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In the News
Articles on Colorado Conservation
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Crested Butte saves a little land for itself
Grand Junction Sentinel
Sunday, March 25, 2007
CRESTED BUTTE — People in Crested Butte are serious about preserving open space. So much so that the town council just donated $750,000 to the Crested Butte Land Trust to help it buy 70 acres to preserve the Upper Slate River Valley .
The land trust already has preserved about 950 acres in the valley through outright purchase or conservation easements, president Sandy Allen-Leinsdorf said, and the 70 acres is in a crucial area because it borders the edge of development by the town.
“It's another connecting piece to all the other preserved areas,” she said. “It's a buffer between the Raggeds Wilderness and development. These open spaces are important for recreation, economic benefit and ranching.”
The land trust was formed the same year the city dedicated itself to preserving open space when voters passed a real estate transfer tax by a 2-1 margin in 1991, Crested Butte community planner John Hess said.
Each time the city sells a piece of property, it puts 1.5 percent of the total into the fund for the acquisition or preservation of land outside town boundaries, he said.
“We've pretty much spent it as we go,” he said. “People just think it's the right thing to do.”
The town also has a program called One Percent for Open Space in which participating retailers and restaurants allow customers to add 1 percent of their purchase price to go to a fund for open space.
Land isn't cheap around Crested Butte, and the recent donation by the town to the land trust is only a portion of approximately $2.5 million the land trust needs to buy the 70 acres, Hess said.
Hess said the land trust is applying for a $500,000 grant from Great Outdoors Colorado and is applying for funds from the town of Mt. Crested Butte , the Gunnison County Preservation Board and the Department of Wildlife Habitat Protection program to buy the land.
The 70 acres is important to the community because it's the location of the winter trailhead to the Slate River and a major elk migration route, Hess said.
“This will add to the 949 acres already preserved there and add protection of the Slate River Wetlands Preserve, which is a huge wetlands area,” he said.
The deal is in the inspection phase.
The contract for sale is set to be signed May 1.
Battling a nature deficit
By Will Shafroth & John Parr, The Denver Post
Saturday, January 13, 2007
To the throngs waiting in line recently for a crack at buying the latest video games, imagining a childhood unplugged from the digital world must be an alien concept. No video games. No cellphones. No computers. Yet many of us over 40 lived such lives, and we may be healthier for it.
Since we didn't have digital entertainment, we organized kickball games, rode bikes and built tree houses. There was a lot of unstructured "messing around" time exploring the world around us, in the process stimulating both our minds and bodies.
Today there are growing concerns that our "plugged-in" kids are suffering physically, emotionally and mentally when compared to past generations. In his best-selling book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder," Richard Louv describes how today's kids are increasingly disconnected from the natural world and suffer from a condition he calls "nature-deficit disorder."
Louv makes a direct connection between children's increased time indoors - watching TV, playing video games and surfing the Internet - to conditions like attention disorders, childhood depression and obesity. He also highlights research showing that time spent in nature can decrease symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and can increase test scores.
It's easy to see how societal changes over the past 30 years have erected barriers, both physical and perceptional, between children and nature. Modern life is busy, scheduled and compressed. Increased traffic, unwalkable communities and parental fear of strangers and crime all have reined in the ability of kids to roam outside of their homes.
When kids have free time, it usually is spent in front of a TV or computer. The average child spends 35 hours per week watching television, making it almost a full-time job. Studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that a child is six times more likely to play a video game on a typical day than to ride a bike.
All this time inside or in scheduled play is extracting a significant health toll on our children. A 2003 study found that almost one in three American youth between the ages 10 and 17 is overweight or obese. Since 1970, the prevalence of obesity among adolescents ages 12 to 19 more than doubled, and it tripled for children ages 6 to 11.
Beyond stimulating bodies, play in nature stimulates the mind, reduces stress and fosters independence. Making angels in freshly fallen snow, jumping in a pile of fall leaves or holding a frog you've found in a pond all stimulate young minds in ways that can't be done on a computer. Inspirational naturalists like Thoreau, Muir and Roosevelt understood the mental and physical benefits that resulted from physical and mental challenges in nature. Their legacy is our system of parks, forests and wilderness areas that form the backbone of our public recreational resources.
Colorado is ahead of the country in many ways. We have top ski areas and federal lands for hiking and camping. We have dedicated public funding sources for parks and open space ranging from the lottery-funded Great Outdoors Colorado to 41 locally funded programs. We have also created many pedestrian- and bike-friendly communities.
It's no surprise, then, that Colorado youth are better off than their peers across the country on several indicators. Fewer Colorado students watch television more than three hours per school day than their peers nationally (26.8 percent of Colorado kids versus 37.2 percent nationally). And in the resulting health indicators, Colorado was the state with the second-lowest percentage of youths ages 10 to 17 who were obese (22 percent versus a high of 38 percent and a national average of 31 percent).
But even in Colorado , we have slipped from where we were a generation ago.
Growing awareness of the problem has led many to take action. Louv's Children and Nature Network's website (www.cnaturenet.org) describes region and national initiatives that are underway. The Colorado-based Outdoor Industry Foundation's "Get Youth Active" program (www.outdoorindustryfoundation.org) lists 17 organizations working in the state that help connect kids of all ages with outdoor recreational activities. Programs like Connecticut 's "No Child Left Inside" and the National Wildlife Federation's daily "Green Hour" all encourage children to play outside.
How we plan our communities and protect open spaces also is a vital component to reversing these trends. We need to encourage communities to be pedestrian- and bike-friendly so that residents have alternatives to the automobile. And we need to build off of the 41 local governments with dedicated open-space acquisition programs so that nature is close by, not a long drive away.
Finally, let's remember to take time to get outside with our kids every day. There is so much for them to learn and enjoy from the amazing natural amenities at our doorstep. It's good for their health and good for their mind. And it might do us adults some good, too.
Lottery sales set record again
The Denver Business Journal
Tuesday, January 16, 2006
The Colorado Lottery posted record sales for the third consecutive year in 2006.
Last year's sales of lottery tickets hit $454.2 million, a 2.6 percent increase over $442.6 million in sales the year before, according to the Colorado Lottery.
Record Powerball jackpots and higher sales of Cash 5 tickets helped drive the increased sales in '06. Sales of Lotto and Scratch tickets decreased a little for the year.
Proceeds from lottery-ticket sales, after payouts to winners, go to nonprofit groups such as Great Outdoors Colorado, Conservation Trust Fund and Colorado state parks. Since the lottery started in 1983, such groups have received $1.7 billion.
"Higher jackpots, loyal players and diligent retailers were just a few vital elements that helped us attain our sales goals," Peggy Gordon, Colorado Lottery director, said in a statement. "We plan to use the momentum to lead us through the upcoming year."
Powerball sales increased 15.6 percent to $111.6 million last year, the largest jump of all types of lottery tickets. Jackpots for Powerball hit a record $365 million last February, but another three Powerball jackpots reached more than $200 million each during the year.
Cash 5 sales rose 8.9 percent to $17.2 million.
Scratch sales dipped 0.7 percent to $288.7 million, and Lotto sales dropped 7.9 percent to $36.7 million.
In 2007, the Colorado Lottery plans to recruit more retailers to sell lottery tickets, hoping to have a total of 3,000 retailers by June 30. The lottery already has 2,900 licensed retailers statewide.
The lottery also wants to better manage its scratch ticket inventory by making sure more tickets available and existing ticket dispensers stay filled.
Yet another goal for the lottery this year is to come up with new games "that will excite loyal players while creating interest among new or infrequent players."
"We have very ambitious, but attainable, goals this year," Gordon said.
Private land conservation booms in US
by Mark Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Look out development sprawl, the land trusts are coming.
Each year the US loses about 2 million acres of open space, farms, and forest to development. But now the tables are turning. Rather than see local green space and rugged outdoor areas gobbled up by strip malls or subdivisions, private land owners are increasingly preserving it.
Out on the east fork of New Mexico 's Gila River , the endangered Gila trout is getting help from adjacent landowners who are setting aside 48,000 acres in several land trusts to protect its habitat by preventing development.
At the same time, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, 206 properties totaling more than 38,000 acres of fragile estuary habitat for migratory birds and marine life, like the short nose sturgeon, have been permanently set aside using legal tools like land trusts and conservation easements.
It's all part of a huge new boom in conservation of private lands in which landowners voluntarily give up rights to develop their land - often in return for tax breaks, but also to save rugged landscapes they love.
Private land set aside for conservation grew 54 percent from 24 million acres to 37 million acres- an area larger than New England - between 2000 and 2005, according to a recent study by the Land Trust Alliance, a Washington-based umbrella group of local, state, and national land conservation groups.
National groups such as The Nature Conservancy were key in this push for preservation. But the biggest drivers for growth were volunteer local and state land trusts, whose protected acreage doubled from 6 million acres in 2000 to 11.9 million acres. Meanwhile the rate at which those associations were saving land tripled to 1.2 million acres a year between 2000 and 2005.
"People are not sitting around and waiting for a Washington bureaucrat to solve the problem of strip malls in their own backyard - they're forming land trusts," says Rand Wentworth, president of the alliance.
Land trusts are nonprofit groups that assist in setting up conservation, agricultural, and other land-preservation easements and then act as land stewards. Over the five-year period, their numbers leaped by nearly a third to 1,667, the study shows. The focus of such trusts varied widely with 39 percent protecting natural areas and wildlife habitat to 38 percent for open space and 26 percent wetlands and water resources. Others focused on preserving farms, local parks, and urban gardens.
The single largest such deal saw 763,000 acres of Maine 's Pingree forest protected by a 2001 conservation easement now overseen by the New England Forestry Foundation, preserving the shorelines of many pristine lakes.
A tactic in combating sprawl
Even though land conservation during the five-year period grew faster than sprawl, that's no reason for complacency, Mr. Wentworth says.
"Sprawl is breathing down our necks in the communities in which we live," he says. "We need these community land trusts with urgency."
Funding from government agencies for land acquisition has dropped significantly in recent years. But state and local bond issues in which the public votes to fund land purchases has been booming.
The public is voting solidly to increase taxes in order to preserve land, Wentworth notes. In 2006 alone, 133 ballot initiatives nationwide from California to Georgia , New Jersey , Texas , and North Carolina raised $6.7 billion in public funding for land conservation.
Residents of Austin , Texas voted in November to spend more than $50 million to buy open space, says George Cofer, executive director of the Hill Country Conservancy, a land trust. Much of that will go to preserve land critical to recharging local aquifers the city depends on for drinking water.
Indeed, much of the impact has occurred in the western US, which saw an 89 percent jump in land preservation from 2.7 million acres in 2000 to 5.2 million acres in 2005 - the nation's biggest.
The incentives
Taxes are a key issue driving the phenomenon. With property values soaring, taxes on ranch land near Austin has soared for family ranchers. That has left some with the option of selling land to pay taxes - or lowering taxes by permanently setting the land aside from development.
"One rancher who put 5,700 [acres] in conservation recently told me, 'you saved not just my ranch, but my family,' " Mr. Cofer recounts.
In other parts of the West, ranchers face the prospect of selling family land just to pay estate taxes. But a growing number are choosing land-trust easements that diminish the land's value, but also chop estate taxes.
The Wyoming Stockgrowers Agricultural Land Trust, for instance, only got going around 2000, but now has more than 20 ranches and 50,000 acres in easements. Another 20,000-acre ranch will soon be added.
"Probably the biggest thing we've got now is wealthy people coming in and buying intact ranches and some building tract houses," says Ogden Driskill, whose 10,000 acre ranch surrounds two-thirds of majestic Devil's Tower National Monument.
He desperately wants to keep the view around it uncluttered. So he's pitching fellow ranchers easements to fend off the trend toward chopping up ranches into 40-acre pieces with houses.
Fortunately for him, western land trusts could see a banner year in 2007. That's thanks to a tax break for farmers and ranchers that preserves their land approved in August 2006.
"Many ranchers can't afford to do a conservation easement without tax incentives," he says. "It's one of the few ways to keep working ranches intact and in the family."
15 People and Organizations Who Use Fame, Fortune, Heart and Soul to Help Others
by Karen Breslau, Newsweek
Sunday, June 25, 2006
THE PIONEER
Randy Rusk
Wet Mountain Valley, Colo.
A conservative rancher stands up for his land by forging an unlikely alliance.
It wasn't too long ago that Randy Rusk considered "environmentalist" a dirty word. Like many of his fellow ranchers in Colorado's Wet Mountain Valley, a high prairie in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Rusk resented outsiders' telling him how to manage his land. But as he watched one ranch after anotherland that was once the domain of cattle and elkdisappear into housing developments, he had a change of heart.
In 2002, Rusk teamed up with the Trust for Public Land, a natonal nonprofit, and set up a conservation easement on his family's 1,500-acre spread. He sold his land's development rights to the TPL for less than half its $4 million market value. What's in it for him? He can count on the trust and its local partners to keep the property intact forever, ensuring that his grandkids can continue to ranch.
"It's hard to walk away from half of your net worth," says Rusk, "and it sure didn't make me real popular around here at first. But if you love the land, you want to keep it whole."
Once Rusk made his deal, saving the range became a personal crusade. In the years since, he's persuaded other area ranchers to make similar arrangements. The concept has become so popular that some landowners are simply donating the easements, allowing the land trusts to use their cash to buy up more acreage in the Wet Mountain Valley.
"Randy was able to show people around here why it makes sense," says Doug Robotham of the Trust for Public Land. "He's the validator in this community." By 2007, more than 11,000 acres of Wet Mountain Valley land will be protected from subdivision. "People are starting to realize that open space is valuableno matter what developers think," says Rusk. With his help, it's becoming priceless
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