State Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, is scrambling to recover goodwill with 1,000 coal miners in her sprawling district after she risked alienating them with a vote last week, the Glenwood Post-Independent reports.

Schwartz, who has evolved as a champion of clean energy and carbon reduction, voted for a bill that encourages replacing coal with cleaner burning natural gas in three power plants in the Front Range. The legislation was opposed by the Colorado mining industry, including coal mining firms and their employees in the North Fork Valley, which is over McClure Pass from Marble.