avenue
Barkman Branch Library: 1300 Jerry Murphy Rd.
Lamb Branch Library: 2525 S. Pueblo Blvd., behind the building
Routt Ave MV Drive Thru: 1228 Routt Ave.
Colorado State University Pueblo: 2200 Bonforte Blvd., accessible from Gonzales Drive
Pueblo Community College: 900 W. Orman Ave., accessible from Harrison Street
Additionally, the Pueblo County Election Office will have an in-person voting location open until 7 p.m. on the seventh floor of the building, according to an official notice on the May 6 election.
Where to find live election results
When available, election results will be shared by Pueblo County at facebook.com/PuebloCounty. Because results will not be released until after the Chieftain's May 7 print deadline, coverage of the results will appear in print on May 8.
More on 2A: 'Continue the path forward': Mayor Graham discusses findings of full 2A feasibility study
Pueblo Chieftain reporter James Bartolo can be reached at JBartolo@gannett.com. Support local news, subscribe to the Pueblo Chieftain at subscribe.chieftain.com.
This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Pueblo special election: Get results here
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Politico
03-08-2025
- Politico
What It Will Take to Get U.S. Citizens to Work the Farm — According to Dolores Huerta
And the 95-year-old Huerta has seen a lot. She first began lobbying the California legislature on farm labor issues when she was just 25, and she founded an agriculture workers union soon after. In her early 30s, she partnered with civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to create the National Farm Workers Association, now the United Farm Workers. For years, she and Chavez worked in tandem, delivering major victories to protect farm workers from exploitation and exposure to dangerous pesticides. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins' recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. 'I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,' Huerta joked. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The Trump administration has launched farm raids targeting undocumented immigrants, which has sent a chill through the labor force and industry. You've advocated for farm workers for decades. Does the current climate feel familiar, or are we in a really different place? Oh, it's a very, very different place. Because in the past, in the '50s, when we had this 'Operation Wetback,' they were not putting people in jail. They would repatriate people. They would deport them, take them to the border. Somewhere along the way, I think during Newt Gingrich's time, they started putting people in jail, but then they would let them go. It was not putting people in prisons, like we're seeing right now. The kind of brutality, the horror, the kidnapping, endangering people's lives, separating the families — the way that Trump did in the last administration, and they're doing now, leaving all of these missing children — it's an atrocity, what they've been doing to the immigrant community. Many of those people that they have been picking up and arresting are farm workers. Here in Bakersfield, California, we were the first city to be hit. When Border Patrol came in, they arrested [78] people, and only one person had any kind of criminal record. And when they talk about a criminal record, it could be a traffic stop. It could be just that they came in, and they were deported, and came back in again. These are not violent crimes that we're talking about. They are, you might say, civil infractions, and yet they're being treated like they were criminals. This administration says it wants to get to a '100 percent American workforce.' It also has discussed rapidly expanding migrant visa programs, like H-2A. Do you see those two goals in conflict? How might that play out? Well, I think it would be really great to have American workers to work on farms. Farm work has been denigrated for so many years by the growers themselves, and they did this because they never wanted to pay farm workers the kind of wages that they deserve. Farm workers were essential workers during the pandemic. They were out there in the fields. So many of them died because they never got the proper protections that they needed. But they were out there every single day, picking the food that we needed to eat. Farm workers don't get the same kind of benefits or salaries that others get. We just recently did a study with the University of California Merced. Their average wage is $30,000 a year, $35,000 a year. And on that, they have to feed their families. A lot of them, unless they have a union contract, they're paid minimum wage. They're not respected. The whole visa program, the H-2A program, it's always been there. Cesar Chavez and I, when we started the United Farm Workers, one of the first things that we did was end the 'Bracero Program,' which was a similar [guest worker] program. Now they've increased these H-2A workers in agriculture. This is a step above slavery. They can't unionize. They don't get Social Security. They don't get unemployment insurance. Farmers save money by having these H-2A workers. They cannot become citizens. There is no way for them to even get a green card. If you were trying to get to a 100 percent American workforce, what's the solution here? Does it start with paying more competitive wages for workers? Or is it something else? Well, right now, we're trying to stop a detention center here in California City, which is up here in the Mojave Desert. They are offering the people to work in that center $50 an hour. In California, our minimum wage is $16. That's what a lot of workers get. Let's offer farmworkers $50 an hour, the same kind of a salary that you offer the prison guards, and you'll get a lot of American workers. We have very high unemployment in the Central Valley. We have the prison industrial complex, where a lot of our young people are going to prison. So many of these young people don't have to go to prison if they were paid adequately. I'm sure a lot of them would go and do the farm work, especially if they had good wages to do it. And we still have a lot of young people here in the valley that go out during the summers and they do farm work to help their families. I'm sure a lot of people that we now see that are homeless on the streets and that are able to work would go to work if they were paid $50 an hour. So it's just a matter of improving wages? And training, too. Because farm work is hard work. I mean, you've got to be in good physical shape to be able to do farm work. Why are undocumented workers such a large part of the agricultural workforce? Is it just that these are low-paying, hard jobs that Americans don't want to do, or is there more going on? Well, like I said earlier, the growers have denigrated the work so much that people don't realize that this work is dignified. Farm workers are proud of the work that they do. They don't feel that somehow they're a lower class of people because they do farm work. They have pride in their work. If you were to go out there with farm workers, you would be surprised to see that they have dignity, and they care about the work. They care about the plants. When we started the farm workers union way back in the late '50s and early '60s, you would be surprised how many American citizens were out there. Veterans were out there. The Grapes of Wrath was filmed here. All of those workers in that camp were white. It was the 'Okies' and 'Arkies,' the people that came from Oklahoma and Arkansas and those places to work in the fields. They were all white workers. There were some Latino workers, and then over the years, you had the Chinese, you had the Japanese, and different waves of immigrants that came in to do farm work. When did it change? Well, the growers always fought unionization, as they still do to this day. I'll give an example. There's a company called the Wonder Company. When you watch television, you see all of their ads for pistachios. They're billionaires. The United Farm Workers just won a recognition election, and they refused to recognize the union. When you have a union out there, you have a steward out there in every single crew, and their job is to make sure that there's a bathroom out there in the fields, which farm workers never had before. We had a big movement to get farmers just having toilets in the field and hand washing facilities, cold drinking water, risk periods, unemployment insurance, et cetera. This is the thing that we fought for, and the growers fought against it, right to the end. The Farm Bureau Federation fought against all of these improvements for farm workers, and they continue to fight. You supported the 1986 Reagan amnesty, when 1 million farm workers received legal status. The Trump administration has been adamant, for political purposes, that there will be 'no amnesty.' Do you think the administration could get to some sort of mass legalization for farm workers? If not, what happens next? The problem with this administration is, they're so racist. Racism rules, fascism rules with this administration. I don't know, I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work. What about pesticides? You've long fought against pesticide use in agriculture because of the effect of exposure on farm workers. Now, there's this 'Make America Healthy Again' push to get rid of pesticides. What do you make of that? Well, I think maybe that's one good thing that Robert Kennedy Jr. might do. His father was a champion for the farm workers. The pesticides — we should have gotten rid of those a long time ago. We didn't have pesticides until after World War II. There's a pesticide called paraquat. Paraquat is banned in Europe. It's banned in almost every country except the United States of America, and it is used right here in Kern County in California. It causes cancer. It causes leukemia. It causes Parkinson's disease, and we cannot get it banned in California. We know that when plants are planted, when food is planted, the pesticide is already in the seeds. We were trying to stop that in Washington, D.C., and were unable to. We were even just trying to get them to put information on it, so when you go in to buy your fruit, it would have a sticker on it that said, 'This particular fruit or vegetable has been treated with this pesticide.' It's in the fruit when you eat it. Just recently, we had about four or five young people in their late 40s, early 50s, all have died of cancer, and they're from Delano, California. Are these farm workers? No, but when they spray this stuff, it also goes into the towns. So nobody's really safe from it. Is this pesticide issue something you could collaborate or find some common ground with the Trump administration? Yeah, we would love to. But you know what? It's not going to happen, because pesticides really come from the petroleum industry. Have you discussed this with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or would you be open to meeting with him? I know his father was a friend of yours and a great champion of your cause. I imagine, maybe, when we talk about this issue. I wouldn't agree with Robert Jr. on the issue of vaccinations, or fluoride in our drinking water, et cetera, and some of the issues that he espouses. I know him. I've known him for many, many years. I haven't spoken to him. He did try to contact me when he was running, and I didn't respond. I knew that the family, that Kerry and Ethel and the rest of them, were not happy about his supporting Trump. But you haven't spoken to him since he became HHS secretary? No. I know people that have spoken to him. The labor movement as a whole has an unusual relationship to Donald Trump, who claims to champion the working class. Do you think union leaders have more to gain by working with Trump, or by opposing him? What explains his appeal to many union members? Well, I can't speak for the Teamsters. I think there was a kind of a betrayal of the working people, because I know the majority of the labor unions went against Trump and endorsed Biden [in 2024]. I think that was very damaging. I think a good comparison is if you look at what they've done in Mexico with Claudia Sheinbaum and the president before her. They've done incredible work in Mexico right now because it has been very labor-focused, very working people-focused, in contrast with what's happening here in the United States, where we are very billionaire- and millionaire-focused. And so you can see in Mexico they've been able to increase pensions, increase the minimum wage, increase benefits for the working people. I'm a vegetarian, and I just stay busy. I think you just have to stay busy.
Fast Company
29-07-2025
- Fast Company
Trump's deportations could boost demand for foreign farmworkers
The U.S. has an important choice to make regarding agriculture. It can import more people to pick crops and do other kinds of agricultural labor, it can raise wages enough to lure more U.S. citizens and immigrants with legal status to take these jobs, or it can import more food. All three options contradict key Trump administration priorities: reducing immigration, keeping prices low and importing fewer goods and services. The big tax-and-spending bill President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, included US$170 billion to fund the detention and deportation of those living in the U.S. without authorization. And about 1 million of them work in agriculture, accounting for more than 40% of all farmworkers. As the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants ramps up, one emerging solution is to replace at least some deported farmworkers with foreigners who are given special visas that allow them to help with the harvest but require them to go home after their visas expire. Such 'guest worker' programs have existed for decades, leading to today's H-2A visa program. As of 2023, more than 310,000 foreigners, around 13% of the nation's 2.4 million farmworkers, were employed through this program. About 90% of the foreign workers with these visas come from Mexico, and nearly all are men. The states where the largest numbers of them go are California, Florida, Georgia and Washington. As a professor of Latin American politics and U.S.-Latin American relations, I teach my students to consider the difficult trade-offs that governments face. If the Trump administration removes a significant share of the immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission from the agricultural labor force to try to meet its deportation goals, farm owners will have few options. Few options available First, farm owners could raise wages and improve working conditions enough to attract U.S. citizens and immigrants who are legal permanent residents or otherwise in the U.S. with legal status. But many agricultural employers say they can't find enough people to hire who can legally work – at least without higher wages and much-improved job requirements. Without any undocumented immigrant farmworkers, the prices of U.S.-sourced crops and other agricultural products would spike, creating an incentive for more food to be imported. Second, farm owners could employ fewer people. That would require either growing different crops that require less labor or becoming more reliant on machinery to plant and harvest. But that would mean the U.S. could have to import more food. And automation for some crops is very expensive. For others, such as for berries, it's currently impossible. It's also possible that some farm owners could put their land to other uses, ceasing production, but that would also necessitate more imported food. Trump administration's suggested fixes U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has predicted that farm owners will soon find plenty of U.S. citizens to employ. She declared on July 8 that the new Medicaid work requirements included in the same legislative package as the immigration enforcement funds would encourage huge numbers of U.S. citizens to start working in the fields instead of losing their health insurance through that government program. For one thing, most adults enrolled in the Medicaid program who can work already do. Many others are unable to do so due to disabilities or caregiving obligations. Few people enrolled in Medicaid live close enough to a farm to work at one, and even those who do aren't capable of doing farmwork. When farm owners tried putting people enrolled in a welfare program to work in the fields in the 1990s, it failed. Another experiment in the 1960s, which deployed teenagers, didn't pan out either because the teens found the work too hard. It seems more likely that farm owners will try to hire many more foreign farmworkers to do temporary but legal jobs through the H-2A program. Although he has not made it an official policy, Trump seems to be moving toward this same conclusion. In June, for example, Trump said his administration was working on ' some kind of a temporary pass ' for immigrants lacking authorization to be in the U.S. who are working on farms and in hotels. Established in 1952, numbers now rising quickly The guest worker system, established in 1952 and revised significantly in 1986, has become a mainstay of U.S. agriculture because it offers important benefits to both the farm owners who need workers and the foreign workers they hire. There is no cap on the number of potential workers. The number of H-2A visas issued is based only on how many employers request them. Farm owners may apply for visas after verifying that they are unable to locate enough workers who are U.S. citizens or present in the U.S. with authorization. To protect U.S. workers, the government mandates that H-2A workers earn an ' adverse effect wage rate.' The Labor Department sets that hourly wage, which ranges from $10.36 in Puerto Rico to about $15 in several southern states, to more than $20 in California, Alaska and Hawaii. These wages are set at relatively high levels to avoid putting downward pressure on what other U.S. workers are paid for the same jobs. After certification, farm owners recruit workers in a foreign country who are offered a contract that includes transportation from their home country and a trip back – assuming they complete the contract. The program provides farm owners with a short-term labor force. It guarantees the foreign workers who obtain H-2A visas relatively high wages, as well as housing in the U.S. That combination has proven increasingly popular in recent years: The annual number of H-2A visas rose to 310,700 in 2023, a more than fivefold increase since 2010. Possible downsides Boosting the number of agricultural guest workers would help fill some gaps in the agricultural labor force and reduce the risk of crops going unharvested. But it seems clear to me that a sudden change would pose risks for workers and farm owners alike. Workers would be at risk because oversight of the H-2A program has historically been weak. Despite that lax track record, some unscrupulous farmers have been fined or barred from participating in the H-2A program because of unpaid wages and other abuses. Relying even more on guest farmworkers than the U.S. does today would also swap workers who have built lives and families north of the border with people who are in the U.S. on a temporary basis. Immigration opponents are unlikely to object to this trade-off, but to immigrant rights groups, this arrangement would be cruel and unfair to workers with years of service behind them. What's more, the workers with guest visas can be at risk of exploitation and abuse. In 2022, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia described conditions for H-2A workers at an onion farm the government had investigated as ' modern-day slavery.' For farm owners, the downside of ramping up guest worker programs is that it could increase costs and make production less efficient and more costly. That's because transporting Mexican farmworkers back and forth each year is complicated and expensive. Farm groups say that compliance with H-2A visa requirements is cumbersome. It can be particularly difficult for small farms to participate in this program. Some farm owners have objected to the costs of employing H-2A workers. Rollins has said that the Trump administration believes that the mandatory wages are too high. To be sure, these problems aren't limited to agriculture. Hotels, restaurants and other hospitality businesses, which rely heavily on undocumented workers, can also temporarily employ some foreigners through the H-2B visa program – which is smaller than the H-2A program, limits the number of visas issued and is available only for jobs considered seasonal. Home health care providers and many other kinds of employers who rely on people who can't legally work for them could also struggle. But so far, there is no temporary visa program available to help them fill those gaps.
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Epoch Times
29-07-2025
- Epoch Times
[LIVE 07/29 at 10:30AM ET] Florida to Launch Tax Holiday for Guns; DOGE Gets Supercharged
Florida has declared a tax holiday dedicated to the Second Amendment. The new ' 2A tax holiday ' will allow Americans to buy guns, ammunition, and other items tax-free from Sept. 8 through Dec. 31. In other news, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) h...
