Welcome to the September 2024 Keep Routt Wild Newsletter!

Hello, Keep Routt Wild followers!

For those unfamiliar with Keep Routt Wild, we are a community organization dedicated to preserving wildlife and wild places in Routt County. Our mission is to promote policies and practices for the benefit of conserving the Yampa Valley for future generations of outdoor enthusiasts by balancing opportunities for recreational development with the habitat needs of wildlife. We do this through education, engagement, and practicing conservation through informed science.

It's the end of September, as we delayed the publication to include late breaking news.

Articles for this month’s newsletter are:

• Mad Rabbit Funding Update

• Proposal to fund Mad Rabbit Trails NOT included in Referendum 2A

• Mad Rabbit Adaptive Management Plan

• Letter: Keep Routt Wild works to protect our wildlife

• What we’ve been reading and watching

• Quote of the Day

To find out more about Keep Routt Wild, go to our website, or follow our nearly daily postings on Facebook.

Mad Rabbit Funding Update

Last month’s KRW Newsletter, and a subsequent Letter to the Editor, has certainly energized the debate on how to spend the remaining 2A Trails funds, approved by the voters in 2013. There we documented the history of Referendum 2A, how its success was driven by the Core Trail support, and the subsequent prioritizing of mountain bike trails instead. We stated:

“But Core Trail expansion never occurred.

The 2A Trails Committee subsequently prioritized building of mountain bike trails instead, claiming their charter was to encourage tourism, not local amenities. Thus the City funded a massive construction of bike trails in the Buffalo Pass area, but not the Core Trail. Now there is a proposal that the bulk of the remaining funds be used to fund a second set of mountain bike trails, Mad Rabbit, again with little or no funds for the Core Trail.”

We suggested that the Council honor the wishes of the voters and extend the Core Trail and other connector trails within the City. Many of you wrote to City Council expressing similar sentiments. You can read about the City Council discussion on the topic here.

There is a counter-narrative that this vote wasn’t about the Core Trail and its connector network at all, and that Core Trail expansion was barely mentioned at the time of the vote. This is in direct contradiction to the historical record and the personal recollection of a multitude of voters. Click the image at the top of this article or go directly to the Steamboat Pilot Referendum 2A editorial at the time which states, “Imagine the Yampa River Core Trail extending upstream all the way to Haymaker — 2A provides the funds the community needs to leverage outside grants and make that dream a reality.” This is what the voters were led to believe would occur.

To be fair, mountain bike trails were also included in the STA (Steamboat Springs Trails Alliance) proposal, which you can read here. That’s how the Buffalo Pass trails were funded. But the Core Trail South expansion was regarded as low priority and never pursued in earnest. A million dollar grant to the City for the southern extension was returned.

Some of these decisions may be due to the priorities the 2A Trails Committee were given. The City Council at the time (December 2013) directed the 2A Trails Committee to prioritize their recommendations for specific STA trails, including:

A.    Promote Tourism

B.    Enhance the vitality of Steamboat Springs as a premier destination resort

Perhaps these priorities were relevant 10 years ago, but these priorities simply don’t match the current priorities of the citizenry or the City Council. A lot has happened since 2013, including Covid, a massive surge of summer visitors, and a related affordable housing crisis. Steamboat is packed in the summer. The City Council has requested the Chamber of Commerce to do less marketing and more managing of visitor impact. Mad Rabbit is counter to all this. The incremental 1700 summer visitors per day projected for Mad Rabbit (prorating the figures in the STA proposal) will only make our affordable housing crisis worse as demand for short term rentals skyrocket.

What makes this controversy worse, is that the 2A Committee will be recommending to City Council in December that Council use 2A funds to fund mountain bike trails NOT even included in the STA proposal – counter to the express wording and intent of Referendum 2A. They claim they can do this through a novel legal theory put forward by the City Attorney called “functional equivalence” to justify the funding of different trails. This is discussed elsewhere in this newsletter.

This is terrible advice to the City Council. Steamboat Springs faces multiple challenges regarding growth, finances, and affordable housing. Many of these may be addressed by future ballot referendums proposed by the Council itself. The Council risks loss of credibility, and potential loss of future referendums, if they are perceived to circumvent the intent of the voters using a controversial legal theory. It is best for the Council and the community if the Council stays within the confines of Referendum 2A.

This topic is scheduled to be discussed and decided at a City Council meeting on December 3. You can make a difference! You can write to the City Council asking them to fund the Core Trail instead of Mad Rabbit at citycouncil@steamboatsprings.net

You would not only be defending wildlife and wild places, you’d be helping to build a Steamboat Springs for the future.

Proposal to fund Mad Rabbit Trails NOT authorized by Referendum 2A

Referendum 2A was approved by the voters in 2013, and contained language authorizing only those trails explicitly included in the STA (Steamboat Springs Trails Alliance) proposal to be funded. In the article above, we mentioned that the 2A Trails Committee will be recommending to City Council that Council now fund three Mad Rabbit trails NOT included as part of Referendum 2A.

These specific trails have little or no relationship to the location or length described in the STA proposal. This violates the guideline that only trails in the STA enumerated list can be funded. These trails were included based on the rationale that they are “functional equivalents” if they perform part of an objective of an included trail. The apparent justification for these different trails is based on language in the STA proposal which states “[t]his project and its mapped location are subject to change during the land managers final planning and approval process.”

We agree with this statement. Indeed, we believe the original STA trails should remain as valid trails should the Forest Service tweak their specific distances and locations to accommodate resource and final planning needs.

However, the 2A Trails Committee is seeking to include trails that were never derivatives of STA trails. We know this from the historical record. In 2019 the Forest Service published a document explaining which trails were from the STA proposal, and which were of the Forest Service’s own making. This was also made available to the 2A Trails Committee at the time. We’ve overlayed which trails are which on the Mad Rabbit trails map below. The two columns on the chart to the right of the map are a direct screen capture of the Forest Service document.

This clearly shows that Mad Rabbit trails 4-18 were never part of the STA proposal. Yet Trails 7, 14, and 18, (totaling over $470,000) are proposed to be funded by the 2A Committee, by declaring them “functional equivalents” of STA trails.

We don’t know if this legal theory would be held up in a court of law. But in the court of public opinion this is terrible. Following the 2A Committee’s recommendation to fund these trails would place us in the paradox-like situation where trails outside the STA proposal would be funded, while other trails specifically approved by the voters would not.

We will be generating a white paper that dives deeper into this topic, and examines each trail. Stay tuned.

Mad Rabbit Adaptive Management Plan

As we’ve reported earlier, there were 15 instructions given by Forest Supervisor Russ Bacon to District Ranger Michael Woodbridge that were to be completed before Mad Rabbit is given final approval. The most significant of these is the requirement for an Adaptive Management Plan to be created jointly by the Forest Service and CPW (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

An August 9th draft can be read here. The plan divides up Mad Rabbit into three construction phases, with gated checkpoints before proceeding to the following phase.

In theory, a well-resourced adaptive management plan can keep a project within the bounds of no significant impact. Our input to the Forest Service and CPW was to make sure there is adequate funding year after year to perform the monitoring needed to assure the project proceeds incrementally within those bounds.

“I know the Mad Rabbit Trail project is a passionate topic, but it’s important to stick to the facts. Mr. Frithsen incorrectly states that Keep Routt Wild was formed with the “sole purpose of preventing the implementation of the Mad Rabbit trails project.” That is incorrect.”

– Dagny McKinley in the Steamboat Pilot

We were pleasantly surprised to read Dagny McKinley’s letter to the editor in the Steamboat Pilot. Read the whole thing here. It corrects a recent letter to the editor written by Mad Rabbit proponents that included false and derogatory comments about Keep Routt Wild.

We locals love our outdoor recreation and our abundant wildlife, so it is not surprising that we see passionate debate when there is a proposal that seemingly pits the two against each other. However, we live in a small community. We need to respect others, even when we disagree. We, like Dagny, hope that the issues can be discussed civilly with a focus on the facts, and certainly not by making accusations about other community members who may hold different views.

What we’ve been reading and watching

(Click on any title to read the article)

California voters banned mountain lion hunting three decades ago, but the killing never stopped

“Experts on ballot initiatives say that [California’s mountain lion hunting ban] should serve as a warning about the unintended consequences of voters enshrining hard-to-change measures into law.”

“Since [the hunting ban] passed, an average of 98 mountain lions have been killed each year with depredation permits – nearly four times the average number of lions killed each year under such permits prior to the ballot measure, according to a Sacramento Bee analysis of state records.”

California is the only state to outlaw mountain lion hunting, but Coloradans will vote on a similar hunting ban, Proposition 127, this November. We love these big cats, but Proposition 127 is misguided and counter to modern science-based wildlife management.

The investigative reporting linked above from the Sacramento Bee shows how unintended consequences can be enshrined for perpetuity through ballot proposals without achieving their primary objective. Regulating the take of wildlife, including mountain lions, should be left to the professionals at CPW where population levels can be managed holistically with that of the associated prey species. We hope the voters will agree with us in November by voting NO on 127.

The Copper Creek wolf pack has been captured and CPW says the adult male was unhealthy and has died

“CPW says six animals were caught: an adult female and an adult male, and four pups. But the male wolf has died from injuries not related to its capture, according to CPW.”

“The four pups were captured over three days (Sept. 3-5) and CPW says they were underweight but otherwise healthy. … CPW plans to watch their health and re-release them when they are adult-sized so they can “hunt on their own or together in a pack.”

Ranchers with the most wolf depredations ask U.S. Fish & Wildlife to take over Wolf Management

“Two ranching families have sent a letter to U.S. Fish and Wildlife asking the federal agency to take over the management of the wolves from Colorado Parks and Wildlife.” 

Bears need everyone’s help to survive

“Bubenheim said residents do not realize that up to two dozen bears are living within city limits. The Keep Bears Wild educator noted “a lot of misinformation flowing around Facebook” about bears in Steamboat, so she provided an update on the curious, hungry bruins and one high-profile black bear family.”

Quote of the Day

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