Money running out on sage grouse

County’s last two partners to pull out in 2011

The local resolve to preserve the Gunnison sage grouse as a species might be boundless for some people. But the dollars supporting the preservation effort are fading fast.

Gunnison County started the Sage Grouse Conservation Program in 1995 as a working group made up of area stakeholders who worked to find ways of preserving the sage grouse.
As the program grew, the towns of Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte both agreed to participate in the program for three years while Gunnison County Electrical Association and its power supplier, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, signed on as well.
According to Gunnison County wildlife coordinator Jim Cochran, when the towns’ three-year commitments were up, they pulled out.
“Crested Butte’s view was more related to conservation and they felt that a county program could do more to control activity across the range,” Cochran says. “Our regulations are limited to the occupied areas and there aren’t a lot of those up north. But with them went the money they contributed to the program.”
Then the county learned earlier this year that it would probably be losing its remaining funding partners over the next two years.
GCEA chief executive Mike Wells told the county that his company would phase out of the partnership and annual contribution of $10,000 by 2011. Cochran expects Tri-State to do the same.
“Both [GCEA and Tri-State] contributed roughly 20 percent of our funding base. They’ve been very good to participate in the program. But we’re proposing that it will impact the [Sage Grouse] Action Plan,” Cochran says. “It’s a real scramble and it’s our understanding that we’re really going to have to pick up the slack.”
The Sage Grouse Action Plan is a work in progress, despite the uncertain financial future of the program.
The Gunnison Board of County Commissioners saw the “Priority Management Areas” of the plan that were identified by the Action Item 8 Subcommittee of the Sage Grouse Working Group at a work session on Tuesday October 30.
Al Pfister, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s representative in the working group, told the commissioners, “For the past few years I’ve been emphasizing that the strategic committee needs to look at areas of sage grouse habitat and separate areas designated for development and for recreation. The more fragmentation that goes on, the fewer sage grouse are going to be there.”
The group is working closely with county Geographic Information Systems manager Mike Pelletier to map out sage grouse habitat that is occupied, so steps can be taken by county planners to keep development and certain activities away from those areas.
They are also listening to stakeholders and collecting information from landowners where sage grouse congregate. The data the group collects will be stored with the county’s GIS department, which could be accessible to other groups working toward the preservation of the species.
“We could face some challenges because the data about the sage grouse [that] people need to put in publications is not available. So we need to find a way to work through that and this might be one of those ways,” Cochran says.
Still, the county would serve as a clearinghouse for that data and its resources would be used to make the information available. Without some additional financial support, it could be an unsustainable effort.
According to the draft 2010 county budget, the sage grouse fund will get almost $46,000 from a special fee that is collected for yard waste taken to the landfill, and additional money has been shuffled into the fund to fill the gaps. The annual amount of revenue generated by the program is listed as zero in the budget.
To Cochran, “It’s a shell game.”
For county manager Matthew Birnie, it is the harsh reality of the current economy.
“For 2010, because of our situation, we have given $75,000 to the program,” he says. “That’s not a sustainable amount. That’s more than what comes into the fund and we’ll have to cut that back, probably in 2011. What we’ve allocated for this year may not be at the level that will be necessary, but that’s all we can do.”
Birnie, Cochran, county planners and the commissioners all believe that if the species is listed as endangered, business as usual will be much different inside the bird’s habitat boundary from what it is now.
If the bird is listed, all development planning that takes place inside the bird’s occupied and potential range would face the scrutiny of the federal process, which can take much longer than the local process. Cochran says that is a large portion of developed Gunnison County.
The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which oversees the Endangered Species Act, is still reviewing data from a contested 2006 decision that concluded the sage grouse did not warrant listing as an Endangered Species.
The county expects a decision on the listing sometime next June with three possible outcomes: warranted for listing, warranted for listing while precluded (usually by economic forces), or not warranted.
If the sage grouse population is warranted for listing, the FWS could include some components of the county’s Action Plan in its own management plan and secure some of the county’s interests in the process.
A listing isn’t a guarantee of funding or other perks, either, although Birnie thinks the county’s location inside the sage grouse habitat would give it preference when vying for certain federal grants and other money. Even if it meant money, however, he says listing is not the preferred outcome.
But neither is losing all of the county’s funding partners, “which would leave us holding the bag,” Birnie says. “That mitigation fund has become very important to sustaining the program at all.”