Cheyenne Mountain Zoo wins innovation award
The Quarters for Conservation program won Cheyenne Mountain Zoo the Innovation in Conservation Award from the Palmer Land Trust on Wednesday. The award, part of the Southern Colorado Conservation Awards, honors an individual, group, project, or program that has advanced the cause of conservation by developing new ideas.
Read more from the Colorado Springs Gazette here.

Land trust preserves Summit County’s natural landscape
With a strong volunteer base and big dreams, Continental Divide Land Trust works hard to preserve Summit County’s natural landscape. “Open space and preserving it is one of the most important things to think about in Summit County,” said Terry Hershey, a CDLT volunteer and board member.
Read more from the Summit Daily News here.

Colo. OKs fine in drilling contamination case
Colorado regulators are fining an energy company a record $423,300 for contamination from natural gas operations that fouled a landowner’s spring and made him ill. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and Williams Production agreed to the settlement Thursday.
Read more from the San Francisco Examiner here.

Western Colorado land swap runs into opposition
A land swap involving one of the richest men in the world and a congressman who enjoys hunting on the ranch has stirred up local controversy and riled a national land-exchange watchdog group. U.S. Rep. John Salazar introduced a bill in April that would give energy magnate Bill Koch just over 1,840 acres of Bureau of Land Management land and a 3-acre sliver of Forest Service land in Gunnison County for Koch giving the National Park Service 991 acres in Dinosaur National Monument and the Curecanti National Recreation Area.
Read more from the Denver Post here.

The perils of T. Boone Pickens’ energy plan
There natural gas industry likes to cast itself as a green alternative in the fight against global warming, with folks like T. Boone Pickens and his allies at the forefront of the effort to increase gas use for electricity generation and as an automobile fuel. Now Congress appears ready to provide taxpayer subsidies in a Senate energy bill for parts of the Pickens plan. But let’s be sure we’re getting good public policy, not just an expensive public relations push.
Read more from the Denver Post here.

Check out the video below of the majestic sandhill cranes which are drawn to the vast open lands and wildlife refuge of Monte Vista.

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Thousands of acres of private lands that are home to critical wildlife habitat, river corridors and scenic landscapes would be saved from development under an $800 million plan unveiled Wednesday.

The undertaking is the work of a new coalition called Keep It Colorado. Its high-profile members include the Conservation Fund, Colorado Open Lands, Nature Conservancy, Trust For Public Lands and Colorado Conservation Trust.

The group will focus attention and preservation efforts on 700,000 acres of land in 24 different regions of the state, from the San Juan Valley to the Eastern Plains.

Keep It Colorado officials are counting on landowners to donate easements on critical properties worth $400 million, and they hope to raise roughly $400 million from private and public sources, possibly from severance tax funds.

But severance tax funds are far from guaranteed.

Rep. Bernie Buescher, chairman of the Joint Budget Committee, said if changes are made to oil and gas severance tax rules, then voters will be the ones to decide if new monies are channeled into land conservation.

“And the fact is that there is going to be a lot of competition for that money,” Buescher said.

The plan is not without its critics.

“We have no shortage of open spaces in Colorado,” said Jon Caldera, president of the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank.

Caldera doesn’t think Colorado should be spending tax money to protect land.

“What gets me is that right now everyone is licking their lips over oil and gas money and more taxes,” said Caldera. “The only thing we need much more of is energy. The last thing I want to tax is what we need the most.”

But Gov. Bill Ritter, who introduced Keep It Colorado to dozens of conservation groups at a breakfast at the Denver Botanic Gardens on Wednesday, lauded the plan. “This will invigorate our collective efforts to preserve what’s best about our state,” he said.

Colorado has become a national leader in land conservation, saving more than 1.1 million acres using easements, legal tools that allow property owners to claim lucrative income tax credits in exchange for prohibiting development on their lands.

But Colorado’s program, enacted in 2000, has been plagued with abuse, with hundreds of easements under investigation for using faulty appraisals and for protecting lands of questionable public value.

Ritter acknowledged those problems, but said he wanted the conservation tax credit program preserved.

“We’ve found there are people who have abused the tax credit program. And worse, there are people who say it should end. But we are not going to let it go away,” he said.

Great Outdoors Colorado, an independent agency funded with lottery dollars, has protected hundreds of thousands of acres statewide, as have local open space programs.

But Colorado’s lands are under increasing pressure due to residential and commercial development and new oil and gas production.

“If we are ever going to keep it Colorado, now is the time to do it,” said Michael Dowling, chairman of the Boulder-based Colorado Conservation Trust.

Where ‘Keep It Colorado’ hopes to find $800 million

The coalition has identified 700,000 acres of critical view sheds, river corridors and wildlife habitat that it says should be protected from development. The lands targeted for protection are private. Here’s how the coalition envisions funding the ambitious plan:

Total cost $800 million

Private land donations $400 million

Private cash donations $100 million

Public funds from Great Outdoors Colorado grants and local open space funds $100 million

Unmet need, possibly from severance tax funds $200 million

Money committed to date:

$2 million: Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

$15 million: Colorado Division of Wildlife

Over several decades, Colorado has built one of the nation’s most effective land-conservation systems to protect its diverse and dramatic landscapes. Local governments, nonprofit land trusts, and citizens’ groups pioneered public open- space funding and developed innovative financial incentives that, together with philanthropic contributions, have protected more than 2 million acres of private lands with important conservation values. Only California and Maine have protected more land.

However, regulators and the media have questioned whether in some cases, the public conservation benefits justify lost revenue from Colorado’s tax- credit program. State agencies are investigating whether tax credits were claimed to protect lands possessing few conservation values or where tax savings may have been based on inflated appraisals. And the Internal Revenue Service is auditing close to 300 tax returns with federal conservation-easement deductions.

Central to these inquiries are conservation easements, voluntary legal agreements that allow property owners to donate all or part of the development value of their lands to nonprofit land trusts or government agencies while retaining private ownership. Conservation easements typically limit future development and subdivision of the land, thereby permanently preserving its important natural features. The easements are particularly useful in protecting Colorado’s working farms and ranches, which comprise almost 80 percent of private lands statewide.

Substantial state and federal tax benefits were created to recognize the public benefits of property owners voluntarily restricting the future development potential of their land through conservation easements. In return, land trusts and government agencies that hold these easements promise to protect these lands forever.

Unfortunately, some opportunistic individuals appear to have viewed these tax incentives as a way of profiting at taxpayers’ expense without providing lasting conservation benefits in return.

Colorado’s conservation community welcomes the state inquiry to investigate potential fraud. The Colorado Conservation Trust issued a report in 2005 calling on the state Department of Revenue to provide more oversight and enforcement of the state tax credit program. Thankfully, Gov. Bill Ritter is now bringing abuses to light and addressing them.

We also must avoid harassing landowners who have played by the rules and not make the system too cumbersome for legitimate conservation-easement transactions to occur. Many easements being audited involve partnerships with city, county, state and federal land-protection agencies, where easement value was purchased by Great Outdoors Colorado, the Colorado Division of Wildlife, or federal conservation programs. The conservation purposes and assessed values of these transactions received significant analysis and oversight, as well as funding, from government land-protection programs.

The land trust community understands the need to maintain the integrity of our conservation organizations and practices. Conservation leaders worked last session with Rep. Alice Madden and Sen. Jim Isgar to pass legislation improving reporting requirements and clarifying public benefits for easement-protected lands, and are active participants in a task force to develop for future reforms.

We must tighten standards so that tax credits are awarded only for fairly valued conservation easements offering substantial public values on lands that will be monitored by capable conservation organizations. But time is running short for us to protect our most important natural lands.

Michael Dowling is a founder and the current chairman of the Colorado Conservation Trust. Doug Robotham is deputy director for programs and policy at the Colorado Conservation Trust.

Guest commentary submissions of up to 650 words may be sent to openforum@denverpost.com

Thanks to a dedicated effort by The Trust for Public Land and some key financial support, peakbaggers in southwestern Colorado soon will regain access to a historic route up Wilson Peak, the highest point in San Miguel County.

The route up 14,017-foot Wilson Peak goes through Silver Pick Basin on the mountain’s north side and also provides the easiest and most-direct access for climbing Mt. Wilson and El Diente, two nearby peaks in Dolores County.

However, after a series of contentious run-ins with climbers, landowner Rusty Nichols closed off access through his property to Silver Pick Basin. Although Nichols wasn’t interested in re-opening the mining claims, he did say he was concerned about liability and some problems he had had with trespassers.

In stepped the TPL, which negotiated with Nichols and eventually signed a deal worth $3.25-million for his 230 acres of mining claims. Additionally, another 70 acres is being protected through conservation easements.

“We are very gratified to take this initial step in the process to restore access to the Wilson Peak area,” said TPL Colorado state director Tim Wohlgenant. “We have extended ourselves financially because this is such an extraordinarily vital property. There is only one Wilson Peak and the prospect of losing it to development is unthinkable.”

Included in the fundraising effort was a climb last August led by blind mountaineer Eric Weihenmayer of Golden, who is only blind person to have climbed the “Seven Summits,” the tallest peak on every continent.

During that climb, Weihenmayer was quoted as saying, “People here (in Colorado) place a value on space for recreation. There are some places to me that just shouldn’t be owned.”

According to a report on the Web site Outside Online, the purchase marks the first time a Colorado 14er was bought from a private owner. Several other 14ers have similar private land access problems, including Culebra Peak and Mounts Lincoln, Democrat, Bross and Cameron.

The Silver Pick trail won’t open until next summer, said TPL spokesperson Karen Macdonald. As soon as conditions allow next spring, the conservation group plans to re-route the trail away from the Nichols cabin (which under the agreement Nichols will retain) and re-build parts of the trail.

Sometime next summer the TPL will turn over title of the land to the U.S. Forest Service.

This is an important purchase for backcountry users, Macdonald said.

“We want people to go out and enjoy and respect these places by actually using them,” Macdonald said.

Macdonald said the TPL still is trying to raise funds to cover a $1.7-million loan the group received from Colorado Conservation Trust for the Nichols property.

Among the supporters was the Coors Brewing Company, which uses an image of Mt. Wilson on its beer cans.

Dave Buchanan can be reached via e-mail at dbuchanan@gjds.com