Side Streets   Neighborhoods, people and issues

Joan Wolford of Rockrimmon  carries an 8-ounce air horn whenever she goes outside with her toy poodles, Duffy and Clancy. She has chased off coyotes, treed bears and even protected herself from a guy who tried to rob her in Texas with the air horn.

Readers are sounding off about the recent coyote attacks on two preschoolers in a popular Colorado Springs park.

John Mims of Village Seven neighborhood told me coyotes are becoming a common sight on the Homestead Trail and he’s disappointed in the seeming indifference displayed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials to reports of the predators near playgrounds.

Cindy Dyer who lives in the Holiday Village Mobile Home Park near Goose Gossage Youth Sports Complex where the children were attacked told me coyotes have been a growing concern.

“I don’t take my dog out without carrying bear mace,” she said via email. “The enjoyment of being outside in my yard with my dog has been ruined by having to be on guard continually for a possible attack.”

Soccer dad Dennis Mesward reports confronting an aggressive coyote while walking with his golden retriever at Gossage.

“I was surprised how brazen this coyote was as he stood 15 feet in front of us and was creeping toward us,” Mesward said in a Facebook message. “Definitely no fear of humans.”

Phill Pollard posted on Facebook that his wife, Candy, fought off the first coyote attack in the park and alerted authorities.

“But they didn’t do anything,” Pollard said. “She even predicted there would be someone else hurt by that animal.”

Of course, a second child was mauled by a coyote a short time later, triggering a fullscale hunt that resulted in two adult coyotes being killed by CPW officers at the park along Monument Creek north of Fillmore Street.

On Wednesday,  I called the agency to learn lab results of the coyotes’ remains and to give wildlife officials a chance to respond to complaints they’ve been slow to act.

Jennifer Churchill

The good news is that neither coyote tested positive for rabies, said Jennifer Churchill, wildlife agency spokeswoman. So the two young victims won’t face long, painful rabies treatments.

Whew!

But Churchill also delivered some news that will not please those who want coyotes driven out of city neighborhoods and parks.

“There’s no way you can remove all coyotes from an area,” Churchill said. “If you have the habitat, you are going to have coyotes.”

And the state isn’t interested in spending thousands of dollars to trap and remove “good” coyotes from cities, she said.

Instead, Churchill said it’s time for community conversations in Colorado Springs and every city in Colorado about how to deal with urban coyotes.

“It’s an issue for everybody,” Churchill said. “It’s up to us — citizens, the city, the Parks and Wildlife department — to meet and decide what our level of tolerance is and what we want to do about coyotes.”

She noted that coyotes can be hunted year round in Colorado with a small game license. Ranchers and landowners in unincorporated areas can shoot them, if they like. But not in cities.

In urban areas, there are no easy answers to coyotes. They have adapted to urban environments, especially where there are greenbelts and open spaces for them to hunt and den.

Coyotes aren’t a problem as long as they remain scared of humans. But the problems develop when people feed them or when coyotes hunt pet dogs and cats.

“We’ve spent five years looking at all the research on coyotes,” she said. “We’re trying to have this conversation with cities and counties. What can we allow people to do in cities when it comes to coyotes?”

Especially when they become comfortable around humans.

“We want people to be chasing them out of their neighborhoods,” Churchill said. “We need to enjoy wildlife from a distance. Don’t yield your own backyard to coyotes. Don’t yield the space under your porch to their den. Make sure you are not welcoming them.”

Most important, she said, is your reaction when you see coyotes.

“Coyotes see dogs as a possible threat, possible prey or a possible mate,” she said. “You need to protect your pets. Keep them on leashes and near you. And haze coyotes whenever you see them. Respect them enough to keep them wild.”

Duffy and Clancy are toy poodles and the best friends of Joan Wolford of Rockrimmon neighborhood. She protects them with an air horn whenever they are outside.

Which brings me to Joan Wolford, a native of Colorado Springs and longtime resident of Rockrimmon with her husband, Leland Wolford, a retired Air Force colonel and fighter pilot.

Wolford said she learned a dozen years ago the best way to deal with coyotes and other wildlife who roam her backyard and neighborhood. It’s not a gun. Or pepper spray. Or even a big stick.

“I carry an 8-ounce can of signal horn,” Wolford said. “It’s 150 decibels and it works.

“I have run off coyotes, bear, deer, dogs and even a guy who tried to rob me down in Texas once.”

She carries the air horn on shoestring around her wrist whenever she goes out with her toy poodles Duffy and Clancy.

“I’ve had coyotes come out of the creek at me,” she said. “I’ve been able to fend them off with my signal horn. I have treed bears with it. A mama and two cubs. They all went up a tree and stayed there a couple hours.”

Wolford said she waits until the wild animals get close, aims the air horn at their heads and lets them have it.

Joan Wolford carries an 8-ounce air horn with her whenever she is outdoors with her dogs, Duffy and Clancy, to scare off wild animals.

“It doesn’t work from too far away,” she said. “Blast them at head level. It really works. Pepper spray doesn’t do any good. And the purse-size can of signal horn failed me. I use the big one. It costs about $16 in the boating department at Walmart. It’s good, cheap protection.”

Actually, wildlife officials agree that loud noise is a good deterrent to coyotes.

But Churchill stressed that any coyote acting aggressively toward humans needs to be reported.

“That’s not something we take lightly,” she said. “We see pet attacks differently. But coyotes being aggressive to people need to go.”

A coyote runs across a field behind Frank VerHey’s backyard Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013. VerHey’s little dog, Joey, nearly died in December when a coyote snatched him out of VerHey’s yard on North Cascade Avenue . (The Gazette, Christian Murdock) (The Gazette, Christian Murdock)

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Jan Doran

Longtime Colorado Springs neighborhood activist Jan Doran was honored Friday by El Paso County for her years of volunteer service to the region.

Readers of Side Streets will recognize Doran as a leader of the Council of Neighbors & Organizations during a period when the umbrella group of area neighborhoods elevated its profile at the city and county levels.

Doran also has served on countless volunteer boards and organized workshops in her seeming tireless commitment to public service.

Here are comments made by El Paso County Commissioner Sallie Clark at the Friday volunteer appreciation breakfast:

“From county fair to storm water task force, it’s hard to attend an El Paso County function or participate in a serious long range discussion without hearing her name,” Clark said of Doran.

Clark then listed some of Doran’s contributions: founding member of the Citizens Outreach Group;  member of the Citizens Budget Oversight Committee; the Department of Human Services Advisory Commission; the Fair & Events Complex Advisory Board; and the Pikes Peak Regional Stormwater Task Force.

“She has is truly a force for the good of this community,” Clark said. “”It’s good thing she doesn’t work by the hour because we couldn’t possibly afford to pay her for all she does to support this county and this community.”

Jim Abbott

Also honored Friday was Jim Abbott, who received the 2013 Jack L. Blackwell Award for the Outstanding County Volunteer for giving more than 3,000 volunteer hours to the Veterans Services office helping veterans and their families secure benefits.

Commissioner Amy Lathen had this to say about Abbott:

“Jim Abbott has been there in the Veterans Services office for more than five years now,” Lathen said. “Most often, Jim is the first person they meet when veterans, widows and dependents come through the door.  Many have already tried to navigate a web of federal rules and procedures required to get veterans benefits and all they know for sure is that they need help.  So it’s a real relief when Jim Abbot meets them at our door with warm, courteous professional and confident greeting.”

The appreciate breakfast recognized all the folks who donate their time to46 different advisory boards, commissions, task forces and working groups.

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Mary Bigler, 83, seen here May 7, 2013, has sold tools at Sears on Southgate Road in the Broadmoor Towne Center since 1982. She went back to school to become a teacher and took a weekend job at Sears after her husband died, leaving her as a single parent with four children. She hopes to work “until they carry me out on a gurney.”

Mary Bigler isn’t quite Rosie the Riveter, the World War II icon of American women who left their homes by the thousands to work in factories building planes and munitions in support of the war effort.

Welcome to Walmart!

And she’s certainly not a Walmart greeter — older folks hired to stand at the doors of the retail giant welcoming shoppers.

Mary falls somewhere in between as an 83-year-old tool saleswoman at Sears on Southgate Road in the Broadmoor Towne Center mall.

Need a router? Just ask Mary.

“I’ve always been fascinated by them,” she said, describing how she built a birdhouse using a router just so she’d know what she was selling.

Maybe you need a drill. Mary has two at the home east of downtown where she has lived most of her life since her family moved to Colorado Springs during the Great Depression in 1936.

She was just 6 at the time but remembers her family leaving their farm in Missouri and taking a train here in search of work. They were poor and didn’t have a car until she was an adult. For years they lived in rentals near the Union Printers Home where her mother walked to work each day. (When it snowed, her mother wrapped her feet in newspapers because they couldn’t afford boots.)

Mary Bigler

Perhaps you need a finish sander or sabre saw. Mary is adept with each and can help you find just what you need.

“Whenever I need to know about a tool, I call her,” said Mary’s son, Methodist minister Ed Bigler of Sterling. “She knows that stuff inside and out.”

That wasn’t the case in 1982 when she took the job.

“I knew nothing about tools,” she said. “I learned on the sales floor.”

At the time, Mary was a widow and single parent and needed the income and benefits. Her beloved husband, Edgar, had died at age 50 in 1971. She had three older children but still had a 7-year-old daughter at home to raise.

Mary met Edgar at a drugstore downtown in 1945 after he returned from the war. He’d been a tailgunner in a B-17 and flowed 36 missions over Germany, his son said. They were married a few months later.

When he died, Ed Bigler said his mother drew on her history of hard work.

“She was determined to live life on her own and provide for her own needs,” he said.

Going back to work, even in a job she knew nothing about, came naturally. Just as her father had quit farming, moved the family and become a common laborer to support their family all those year ago.

Mary also went back to school. It took her 10 years of night school until she earned a teaching degree from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Once she completed the degree, she taught at Hunt Elementary School for 10 years, still hawking tools on weekends.

“I had expenses and I needed the benefits,” Mary said of her double-duty teaching and selling tools at Sears.

It hasn’t always been easy at Sears.

Early in her hardware sales career, she heard snide comments that she belonged in women’s wear.

And she endured pay cuts, such as in 1992 when the retail giant slashed the hourly pay of sales employees and put them on a commission status.

Mary Bigler seen on microfilm in Feb. 21, 1992, Gazette-Telegraph photo for a story about Sears slashing pay for sales clerks to save money. She went from making $7.50 an hour to $4.50 an hour plus a 1 percent commission. She needed to sell $300 worth of hardware every hour she worked to recoup her lost pay. Jerilee Bennett / The Gazette file

Mary went from making $7.50 an hour to $4.50 an hour, plus a 1 percent commission. To recoup her lost hourly pay, Mary figured she had to sell $300 worth of hardware every hour she worked. Of course, she never did and even now only makes a $6 hourly base.

Even with her Social Security, Mary said she needs the extra income and so she works three days a week, Tuesday through Thursday, typically about four hours a day.

Over the years, she’s become pretty knowledgeable about tools. And she marvels at the innovations she’s witnessed over the years.

“Every year they come out with something new,” she said. “Everything is cordless. I remember the first cordless drill we sold. When we first started selling them, we sold so many that I even dreamed about that drill.”

A mobile, point-of-sale tablet used by Sears and other retailers to reduce the need for customers to stand in line. They can process credit card sales.

She has kept current on the new models with regular training. She can tell you how different attachments available make a new drill actually seven different tools in one.

Besides the tools, Mary said she enjoys the customers.

“Rarely a week goes by that someone doesn’t come in and say: ‘You sold me my first tool set. I’m so glad you’re here,’ ” she said.

Her son says she’s also a fan of music and the arts and is especially fond of the Fine Arts Museum.

“She’s a very cultured woman,” said Ed Bigler, who has been a minister nearly 40 years. “She loves to read. She follows politics assiduously. And until recently, she always raised a big garden.”

I wondered how long Mary planned to continue working.

“Until they carry me out on a gurney,” she said with a chuckle.

Then she turned serious. Seems she’s facing perhaps the biggest challenge of her Sears career. And she genuinely fears it will doom her.

Rosie the Riveter

It’s a mobile “point of sale” tablet that Sears sales clerks are using. Instead of sending customers to stand in line at a cash register, clerks can make credit card transactions on a handheld computer tablet.

“I’m struggling,” said Mary, who doesn’t even own a cell phone much less an iPad. “I’m having a terrible time learning that technology. It might do me in.”

I doubt it, actually.

Just like Rosie the Riveter, Mary is smart and tough and has spent her life working hard and rising to challenges. I’m guessing she’ll have that tablet figured out in no time.

I hope so, cause I’m needing a snow blower and I wouldn’t want to buy it from anyone else!

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Alana Thompson, known as Honey Boo Boo, is the star of a reality television show “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” on the TLC network. It follows the 7-year-old Alana, a child beauty pageant contestant, her mother, June Shannon, father, Mike Thompson, and her sisters. It is filmed at their home in rural Georgia.

On any given day I get some odd calls and email.

For example, on Tuesday I got a call from a woman asking me who she could call at the U.S. Olympic Committee to get help fixing her fence. It had been blown down in our windstorm that day.

It took me a minute to realized she had found my June 23, 2010 column in which I wrote that the USOC wanted to “mend fences” with folks in Colorado Springs and be a better neighbor. She hung up quickly after I explained what the expression really meant.

I also get a lot of come-ons from people wanting to make me a millionaire or who want to help me win a Pulitzer Prize for excellence in journalism. (We all know that isn’t going to happen.)

Anyway, that’s why I was skeptical when I read a recent email from Bert Klasey, who identified himself as “development producer” for a television production company called Zodiak USA.

He was looking for ideas for a new reality show.

For some reason, Klasey figured I might have come across the next Honey Boo Boo.

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“I’m rolling out a development initiative here that would, I hope, allow us to get more in touch with different parts of the country in our continued search for new people, businesses and ideas that we could ultimately feature in a television show,” Klasey wrote.

Before I jettisoned his email to the spam folder, I decided to check him out. (Mainly because he was offering some serious cash for successful story pitches.)

So I made a call to a friend in the business. (I really do have an actor/director friend in Hollywood.) Anyway, seems Klasey is legit and produced the Hoarders show on A&E network.

Got me thinking maybe I could scare up a tip or two for him.

Frankly, the newsroom would be a perfect reality show except no one would believe it.

Actor Michael Richards played the character Cosmo Kramer on the NBC sitcom Seinfeld from 1989-98.

Who would believe my buddy Bill, who used to sleep in his chair, head cocked straight back and snoring? He even sprawled out a few times under his desk. We took photos to prove it.

Or the editor who came in after midnight and videotaped himself dancing on file cabinets, smoking pot and pretending to use heroin. He spliced it with video he’d taken of a publisher he hated and turned it into a spectacular resignation video.

Or the reporter who was our version of Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld. He lived in a hotel room for months and then in an RV. He’d drive 1,000 miles on a weekend to find a good taco. One day he called in sick, flew to Chicago to party with his girlfriend, felt guilty and called his editor to confess. And got canned.

Anyway, maybe there is a Honey Boo Boo in our midst. Or someone who might be a great subject for reality TV. Please send me your suggestions.

And no, the USOC does not fix wind-damaged fences.

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Who doesn’t like an “attaboy” now and then?

I certainly do.

And I am enjoying a pretty steady stream of calls and emails from Side Streets readers after a Monday column led to the arrest of a man suspected of conning Colorado Springs residents out of cash.

The suspect, Perry Wayne Suggs, is accused of targeting military families with a sob story of a broken down car, stranded wife, shortage of cash, etc.

Suggs, 49, even flashed a retired Army identification card in his well-rehearsed pitch for a ride to the nearest American Legion post or a Veteran’s Administration office.

I received a phone call from Donald,  who was victimized at his Garden Ranch home on Jan. 12 by a man he identified as Suggs, based on a mug shot that accompanied my column. He lost $160 to the con artist.

I got a call from Joan who said her son-in-law gave $60 to  the same man when he was working the Mountain Shadows neighborhood.

Jim in the Quail Lake area gave the man $220. Jim was “energized” that the suspect reportedly confessed to police that he’d stolen $80 from another victim.

One of the folks I heard from was Jay Bowen, commander of the American Legion’s Centennial Post 209 near Austin Bluffs Parkway and Academy Boulevard.

Perry Wayne Suggs. Photo courtesy Colorado Springs Police Department.

Here’s an excerpt from his note to me:

“I see there was an arrest for the guy highlighted in your Side Street column Monday. Great job getting exposure on this! I had our state folks check his name and he is NOT a member of any American Legion Post in the state of Colorado.

“Thanks again for bringing this to the attention of our great Colorado Springs citizens.  Keep up the good work!”

Bowen, understandably, wants everyone to know Suggs is not affiliated with the American Legion. And he stressed that there is never a reason to take a vet to a legion post to get cash, as Suggs is accused of telling his victims.

“We never require a vet to come to us to get a check,” Bowen said. “We go to them at their home.”

In a way, Bowen said it was gratifying to learn how much folks around town are willing to help veterans.

“The people in Colorado Springs are very generous,” Bowen said. “We’re very proud of that fact. That why incidents like this really bother me. It both saddens and angers me.”

He warned everyone to be skeptical if someone knocks on your door claiming to be collecting for the legion. And always demand multiple identification cards of anyone claiming to be a legion representative.

“Door-to-door is not how we do business,” Bowen said. “If we have a fundraiser, it’s very organized and everyone knows it.”

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Early Sunday morning, eight young bucks and one old buck gathered in the open space behind my home in the Rockrimmon neighborhood of Colorado Springs.

After a day of high winds and blizzard conditions, the bucks seemed to be enjoying the warm sunshine. They were feisty, engaging in group sparring.

The old buck with a broken antler stayed away from the group and relaxed behind my fence.

Meanwhile, the young bucks took turns locking antlers and pushing each other around.

A couple of them were particularly rambunctious, even pawing the ground and driving each other into trees and bushes.

The winner of that bout then went over and challenged the old buck, who had been relaxing under a pine tree.

They went at it for several minutes. We heard the clacking of antlers as they pushed back and forth.

Eventually, the old guy drove the young buck into a bush and shook his head vigorously and it was over.

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Longtime neighborhood activist Jan Doran has a few things she wants to ask the new state HOA boss at his public town hall meeting in two weeks.

Bud Stringfellow also wants to meet Gary Kujawski, HOA Information Officer, to ask about his homeowners association at Park Vista Estates.

Ditto for many other Side Streets readers who perked up at the news Kujawski will hold a town hall meeting at 9 a.m., Saturday, March 23, in the Penrose branch of the Pikes Peak Library District at 20 N. Cascade Ave., in downtown Colorado Springs.

Gary Kujawski

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Now, here’s an important detail for folks who want to attend the scheduled three-hour meeting: you must reserve one of the 100 seats available. That means sending an RSVP email to the HOA Information Office and Resource Center, cynthia.aguilar@state.co.us, or calling 303-894-2292 to reserve a seat.

The event is free but Kujawski is limiting attendance to allow for more give-and-take between himself and the crowd.

“One of my goals is to have a more outreach from this office,” Kujawski said. “I want to get out and speak with people, see what they are thinking, see what they would like from this office in terms of legislative changes and education efforts.”

Larger groups make meaningful conversation difficult.

Doran hopes to get a meaningful answer to her question about why all HOAs are treated the same under state law regardless of size.

Doran is administrator for the Discovery neighborhood in Rockrimmon where dues are $30 a year for 329 homeowners. By comparison, some HOAs in the Broadmoor neighborhood, Peregrine and other areas charge upwards of $300 a month in dues and fees.

Jan Doran

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She said it’s unfair for the state to impose mandates for record-keeping and document disclosures, for example, and other time-consuming chores on HOAs like Discovery when there is no paid staff or professional property management.

“They’ve lumped everybody together — condos, townhomes, patio home complexes, large single-family developments,” Doran said. “What about little HOAs like ours? One size doesn’t fit all. It’s not fair.”

Doran would like to see Kujawski ask the General Assembly for an exemption for small, low-budget HOAs that existed prior to 1992 when lawmakers first enacted the Colorado Common Interest Ownership Act, which governs HOAs. Small HOAs built after 1992 were exempt from it but not older HOAs like Discovery.

It’s important to know that if you aren’t able to attend the March 23 town hall meeting, you aren’t completely out of luck.

Kujawski said he intends to make regular visits to Colorado Springs and hold more town hall meetings.

“I really want to get a good, thoughtful discussion going,” he said. “We’ll have larger groups down the road.”

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Can we talk? Just us neighbors?

Maybe to organize to fight a commercial development on vacant land.

Or to get City Hall to listen to our concerns about traffic.

Or to preserve the character of our unique neighborhood.

Some on the Colorado Springs City Council and the Planning Commission say no. You can’t talk. They won’t grant you permission to talk.

Dave Munger in 2011

No kidding. I heard it myself.

The idea that some in Colorado Springs government would dismiss groups of neighbors who organize informally and approach their elected leaders is troubling to the city’s top neighborhood activist, Dave Munger, president of the Council of Neighbors & Organizations.

Munger was puzzled the first time it happened in January when the Planning Commission rejected a request by the Rawles Open Space Neighborhood to initiate a city-sponsored conversation about creating a master plan for 38 large properties along Mesa Road on the city’s west side.

The commission voted 6-3 to deny neighbors the right to talk, demanding the group get agreement from 100 percent of the property owners before having a conversation. It didn’t matter the city code doesn’t require unanimous agreement before a master plan conversation can begin.

Then similar comments were made last week during the City Council meeting. (You can watch the three-hour City Council debate at this link. Selected Item 14 for viewing.)

The Rawles neighborhood leaders presented signatures of 26 homeowners who all want to discuss a master plan. It was not 100 percent but it was near 75 percent agreement.

Janet Suthers

(Janet Suthers, the commission chairwoman, told the City Council during its hearing that her panel really only wanted two-thirds agreement, even though it repeatedly insisted on unanimous agreement.)

Suthers and commission member Don Magill tried to explain to the council that the issue wasn’t about basic democracy and the right to congregate and self-govern, as Munger had tried to argue.

Suthers and Magill said the issue was property rights. And a simple conversation about a master plan, which would declare the neighborhood’s desires to preserve a rural character and open development style, was too dangerous to allow.

Don Magill

That attitude won agreement from three on City Council, including Angela Dougan who wanted to know who had elected the 26 Rawles neighbors to speak for all 38 property owners.

“You have no documentation,” Dougan told Rawles spokesman James Kin. Dougan then tried to discredit Kin and his group by suggesting they were no more legitimate than if she and Councilman Merv Bennett went to a hotel and represented themselves as a married couple.

Nervous laughter erupted on the council. But Munger wasn’t laughing at efforts to knock down the Rawles group because he passionately believes neighborhood groups, no matter how informally organized, ought to be respected and encouraged to get together and talk.

“Democracy ought to be the over-arching goal here,” Munger said. “We ought to be empowering people to have a voice over their own lives.

“If we’re not willing to give people the voice they deserve, we need to rethink our priorities.”

Of course, Munger was buoyed by the final City Council vote, 5-3, to allow the master plan process to begin. And he said he would never advocate letting a majority of neighbors trample the property rights of the minority. Nor would city staff, the commission or council, all of whom must approve any master plan before it is enacted, Munger said.

“There will be lots of opportunities for us to defend those who don’t agree with the majority,” Munger said. “Our history as a city is pretty clear. We’ve always encouraged neighborhoods to have conversations and speak for themselves and decide what their neighborhood ought to look like.

“I’m not sure why anyone would oppose the idea of a conversation.”

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Are residents of the Pikes Peak region just a bunch of complainers or what?

For the second consecutive year, Colorado Springs ranks No. 1 in the number of complaints registered with the state HOA Information and Resource Center.

The news was contained in the recently released annual report of Colorado’s homeowners associations by Gary Kujawski, an attorney who was appointed in late October as the new state HOA Information Officer.

Kujawski said he doesn’t view the region as whiners.

“In Colorado Springs, the number of complaints is up there,” Kujawski said. “There could be a number of reasons and it might be a simple case that people there are more aware of this office.

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“I’m not sure a lot of people statewide are as aware as people in Colorado Springs.”

Kujawski’s office is responsible for registering HOAs in Colorado and gathering information for a database on HOAs.

(I use the HOA abbreviation to describe all covenant-controlled communities whether they are single family neighborhoods, condo and townhome associations, voluntary improvement associations, or property owners associations. And covenants are rules governing everything from house design, landscaping, paint colors, roofing materials, parking that homeowners voluntarily agree to follow when they buy their homes.)

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Since launching operations in 2011, the HOA office has registered 8,347 HOAs covering 853,542 units, or homes. An estimated 2 million Coloradans live in HOA communities.

Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak region are grouped in the South Central region in which 664 HOAs are registered.

In 2012, the office fielded 2,873 inquiries, of which 576 were complaints lodged by 309 people.

They range from handling of elections of the board of directors to meeting procedures to conflicts of interest as well as covenant enforcement complaints, fines, liens and foreclosure issues.

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“Of particular concern is the serious nature of many of the complaints received and the inability of homeowners to resolve their issues without resorting to legal channels,” Kujawski wrote in the annual report.

While some might view the complaints totals as low, given the number of HOA residents in Colorado, Kujawski said he takes them seriously.

“You can see in the report you don’t have trivial complaints,” he said. “They are serious matters and they affect many people.”

Repeated complaints of rogue HOA boards and managers led leaders of the Colorado General Assembly to introduce bills aimed at reforming HOA operations. They want to make HOAs operate more professionally and with greater transparency. Some want to restrict the ability of boards to impose large fines and lien homeowners for minor violations.

There’s even a push to expand Kujawski’s role to police HOAs and enforce state laws on boards found to be violating the law.

But for now, he is focused on collecting data, listening to complaints and dispensing information about the rights of HOA residents and board members.

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And he sees part of his duties as educating the public about the very existence of his office.

So he’s scheduling a series of town hall meetings around the state to listen to homeowners and discuss issues they are facing.

“I’m working on some educational materials and refining our system here,” he said. “I want to get input from homeowners directly to find out what they need from our office.”

In fact, he has scheduled a three-hour public meeting at 9 a.m., Saturday, March 23 at the Penrose Library, 20 N. Cascade Ave. in downtown Colorado Springs.

“I really want to get thoughtful input and get a good discussion going,” Kujawski said. “If necessary, I’ll come down more often, every month or so.”

So mark your calendars and get to the library early to be sure you get a seat.

Follow this link to my Jan. 27, 2012, column about the first HOA report.

To read the associated blog, click here.

Here’s a link to the full 2012 Annual Report of the HOA Information and Resource Center.

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John G. Bock in 1909

Perhaps you love the Red Rock Canyon Open Space for all it offers: miles of hiking trails amid dinosaur tracks and fossils of prehistoric trees and extinct sea creatures.

Maybe it’s rocks you love in this geologic extension of the nearby Garden of the Gods. Who isn’t inspired by its 320-million-year-old red sandstone lifted from the depths of the earth?

History buffs like me cherish its history as an Indian camp, a late-19th century quarry, as a site of factories and mills, home to Old West horseback tours, a campground and even a landfill.

Or you just want to know more about John G. Bock, the cowboy/entrepreneur who pieced together the huge parcel we now enjoy after his arrival here in 1923.

Then get to the Old Colorado City History Center, 1 S. 24th St., 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday for your only chance to see an exhibit of memorabilia from the pioneering Bock family.

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The one-day exhibit will include many items Bock displayed in his own Western history museum before he closed it and put everything in storage in 1939.

Many items subsequently were bought by avid historian Dave Hughes for preservation.

The exhibit coincides with the 10th anniversary of the city’s $12.5 million purchase of the 789-acre canyon property.

“It’s nice to see how the park was established and how it was saved,” said Sharon Swint, president of the Old Colorado City Historical Society board of directors.

The display will include lanterns, pottery and spurs collected by Bock, who left Philadelphia in 1907 and took a train to Colorado Springs.

In his autobiography, “In Red Rock Canyon Land,” Bock wrote of a life working on ranches across the West and prospecting before returning to Colorado Springs in 1923 as a disabled World War I veteran to sell real estate.

He bought a house near the entrance to Red Rock Canyon at 31st Street and Colorado Avenue — where the family home would remain until 1965.

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He also ran the Roundup Saddle Stables and led guided horseback rides into the canyon. Over the years, Bock collected antiques from his travels.

There’s a military uniform as well as scrapbooks, family photo albums and books.

In addition, there will be documentation for what might have been in the canyon if John G. and his sons Richard and John S. Bock had been able to develop the property as they hoped.

They had big plans. They wanted to build a resort, golf course, homes and businesses.

Even a world trade center.

It’s all contained in architect Richard Bock’s nine-volume business plan, which was translated into six languages and distributed around the world in an effort to generate interest.

His plan called for 800 hotel rooms, 3,600 residential units in three-winged towers, some 36 stories tall.

There was a shopping center of 1 million square feet, convention center, sports arena, theater, museum, a medical research center, communications tower, industrial park and underground parking.

The history center will have architect’s drawings and documents related to that and other development efforts.

After Saturday, the artifacts will be available to researchers through the society’s librarian, Swint said.

“This is everyone’s chance to see this stuff,” she said.

This is architect Richard Bock’s rendering of a shopping center he had planned as part of a massive world trade center development in Red Rock Canyon.

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