Developers hope to build temporary workforce housing for Four Seasons Mountain Village in Naturita
A proposed temporary workforce housing facility in Naturita fell short when presented to the Montrose County Board of Comissioners at Friday’s meeting.
Developers are hoping to receive a special use permit application, which would allow them to build the facility and house up to 215 construction workers for the Four Seasons project in Mountain Village through roughly March 2029.
The proposal outlined 42 dwelling units, a commercial kitchen, and recreation facilities on a 25.5-acre site.
Commissioners sharply criticized the application as disjointed and internally inconsistent, pointing out unlabeled figures and tables, missing exhibits, conflicting housing and parking numbers, and no table of contents. Planning & Development Director Tallmadge Richmond reported late concerns from the Basin Clinic and Nucla-Naturita Fire Protection District over their capacity to handle the sharp increase in population. Two Naturita residents spoke against the project, warning that adding 215 people to a town of roughly 400 would strain infrastructure and public safety. The commission voted to keep the public hearing open and continue the item to October 22, citing the power outage that blocked remote participants and requests from absent parties to continue.
Victor Marx uses unlicensed clip from PBS NewsHour story about a young woman trafficked by ISIS militants in video about his work
Earlier this week, KVNF reported that churches across Colorado have violated their tax-exempt status by promoting Victor Marx as a candidate. Marx is the GOP nominee in Colorado’s gubernatorial race, and has centered his Christian faith in his campaign.
As we mentioned in Monday’s story, Marx opens his appearances with a video. Dramatic music accompanies quick flashes of clips and images that move so quickly it’s hard to actually process what you’re looking at. Marx appears in most of them– serving in the military, demonstrating martial arts skills, with his wife, and serving missions in other countries.
The clips he doesn’t appear in show buildings exploding, hands on a gun, children laughing, a cross in a field. It’s common for politicans to curate a particular vibe using seemingly random photos and videos, like someone grocery shopping, a flag waving in the wind, or a family at the dinner table.
But one of the clips in Marx’s video stood out to us– it shows a teenage girl wearing a headscarf that covers both her hair and her lower face. A teardrop falls from one of her eyes, and it darkens the yellow fabric covering her cheeks. It’s sandwiched between many clips of Marx in the Middle East, so it looks like it’s from one of his supposed high-risk missions. It’s not. It’s actually from a 2015 PBS segment, in which correspondent Marcia Briggs spoke to Yazidi women in Northern Iraq that escaped captivity from ISIS militants.
We reached out to Biggs to see if Marx may have had any role in this camp while she was working on the story. She told us, “No, I never encountered him at that camp, and NewsHour Productions neither gave permission nor licensed that imagery to his campaign.” She also said it was “A rather bold move to use a shot that distinctive.”
Marx’s outlandish claims of rescuing women and children from captivity through high-risk missions have received a lot of criticism. It didn’t help when 9News reporter Kyle Clark pressed him on how many people's he's rescued. Marx answered, "I'd say more than one, and less than a bunch."
Again, politicans frequently use images that they have no relation to. That’s part of advertising. But to take a video that you had nothing to do with from PBS NewsHour of a vulnerable minor, without permission, and sandwich it between your own is a different story. And it certainly doesn’t help with Marx’s credibility problem.
North Fork Creative Cohort
If you run a small business in the North Fork Valley, a new six-month program wants to help you grow it, and sign-ups close October 10th. KVNF's Brody Wilson has more.
