Guest Column
The Challenges of and Reasons for ‘Saving the Ranch’
By Jim Spehar, Guest Writer, 9-14-07
“(We are) caught between the old West where there was always another valley over the next hill and the new West with the reality that geography is finite.”
— Dick Lamm, former Colorado governor
We put more than 500 miles on the truck last weekend. That included plenty of western Colorado hills and valleys and a chance to ponder the wisdom expressed by the governor who first colored our state’s political landscape green three decades ago.
Half of those miles took us down to Pagosa Springs, where the Southwest Land Alliance invited me to participate in its second annual discussion about “Saving the Ranch.” Along the road we saw fields of corn around Olathe, freshly mowed hayfields between Montrose and Ridgway, grazing cattle and horses on both sides of Durango, and very different but equally well maintained fences of both working and trophy ranches as we headed toward Wolf Creek Pass.
Also visible was the development that tends to eat up those landscapes. There’s not much “orchard” left along Highway 50 as you exit Grand Junction through Orchard Mesa. Headed south on 550, formerly verdant fields now sprout shopping centers and homes on the southern border of Montrose. There’s so much growth marching in all directions from Durango that the community’s primary medical center is now several miles east of town, closer to Bayfield than Main Avenue.
“Saving the Ranch” is serious business in Archuleta County. The Alliance isn’t alone in working to use purchased or donated conservation easements to preserve the working landscapes that provide much of our open space. The Pagosa Springs Area Association of Realtors and the Archuleta Economic Development Association helped put on this year’s conference.
Representatives of both those groups spoke about the importance of maintaining agriculture as a component of the community character, the sense of place that brings new residents and new business to the county. Driving their point home was the fact that those of us from out of town competed for hotel space with more than a thousand participants from all over the country in Pagosa Springs for a horse clinic put on by a local business.
When my time came, I opened with Dick Lamm’s thought and closed with this from another prominent westerner.
“Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all brief tenants on this planet. By choice or by default, we will carve out a land legacy for our heirs.”
— Stewart Udall, “The Quiet Crisis”
The conversation last Saturday was about choices and legacies and as much about taxes and estate planning and inheritance as it was about views and open spaces and working landscapes. Realtors from international firms and appraisers specializing in conservation properties told how easements can actually increase the value of both the properties to which they’re applied and those of neighbors.
Author/architect Tony Anello talked about the economic advantages of first mapping and excluding areas with high conservation values, then plugging in potential development on a ranch in New Mexico. And, while I’ve had occasion over the years to be moved to tears by accountants, most in the room choked up for a different reason when Brad Tafoya from Cortez closed his typically CPA-like presentation by reading his father-in-law’s emotional message about what it meant to keep intact the Montezuma County acreage that had been in that family for generations.
The rest of our trip brought us home through Creede and Lake City with a stop to visit my sister-in-law on the ranch she and my niece and nephew maintain in the Powderhorn Valley south of Gunnison. Pulling off the pavement, we met my son and his other cousins heading home from a weekend enjoying the lifestyle that’s part of our family’s heritage. Stepping on to the porch after eight miles of two track, most of it in low range 4WD, and looking over the meadows where we’ll gather to hunt in a few weeks drove the weekend’s lessons home.
It’s not easy, this “Saving the Ranch” business. It gets tricky out there at the intersection of private property rights and community values. But the folks in Archuleta County and elsewhere who work so hard at it deserve our thanks and support.
“The land is where we live and the consequences of our presence accumulate, determining what we can do and can no longer do. The land is thus the book of our lives. Each day we write upon it new pages, some splendid, some sordid, informing our progeny of the truth about us whatever we may write elsewhere.”
— Roger G. Kennedy, “Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause”
Jim Spehar works with the the Sonoran Institute, an organization that helps communities across the West make decisions which respect both the land and its people. He can be reached at .
Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.
Comments
Daryl L. Hunter
Rancher talk land and cattle what about de section 36 dat was given for Secular education of a higher hearking?
Consider the dreaded “P” word
By BRODIE FARQUHAR
Casper Star Tribune correspondent
A conservationist and a businessman considered the dreaded “P” word – planning – and all its implications Thursday night during the opening round of a free lecture series sponsored by the University of Wyoming and Casper College.
Bob Budd, executive director for the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust and Mark Willis, chief operating officer of the Wyoming Business Council, spoke eloquently and passionately about the challenges facing Wyoming’s citizens, and the chance that Wyoming might yet get it right when so many other states have gotten it terribly wrong.
Budd, a member of an old ranching family, who has worked for both the Wyoming Stock Growers and The Nature Conservancy, called upon Wyoming citizens to be truly mindful of what we’re doing and the consequences of our actions.
“We need to think in (terms of) complete strategies about development, from beginning to end,” said Budd. Take Jonah Field, for example, he said. It is obvious that close spacing of wells has an impact on sagebrush and sage grouse. “But what about the workers buying homes in Pinedale, which dramatically expands the footprint of energy development? What about the lost AUMs (grazing units)? Do we mitigate for that? Where does that push the rancher, if a key part of his business plan is occupied? It’s going to push him into (selling out and subdividing )35-acre parcels.”
Wyoming has to do a better job considering the economic, environmental and sociological consequences of development, said Budd, whether it is energy or housing development.
Environmental problems tend to sneak up on Wyoming’s citizens, incrementally, said Budd. “Have you ever driven into a place you haven’t seen for years, and you wonder ‘What happened?’” asked Budd. That recently happened to him when he drove through Star Valley, a place where his best friends from college grew up on dairy farms. Instead of farms, he found burgeoning housing developments.
“I’m a big advocate for local control, but sometimes locals get overwhelmed,” said Budd. That’s when the state, think tanks and the private sector need to step in and help locals think through all the ramifications of development and what it really means, he added.
A big impediment to thinking things through is the fall-back position of “That’s how we’ve always done it,” said Budd. The entire coal-bed methane industry is predicated on doing things in new and different ways, he said – using water well drilling rigs instead of massive oil and gas rigs to go after methane gas in Wyoming’s massive coal beds.
Long-held assumptions need to be challenged, according to Budd. Why this artificial limit on subdivision planning, set at 35 acres? Why do county commissioners still believe that rural housing development brings in new tax revenues, when all the evidence says it costs counties more in new services than they ever get in new revenues? Why insist on roads throughout a timber cut, when a road to the loading area works just as well?
At the same time, common sense needs to be recognized and valued, said Budd.
“Yeah, I like science, but too often it is used as a delaying tactic or for obfuscation,” he said. The best science gives useful information, like the research that demolished the assumption that sage-grouse are residential home-bodies and actually migrate 20-60 miles. The sage-grouse that summer on the slopes of Red Canyon Ranch near Lander actually came from leks near Hudson, “on legs no longer than your pinkie,” said Budd.
Budd cautioned that “just stopping activity doesn’t automatically produce the Garden of Eden. Conservation costs money. It is not free. It costs somebody money. Whether you want to restore a river, or a mountain—it costs money.
“We’re ahead of most states, but we need market-based strategies to get the conservation work done.”
That also means fairness, he said, that if oil and gas are expected to fund conservation efforts and they can’t develop a lease they already own, “then in fairness, they should get their money back,” said Budd.
He praised his Wildlife Trust board for taking the kind of long-range planning view that’s needed throughout the state, from local government to state and federal government. The board encourages those with good conservation ideas to take longer and broader views into their planning process, thereby coming up with even better projects, he said.
Business view
Willis cautioned that his opinions are not necessarily those of the Wyoming Business Council, and noted that he wasn’t supposed to mention the word “zoning.”
He warned the audience of students and Casper residents that Wyoming can anticipate future fights over water, from more populous and downstream states.
“Ground water isn’t the answer, because groundwater is a finite resource,” said Willis, as the suburbs of Cheyenne are learning to their sorrow, with ever-deeper wells.
A veteran of the oil business in Texas and Oklahoma, Willis has seen communities exhaust their groundwater through a lack of long-range planning. Most alarming, said Willis, T. Boone Pickens is busy buying up water rights, making a major shift from oil to water. “I can do without oil, but I can’t do without water,” said Willis.
He said living south of Fort Worth taught him the hazards and penalties of bad or no planning and poor management of land and water. “Wyoming still has a chance to look at what’s happened elsewhere and do it right here,” he said. He praised the value of planning, as seen in the counties between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, where it has been efficiently used to avoid problems and enhance quality of life.
He once saw a caravan of tractors beat back an attempt to extend planning into a rural area, which worked out just fine until an objectionable business moved in, and nothing could be done.
Two weeks ago, Willis visited a planned development outside Albuquerque, NM, which has things planned out to a 20-year horizon and will accommodate 100,000 residents in a community that conserves water, energy, provides efficient public transportation and encourages lone-eagle, Internet-based businesses with broadband access and neighborhood business centers that have a Kinko’s and Starbuck’s downstairs and offices upstairs.
Both Budd and Willis said Wyoming needs a range of creative incentives and disincentives to encourage government and businesses to take longer views on planning. One example might be a recapture taxes policy, aimed at farms outside of town and prime for development, but taxed at agricultural rates until actually sold. Such a tax could be deferred, they said, if the developer planned for cluster development, open space and preservation of wildlife habitat – even offering a community stable that everyone could use, rather than have dozens of small stables on ranchettes.
The next public lecture in the series will be Sept. 20, “Tinkering With Invisible Water,” featuring Diana Hulme of the UW Ruckleshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources, and Jim Cochran of the Laramie County Conservation District.
-30-
</a>