The funds granted to Colorado, along with more than $1 billion for projects in 40 other states, are part of a to improve and eliminate more than 1,000 crossings to reduce train-vehicle collisions and traffic delays.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release, called the initiative “a sweeping effort that directly supports cities, towns and villages in every region of the country in their efforts to protect lives, prevent drivers being delayed by blocked crossings, and improve the overall quality of life for their citizens.”

Train-vehicle accidents at crossings rank as the second largest cause of U.S. rail-related deaths, with more than 2,000 incidents and 200 fatalities documented each year. Federal Railway Administration officials say blockages caused by slow or stalled trains at crossings, including cases where emergency responders are delayed, resulted in 26,000 formal complaints this past year.

The feds said the grants are designed to reverse 50 years of underinvestment in rail networks.

In Colorado, the funds were awarded for the following projects:

• Central Denver efforts to eliminate grade crossings along the tracks at six locations. The funds to evaluate options are aimed at corridor-wide improvements and BNSF will contribute a 20% match to the federal funds of $1.2 million.
• Fort Collins efforts to plan a project to eliminate the Vine/Timberland Rail Grade crossings to improve safety, reduce traffic congestion and increase mobility. The city will contribute a 20% match of non-federal funds.

NEW YORK (AP) — and on Tuesday went after each other’s running mates in a vice presidential debate that opened with a discussion of burgeoning domestic and international troubles — a hurricane that ravaged much of the southeast U.S. and growing fears of a regional Middle East war.

Both Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, focused many of their largely cordial attack lines on the top of the ticket, as is traditional for VP debates. They each pointed to the crises of the day as reasons for voters to choose Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.

The debate unfolded in the final weeks of a campaign that has been defined by harsh, personal attacks and historic convulsions, including a candidate dropping out and two attempted assassinations. Polls have shown Harris and Trump locked in a close contest as early voting begins across the country, to anything that can sway voters on the margins, including the impression left by the vice presidential candidates.

The heated tone of the campaign was mostly replaced by deep policy discussions, with the candidates sometimes saying they agreed with each other — even as they outlined vastly different visions about the future of the country.

In one raw moment when Walz said his teenage son had witnessed a shooting at a community center, Vance expressed empathy.

“I’m sorry about that. Christ have mercy,” Vance said.

“I appreciate that,” Walz said.

The former president, who sought the spotlight himself Tuesday by posting live commentary online during the debate, was a central focus as both Walz and Vance argued over whether Americans should return him to the Oval Office.

Walz depicted Trump as wrong on the issues and a chaotic leader. Vance rebuffed him with every answer and made the case for the man he once heavily criticized.

“What’s fundamental here is that steady leadership is going to matter,” said Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, said in response to a question about the situation unfolding in the Middle East. “And the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago, a nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment.”

Vance, in his reply, argued that Trump is an intimidating figure whose presence on the international stage is its own deterrent.

“Gov. Walz can criticize Donald Trump’s tweets, but effective smart diplomacy and peace through strength is how you bring stability back to a very broken world,” he said.

A sharper turn on immigration

The debate in New York hosted by CBS News opened with a sober tone that reflected growing domestic and international concerns about safety and security. But it gave way to sharper attacks from both Walz and Vance — and a moment in which the moderators stopped the discussion by cutting the two men’s mics.

Walz accused Vance and Trump of villainizing legal immigrants in Vance’s home state. He pointed to the fact that Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine had to send in extra law enforcement to provide security to the city’s schools after Vance tweeted about and Trump amplified false claims about Haitians eating pets.

“This is what happens when you don’t want to solve it, you demonize it,” Walz said, saying not doing so would allow people to “come together.”

Vance said the 15,000 Haitians in the city had caused housing, economic and other issues that the Biden-Harris administration was ignoring.

When the debate moderators pointed out that the Haitians living there had legal status, Vance protested that CBS News had said its moderators would not be fact-checking, leaving the onus to the candidates. As Vance continued and the moderators tried to move on, his microphone was cut and neither man could be heard.

A return to cordiality on the debate stage

The two Midwesterners struck a noticeably friendlier tone than the matchup between Trump and Harris — or, earlier this year, the showdown between Trump and President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance.

When they first turned to immigration and the influx of migrants coming over the U.S.-Mexico border, one of the most heated topics of the campaign, the two men credited each other with having good intentions.

“I believe Sen. Vance wants to solve this, but by standing with Donald Trump and not working together to find a solution, it becomes a talking point and when it becomes a talking point like this, we dehumanize and villainize other human beings,” Walz said.

Vance echoed the sentiment, saying, “I think you want to solve this problem, but I don’t think that Kamala Harris does.”

Walz catapulted onto Harris’ campaign by branding Trump and Republicans as “ ,” creating an attack line for Democrats seeking to argue Republicans are disconnected from the American people. But for almost the entire debate, he never used the word.

Vance’s occasionally confrontational interviews and appearances have underscored .

Vance in particular seemed to be attempting to soften his aggressive image, ratcheting down his typically forceful delivery, referring to Walz as “Tim” and a more supple approach, saying at one point, “I know a lot of Americans don’t agree with everything that I’ve ever said on this topic.”

His efforts to explain Trump’s policies and positions with a more gentle touch were also reminiscent of how former Vice President Mike Pence often operated when he and Trump were in the White House.

The two broke over Pence’s refusal to join his efforts to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Both men acknowledged past missteps

The role of a presidential running mate is typically to serve as an attack dog for the person at the top of the ticket, arguing against the opposing presidential candidate and their proxy on stage. Both Vance and Walz have embraced that role.

Vance was asked to address his past biting criticisms of the former president, including once suggesting Trump would be “America’s Hitler.”

“When you get something wrong and you change your mind, you ought to be honest with the American people,” he said Tuesday.

Walz, meanwhile, was pressed on his misleading claim, this week by Minnesota Public Radio and other outlets, that he was in Hong Kong during the turbulence surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, part of a broader pattern of inaccuracies that Republicans hope to exploit.

Confronted with his misstatements about his travels to China years ago, Walz defended himself by saying, “I’ve not been perfect.” In fact, he said, “I’m a knucklehead at times.” Eventually, he acknowledged he misspoke about his history.

___

Price and Megerian reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Josh Boak in Baltimore, and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

ATLANTA (AP) — From her earliest campaigns in California to her serving as President Joe Biden’s , Kamala Harris has honed an aggressive but calibrated approach to debates.

She tries to blend punch lines with details that build toward a broader narrative. She might shake her head to signal her disapproval while her opponent is speaking, counting on viewers to see her reaction on a split screen. And she has a go-to tactic to pivot debates back in her favor: saying she’s glad to answer a question as she gathers her thoughts to explain an evolving position or defend a past one.

Tuesday’s presidential debate will put the Democratic vice president����ap skills to a test unlike any she’s faced. faces former President , the Republican nominee, who will participate in his seventh general election debate since 2016 for an event that will be seen by tens of millions of viewers just as around the country.

People who have competed against Harris and prepared her rivals say she brings a series of advantages to the matchup, including her prosecutorial background juxtaposed with Trump being the first U.S. president . Still, Harris allies warn that Trump can be a challenging and unpredictable opponent who veers between policy critiques, personal attacks, and falsehoods or conspiracy theories.

“She can meet the moment,” said Marc Short, who led Republican Vice President Mike Pence’s debate preparation against Harris in the fall of 2020. “She has shown that in different environments. I would not underestimate that in any way.”

Julian Castro, a Democrat who ran for president against Harris in the 2020 primary, said Harris blended “knowledge, poise and the ability to explain things well” to stand out during crowded primary debates.

“Some candidates get too caught up with trying to be catchy, trying to go viral,” Castro said. “She’s found a very good balance.”

Balancing narrative and detail

A former Harris aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about her approach, said the vice president views the events like a jury trial she would have led when she was district attorney in San Francisco or querying a judicial nominee on Capitol Hill as a U.S. senator. The idea, the former aide said, has always been to win the debate on merit while leaving more casual or piecemeal viewers with key takeaways.

“She understands that debates are about the individual interactions themselves but also about a larger strategy of offering a vision for what your leadership and style looks like,” said Tim Hogan, who led Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s 2020 primary debate preparation.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said Harris makes deductive arguments but folds them into a broader narrative — the same way she would talk to jurors.

“She states a thesis and then follows with fact, fact, fact,” Jamieson said.

Jamieson pointed to the 2020 vice presidential debate in which Harris hammered Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy, and to her most memorable 2019 primary debate when she skewered Biden for how he had talked about race and institutional racism. She weaved her critique of Biden’s record with her own biography as a young, biracial student in the early era of school integration.

“That little girl was me,” Harris said in a widely circulated quip that punctuated her story about court-ordered busing that helped non-white students attend integrated schools.

“Most people who are good at the deductive argument aren’t good at wrapping that with an effective narrative,” Jamieson said. “She’s good at both.”

Landing memorable punches

Castro said Harris has a good feel for when to strike, a quality he traced to her trial experience. In 2019, as multiple Democratic candidates talked over one another, Harris sat back before getting moderators to recognize her.

“Hey, guys, you know what? America does not want to witness a food fight. They want to know how we’re going to put food on their table,” she said, taking control of the conversation and drawing applause.

When Harris faced Pence in 2020, it was a mostly civil, substantive debate. But she got in digs that framed Pence as a serial interrupter, as Trump had been in his first debate with Biden.

“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said at one point, with a stern look. At another: “If you don’t mind letting me finish, we can have a conversation.”

Finding traps in policy

Debates have sometimes put Harris on the defensive.

In the 2020 primary matches, Tulsi Gabbard, who this year has endorsed Trump, over how aggressively she prosecuted nonviolent drug offenders as a district attorney.

That fall, Pence made Harris sometimes struggle to defend Biden’s positions. Now, her task will be to defend not just Biden’s record, but her own role in that record and what policies she would pursue as president.

Short, one of Pence’s top aides, noted that Republicans and the media have raised questions about more liberal positions Harris took in her 2020 primary campaign, especially on fracking, universal healthcare, reparations for slavery and how to treat migrants who cross the U.S. border illegally.

“We were surprised that she missed some opportunities (against Pence) when the conversation was centered around policy,” Short said.

Timing, silence and nonverbal communication

One of Harris’ earliest debate triumphs came in 2010 as she ran for California attorney general. Her opponent was asked about his plans to accept his public pension while still being paid a salary for a current public post.

“I earned it,” Republican Steve Cooley said of the so-called “double-dipping” practice.

Harris looked on silently, with a slightly amused look as Cooley explained himself. When moderators recognized her, she said just seven words – “Go for it, Steve. You earned it!” — in a serious tone but with a look that communicated her sarcasm. The exchange landed in her television ads within days.

“Kamala Harris is quite effective at nonverbal communication and knowing when not to speak,” Jamieson said.

The professor said Harris often will shake her head and, with other looks, telegraph her disapproval while her opponent is speaking. Then she smiles before retorting, or attacking, in a conversational tone.

“She defuses some of the argument that Trump makes that she is ‘a nasty woman,’ that she’s engaging in egregiously unfair behavior, because her nonverbal presentation is actually undercutting that line of attack,” Jamieson said.

Meeting a new challenge with Trump

For all of Harris’ debate experience, Tuesday is still a new and massive stage. Democrats who ordinarily tear into Trump instead appeared on Sunday’s news shows to make clear that Harris faced a big task ahead.

“It will take almost superhuman focus and discipline to deal with Donald Trump in a debate,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, yet another of Harris’ 2020 opponents, on CNN. “It����ap no ordinary proposition, not because Donald Trump is a master of explaining policy ideas and how they’re going to make people better off. It����ap because he’s a master of taking any form or format that is on television and turning it into a show that is all about him.”

Castro noted that Trump is “a nasty and crafty stage presence” who makes preparation difficult. And with ABC keeping the candidates’ microphones off when they are not speaking, Harris may not find it as easy to produce another viral moment that hinges on viewers having seen or heard Trump at his most outlandish.

“The best thing she can do,” Castro said, “is not get distracted by his antics.”

More than 600 flights were canceled or delayed at Denver International Airport on Sunday as airlines continued to recover from a global technology outage that began Thursday.

There were 99 canceled flights and 508 delayed flights at DIA as of 4 p.m., according to .

Of the 99 canceled flights, 65 were on United, 26 on Delta, seven on Frontier and two on American. Most of the delays were on Southwest, United and Frontier.

Thunderstorms in the area were also causing delays on arriving flights by an average of 40 minutes,

The initial outage caused more than 1,200 canceled and delayed flights at DIA on Friday and more than 800 on Saturday.

, Frontier and Delta airlines posted Friday said the companies were recovering from the Crowdstrike software outage, which also impacted the Regional Transportation District, Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles and some police and fire agencies.

Some passengers reported airlines only offering flight credits to passengers whose flights were canceled because of the outage,

“Let me be clear — you are entitled to get your money back promptly if your flight is canceled and you don’t take a rebooking,” Buttigieg said. “If your airline is automatically giving you credits but you prefer cash, you can tell them you want a refund — and let us know if they fail to provide one.”

Passenger complaints can be filed with the

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Lost and damaged wheelchairs are in U.S. air travel that federal officials have proposed new rules that could slap airlines with six-figure fines when mishaps occur.

But an attempt to give Coloradans more power to seek compensation for problems they experience with their mobility devices at faltered at the State Capitol as the recent legislative session wrapped up. A key sponsor accused DIA and city officials of undermining the bill, including by pushing lawmakers to water it down.

State , the first wheelchair user to serve in the legislature, sponsored . He said that at the 11th hour, the lobbying resulted in the bill’s proposed enforcement mechanism — a provision granting travelers the right to bring lawsuits against the airport if it failed to meet certain accessibility deadlines — being stripped out.

Now Ortiz is vowing to file an ethics complaint against Denver City Attorney Kerry Tipper and others over their actions surrounding the bill.

When a wheelchair is damaged or lost, Ortiz said, “airports and airlines create a circular firing squad where they all point fingers at each other.” He added: “It’s really disgusting that (the city and DIA) think that they should be exempt” from liability.

But Denver city officials defended the way they approached the legislation. (Gov. Jared Polis signed the bill in its revised form on Wednesday, after this story was published.)

Tipper, who served in the state House until last year, told The Denver Post that the city supported the bill at the Capitol while also seeking to provide lawmakers with clarity on just which services were under the airport’s control. Airlines, Tipper noted, are responsible for handling passengers’ wheelchairs and other mobility and medical equipment — not airport staff.

“DEN wanted to comply in every way that they could,” Tipper said, referring to DIA by its airport code. “But I think legally it would not be appropriate to impose liability against the airport for something they don’t have control over.”

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, air carriers nationally reported mishandling 11,527 wheelchairs and scooters in 2023. In March of this year, the most recent month for which data was available, , down slightly from March 2023.

Ortiz’s anger over the bill’s changes has not subsided since the final weeks of the 2024 legislative session, which concluded May 8. That late period is when amendments passed in the Senate defanged the bill after it had already cleared the House.

Before it was amended, the bill provided grounds for potential lawsuits if the airport failed to meet several deadlines that are still set out in the legislation. Those include installing wayfinding technology to serve people who are blind or vision impaired by the middle of this year; providing comprehensive, ongoing training to all staff members on how to handle wheelchairs and other equipment by the end of 2026; installing accessible bathrooms with adult changing tables in every terminal by the middle of 2030; and by the end of that year, ensuring the use of elevators to move power wheelchairs from the tarmac up to jetways.

“Shame on the airport,” rep says

Acting on the advice of advocates who viewed sections of the legislation as progress worth preserving, Ortiz urged his House colleagues to accept the Senate-amended bill on May 6.

But not before he called out city and airport officials.

“Shame on the airport for the disingenuous way they engaged with the community living with a disability for the past three years,” Ortiz said in a speech on the floor.

He also said he planned to log a formal complaint over city officials’ conduct around the bill.

In an interview with The Post last week, Ortiz reiterated his intention to file ethics complaints with the state. He called out Tipper specifically, alleging that she leveraged her connections as a former state representative to sway lawmakers.

Tipper described Ortiz as a friend and said it had been hard to hear his public criticism of the way Denver approached the legislation. She did testify on the bill, she said, but that was because lawmakers had questions about the legal ramifications — and she is the city’s chief legal officer.

DIA spokeswoman Courtney Law, in an email, pointed out that federal law requires airlines to provide wheelchair services to passengers, and the airport’s role is limited to ensuring that it provides accessible pathways through its facilities.

Airport officials also made themselves available to answer lawmakers’ questions about the implications of the bill, Law said.

“Here, airport employees highlighted their continued work on improving accessibility while also expressing legitimate concerns on certain sections of the bill,” she wrote. 

One city official testified in favor of the stronger legislation.

City Councilman Chris Hinds is a wheelchair user and the chairman of the body’s Business, Arts, Workforce, Climate and Aviation Services Committee, which handles issues concerning DIA. He testified as a private citizen, he said, since the subgroup of city officials who dictate city lobbying at the Capitol never reached consensus on an official bill position.

“We will certainly have additional conversations in the city about the lobbying process on state bills, and specifically how the airport accountability bill was handled,” Hinds said.

Feds consider proposed rule

While the city and state have some power over DIA, the airlines largely are regulated by the federal government.

In February, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that would make damaging or delaying the return of a wheelchair an automatic violation of the . He suggested that fines levied against airlines could exceed $100,000 per violation. The rule is currently open for public comments, according to USDOT officials.

Disability rights advocates are optimistic the rule will be finalized.

In their circles, horror stories about air travel are prevalent. Julie Reiskin, the co-executive director of , took a Southwest Airlines flight from DIA to Kansas City a few years ago.

Beyond the typical delays and aggravation that come with flying with a wheelchair, Reiskin said that when she landed, she found out the control stick for her power chair had been broken. That required her to use two replacement chairs that were suited to her needs while her chair was repaired.

“What really made me mad is they didn’t tell me,” she said. “They did this in Denver, let me get to a strange city and (then) I had to deal with it.”

Reiskin acknowledged it is airline employees who typically handle wheelchairs and other equipment, but she noted that DIA has a reputation in her community for its poor accessibility.

Despite the legal liability provision being stripped from HB-1452, Reiskin said key components of the legislation could result in better accessibility at the airport — and could even present grounds for legal action under existing laws.

The bill calls for the establishment of a cross-disability advisory committee to assess and provide feedback on areas where DIA can improve. It also would mandate the creation of an online dashboard by the beginning of 2026 to allow people to report violations of accessibility requirements.

“To be honest,” Reiskin said, “I think it was about putting DIA on notice — that the legislature has expectations that they are going to have to answer for if they continue to not meet them.”

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When a 900-foot container ship struck the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge in 2007, the span stood firm and no one died, either on the ship or the highway above.

The bridge’s supports were protected by a fendering system of concrete and other materials that was installed to absorb such strikes. And it����ap now prompting the question: Could such a system — or others like it — have saved Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge?

Some experts are saying yes.

Sherif El-Tawil, a University of Michigan engineering professor, said there are several safety measures that “would have made a huge difference” had they been in place Tuesday morning when a cargo ship plowed into the bridge and caused its collapse.

El-Tawil said a fendering system may have softened the 985-foot-long ship’s blow. Pilings anchored to the river bottom, known as dolphins, are another measure that could have helped to deflect the container ship Dali. And yet another potential protection would have been islands of rocks or concrete around the bridge’s supports.

“It may seem like a very large force,” El-Tawil said of the massive cargo ship. “But I think you can design around it, either through a protective system or by designing the bridge itself to have massive towers.”

Such protections have become a focal point in the wake of the tragedy, which claimed the lives of six construction workers. Experts say the 47-year-old Key Bridge did not appear to have the protections that are common among newer spans.

The incident is raising questions about how much money American taxpayers are willing to spend to protect against these rare but deadly catastrophes. And not everyone agrees the Key Bridge could have been saved.

“There’s a lot of debate taking place among the engineering community about whether any of those features could have had any role in a situation like this,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday at a White House briefing.

“It����ap difficult to overstate the impact of this collision we’re talking about,” Buttigieg said. “It����ap not just as big as a building, it����ap really as big as a block — 100,000 tons all going into this pier all at once.”

Buttigieg did not directly answer a question about whether steps should be taken to protect the nation’s bridges. But the secretary noted that many bridges have been designed to better protect against collisions since a freighter struck Florida’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge in 1980, killing 35 people.

Baltimore’s Key Bridge opened three years before that disaster in 1977, a time when cargo ships were much smaller in size. In recent years, vessels have grown to carry more containers to save on shipping costs. Ports in Georgia and South Carolina have dredged deeper channels to accommodate them, while part of a bridge was elevated to allow bigger ships to reach New York City-area ports.

The Skyway Bridge disaster in Tampa prompted a paradigm shift in design in the early 1980s, said Mark Luther, a University of South Florida oceanography professor and director of the USF Center for Maritime and Port Studies.

The new Skyway Bridge was built with rock islands around its main supports and large cylindrical piers on either side of those islands to make it “very difficult for a vessel to strike any part of the bridge and knock it down,” Luther said.

“To go back and retrofit a bridge like the Key Bridge with these features would be extremely expensive,” Luther said. “And to my knowledge nobody’s done it. (They’ve) just had to accept what risk there is with the construction that was state-of-the art in the ’70s.”

Roberto Leon, a Virginia Tech engineering professor, said the technology exists to protect a bridge against a collision with a massive cargo ship like the Dali.

But he cautioned that governments will always be weighing the costs and the risks. And the protections put in place don’t always match up to the size of the disaster, even if the Key bridge was retrofitted with modern safety measures.

“This was an enormous load,” he said of the ship that struck the Key Bridge. “If the protection system had been designed for that load. I think it would have protected the bridge. But a big question is: Would you design it for such an enormous load? Because as the load increases, it becomes much more expensive.”

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Four years ago, Colorado voters could have seen a wide array of Democratic contenders in the flesh in the weeks leading up to the March 2020 primary, including Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg and Tulsi Gabbard, while Joe Biden hit up donors in Denver. Several campaigns had paid staff on the ground here for weeks or months.

Even then-President Donald Trump stopped by for a visit just weeks before the primary, landing in Colorado Springs for a rally at the Broadmoor World Arena.

“This election is not going to be confused with past presidential primaries in Colorado,” said Eric Sondermann, an independent political analyst. “This year strikes me as a going-through-the-motions exercise.”

Ahead of Haley’s rally in Centennial, her campaign on Monday announced her “Colorado state leadership team” — a list of prominent supporters who will try to build support as primary voters return their ballots in the next week. Among them are former U.S. attorneys Troy Eid and Jason Dunn; Tom Norton, a former state Senate president and a former Greeley mayor; Todd Chapman, a former diplomat and U.S. ambassador; and Wendy Buxton-Andrade, a Prowers County commissioner.

But in terms of paid staff, Haley, a former South Carolina governor who served as United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration, has a minimal state operation, with one staffer on the ground.

The reasons for Colorado’s quiet campaign season begin with the slate of candidates on the Republican side being effectively winnowed down early to a David-and-Goliath battle between Haley and Trump. And despite polls showing that voters have concerns about of 81-year-old President Biden, who’s less than four years older than Trump, no serious Democratic contender has arisen to take him on.

The other major reason is that as Colorado has continued to drift to the left — fully shedding its status as a swing state — candidates can’t afford to waste time or money in a place where their political prospects are already evident.

“Nobody should be spending money in Colorado when all those other swing states need to get their infrastructure built,” said Ian Silverii, a longtime Democratic strategist, referring to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and other states likely to be in play in November. “A Biden win in Colorado is all but guaranteed — the question is by what margin.”

Biden bested Trump in 2020 by 13.5 percentage points.

Sheena Kadi, a spokeswoman for the state Democratic Party, said she was not aware of a campaign office or a state director for Biden’s reelection effort in Colorado. The same goes for Dean Phillips, a Minnesota congressman who’s the best-known Democrat taking on the president.

Biden was last in Colorado in November, when he promoted recent economic investments at a wind tower factory in Pueblo and attended a private fundraiser in Cherry Hills Village.

“Not speaking for either campaign — campaigns take three finite things: time, money, and resources,” Kadi said. “They are making the best decisions they can with the information they’ve got.”

If Trump wins the nomination, whether he will build the kind of multifaceted general election campaign organization he assembled in Colorado in 2016, during his first presidential run, is yet to be seen.

“Biden and Trump are pretty confident where they are in the presidential primaries,” said Dick Wadhams, a former chair of the Colorado Republican Party.

Colorado allows unaffiliated voters to participate in the party primary of their choosing. Those voters received mail ballots for both parties but may return only one of them.

Wadhams said perhaps the most interesting thing about Colorado’s March 5 primary is the “noncommitted delegate” option at the bottom of the listed Democratic candidates on the ballot. While Kadi, with the state Democratic Party, said that option was added to the ballot because “Democrats are the party of choice, the party of empowering people,” others see it differently.

“It will allow voters who are concerned with Biden’s physical and mental state to vote for someone else,” Wadhams said. “It’s a potential embarrassment for Biden if that gets a significant number of votes.”

Kristi Burton Brown, another former chair of the Colorado GOP, called the uncommitted line a potential “protest vote” for disaffected Democrats.

“They’re trying to gauge how much dissatisfaction is out there,” Brown said of the Democratic Party.

Fellow Democrat David Skaggs, who represented Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District in Washington, D.C., for a dozen years, wrote in a column in The Post last week that had cast his ballot for “uncommitted.”

“It is the ballot option that could lead to an open convention, where Democrats can pick a ticket that could more assuredly save the nation from the disaster of a second Trump administration,” he wrote.

������ showed Biden with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency. But Silverii said that whatever headwinds Biden is facing nationally, he won’t lose Colorado in November.

That’s because of the state’s large contingent of unaffiliated voters, who broke hard for the president in 2020.

“Unaffiliated voters have proven twice now that they will not vote for Trump — and in increasing numbers,” he said.

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The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the District of Columbia on Monday, claims that the U.S. departments of Transportation and the Interior, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Federal Highway Administration violated the by not considering alternatives to constructing an 8-mile greenway “through the most heavily plutonium-contaminated portion” of the refuge.

“Although this facility is no longer in operation, the radioactive contaminants, particularly weapons-grade plutonium, that persist in the local ecosystem threaten grave harm to those who live, work or recreate in or near these areas,” the complaint states. “In the absence of intervention by this Court, the health and safety of many individuals will be at risk due to exposure from nuclear contaminants that are far above regulatory limits for radiation and appear to be migrating by air and soil.”

The lawsuit repeatedly cites a soil sample found in 2019 along the eastern edge of the refuge that had plutonium levels more than five times above the cleanup standard. Dozens of subsequent soil samples did not have elevated plutonium levels, and federal agencies later declared the area safe for public use.

In addition to not considering alternative trail routes, the lawsuit claims the federal agencies failed to hold a public hearing or public comment period about the project and that they did not take into account the 2019 elevated plutonium reading.

The advocacy groups asked the court to find that the agencies violated the National Environmental Policy Act and to halt work on the project until they comply with the law.

and Department of Interior declined to comment on the pending lawsuit. The Department of Transportation could not be reached for comment.

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The facility, envisioned as a multi-level garage, is still a ways off. DIA’s planning process is expected to ramp up over the course of 2024 with airport officials hoping to put the project out to bid to contractors late next year.

But identifying a location is an important step. DIA officials considered three sites and zeroed in on the employee lot along East 78th Avenue, just north of Peña Boulevard and east of Jackson Gap Road. That lot would be relocated.

In a new release Monday, DIA officials cited the possibility of the facility consolidating all of the airport’s rental car operators on one property. It could be connected to the terminal using some sort of “automated people mover” — a train system or bus route in a dedicated guideway — that also might serve other new parking lots or developments along 78th Avenue, DIA says.

That would eliminate the need for the branded shuttle buses that ferry customers to and from the spread-out rental car lots today.

If the on-airport lots that accommodate the Avis, Enterprise, Fox, Hertz and Sixt rental car operations now were moved, that would open up 160 acres of space for other airport uses and potential commercial development, according to Monday’s release. Other rental agencies have lots off airport property.

“Having a (consolidated rental car facility) will provide much-needed room for growth, a better customer experience and a more sustainable program, especially if coupled with a people-moving solution to eliminate rental car shuttles,” DIA CEO Phil Washington said in the release.

Airport leaders are charting a path forward as DIA’s passenger traffic is projected to reach more than 120 million people per year by 2045. Last year, DIA accommodated 69.3 million passengers, making it the third busiest airport in the United States and the world, with connecting traffic among its major carriers driving much of the growth.

A consolidated rental car garage is viewed as an important part of the equation. DIA officials noted Monday that the airport is the only one out of the top 10 busiest airports in the country that lacks such a facility.

The airport is projected to need 16,130 spaces for rental vehicles to meet passenger demand. That’s a 26% increase over the 12,760 spots it has now, according to officials.

The airport hasn’t released a project budget for the planned facility. But it made a move to supply financing when it increased daily service charges on rental cars to $6 earlier this year, up from $2.15. That increase brought DIA closer to the fees charged at other big hubs such as Seattle-Tacoma International Airport ($7) and Chicago O’Hare International Airport ($8). The fees could rise further to support the project.

Rental car customers in Denver also pay an on their vehicles to cover operators’ contractual obligation to pay 10% of revenue back to the airport.

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A team of federal investigators on Monday began probing a fatal Pueblo County train derailment and bridge collapse that blocked Interstate 25 as officials sorted out who owned the 65-year-old structure and who had responsibility for its integrity.

The Sunday afternoon incident sent train cars and coal falling onto the highway, killing a 60-year-old truck driver and closing I-25 indefinitely in both directions — potentially for longer than a week.

It may take up to two years for investigators from to complete their work and release a final cause for Sunday’s derailment and bridge collapse, though an initial report should be released within a month, the NTSB said.

The interstate can’t be cleaned up or reopened until investigators finish their on-site inspection, state and federal officials said Monday. That process is expected to take at least several days.

In an interview, Shailen Bhatt, the leader of the Federal Highway Administration and a former head of the Colorado Department of Transportation until 2017, reiterated a state timeline that the closure could extend for days to weeks.

Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement that state officials’ “immediate priority is safely getting the highway open both ways,” but he cautioned the reopening would take time, given that the NTSB was in control of the site. (For the most up-to-date information on local and regional traffic detours, travelers should check CDOT’s �����Ի��� as well as .)

The safety board said in a statement Monday afternoon that the derailment of the BNSF Railway-operated train caused the bridge to partially collapse, crushing the semi-truck and killing its driver. Thirty rail cars on the 124-car train derailed, spilling coal and debris across the interstate about four miles north of Pueblo. CDOT said six or seven train cars landed on the highway itself.

Once the NTSB’s initial field work is complete, it may take crews another two days to fully clear the debris, Polis said.

A long line of trucks were arrayed near the scene Monday afternoon, waiting to begin clearing the scene. One driver said he’d been waiting since midnight.

“Just being down here, you see all of the coal from the overturned train cars — it is a significant recovery effort,” Bhatt said of the work to come.

Polis’ statement expressed condolences for the truck driver and his family. The Pueblo County Coroner’s Office on Monday  as Lafollette Henderson, 60, of Compton, California.

The governor said he had spoken with U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and that the state was prepared to move as quickly as possible to reopen I-25 once given the green light.

“Our administration has been working for months to position Colorado to take advantage of the safety and rail investments that Congress and President Biden made possible through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” Polis said. “Sadly, those improvements come too late to prevent this incident, but it����ap clear that federal funds for rail support are critical for Colorado.”

Questions remained Monday about who owned the rail bridge and who had inspection and oversight authority for it.

The bridge did not have an official name, according to Sarah Sulick, a spokeswoman for the safety board. Initially, state officials said it was owned and operated by BNSF, which owns the train that derailed. Railroads typically own, inspect and maintain the tracks and bridges over which their trains run, according to the Federal Railroad Administration, with rail bridges numbering in the tens of thousands across the United States.

The railroad administration also said BNSF owned the line. But the company told The Denver Post that the state owns the bridge, as did Bhatt, the federal highway administrator.

CDOT spokesman Matt Inzeo said the agency still was trying to confirm who had responsibility for the bridge, noting that staff were digging through records going back to its construction in 1958. He confirmed that the state inspected the bridge in 2022, though he said the structure was not covered by federal rules requiring regular inspections.

The bridge was a 188-foot-long, 14-foot-wide steel girder bridge, according to CDOT.

Jaime Horowitz, a spokesman for the Brotherhood Of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents at least one crew member on the derailed train, said he couldn’t comment Monday because the union is part of the federal investigation team.

There have been 11 train derailments in Colorado this year, all involving BNSF, . The Texas-based railway and competitor Union Pacific together . BNSF has had 177 derailments nationwide so far in 2023, federal data shows.

Company spokeswoman Kendall Kirkham Sloan wrote in an email that the state owned the collapsed bridge but declined to comment further, beyond providing a statement confirming the derailment and the subsequent investigation.

Bhatt said the White House had been informed of the derailment and interstate closure. Asked about potential causes, he deferred to the federal investigators, who are interviewing witnesses and reviewing video recordings.

“I would just say that this is being tracked at the highest levels,” he said, “and we’re very aware of the national impacts of a closure of an interstate, but also the local impacts to Pueblo and other communities down here.”

The derailment comes as legislators here are taking a closer look at railroad safety and oversight in the wake of in East Palestine, Ohio, that sparked a large fire and raised concerns about hazardous chemicals aboard.

Two weeks ago, that would cap the length of trains in Colorado at 8,500 feet, require operators to maintain safety detectors and allow crew members to report safety concerns.

“Commercial rail incidents have become more frequent and with increased severity over the last decade,” said Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, a Pueblo Democrat. “And I think we’re overdue for taking action to mitigate that, to put some safeguard into the commercial rail transportation network.”

Denver Post photographer Helen Richardson and the Associated Press contributed to this story.

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