Colorado Parks & Wildlife Held Purgatoire Watershed Strategy Meeting
- Anne Boswell Taylor
- 7 minutes ago
- 4 min read
~Norman L. Kincaide, Ph.D.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) held a meeting on the Purgatoire River Watershed Strategy in the Pioneer Room, Student Center, Trinidad State College, May 11, 2026, from 6:30 to 8 P.M. This meeting was to illustrate the Habitat Conservation and Connectivity Plan, (HCCP) published in December 2024. This strategy defines priority wildlife species, priority wildlife landscapes and movement corridors that connect these landscapes. The goal is to select a subset of watersheds to focus habitat conservation and restoration efforts. The desired outcome is to assist Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s work and facilitate the use of limited staff capacity and funding in the most efficient manner and to help communicate CWP’s priority areas to their conservation partners.
The focal species identified were for the Purgatoire Watershed: deer, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, native fish and sport fish. Justification criteria for inclusion in the model are: CPW has a habitat restoration target or program focus for that species; established habitat restoration practices for the species; and available state-wide spatial data layers that incorporate abundance and occupancy.
According to CPW, many planning efforts stop short of actually setting conservation targets to implement, while identifying funding opportunities to achieve management targets set forth in the planning document. The HCCP was developed as a two-phase process: An analysis phase to identify priority landscapes at the larger statewide scale. And a local planning phase, to set implementation targets at the local scale. The analysis phase helped CPW identify landscapes where CPW intends to focus its habitat restoration, conservation and connectivity efforts. In identifying the priority watersheds necessary to CPW moving forward to the local watershed planning phase, CPW evaluated several different approaches. CPW ultimately chose the highest combined ranked watershed in each of the four CPW regions: Purgatoire, Southeast Region; Upper Yampa, Northwest Region; Upper Gunnison, Southwest Region; and Middle South Platte-Sterling, Northeast Region.
All of this is to develop working partnerships in restoration, stewardship of conserved lands and conservation. This is done by identifying existing interests, plans, programs, and capacity across entities. This is not a request for proposals or a grant program. This is also to identify locally driven watershed strategic watershed priorities, to meet annually to discuss upcoming projects and priorities, to incorporate feedback into implementation strategies and focus field level management actions and ground delivery.
The delivery mechanisms for the HCCP are vegetation habitat and riparian restoration. Stewardship of conserved land is done by participating in land use or development planning processes and providing data and expertise on plans. Conservation Easements and fee simple land purchases provide the field level delivery. Amanda Nims, Land Protection Specialist with the CPW, reiterated that conservation easements are completely voluntary. There is also a long and costly process involved that may take many years. They are touted as necessary for conservation of lands for wildlife and preservation of land and values. John Barkowski, CPW, even pointed out how many and where current conservation easements were in place on a map of Purgatoire Watershed. The Purgatoire Watershed guiding principles are: maintaining ecological intactness, maintaining connectivity for wildlife across the landscape, and ecological restoration and climate adaptation through intact ecosystems.
There were twenty-two people in attendance along with several CPW personnel. The presentation was basically to present an opportunity to sell conservation easements through land trusts who work with CPW. These were presented as perpetual conservation easements or public access easements. This again plays upon property owner emotional attachment to their temporal possession. This was the same situation at the Stop the NIETC informational meeting at the Cow Palace in Lamar on April 1, 2026. Very little was presented about the Transmission Line Corridor issue, but an individual was there to sell perpetual conservation easements. This did not set well the folks in Lamar and again in Trinidad. The skepticism and wariness of residents of southeastern Colorado has been well justified by how many times they have been targeted by various entities, one of the most egregious was the State of Colorado conservation easement tax credit scam of the early 2000s.
There was no indication that the CPW plans were in any way connected to the Forest Service Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands revised management plan process which was initiated in October 2023. But any government plans that involve southeastern Colorado raise a large blip on the radar of property owners.
CPW personnel complained that property owners refuse to provide data. Property owners counter that nobody is entitled to their information nor do they have to fill out a survey that may come back to harm them in the future. To the property owners in the Purgatoire Watershed, it appears they are being targeted again because of the sparse, aging population that may be vulnerable to government programs. The CPW is concerned about development in a seven-county region with roughly 70,000 people. Whereas within a two-hour drive of the Pawnee Grasslands there are 1.5 million residents.
The concerns of the attendees listed on a large chart of pressures and challenges were: rewilding of Colorado is a threat to private property rights; red cedars; prairie dogs; wind & solar farms; tamarisk abatement; tax base concerns and water leaving farms; ATVs; and gaps in CPW data. For Tony Hass, Las Animas County Commissioner, his concern was the detrimental effect of a Wild and Scenic River designation for the Purgatoire River at Pickett Wire Canyon, which the Forest Service insists is free flowing under the act.
The other troubling issue for Andee Leininger of La Junta, was that CPW stakeholder and conservation partners were consulted and met with before property owners were notified of this HCCP process. They were the last to know for the Forest Service revised management plan process. It was interesting that none of CPW’s conservation partners or stakeholders were in attendance. It is little wonder that property owners feel they are being targeted for conservation easements again. Not to mention their mistrust of land trusts. Was the real purpose of the CPW meeting in Trinidad to find vulnerable and gullible property owners who could help the CPW meet its conservation goals and field level targets by throwing away the freedom of having clear title to their property?
Source: Colorado Parks & Wildlife Habitat Conservation and Connectivity Plan, December 2024
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