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Back on course/Great Outdoors Colorado is on the rebound, but the Division of State Parks ...

Saturday, September 1 at 12:00 AM

By Andrew Wallach

After a rocky period of uncertainty and of conflict with its state government cousins, Great Outdoors Colorado is back on track.

However, the recipient of about one in four GOCO dollars — Colorado State Parks — badly needs an overhaul.

Colorado voters created GOCO in 1992 and charged the new state agency with distribution of about half of Colorado’s lottery proceeds.

In its 15-year life, GOCO has funded preservation of more than a thousand square miles of Colorado land as open space and wildlife habitat. This is a land area greater than the combined sizes of Denver and Douglas counties.

In the upcoming state legislative session, GOCO will face powerful challenges to its hold on its revenues. State colleges and universities, public school districts, state veterans’ groups and others have all tried to persuade state legislators that they should share GOCO’s lottery riches.

A few years ago, the future didn’t seem to hold much promise for GOCO advocates.

After Gov. Bill Owens’ election in 1998, his administration pushed GOCO away from its early focus on land protection. Instead, Owens favored bolstering thinly stretched state agency operating budgets and curbing expansion of public land ownership.

But now GOCO seems to be back in the land protection business in a big way. In June of this year the GOCO board earmarked $100 million for grants this year, with the majority for land protection and GOCO’s high-profile Legacy Grants.

State agency partners

GOCO’s two largest constitutionally mandated grant recipients are the state divisions of Wildlife and State Parks, each receiving 25 percent of GOCO’s grants.

Early on, GOCO and the state agencies had seemed able to manage their arranged marriages successfully. In the late 1990s, as GOCO provided grants for preservation of more than 230,000 acres, Wildlife used GOCO funds to significantly expand its protected habitat lands. State Parks embarked on its ambitious “Crown Jewels” park acquisition program.

GOCO’s direction changed as the decade closed, with Owens’ appointment of Greg Walcher as the director of the Department of Natural Resources. The department oversees both the state parks and wildlife agencies, and has an important voice on the GOCO board.
Walcher acted quickly to assert independence from GOCO, essentially terminating two DNR agencies’ participation in major land acquisition programs.

In the Division of Wildlife, which faced decreased growth in its fishing and hunting fees, Walcher pushed to channel GOCO funding into salary support for agency staff. At their peak in 2001, these staffing support programs consumed $8 million per year in GOCO funds and elicited growing resistance from the GOCO board.

Unrealized ambitions

In State Parks, efforts to preserve the state’s most desirable mountain properties peaked in 1998. That year GOCO funded acquisition of 17,000 acres for four spectacular parks around the state, sites labeled the “Crown Jewels” by State Parks staff:

Scarce Front Range foothills open space at Cheyenne Mountain, adjacent to the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs.

Foothills ranchland at Staunton Ranch, near Pine at the frontier of the southwest Denver exurbs.
The nearly pristine mountain valley at Brush Creek, now part of Sylvan Lake Park near Eagle.
And the remote but spectacular 11,000-plus-acre Lone Mesa in southwestern Colorado, near Dolores.

In 2001 Walcher appointed Lyle Laverty, a former U.S. Forest Service official, as State Parks director.

Laverty faced shrinking legislative appropriations for parks operations. He quickly shut down agency land acquisition and deferred basic development programs at two new parks. He replaced these efforts with a program using GOCO funds to develop “resort-level” amenities in the parks.

Laverty argued these embellishments would provide a revenue windfall for the financially struggling agency. Among his first efforts using GOCO’s “free” capital was investment of $820,000 in “three exceptional, lodge-caliber cabins” at Mueller State Park. While net revenues on this investment have never been published, staffers acknowledge that new cabin “profits,” if any, are meager.

Meanwhile, two of State Parks’ four “Crown Jewels” are languishing. Lone Mesa, with some of the most spectacular scenery in the state, has yet to open to the public except for seasonal hunting use. And the scenic Staunton site is also closed to the public. It awaits, according to State Parks, improvements on nearby U.S. 285.

In February of this year, when Laverty approached GOCO for funding to construct a wedding and banquet “events center” at Cheyenne Mountain, the GOCO board dug in its heels. A commitment from current DNR Director Harris Sherman to thoroughly review State Parks finances has put that project on hold.

State parks users need Gov. Bill Ritter and Sherman to find a new, less capital-intensive approach to using GOCO funds to help restore our existing parks and allow the public to enjoy our new “crown jewels.”

Opening the new parks to dispersed camping, and funding youth and volunteer groups’ construction of new trails seems one good possibility. This would avoid the heavy infrastructure investment necessary to accommodate recreational vehicles and resort-level lodging.

In the meantime, GOCO has consistently been graced with talented and conscientious board members since its inception. It continues to creatively and energetically address the mission Colorado citizens set out for it 15 years ago. The agency deserves undiminished support from the state and its citizens.

Andrew Wallach held management positions in three Denver mayoral administrations and served as deputy director of Great Outdoors Colorado from 1998-2000.

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