🦫 Is Buc-ee’s breaking Palmer Lake?

🦫 3 More Officials Resign Over Buc-ee’s Debate

Two Palmer Lake board trustees and the town attorney mark the most recent departures in a slew of resignations over the divisive debate to bring a massive Buc-ee’s travel center to the tiny town south of Denver.

• In total: The board has seen four resignations (including the mayor) and two recalls related to the Buc-ee’s fight, leaving only one trustee on the board who was part of the initial conversations last year. [KRCC]

📡 Trump Targets Colorado’s Environmental Work

The president has announced plans to dismantle the 60-year-old Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research. It’s one of the nation’s leading climate science research facilities — but the Trump administration called it “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism.”

• On top of that: White House officials also announced this week they will cancel $109 million in transportation grants awarded to Colorado for environmental projects. [Denver Post 🔒]

🥊 Denver’s Biggest Beefs of 2025

From local politicos fighting online to Denver’s contentious brush with reality dating show fame, 2025 was host to some juicy battles. So, when it comes to the Mile High City’s biggest beefs of the year, who won? [City Cast Denver 🎧]

🧑‍🎨 New Art Residency Program Comes with Posh RiNo Penthouse

A new artist residency program in Denver’s River North Art District is putting out a call out to chefs, designers, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and artists around the world. In exchange for hosting events, activations, workshops, and a final showcase, the selected resident will get put up in a fully furnished luxury penthouse overlooking the Platte River for a yet-to-be-determined amount of time. [Westword]

• Related: This area of Denver known as the place “where art is made” has changed a lot in the last two decades, including the loss of many of the artist residents who made it what it is. So, where does Denver’s most famous neighborhood for the arts go from here? [City Cast Denver 🎧]

For many Denver families, tamales are a beloved holiday tradition. Whether you make them yourselves or get them from one of the many local restaurants that sells them in bulk, there’s nothing quite like a tamale at Christmas time. But what’s the best filling? In this special essay, City Cast Denver producer Paul Karolyi shares his answer.

In the spirit of the holidays, I come to you now with a modest proposal — one with the potential to bring a family closer together or drive it apart. It’s an idea freighted with contested histories, fraught with big feelings, and fit to bursting with saturated fats.

It’s the hot dog tamale.

But I have to tell you the backstory first.

A few years ago, my wife Megan made tamales with a friend because she had never done it before and wanted to try. She grew up in a half white, half Chicano family in northern Colorado and never learned how. As an adult, she has enjoyed deepening her connection to Mexican cuisine. So, the next year she thought, what if the whole Chicano side of the family got together in December to roll a big batch together? We could all reconnect over huge bowls of masa and spend an afternoon together spreading, filling, folding, and catching up on the year that was.

It went great. Everyone loved it, and we’ve been doing it every year in early December. It’s a really nice holiday tradition.

We’re getting pretty good, too. That first year’s batch had a lot of misshapen, under-filled knobby little logs of masa and meat. Now we’re really cooking. At this year’s gathering earlier this month, I think we rolled up over 200 beautiful little ingot-shaped morsels.

Slow-cooked pork is a traditional and reliably delicious filling. Chicken, I personally find hit-or-miss (it tends to dry out). Shockingly, a perennial favorite has become the jalapeño popper — a friend brought this to us a couple years ago. You buy a big can of pickled jalapeños, pop the tops off, scoop out the guts, then fill them with cream cheese and shredded cheddar before rolling them up in the masa-caked hoja. They can be a little spicy and a little lumpy, but I love them.

So that brings me to this past November. Megan had started a group chat to organize everyone’s schedule, and I was sitting there thinking, what else could you put in a tamale? What other flavor combinations would taste nice with masa?

A corn dog is kinda like a tamale, if you squint. What if you cooked up a hot dog and rolled it up inside?