Northwest Colorado Stewardship Partnership lays groundwork
for first community-based planning project

CRAIG, CO—In a clubhouse west of town, ranchers sat next to environmentalists, while county officials and state employees rubbed elbows with federal land management staff. When the Sept. 16 meeting was concluded, the Northwest Colorado Stewardship Partnership had laid the foundation for collaborating in land management decisions that have historically been polarizing questions in this far corner of Colorado.

Most of the land in Moffat County is managed by the federal government, making public land management a critical concern for the more than 13,000 county residents. In recent years, the county has seen mineral development vying with wilderness proposals from environmental groups in an area where ranching is still an important economic activity.

"Often federal land managers are faced with competing interests positioning themselves legally and politically to have public lands managed for their particular point of view," said BLM Little Snake Field Area Manager John Husband. "This has not been very productive for anybody. We hope to start a process where all the interests can work together to find consensus."

The Northwest Colorado Stewardship Partnership got off the ground with its first meeting in April 2003. The group evolved from the Northwest Colorado Working Landscape Pilot Project, a Moffat County proposal to improve community input into land management decisions. The proposal stemmed from a statewide county government initiative to involve county governments in wilderness designations, many of which left western slope residents feeling left out of the process. In addition, Moffat County government has been very active in the RS 2477 debate, which identifies and asserts historic rights-of-way on federal lands under the authority of county government.

"This innovative management approach empowers those of us who live on the land to be part of the managerial process which allows us to use, preserve and enjoy the public land we are all dependent on," said Moffat County Commission Chair Les Hampton.

From that beginning, the partnership has evolved to include people from all walks of life.

At the Sept. 16 meeting they received the welcome news that the fledgling partnership had been selected by the Red Lodge Clearinghouse, an organization emerging from the Workshop on Collaborative Resource Management in the Interior West, to receive a $10,000 grant and support in making the stewardship project a success.

Buoyed by news of their selection, the partnership turned their attention to a project that would allow them to learn together and begin to play a more meaningful role as an organization in finding collaborative solutions to land use questions.

The partnership will work on a fire management plan for the Seven Mile Ridge/Bald Mountain area. They hope ecological models for fire management developed as part of that project can then be used for a county-wide approach to improving the health of the land that is so important to all of the partnership’s members.

The next Northwest Colorado Stewardship Partnership meeting will be at Shadow Mountain Clubhouse, at 8 a.m. Friday, Oct. 17. The morning will consist of four hours of presentations on ecological models of the dominant vegetation types in Moffat County, with an afternoon field trip to the project area to see those vegetation types first hand.

The public is invited to participate in the partnership meetings. For more information contact BLM’s Jeremy Casterson at 970-826-5071 or Moffat County’s Ann Franklin at 970-824-9151.

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