Colorado Parks and Wildlife will continue wolf reintroduction with or without the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency’s new leader, Laura Clellan, said in a ranging interview with The Colorado Sun.
In her new job, she said she will ensure Colorado’s wildlife management remains based on “science, law and long-term sustainability,” and that she will keep politics out of her decision-making to enact policy decisions made by the parks and wildlife commission and to “ensure transparency across the agency.”
Clellan was a late addition to the roughly 150 candidates for the position that oversees about 1,000 employees and an annual budget of around $365 million. She was brought in after five finalists had been interviewed by the Parks and Wildlife Commission. The commission on Feb. 23 voted unanimously to confirm her.
Clellan, who was named the agency’s acting director on Dec. 1, soon after Jeff Davis resigned, said CPW staff members, leaders, commissioners and stakeholders asked her to apply for the permanent job, because “we need leadership. We need purpose, direction and structure. We need somebody who’s going to lead this organization and not be afraid to make decisions.”
In college, Clellan signed an eight-year commitment with Army ROTC and was jumping out of planes and leading a unit of 33 men and women in Honduras by 1989.
After returning to the Fort Bliss Army garrison in El Paso, Texas, “with a little experience” under her belt, she was deployed to Operation Desert Storm and then on a law-and-order mission to post-Manuel Noriega Panama. Four years later, she decided to take an early out, and started teaching elementary school in Texas and Colorado.
Then she received a cold call from a major in the Army Reserves, asking if she wanted to join. She did that job until the Colorado Army National Guard called looking for a military police commander. One of the hardest things she did in that role was secure the perimeter around Columbine High School after the mass shooting there in 1999.
After stints as assistant professor of military science at University of Colorado Boulder, and in Afghanistan, where she ran a detention center in Bagram, and after serving in several other distinguished appointments, she retired in 2019 and started working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Lakewood. But in 2020, she was called up again, this time by Gov. Jared Polis who appointed her the adjutant general of Colorado in charge of the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, a two-star rank.
“I don’t have a personal relationship with the governor. I don’t know how he got my name. But it turns out you can’t really say no to the governor. It’s really hard,” she said in a TedX Talk in November.
In the interview last week, she insisted she won’t let politics influence her decisions at CPW, however, and emphasizes her three and a half decades of experience “leading teams, people and organizations in extremely complex missions and environments” have taught her “to provide purpose, direction and motivation to achieve a mission.”
And she calls herself lucky to have come to CPW just as the agency rolled out a brand new 10-year strategic plan, set to be presented to the Parks and Wildlife Commission on Wednesday.
Among the “most pressing issues” for Clellan is continuing “wildlife on the ground – wolves, furbearers, water management,” she said. Another “is making sure we have resilient ecosystems and balancing exceptional experiences here in Colorado.” The third is keeping CPW relevant for the future. And the fourth is “organizational and workforce health. I’m a firm believer that we get nothing accomplished without the people of our organization. I was so glad to see this in our plan. We are absolutely going to focus on our people.”
On the topic of wolves, Clellan said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not provided an official response after Director Brian Nesvik’s demand that CPW provide a full accounting of wolf reintroduction actions since the program began in 2023.
She led the correspondence with Nesvik, who she said is a “great partner” she has frequent conversations with. “I also knew Brian Nesvik as Gen. Nesvik when he was in the Wyoming National Guard and I was in the Colorado National Guard,” she added. “So we have, you know, kind of a special connection there.”
Absent a response, CPW is “going to continue to manage the wolves in Colorado as we have been,” she said. “We still have our 10-J. We still have our memorandum of agreement with them. And, you know, I have been in close contact with them. And right now, I feel confident that we are going to be able to continue to move forward with gray wolf restoration in 2026.”
That includes adding 10 to 15 wolves in this calendar year, which likely means those wolves are coming in December. Colorado voters directed CPW to start reintroducing wolves by the end of 2023 in a vote in 2020.
Clellan said she is committed to compensating ranchers for livestock losses, even as the agency has faced pushback for the costs accrued in 2025.
“I think that we can continue this program. And right now, this is all written in statute,” she said. “I know that it is out there as a concern with the public, and this may be something later on that the commission may address. But right now, (the compensation structure) is the right thing to do because the ranchers out there are the ones that are impacted by the wolves on the ground. We have to do right by the ranchers that are experiencing these issues.”
There’s a sentiment among some hunting groups that science-based wildlife management is at risk in Colorado.
But Clellan said hunting is “one of our primary tools to manage wildlife populations … and it provides critical funding for our conservation efforts through licensing and sales and Colorado’s 6.5% excise tax” on the retail sale of firearms, precursor parts and ammunition. That’s on top of the federal Pittman-Robertson excise tax of 10% to 11% to fund CPW.
“My role in CPW is to ensure our wildlife management is based on science, law and long-term sustainability, and hunting is an effective tool for achieving these goals,” she added. “And I can tell you there’s no one in CPW or there’s no one that’s telling me we’ve got to stop hunting. Matter of fact, I know many hunters. I’m friends with many hunters, and all hunters are conservationists – period. I appreciate them. I don’t believe that there’s any one group out there that is threatened. But I’m giving my ear to all groups.”
As federal land managers navigate shrinking budgets, CPW could assume a larger role in managing recreation on public lands around Pikes Peak.
A consortium – the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, El Paso and Teller counties, the cities of Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs and Colorado Springs Utilities – is asking the agency to help manage increasing recreation around America’s Mountain, starting with management of the Ring the Peak Trail.
And Clellan said CPW “bringing our skill set for managing high-density recreation to our large landscapes … is going to benefit the health of our ecosystem.”
“We work for all of Colorado and we appreciate our partnership with the U.S. Forest Service in this endeavor,” she said. “There’s a lot of other additional partnerships in that local community. We’ve got a lot of firepower right now to set a great example, not only in Colorado, but nationally on America’s Mountain. I’m pretty excited about Pikes Peak and the work we’re doing. There’s world-class recreation on and around Pikes Peak, and there’s many different interest groups and stakeholders that are using that and that will use that. So I think finding ways for stakeholders to work together to find solutions to increase our outdoor recreation interest in ways that protect habitat is what makes Colorado so special right now.”
More than 1.5 million Coloradans opted in to buy the $29 Keep Colorado Wild Pass during 2024, its second year on sale, Clellan said. That generated $41 million to support Colorado State Parks, local search and rescue volunteers and the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.
“But we also know there are local governments, nonprofits, stakeholders and others doing work around the state that also intersects with CPW’s mission to balance conservation and recreation,” she said. “That’s a big reason why Colorado’s Outdoors Strategy was created, so we can advance coordination, tools and funding, and prioritize and implement strategic actions on the landscape.”
The strategy champions shared goals, strengthens partnerships and provides data, mapping tools and resources to help inform decisions not just regionally, but statewide, Clellan said. “We believe this strategy will unite Colorado by elevating priorities, and it will focus our efforts in ways that greatly balance these demands.”
“The most challenging part of this job” and “the most challenging part of CPW’s mission” is balancing all of the wishes of CPW’s various stakeholders, Clellan said.
CPW’s stakeholders represent a wide range of perspectives and passions, and her role “is to ensure that we continue to make decisions that are grounded in science, that are guided by our statute and our commission policy, and that are transparent and inclusive,” she said.
To that end, she’s attended listening sessions and meetings, introducing herself to a range of Colorado interests and perspectives. She says she is “here to make sure they all get time to provide their perspective, because balancing stakeholder interest really begins with good listening.” She thinks CPW’s recent Indigenous listening sessions are a great example “of a place where we’re learning from this work and we want to really understand the values and concerns of each group.”
But each group brings different concerns to every issue, and CPW has to rely on the best available science to inform recommendations. So “ultimately, our North Star is the long-term health of Colorado’s wildlife and habitat, not just for us, but for future generations,” Clellan said. “I’ve been a public servant all my career. I am here to serve all of Colorado.”
The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Colorado issues. To learn more, go to coloradosun.com.
