Today’s news roundup includes Aurora’s settlement with the family of a police shooting victim, an unusual plan to save a mountaintop and more.

GO VOTE.

It’s too late to mail your ballot. Take it to one of these locations. (DenverGov)

Aurora to pay out millions for the killing of an unarmed man.

A SWAT officer fired at a fleeing man, Naeschylus Vinzant, whom Aurora Police were trying to arrest. The officer, Paul Jerothe, was not charged, but the city has agreed to a settlement in the millions, Rick Sallinger reports. (CBS4)

Boulder marijuana grow too smelly?

Too smelly for the law, at least. That’s why Dandelion Grow (which is linked to Native Roots) has been fined $14,000. (Boulder Daily Camera)

The Fourteeners Initiative is buying a mountaintop.

The nonprofit, which aims to protect Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains from all those hikers, is in the process of buying the scarred summit of Mount Shavano. It’s part of a unique new nonprofit-public strategy, as Jason Blevins explains. (DP)

A Pueblo company uses the sun to roast coffee beans.

Solar Roast originally used mirrors to focus light directly onto pounds of coffee, roasting the beans with the thermal power of the sun. Finding this to be very expensive, they switched to solar electricity. Then they added a natural-gas generator to make it faster. This story got less exciting as I read it. (Ars Technica)

More and more arts groups want funding.

Issue 4B on your ballot will guarantee a sales-tax source of funding through 2030, and it will send slightly more of that money to the small organizations that increasingly want a piece of the pie, as Erica Meltzer explains. (Denverite)

Assessing the Democrats’ and Republicans’ Colorado efforts:

Democrats deployed four offices in the Republican stronghold of El Paso alone. The Republicans had a single one in the county. Elsewhere, Dave Weigel finds that Democrats are more focused than their rivals on the mechanics, as opposed to the ideology, of getting out the vote. (Washington Post)

Is something wrong with this online charter school?

Ken Crowell’s first try at charter schools, the Cesar Chavez network, fell apart amid findings that executives gave themselves “exorbitant salaries, hired numerous family members,” and more, according to EdWeek.

Now the publication has dug into Crowell’s second effort, the online GOAL Academy, finding that barely a quarter students even log onto the school on a typical weekday. It maintains a graduation rate of 26 percent, reportedly much worse than other alternative schools. EdWeek suggests that slowing growth and focusing on current students could help. For its part, GOAL contends it’s working with students who were at risk of leaving the educational system altogether. (EdWeek)

Trump was here.

I was there. (Denverite)

Today’s writing soundtrack:

Art Tatum, an incredible pianist who did a lot to set the mold for jazz. Have a listen.

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