Pueblo County gives $2M in scholarships from marijuana sales tax chieftain.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chieftain.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ray Aguilera was sitting next to an elementary school student from Pueblo s Bessemer neighborhood at a Colorado Rockies baseball game when he gave him a few dollars to grab a hot dog from the concession stand.
It was his annual trip to Denver, when he chartered buses and brought dozens of students to a game as a reward for learning vocabulary, oftentimes exposing them to the delight of Coors Field and the state’s capital city for the first time: the smell of freshly cut grass, the aroma of stadium food and the tradition of the seventh inning stretch.
Friends say he relished the smiles on those children’s faces more than the game itself.
Ray Aguilera, a longtime Pueblo City Council member and fixture of the Bessemer community, died Sunday morning at age 78, surrounded by his family.
Aguilera was living with his family in Denver under hospice care since early last week. The cause of Aguilera s death is not yet known.
Aguilera served on
Pueblo City Council for more than a decade, first with two consecutive four-year terms starting in 2003 and then again from 2016 until this year. He represented District 4, which encompasses the Bessemer area.
He was devoted to those constituents, and a heroic advocate for Pueblo’s Bessemer neighborhoods, according to a statement from the city announcing his hospice care.
Pueblo County gives more scholarship money than ever before, pulling funds from marijuana tax
KOAA News5
and last updated 2021-02-02 19:56:08-05
PUEBLO â Pueblo County is able to provide more scholarship funds than ever before.
$1.95 million are going to help students afford college education this springs, as a result of pulling from excise tax of marijuana sales.
These scholarship funds would usually only go to the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation and allow them to provide students with money. This time around, the county accepted applications for more distributors.
âWe felt that if we opened it up for entities to apply, we were going to have fresh ideas, a lot of innovation and those dollars would be competed for and weâd have some really good places to award, said Pueblo County Commissioner Garrison Ortiz.
Thanks to state taxes, Pueblo County was able to distribute $1.95 million in scholarship funds drawn from excise taxes on marijuana sales.
The funds, titled the Pueblo County Scholarships, were distributed to Colorado State University Pueblo, Pueblo Community College, Pueblo African American Concern Organization, the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation and the Southern Colorado Press Club.
The funds were distributed as a one-time out-of-cycle award allocation that was deemed necessary to aid in balancing the marijuana excise tax scholarship program account.
The funds are to be distributed to students for the 2021 spring semester and were divided among the institutions based on the applications sent in. The size of an institution as well as academics were weighed in the applications.