Six months of COVID-19 may be hard on people, but it’s done wonders for lowering the level of nitrogen oxide — a dangerous air pollutant — in Denver’s air.

Monday, state officials indicated they hope to keep that momentum going with grants and other initiatives, under the banner of a “Can Do Colorado Community Challenge.”

Officials from the state health department and department of transportation said Monday that two monitoring stations in Denver, in Globeville and on north Broadway, show nitrogen dioxide levels between March 17, when Gov. Jared Polis issued a stay-at-home order, and August 10, are down between 7.5% and 15.3% as compared to the same period last year, with the greatest benefits for air quality in March and April. 

Nitrogen oxide is tied to vehicle traffic, according to John Putnam of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. 

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Unfortunately, the Denver area still exceeds ozone and fine particulate levels, and that’s made worse by the major fires burning on the Western Slope.

Both agencies, along with the Colorado Energy Office, are hoping to stimulate more teleworking and less traffic, through expansion of the Can Do Colorado campaign, which was launched in May to spotlight businesses that are finding innovative ways to adapt to public health requirements. 

The Can Do Colorado Community Challenge is taking some of the lessons from the earlier campaign and putting $5 million into two new initiatives tied to those efforts. 

The first, known as Revitalizing Main Street, focuses on infrastructure projects, such as re-purposing streets for biking or walking, expanded sidewalks that allow restaurants to offer outdoor seating, more one-way streets and weekend-only use of streets for bicycle and pedestrian use. Grants are maxxed at $50,000 and must also be able to take in a 10% match.

The second initiative is tied to telework. Projects to be funded under the grant include marketing and training materials, sharing best practices and additional staff who would promote teleworking and other socially-distant transportation options, such as grocery delivers or other ways to help at-risk Coloradans who should stay home. These grants are limited to $5,000 each and must be spent by December 1. 

The time to act is now, officials indicated. Some schools are reopening, so that means traffic, and the air pollution that goes with it, could increase in the coming weeks and months. 

CDPHE’s air quality division issued alerts Monday, warning “sensitive” groups (aka the elderly or those with heart or lung disease) to avoid prolonged exposure or heavy outdoor exertion.  For Denver and Fort Collins, both ozone and particulate matter are high enough to trigger warnings. But it wasn’t just for the Front Range. The CDPHE alert also included particulate warnings for Grand Junction and the Colorado River Valley, an area that includes most of Garfield and northeast Mesa counties.

An alert about smoke, tied to the Pine Gulch and Grizzley Creek fires, covers eight Western Slope counties, with towns as far east as Leadville and Crested Butte and as far south as Montrose. A second alert, tied to the Cameron Peak and Williams Fork fires, covers seven counties in the central mountains, and affects communities as far east as Fairplay in Park County and Central City in Gilpin County.

Both include this warning: if visibility is less than five miles from a neighborhood, the smoke has reached unhealthy levels.