Towns Fork Over Funds to Prop Up the Feds – By Alan Neuhauser (usnews.com) / Nov 9 2018
Amid federal cutbacks and booming tourism, towns, counties and utilities in the Intermountain West are paying for services once fully funded by the federal government.
After officials in the Colorado ski destination of Telluride discovered nearly 9,000 pounds of trash in an illegal mountainside dump just outside of town on federal land, they called in a helitack crew – normally used to drop firefighters into brushland to fight wildfires – to haul out the trash with a Blackhawk helicopter and a sling.
“They did this as a training exercise, and we were able to avoid a really huge cost,” says Greg Clifton, who was then the town manager of Telluride. “It was just a huge deposit of stuff. It’s a really good illustration of what happens when people just aren’t watching.”
The secret landfill had accumulated not so much under the noses of U.S. forest rangers as in their absence entirely: More frequent and ferocious wildfires have burned through ever larger swaths of a U.S. Forest Service budget that’s failed to keep up, forcing the agency to make cuts in everything from forest rangers to basic facilities maintenance.
In the face of those cutbacks, towns, counties and utilities across the Intermountain West have made an unusual decision – one the Telluride Town Council approved in the wake of the 2015 trash airlift and which has also been implemented across the region: to spend local tax dollars to prop up the federal government.
“Philosophically, it may be a hard pill for the town council to swallow that we’re putting dollars to things that could be going toward local things – we’re allocating dollars to our adjoining federal lands,” says Clifton, who is now town manager for Vail, Colorado, another ski town about a five-hour drive from Telluride. “We also all recognize the incredible shortage of resources that that particular agency is operating with and that they are quite constrained in being able to provide effective stewardship in the lands that surround us.”
Vail, for example, is putting $37,000 a year in a partnership with neighboring towns and Eagle County to hire rangers for the summer. Water districts in Denver and Santa Fe, New Mexico, plus the town of Ashland, Oregon, meanwhile, are helping fund tree-thinning and other fire-prevention measures in crucial watersheds that supply their water systems.
“There’s always that feeling, even at our municipal government, that we pay our taxes, why aren’t you already doing this?” says Alan Hook, manager of the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed Program. “The community realized how much these fires cost and how much the Forest Service is pouring into [fire] suppression costs. … If we lose this source of supply, we could be in dire straits in the near future.”
“There’s always that feeling, even at our municipal government, that we pay our taxes, why aren’t you already doing this?”
Denver Water, for example, owns only 3 percent of the watershed it’s protecting, while the Forest Service holds 54 percent, says Christina Burri, watershed scientist at the utility. But the utility nonetheless agreed to put up $33 million in a 50-50 partnership with the agency, a decision in part prompted by memories of fires in 1996 and 2002 that dumped scorched sediment into water district reservoirs and forced $28 million in repairs and remediation.
“That motivated Denver Water to invest in forest health, to create a healthy forest so we can be proactive against these costs,” Burri says. “It’s important for us to be able to partner to be able to get access to work on these lands and create a healthier condition in these forests, because that’s the source of our water.”
The towns and water districts maintain that the new expenses can easily be absorbed by their budgets. The funds being put forward by Denver Water, for example, account for 1 percent of the utility’s budget overall.
“I would never suggest it’s not a big deal because everything adds up. But we can absorb it,” Clifton, of Vail, says.
Even so, there are financial pressures: Ashland, for example, is facing a budget crunch from an upcoming jump in labor costs.
“We’re in a very difficult position with the public employees,” Mayor John Stromberg, a Democrat, says. But the town has little choice but to fund projects around its watershed, a crucial source of water for the town. “We have to keep control of this, but the fire danger is even greater than before because of the lengthening fire season and drought.”
The approach comes as states such as Colorado and Oregon have seen breakneck growth in both residential development and tourism, with residents and visitors alike being drawn to hiking, biking, skiing and other outdoor activities. The boom has proved an economic boon to such outdoor destinations, but it’s put a new strain on resources such as trails and restrooms. White River National Forest, for example, which surrounds much of Vail, draws 12 million people each year.
“Over the years you can see the increasing impacts on the trailheads and on the trails and on the wildlife,” says Kim Langmaid, a Vail councilwoman and founder of Walking Mountains Science Center, an environmental education nonprofit. “Increasing use at trailheads and not enough management to maintain good access, overuse of trails that were never designed to accommodate so many people, dogs being off leash chasing mountain goats, not having the appropriate facilities in order to leave less of an impact on the land – in the past we’ve always relied on the Forest Service to manage those things that are just outside of our town boundaries, and at this point we just can’t rely on that.”
