Mike Murphy, a resident on Funk Road who’s been cited for zoning violations, is going to get some help cleaning up his place from Dave Schuler, a member of the Sertoma Club, said Terry Rorick, code enforcement officer for El Paso County.  

Murphy, who has been trying to climb out of a severe depression, said this week he’s excited about the prospect. “I want to get this placed cleaned up. I don’t like it at all. It’s gone on way too long.”

Rorick told Dave Schuler, a member of the Hi Plains Sertoma Club, about Murphy’s plight following a recent court case. Schuler dropped by Murphy’s place one day and together they  drew up some preliminary plans.

Murphy said Schuler has a bulldozer and is going to help him dig a pit so he can bury some of his unwanted stuff.

Another friend has offered to help him move some vehicles to a place where they won’t be visible from the roadway, he said.

“It’s going to take time. It took twelve years to get it this way. It can’t be cleaned up in a month or two.”

After we quoted longtime El Paso County administrator Terry Harris as saying that the county commission would never have voted to raze the old courthouse, we got a number of e-mails and clippings from readers that proved unequivocably that the commission did just that.

A copy of the front page of the Nov. 16, 1966 edition of the Gazette-Telegraph sent to us by a reference librarian at the Pikes Peak Public Library shows that the El Paso County Board of Commissioners did indeed vote to raze the elegant old courthouse at the corner of Tejon and Vermijo.

 ”The present courthouse will be torn down, the commissioners left no doubt about that,” the Gazette reported.

The announcement caught Colorado Springs residents by surprise. A group called “Save the Court House Committee” sprang up to fight the plan.

The courthouse was structurally sound and adaptable for many uses, the committee argued. ”To destroy a building of such significance and potential usefulness,” the group wrote, “is a flagrant waste of taxpayers’ money.”

A reader who goes by the name “Geester1″ wrote in to say that people in sandwich boards walked the streets demanding to “save the courthouse” and “move the museum!”

Eventually the judicial complex and jail were built several blocks to the east of the courthouse. The county sold  the courthouse to the city in 1973 for a dollar and it re-opened in 1979 as the Pioneers Museum.

Plans to build a court house began in 1872, four years before Colorado became a state. The commissioners voted to pay Anthony Bott $2,500 for “enlarging and making a satisfactory completion of a fair and ample courthouse.”

In 1899, the town’s founders decided it was time to build a new courthouse. The granite blocks were hauled in by donkey engines and horses. Stone cutters and stone masons, considered the elite craftsmen at the time, were brought in to build the exterior.

The courthouse was presented to taxpayers on May 16, 1903. There were so many speeches that later orators “didn’t bother to say anything because of the lateness of the hour,” one journalist wrote.

Amy Lathen thinks the U.S. Forest Service is “playing politics” with the South Rampart Shooting Range. The range was closed in July of 2009 after a person was killed in a fatal accident.

 The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office found no safety flaws in the design of the range that led to the fatality and Lathen thinks it’s time to re-open the facility. “This has become a political issue,” she said, “not because we’re talking about rafting on the Arkansas but because we’re talking guns.”

The U.S. Forest Service is not willing to move so quickly.  The federal agency wants a couple of things done first: It wants the range cleaned up, some infrasture improvements put into place, including berms, and an on-site manager.

“It’s junky, I’ll give it that, but we have a high number of concealed handgun permits and those folks need a place to practice,” she said.