Colorado’s rivers are bouncing with boats. Anglers are casting everywhere. 

“We are getting into places that have never been paddled before and the increase in demand since COVID is a huge explosion of people getting in the outdoors learning more about our state,” said Nik White, who teaches whitewater paddling skills on the Arkansas River, Clear Creek and the South Platte with nearly a third of his classes focused on packrafting, up from zero five years ago.

And White — who has been teaching paddling for 15 years and owns a company called Whitewater Workshop — has seen a recent uptick in angry landowners. He’s got stories of property owners waving guns, chasing boaters and threatening paddlers as they walk around dangerous rapids. 

“Landowners are getting more aggressive. It’s having a chilling effect that makes it difficult to go paddling in some areas,” White said. 

Conflicts between river uses and property owners date back decades in Colorado, a state that has the murkiest access laws in the country. Courts have handed down rulings in contentious lawsuits involving access on the Arkansas River and Colorado River. Attorneys general have written opinions. Lawmakers have tried twice to clear the waters around floating and wading through private lands. And now, there’s even a split in a newly formed stream access coalition with paddling groups leaving a not-quite-unified effort to craft legislation that would open all of Colorado waterways to the public. 

For years, those conflicts have been settled on a case-by-case basis, with landowners, boaters and anglers sitting at a table and finding some sort of agreement. 

But those negotiations, “often leave the recreator powerless,” said Hattie Johnson with American Whitewater, which a week ago joined other paddling groups in breaking from the new Colorado Stream Access Coalition to forge their own legislation. 

Outfitters are stressed that a landowner could shut down their business. Recreation industry advocates fret river conflicts could paint their carefully manicured, good-times portrait of Colorado in an unflattering light. Property owners point to a 1979 Supreme Court decision and a 1983 Colorado attorney general memo and say passing paddlers are trespassing if they touch a rock in the riverbed.  

“At some point, it’s all going to come to a head,” said Jenifer Freeman, a lobbyist working with paddling groups on possible legislation that would allow river users to pass through private property without trespassing, even if they touch a rock. “So it’s better to try to find a joint solution.”

The camps are forming for a renewed fight. The new Colorado Stream Access Coalition is courting lawmakers for stream access legislation that will open public access through private property. That coalition is splintering though as river users argue over whether legislation should allow floating or wading through private property. Landowners are unifying, arguing that legislation allowing the public to pass through private land will be akin to the government seizing property and they are promising lawsuits “that will bankrupt that state,” said a landowner lawyer. 

The legislation is not yet written. A new movie, “Common Waters,” is landing in Colorado theaters next month, detailing the prickly access challenges in the state’s waterways. A new study is urging advocates and lawmakers to back away from a legislative fix, arguing that the spot-fire negotiations in the last two decades is the best approach to settling river conflicts. 

“We are in this situation where we are recognizing that outdoor recreation is losing. I think that’s bad for our image and it’s bad for our economy,” Freeman said. “These are amazing places, and I get wanting to own your own little piece of it, but I don’t see how it’s in the public interest to allow private property owners to gobble it all up so no one gets to use it.”

A third try for legislation

This would mark at least the third time Colorado lawmakers have considered a law to allow boaters to pass through private property. The Colorado Stream Safety Act was scripted in 1996 to allow kayakers safe passage through private property — allowing them to scout or portage obstacles like waterfalls, barbed wire fences and downed trees. The legislation turned out to be one of the most contentious issues of the 1996 session. It passed the Colorado House but stalled in the state Senate.

The failed legislation prodded the creation of the River Surface Recreation Forum, which formed to study river access conflicts and find solutions. Boating advocates created a national database of river conflicts that showed conflicts on Colorado rivers accounted for nearly 40% of the 82 nationwide issues over 18 months from 1998 to 2000. Most of those were along the South Platte, but the list included incidents on the Taylor, the Elk, Lake Fork of the Gunnison, the Yampa, the Colorado River near Granby, the Dolores, the Roaring Fork, the Poudre, the Eagle, the Arkansas, Clear Creek, Bear Creek, South Boulder Creek and the North St. Vrain. 

The 1996 legislation would have allowed paddlers to scout or portage river obstacles, eliminated the liability of landowners should anyone be hurt paddling through their property and prevented paddlers from fishing, hunting, camping, picnicking or loitering on private property. 

“Access problems in Colorado appear worse in number and severity despite the efforts of your committee and it only seems to be a matter of time before a landowner-boater conflict results in personal injury (or) the boater is injured by running a drop which the boater would have portaged had there been no penalty for doing so,” reads a memo from Ken Ransford, an attorney from the Roaring Fork Valley who worked as American Whitewater’s access director in the 1990s and wrote a “kayaker perceptive” memo in January 2001 for the newly formed River Surface Recreation Forum. 

That forum was unable to fully settle access disputes, so Colorado lawmakers in 2010 — spurred by renewed splashing over access on the Taylor River — again considered a law that would allow rafters to pass through private land so long as they made only “incidental contact” with the riverbed.

House Bill 1188, sponsored by a Gunnison lawmaker and called the Commercial Rafting Viability Act, protected the right of commercial rafting companies to float through private land. The bill passed the state House but stalled in the Senate. 

In 2011, then-Gov. Bill Ritter formed the River Access Dispute Resolution Task Force to help resolve access conflicts on Colorado rivers and streams. That committee, which has not met since 2015, laid out guidelines for how access issues could be solved without courts or legislation. The committee was not tasked with solving the policy quagmire over access, but created “a framework for landowners and boaters to efficiently and fairly resolve disputes over the use of rivers as they arise.”

The Taylor River hotspot

The 2010 legislation, like the 1996 proposal, followed an eruption of conflicts. In 2010 it was around the Taylor River, where developers were peddling high-dollar land with the promise of private river access. Following the death of the bill, the Taylor River flare-up was doused after developers, landowners and outfitters agreed on some limited commercial access on several miles of river below Taylor Park Reservoir. 

Owners along an upper stretch of the Taylor River have closed access to about 4 miles of the river. They’ve stretched barbed wire over the river with a sign that says “no boating” and the reach below the sign “is not passable by any watercraft.” The sign cites the 1979 Colorado Supreme Court case People v. Emmert.

Jason Hopfer, an attorney representing several owners along the Taylor River, said his clients invested in riparian habitat improvements on the river assuming their work was protected by laws that prevent float-in or wade-in access. Some of those riverside parcels sell for $2.5 million with the guarantee of private river access.

Any effort to change the law and allow public access to this private property would not only be an unconstitutional taking, Hopfer said, but could harm stream improvements paid for by landowners. 

Those investments and improvements along — and in — the Taylor River “were made in reliance on the long-settled Colorado law that protects riparian lands against trespass,” reads a memo Hopfer wrote – and shared with The Colorado Sun – for his clients who will oppose legislation that could open their properties to the public. 

“Any effort to change the law and allow public access to this private property would not only be an unconstitutional taking, but would also bring harm to the existing stream improvements and habitat benefits that extend to the Taylor River … and would disincentivize further investments towards such stewardship,” reads Hopfer’s memo.

Why are the waters so turbid?

“Lack of clarity.” “Unclear.” “Murky.” Those are three ways river users describe Colorado’s river access laws. All of that stems from a 1979 Colorado Supreme Court decision — People v. Emmert — which held that while water may be public, the public did not have the right to float on “non-navigable” water rolling through private property. That decision said that anyone who owned dirt owned everything above it. 

(Sidenote: That position is embraced by landowners seeking to block hikers from stepping over fencing separating private property from public lands arrayed like a checkerboard. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver this year ruled that landowners could not block hunters or hikers from stepping from one corner of public land to another even if they were passing through the air above privately owned land. The U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to hear a wealthy rancher’s appeal of that ruling.)

A formal legal opinion offered by the Colorado attorney general in 1983 contended that rafters and kayakers could float through private property but if they touch a rock, the bank or the river bed, they were committing criminal trespass.

So for more than 40 years, conflicts over river access have been negotiated between landowners and river users. That strategy has largely worked to settle issues on the Arkansas, the Lake Fork of the Gunnison, the Taylor, the north and south forks of the South Platte and the North Fork of the Poudre as landowners fought to block rafters and kayakers from passing through water bisecting their property. 

Navigability and the right to wade

In 2018, Colorado Springs angler Roger Hill was wading through the Arkansas River near Texas Creek when a landowner started hurling rocks. That event triggered the latest legal fight to bring some level of clarity to access.

The octogenarian’s 2018 lawsuit against the landowner argued that if a stretch of water used for commerce when Colorado became a state in 1876 — like, say, floating beaver pelts or railroad ties — then the Emmert decision did not matter because the river was navigable by federal definition. That definition, settled in the late 1800s by the U.S. Supreme Court says that a river is navigable if it was used for commerce and all navigable rivers are public property. 

Hill lost in district court. The Colorado Court of Appeals revived his case in 2022 and ultimately his case landed at the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled in June 2023 that Hill actually had no standing to argue for what amounts to an overhaul of private property laws in Colorado.

Underlying the right to wade and right to float arguments are private property rights. If riverbeds were suddenly shifted from private ownership to public land, landowners could credibly argue the federal government was seizing their land and they are entitled to compensation in “takings” claims. 

Attorney General Phil Weiser in 2022 argued against dabbling with property rights in stream access issues. In a brief filed with the Colorado Supreme Court in the Hill case, Weiser said a court ruling that declared a river navigable and changed private land beneath a river to public land “could have monumental consequences for water rights in Colorado and could lead to significant litigation challenging existing property rights.”

Maintaining the status quo

The free-market research group Common Sense Institute in Greenwood Village last month issued a report on the right to float through private property arguing that the case-by-case approach to resolving access issues is working and trying to establish a one-size-fits-all solution through legislation or ballot initiatives “may not be the best approach.”

The report, co-authored by the one-time director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources Greg Walcher, said the occasional flare-up of access issues did not appear to be hindering the explosive growth in river recreation in Colorado. The report suggested that the current use of conflict resolution — typically agreements between rafting outfitters, paddlers and landowners that address user numbers — “is likely the best resolution for landowners and recreationists in the state.”

The Common Sense Institute report said upsetting 150 years of water law and property rights in Colorado with a decision that Colorado’s river and streams were navigable at statehood “would be devastating for Colorado” that could spur “thousands” of lawsuits and put the state on the hook for “incalculable damages” to reimburse landowners. 

The report argued that using legislation to allow “incidental contact” would challenge police tasked with interpreting trespass on rivers that have constantly changing flows. For example, if legislation allows a paddler to portage a dangerous obstacle to protect human safety, how can police differentiate between a necessary portage in high flows and trespass at lower flows when a feature is not dangerous? 

“While it would generally be preferable to resolve the issue definitively and with absolute clarity, Colorado finds itself in a situation where the current status is preferable to any legislative solution,” reads the Common Sense Institute report. “Somewhat paradoxically, a statute, initiative or referendum designed to provide clarity could result in far more ambiguity than the current situation.”

Right to float

The legislation proposed by paddling groups will not touch property rights, navigability or the right to wade, Freeman said. 

The legislation will mirror shifts in recent decades that have leaned toward access in other Western states. The New Mexico Supreme Court in 2023 upheld public access on rivers rolling through private property. The Utah Supreme Court in 2019 upheld a 2010 access law that allows floating through private property, but the court agreed that landowners could limit recreational traffic on some rivers. California and Montana allow access up to the high-water mark. Oregon owns the beds of rivers and allows public access. Idaho says any stream that can be floated is open to the public. Wyoming allows public access but does not allow river users to touch privately owned riverbeds.

In 2023, several recreational river groups filed a friend of the court brief in the Colorado Supreme Court case of angler Hill. American Whitewater, the Colorado River Outfitters Association and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers argued the status quo was “much closer to the Wild West form of dispute resolution than to civil and orderly proceedings one might expect in modern-day Colorado.”

The groups urged the state Supreme Court to give Hill his day in court and find resolution of decades of ambiguity around river access. 

American Whitewater, the American Canoe Association and Colorado Whitewater recently broke from the Colorado Stream Access Coalition as the group argued over the timing and extent of possible legislation. Some members of the group are pushing for a law that would allow anglers to walk through rivers and streams, as they are allowed to do in places like Montana.

American Whitewater, after several months of outreach, “heard in no uncertain terms that approaching stream access for any and all public uses — including walking and wading on the bed of a navigable river — was a nonstarter for the legislature,” said Johnson, American Whitewater’s stewardship director for the Southern Rockies. 

“But we think there is a way forward for floating,” she said. 

For the first 20 years of this century, boating advocates have largely supported the spot-fire approach, working with riverside landowners to negotiate limited access for passing paddlers. In the last decade or so, the number of conflicts have declined and the occasional flare-up usually was quickly and quietly doused. Boaters said repeatedly that the negotiation strategy prevented the creation of winners and losers in an argument that would be costly for losers.

But river use has soared since the pandemic. Other states have hammered out access regulations that support recreational access, leaving Colorado an outlier in the West. The time is right for “broad conversations that try not to create a winner and loser,” Johnson said. 

Allowing contact with the riverbed, protecting landowners

The legislation proposed by paddling groups for the coming year would mirror the 2010 bill that allowed “incidental contact” and would permit paddlers to get out and scout or portage dangerous obstacles — like waterfalls, diversion dams, low bridges or barbed-wire fences. It would prevent access on irrigation ditches. It would also offer landowners liability protection from lawsuits should a paddler be injured on their property.

That liability protection has momentum after a diverse group of recreation advocates last year pushed legislation that amended the Colorado Recreational Use Statute — or CRUS — to better protect mountain landowners from lawsuits. The 50-member Fix CRUS Coalition supported a law that limited lawsuits if landowners erected signs on privately owned 14ers warning of hazards on the property. Like the stream access proposal, it was the third time lawmakers tried to amend the 50-year-old law.  

“We would want that same protection for riparian owners. Our hope is that we can clarify this issue for people on all sides,” said Johnson, noting that no bill has been drafted and precise wording is still being considered. 

New legislation won’t touch property rights. It won’t wade into the prickly arguments around whether a stretch of river could be federally defined as navigable, a standard that would essentially open riverbeds that were used for commerce at statehood to all forms of public access.   

One idea that is floating about is to create a fund that would provide resources for landowners who need to contain roaming livestock with paddler-friendly barriers. That fund also could support education and signage for boaters to not be jerks when passing by private property.

Freeman, the lobbyist, said the floating access group has commitment from two senior Democrats willing to sponsor right-to-float legislation next year. 

A rift within the stream access coalition

Mark Squillace is a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School who represented Hill in his push to prove the Arkansas River was navigable at statehood in 1876 and therefore public property. Squillace is not happy with a right-to-float bill. 

He wants a “recreational access” bill that would give people the right to wade or float through any Colorado waterway that is open for recreational use. His proposal mirrors access laws in New Mexico, Idaho and Montana. 

His bill suggestion stops short of deeming rivers navigable at statehood, which is determined for sections of rivers and he admits would require lengthy and contentious legal and administrative review.  

He worries that lawmakers will only want to take up the controversial stream access issue once. So a right-to-float bill could end chances for a broader bill that would allow wading through private property like other states, he said. This conflict is why boaters left the stream access coalition they originally helped create. It is unclear where the stream access coalition stands without those groups. 

Like Johnson, Squillace does not agree that stream access legislation will spur a deluge of lawsuits. That did not happen when other states like New Mexico and Montana opened riverbeds to public access. 

Read the Colorado Constitution, Squillace said. It says “the water of every natural stream” is public property “and dedicated to the use of the people of the state.”

“If it is dedicated to the use of people, that is the right to recreate not just in a boat,” Squillace said. “Our argument is the Colorado Constitution promotes recreational access to all waterways in the state.”

Rapids ahead 

A group of landowners and property rights advocates have formed the Colorado Water Conservation Alliance to block any legislation that might allow boaters or anglers to pass through rivers bisecting private land. 

“Should someone’s hobby be more important than someone’s home?” asks an Oct. 4 post on the group’s Facebook page that warned of a coming “radical proposal” that “could be one of the largest government takings of private property in U.S. history.” 

The group’s opposition to potential right-to-float legislation is more nuanced. There are many landowners who point to the Emmert decision and say they own the land and everything above it. They see floating as trespassing.

And should a bill pass that would put the right to float into state law, those landowners would likely push river access into court to prove their point, said Trey Rogers, an attorney who represents the Colorado Water Conservation Alliance. 

“If there is a bill, there are going to be people who feel they have no choice but to litigate this issue,” said Rogers, an angler and boater who owns property on the Arkansas River above Browns Canyon. “Do we really want this issue to come to a head? What is wrong with the status quo? We ought to live with it as it is. And the way to get there is no bill.”

Back in 1996 and 2010, lawmakers expressed surprise at the vehement opposition and ardent support for stream access legislation. That same passion will surely roil anew with an updated proposal. 

Johnson said she’s not sure boating advocates are ready for a deflating fight at the Capitol.

In the past, stream access conflicts and legislation have immediately divided people into opposing camps, which has prevented open dialogue or a search for common ground, Johnson said. 

“We are focusing on those conversations. We recognize this is contentious and we are not trying to do anything behind closed doors. We think both sides of this issue have an opportunity for improved clarity,” she said. “I mean every 10 years we can go to our corners and fight about this or we can sit down and talk about areas of agreement that we think are there. We think there are a lot of people in the middle who think there are reasonable changes to be made to better protect landowners and better protect recreators.”

But come January, if a bill looks like it will simply devolve into that yelling, Johnson said, “we likely will make the call to not have that fight under the golden dome.”

ㅤ⚲ㅤ ROCKY FORD

Conjure a Colorado sports event and what do you see? 

Giant slalom? Maybe.   

Football? Obviously.  

Bike races over three passes. Trail races winding 50 miles.  

But horses storming a river while their riders try to hang onto a watermelon? 

Sally Cope is manager of the Arkansas Valley Fair, and her dad did it. He was a contestant in the fair’s Watermelon Derby race, started in 1950. Riders had to hang on — to mane, to melon — while the horses splashed through the Arkansas River to its far bank and back. Then they had to lap the rodeo arena in front of thrilled and clapping fans.  

“Holding on wasn’t too hard when the watermelons were dry,” Cope said, “but they got real slippery when they were wet.” 

Melons, the fair and the Arkansas are why the city of Rocky Ford as we know it exists today.  

Cope can prove it with historical records. 

The Utes inhabited the area first. The Arapaho moved in next. The Comanche pushed the Arapaho out, and we know the history of white settlement after that. 

The Rocky Ford Historical Museum recounts the story of “a genial man who moved alone to the West” finding “a land full of dreams but devoid of settlers.” George W. Swink landed in Bent County in 1871, hand-dug the Rocky Ford Ditch and settled near Rocky Ford, which Kit Carson named when he tried to ford the Arkansas and found it full of rocks. Swink planted cantaloupe and watermelon seeds and officially built those into key industries in the region. 

So maybe Swink, his melon seeds and the Arkansas are why Rocky Ford exists.  

The story picks up in September 1878 when Swink produced a bumper crop of melons. He took them to the railroad depot, sliced them up and placed the juicy disks on a boxcar door laid horizontal. Around 2,530 people tasted those melons. It was such a joyous occasion, Swink decided watermelon needed its own festival. So he started the Arkansas Valley Fair, and it’s been running annually every year since. 

The longest-running fair in Colorado has given sales-tax dollars and a sense of identity to a region that has struggled economically, with a falling population, big-city buyouts of agricultural water and a belief that Colorado leaders know it’s there but don’t really care.

But a recent study showed the historically disadvantaged side of town the fairgrounds inhabit has a shortage of playgrounds for kids, and Rocky Ford leaders wanted to fix it. 

So in 2022, they started envisioning a way they could use 100 acres encompassing the fairgrounds and land around it to anchor not only a playground for the children, but a regional park for camping, fishing and hiking, a trail system along the Arkansas River for bird watching, biking and horseback riding, and a “community living room hub” for people to gather in both when the fair is on and off. The vision includes repairing crumbling parts of the rodeo arena and fairgrounds including adobe stalls.  

The projects would have obvious links to Swink, the Ark and the fairgrounds. They show a community trying to enhance its future by drawing on its history.

It also began with beets  

That ditch Swink dug? It still shares Rocky Ford’s name and runs alongside the Arkansas River. 

It’s owned by the Rocky Ford Ditch Company, which was incorporated in 1888. Water from it irrigated Swink’s melons, corn, wheat, alfalfa, cows and sugar beets that for a long time were the most profitable crop growing in the valley. 

In 1899, beets were booming and Swink wooed the American Crystal Sugar Company into building a processing plant in Rocky Ford. The Holly Sugar Corporation, founded in 1905 by Kenneth Schley, set up shop in the town 100 miles to the east and later expanded with a second large sugar beet factory in the town of, wait for it, Swink. 

Bill Hancock grew up on a small farm just outside of Rocky Ford. He likes thinking about the years sugar beets drove the economy, from the 1900s through the 1950s. “The factories were the hook and bullet of this community,” he says. 

The corporations bought beets that farmers grew in fields fanning away from the Rocky Ford Ditch. They irrigated the fields with Arkansas River water. Everything was flowing. Rocky Ford High School, home of the Meloneers, had 160 students. Locals patronized three grocery stores, four banks, two women’s clothing shops and three car dealerships. The main street buzzed with activity. “My family would go there Saturday evenings for supper and watch all the goings on,” Hancock remembers. “The shops stayed open until 10 o’clock. It was busy, busy, busy.” 

The farmers also employed workers from Mexico, who bought goods from Hancock’s uncle’s clothing and Army surplus stores. They’d pack them in footlockers his uncle sold, and when one filled up, “he’d put a padlock on and a tag on and take it down to the train station and ship it to Mexico,” he said. “It was nifty, and most of the vendors learned enough Spanish to get along.” 

But the region took a blow in 1974, when Congress allowed the Sugar Act of 1934 to expire and President Gerald Ford lifted tariffs on sugar imports, which flooded the market and killed the Lower Arkansas Valley’s largest industry. 

“When the sugar company went out of business, they leased the land to Natco Food Service, which grew hay on it that they made into dehydrated pellets” Hancock said. 

That kept the economy limping along for a little while. 

Then the water brokers came to Rocky Ford. 

Buying and drying  

Acres of land along the Rocky Ford Ditch are fallow after Aurora bought them to water the city. 

Kristie Knackord, with the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District, says there’s “a thought, conveyed out there publicly, that a farmer sold their water directly to the municipality. But often there’s a middle man, and how does that work?” 

It works by a water broker visiting a place like Otero County after its local industry collapses. They find landowners with rights to water, and buy the water and the land. The transfer of water from farms to cities actually began in the 1890s. “But the pace of sales quickened in the 1970s and 1980s as Aurora, Colorado Springs and Pueblo found willing sellers in farmers who were struggling because of high interest rates and low commodity prices,” according to Water Education Colorado. 

Hancock remembers when the Bowlen family, who owned the Denver Broncos from 1984 to 2022, sent brokers on behalf of the city of Aurora. Pat Bowlen was also the principal of Resources Investment Group, which purchased 4,100 acres of farmland and 424 shares of the Rocky Ford Ditch.

It all started in 1979, when Crystal Sugar shuttered its processing plant in Rocky Ford and the company gave local farmers an option to buy it. When they couldn’t raise the money, Bowlen’s group snapped it up – for the water rights. They turned around and sold them to Aurora. 

Some farmers were persuaded to sell their land and water rights, “but there was still maybe a third of the water that didn’t sell,” Hancock said. Farmers who wanted to stay held onto their rights for a number of years.  But the pressure around Rocky Ford didn’t let up and many more of his neighbors sold. 

By 2009, municipal purchasers had bought water rights attached to more than 102,000 irrigated acres in the Arkansas Basin and more than 150,000 acre-feet of water was severed from the land, according to Water Education. That was the start of the most recent “buy and dry,” as the pattern is called. 

Jack Goble, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District, says his group doesn’t know how many acres have been affected in Otero County but that Aurora “dried up around 7,500 acres on the Rocky Ford Ditch.” The district is working on a project that will give them the complete number in a few months. 

Meanwhile, Hancock holds onto another set of happy memories from his childhood. 

Back when the water was flowing, the Hancock kids frequented the rodeo where Cope’s dad wrestled the watermelon. 

“We had an open arena at the fairgrounds. That was before horse trailers,” he said. “So we’d saddle up and ride to town and then rope and then ride home in the dark. The folks would follow us in their car to make sure somebody didn’t get run over. We belonged to the Mill Iron Wranglers. It was a horse drill team like the Lakewood Westernaires. We got contracted to go to a lot of the local rodeos, set flags and be the entertainment.”

Some holdouts still have rights to water in Rocky Ford Ditch, he said. “There’s the (Colorado State University Agricultural Experiment Station) and a few other little farmers and backyard people.” 

Rocky Ford has some water rights as well, says City Manager Stacey Milenski. Which brings us back to the town, melons and the revitalization project. 

Watermeloning and watering the future 

Watermelons are still so central to Rocky Ford the city is known as the Sweet Melon Capitol of the World. Since George Swink gave travelers a sugar high with his free slices, the Rocky Ford Rotary Club has given away 7 million pounds. Rocky Ford High School’s mascot is the Meloneer, described as “a muscular, anthropomorphic watermelon.” Same name for the school paper. 

So in 2021, during the city’s initial visioning process, Electra Johnson suggested they give either the new entrance to the fairgrounds a watermelon theme or make the new playground melon-themed. Johnson’s firm, EJD+P, specializes in regenerative, community-driven solutions to restore landscapes, empower people and build resilient futures for Colorado’s communities. 

When the city thought about how they could give the community more access to nature and recreation, they zeroed in an area called Crystal Lake, a parcel of land between the fairgrounds and the Crystal Sugar Factory property that has the dry depressions of three holding ponds once used by the plant. 

Some community members thought cleaning and revegetating the Crystal Lake area and piping Rocky Ford Ditch water into one of the holding ponds would give kids who live on the north side of town somewhere to run, hike, splash and connect with nature during the summer, Johnson added.  

And Johnson imagined connecting the Crystal Lake recreation zone to the Arkansas River, “the lifeblood of this area, but with no public access to it,” she said. “So the master plan included 33 acres of Crystal Lake, 33 acres of fairground and 33 acres next to it, which is a wetlands.” 

It all sounded so grand, so doable with enough community buy-in, belief and funding. Johnson said the various pieces would help solve some racial disparity in Rocky Ford. “I mean the fair is a place where everyone comes together,” she said. And if a trail could link the fair to Crystal Lake, and Crystal Lake to the Arkansas River, even more equity could come out of the city’s plan. 

Then the reality set in. Completing any part of this project was going to be wildly expensive, Milenski told The Colorado Sun. 

“If you just do, you know, red slides and one of those standard playgrounds, it’s still $300,000,” Johnson said. 

Since the city started dreaming, they’ve received three grants including two from Great Outdoors Colorado for $50,000 and $400,000, and one from the Colorado Health Foundation for $50,000 Johnson said. 

But even receiving money has been a struggle, said Milenski. “We announced we got these planning dollars and the community thinks, ‘They got $400,000? I don’t see any change. What are you doing? You’re not fixing the streets with that money,’ There’s that misconception anytime you get a grant, but what you can do with it and what you can’t is very specific.” 

The city is also looking at a “tough year in 2026, because people aren’t spending money,” she said. “Sales tax isn’t going to be what was projected. And property taxes remain flat.” 

But Johnson calls the project an answer to “a dream from the community and the town that would be a wonderful way of transforming the region.”  

And she calls creating access to the Arkansas River specifically, “a dream and vision that would have to be managed by a land trust or someone like The Nature Conservancy, because the land is super fragile from being over grazed for years. The city of Aurora owns the land and water, but the group we’ve been working with would like to see the land bought back and turned into a state park or managed as a grassland wildlife corridor.” 

It would have to have some political firepower behind it, she said. “Gov. Jared Polis has been interested in the region, but a governor has not come to the (Wake Up Breakfast) that kicks off the Arkansas Valley Fair since Roy Romer.”

A town administrator in Las Animas County is facing several felony charges after investigators say she funneled more than $26,000 from a small town’s water project intended to secure long-term water access, to her personal bank account. 

Tyra Marie Avila, 47, who was the town clerk, treasurer and administrator of Aguilar for 17 years, was arrested on suspicion of theft, cybercrime, embezzlement of public property, forgery and fraud by check, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation said Tuesday.

Avila resigned in September 2024 and posted a $15,000 bond after turning herself over to law enforcement, CBI said. 

Investigators say she took money from federal loans and grants that were awarded to the town of about 450 for a massive reservoir project. The money was allegedly commingled with the town’s general fund and used for unauthorized personal transactions and other town expenses, leaving contractors for the critical water project unpaid, CBI said. 

An attorney for Avila was not listed in online court records.

The town was awarded $5.7 million in 2021 from the USDA to build an augmentation reservoir to replace out-of-priority stream depletions caused by the pumping of the town’s alluvial wells to provide water for the town, the newspaper reported. Construction began in December 2023. 

The reservoir project remains incomplete and uncertified by the state, the Walsenburg-based World Journal reported in August, calling the project “a symbol of small-town infrastructure gone awry.” 

In August 2024, the newspaper reported that the water project had dried up the town’s general fund. 

The town of Aguilar has since taken steps to implement stricter financial controls and set up a separate account for the water project that is only accessible by the mayor and a USDA official, to ensure the project can move forward, CBI said. 

The USDA, Office of Inspector General and Las Animas County Sheriff’s Office also assisted in the investigation. 

El sábado 27 de septiembre, el Comité Demócrata de Legisladores Latino de Colorado estuvo visitando Glenwood Springs para reunirse con Sopris Mountain Collective, una cooperativa formada por residentes del parque de casas móviles Cavern Springs. La visita formaba parte de la “Gira de escucha por el Oeste” del Caucus, una iniciativa bienal para conectar a los legisladores con las comunidades de los cuatro rincones de Colorado.

Cinco legisladores —los representantes Elizabeth Velasco, Javier Mabrey, Julie Gonzales, Matt Martínez y Alex Valdez— se reunieron con los residentes para hablar del tema. “Creo que fue una buena reunión, y el hecho de que vinieran específicamente a escucharnos significa mucho para mí”, reflexionó Judith Álvarez, presidenta del Summit Mountain Collective y residente de Cavern Springs.

La discusión se centró en el esfuerzo del colectivo por recaudar $26 millones de dólares para comprar su parque al propietario establecido en Maryland. El propietario ya había llegado a un acuerdo de adquisición con un comprador anónimo por la misma cantidad, pero el colectivo presentó una denuncia ante el Departamento de Asuntos Locales de Colorado (DOLA) alegando una discrepancia entre el precio de venta anunciado y el precio final, lo que paralizó la compra. Si DOLA exige una nueva notificación de venta, los residentes tendrían otros 120 días para recaudar fondos e igualar la oferta, aunque el propietario no está obligado a aceptarla.

Conseguir ese nivel de financiamiento está resultando difícil. Por lo general, las compras lideradas por los residentes dependen de una combinación de gobiernos locales, subsidios estatales y federales y socios no lucrativos como Thistle ROC, que ayudó a facilitar la compra de los parques de casas móviles Aspen-Basalt y Mountain Valley por $42 millones de dólares, así como del parque Mountain Mobile Home Park, de 40 unidades, en Glenwood Springs, por $4.5 millones de dólares en agosto. Pero para Sopris Mountain Collective, el plazo y el precio hacen que la petición sea más difícil.

“Queremos seguir luchando en la medida de lo posible”, dijo Alvarez a Sol del Valle. “Pero sí, la gente dice: ‘No tienen tiempo. ¿Cómo te podemos ayudar?’”.

Razón por la cual el colectivo invitó al Colorado Latino Caucus a explorar opciones con los legisladores, aprovechar su influencia y buscar soluciones viables a nivel estatal.

Los residentes comentaron sobre cómo ha sido la vida bajo la actual propiedad del parque. Describieron alquileres al alza, la mala calidad del agua, las limitadas instalaciones y el aumento de las multas y restricciones. Aun así, resaltaron su amor por su hogar. La ubicación del parque les mantiene cerca del trabajo y las escuelas. Lo que quieren es quedarse, tener voz en su futuro y ver inversiones en su comunidad.

Pero lo que está en juego va más allá del parque. Si estás 98 viviendas se enfrentan a desalojos, Glenwood Springs perderá familias trabajadoras y a sus hijos.

“No creo que la mayoría de la comunidad fuera de este parque de casas móviles haya lidiado aún con la realidad del tremendo impacto económico que esto tendrá en todo lo demás”, dijo la representante de la junta escolar Jasmin Ramírez.

Para los residentes, la propiedad es algo más que dinero. Ser propietarios del parque les demostraría que la acción colectiva puede generar cambios. “El objetivo es que, en lugar de que la gente se enriquezca, podamos invertir lo que ganemos para mejorar el parque”, dijo Alvarez.

Los legisladores se marcharon con un sentido de urgencia y una mejor comprensión de lo que hay que hacer a nivel estatal en materia de vivienda accesible. Cuando se les preguntó directamente qué podían hacer para ayudar al colectivo a corto plazo, los legisladores mencionaron los problemas presupuestarios de Colorado y un gobernador áspero como barreras inmediatas.

“Queremos asegurarnos de que los residentes tengan realmente la oportunidad de recaudar los fondos, solicitar préstamos y obtener todo lo que necesitan para hacer una oferta”, dijo la representante Velasco. “Y no están obteniendo un descuento. Tienen que igualar una oferta existente, por lo que es importante que este proceso sea optimizado”.

“Cuando hablamos de desarrollo de viviendas accesibles, también deberíamos preocuparnos por la conservación de las viviendas accesibles existentes”, añadió el representante Mabrey. “Andy Boesenecker lideró la iniciativa de estabilización de los alquileres en los parques de casas móviles. Esa iniciativa fracasó hace un par de años, y me gustaría retomar esa lucha con un nuevo gobernador”.

Incluso si el colectivo consigue los fondos, su viaje no terminará ahí. “Comienza una maratón de 30 años”, dijo Álvarez, refiriéndose al posible modelo de préstamo.

Para la cooperativa, la compra también supondría los costos de reparar el sistema de agua potable y añadir servicios. Pero para estos vecinos, la inversión merece la pena y es la menor de sus preocupaciones.

“Esto va a costar mucho dinero. Pero si podemos comprarlo por $26 millones de dólares, entonces podemos arreglarlo”, dijo Álvarez.

Por ahora, tras haber tenido una audiencia de legisladores en sus patios traseros, la cooperativa Sopris Mountain tiene una renovada sensación de esperanza y claridad sobre su situación.

“Realmente, si se está creando un poder en el que ellos tienen voz y la pueden utilizar, sean o no ciudadanos”, dijo Alvarez. “Son residentes de Colorado. Pagan impuestos. Es posible que no puedan votar sobre algunas cosas, pero pueden hablar con sus representantes, y esos representantes son su voz”.

Traducción por Dolores Duarte

The post El parque de casas móviles Cavern Springs lucha por salvar su comunidad appeared first on The Sopris Sun.

Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer is the latest candidate vying to be Colorado’s next governor. 

The state senator from Brighton filed paperwork Monday making her long-anticipated 2026 bid official. She’s planning to hold a launch event Tuesday evening in Fort Lupton.

Kirkmeyer ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022, losing narrowly to Democrat Yadira Caraveo in the 8th Congressional District. Kirkmeyer sits on the legislature’s powerful Joint Budget Committee, which makes her a ubiquitous voice in the state’s budget conversations.

Before entering the legislature in 2020, Kirkmeyer spent two decades as a Weld County commissioner. As a commissioner, Kirkmeyer supported an unsuccessful 2013 push for 11 counties in northeastern Colorado, including Weld County, to break off from Colorado and form a 51st state.

Kirkmeyer also served as head of the Colorado Department of Local Affairs under-then Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican. Additionally, she ran unsuccessfully in 2014 for Congress in the 4th Congressional District. 

Current Gov. Jared Polis is term-limited and can’t run for reelection in 2026. He won reelection in 2022 by nearly 20 percentage points. He secured his first term in 2018 by 10 points.

Colorado has not elected a Republican to be governor since 2002, when Owens secured a second term.

Two prominent Democrats are running to replace Polis: U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. 

The Democratic headwinds in the race haven’t stopped a growing crowd of Republicans from mounting a run for governor, including state Rep. Scott Bottoms of Colorado Springs; Sen. Mark Baisley of Woodland Park; and Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell.

Baisley and Kirkmeyer serve in the state Senate together. They’re statehouse colleagues with Bottoms.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

Many communities have foods that define them: Los Angeles has tacos, Green River, Utah, has melons, while New Mexico’s Hatch Valley is famous for its green chiles. Historic power dynamics — from colonization to migration — have always influenced how and why people began growing, cooking and consuming these symbolic dishes and crops. Today, these foods and those who prepare, raise and sell them carry cultural power; people travel hundreds of miles to buy a juicy Crenshaw or sweet canary melon from a family-run stand in Green River. And yet the farmers themselves often struggle to stay afloat. They lose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores. 

Most grocery stores across the West trace back to a few major corporations. Whether you’re visiting King Soopers in Colorado, Smith’s in Utah or Fred Meyer in Oregon, you’ll find the same Kroger-brand products. The original names of the once-locally owned grocers might remain, but the shops are now just part of one of the nation’s largest grocery corporations.

A handful of companies control the production and distribution of most of our food, and the West plays a leading role in that system. The U.S. headquarters for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS S.A., is in Greeley, Colorado, while Driscoll’s, the largest berry producer, is headquartered in Watsonville, California. These companies rarely confront the riskiest parts of agribusiness, raising the cows and growing the berries. Instead, they produce, brand and ship them. 

This global food system has profound impacts on the West’s farmers, workers and consumers. It’s getting harder for family farms to turn a profit, and those who seek alternatives to the consolidated corporate market must navigate complicated policies and finances in order to sell directly to consumers. Berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants — face exploitation and unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state. 

Meanwhile, food insecurity has increased across the West, and yet Republican-led states, including Utah and Idaho, opted out of a federal summer grocery program for kids last year, in part because of anti-welfare politics. 

Beyond its connection to this international system, the West has deeply rooted myths and policies around water and land that create and sustain other layers of power. In the 1800s, settlers stole land from Native people and killed off bison as they drove tens of thousands of cattle westward. Ever since, the cowboy and his glorified cattle have held cultural power that politicians are rarely willing to tarnish. 

As “The Big Four” meatpackers have consolidated most of the beef industry, the economic power of ranchers has dwindled. Only 2% of U.S. beef comes from cows that graze on public lands, and yet multigenerational ranching families and large landowners continue to influence and benefit from antiquated federal grazing policies. 

Most land in the Eastern U.S. is privately owned, but the federal government owns nearly half of all land in the West. Ranchers graze cows on huge swaths of public lands, paying fees well below the actual cost of managing those lands. Over the past century, grazing policies have changed little even as cows destroyed native vegetation and degraded waterways. State and federal policies often put the health of livestock above that of the region’s arid soils or the lives of large carnivores like wolves and bears. 

Ranchers and Big Beef also intersect and overlap with those who control water in the West. Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the water diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, primarily to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. An investigation by ProPublica and The Desert Sun found that most of the water consumed in California’s Imperial Valley goes to just 20 farming families, with one of them using more than the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. Only four of those families use the majority of their water rights to grow foods people consume, like broccoli or onions. The rest use their water to grow hay for livestock. 

Many of these families have senior water rights, and that increasingly means power in the arid and rapidly growing West. Together with livestock associations, irrigation districts and their political allies, they have sought to influence food and water policy. 

Yet in some parts of the West, other interests are gaining power. In the Northwest, years of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups led federal agencies to decommission dams on rivers like the Elwha and Klamath. The farmers might worry about their ability to continue irrigating, but tribes are reclaiming their traditional foodways as salmon return. 

And the Northwest’s rivers aren’t the only places where tribes are reasserting their culture and food sovereignty: Indigenous-run restaurants, farms and cooking classes are springing up across the West. 

Farmers markets, mutual aid efforts and community gardens are creating new forms of cultural, social and economic power, often led by and benefiting those who are excluded and marginalized, including queer, immigrant and Black farmers. Their efforts encourage people to take back intrinsic food traditions while they act in resistance to the global, capitalist food system. 

Still, the corporate structures of our food system are so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to fully comprehend or even notice. In this region, food is power, and that power is not equally shared. Before that can change, however, we need to understand the complexities of this system, tracing its roots to the growth of retail giants and the consolidation of Western agricultural production. 

The grocery giants

The illusion of competition

Farmers markets — a bright spot in the grocery landscape

Get big or get out: Consolidation in agricultural production

The small family farm holds a special place in the American imagination. Today, however, a modest and diminishing portion of our nation’s food is grown on smallholder farms. Production is shifting to larger-scale factory farms in every Western state and across nearly every commodity.