PAGOSA SPRINGS – Enough is enough. County commissioners across Southwest Colorado say they can no longer afford any additional unfunded mandates from the state Legislature.
They say the ever-growing list of requirements strain already limited rural budgets.
On Monday, La Plata County commissioners attended a quarterly meeting of regional commissioners and county managers in Pagosa Springs, along with officials from Montezuma, San Miguel, San Juan, Archuleta and Dolores counties, to discuss issues of mutual concern.
One of the primary issues commissioners said affects all of them: unfunded mandates, which require counties to implement state or federal policies without providing the funding needed to carry them out.
For example, if the federal government required communities to increase accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act but did not provide them with the funding needed to make those changes, that would be an unfunded mandate.
For rural counties in particular, unfunded mandates can mean fewer resources for road maintenance, public safety or social services as local governments scramble to cover costs imposed by higher levels of government.
At the meeting, La Plata County Commissioner Marsha Porter-Norton pointed out that 50 of the 64 counties in Colorado have signed letters saying “enough is enough.”
“That’s the most bipartisan thing I’ve seen since I'’e been a commissioner,” she said.
La Plata County commissioners signed a letter in September asking Gov. Jared Polis to consider the volume and scope of legislated programs and new bills without funding mechanisms and the burden they place on counties.
The letter cited recent examples of bills such as the Wildland-Urban Interface Code, Energy Benchmarking and Building Performance Standards, and Demographic and Contact Reporting, which commissioners said they support but cannot continue to implement when considered alongside residential assessment rate cuts, inflation and local factors like the decline in oil and gas revenue.
“We cannot be forced to continue further cutting our core programs and services – the majority of which were previously mandated by the State – to enact any new mandates,” the letter said. “We desire that every bill introduced carries a note that specifies the cost to local governments.”
At the meeting, several commissioners from multiple counties pointed to a new landfill regulation passed in July as an example of the mandates they are concerned about.
Regulation No. 31, focuses on controlling methane emissions from municipal solid waste landfills. It requires counties across the state to install wells faster, a new methane-based threshold for installing monitoring technologies and more stringent requirements for operators to respond to detected methane gas exceedances.
“A lot of these unfunded mandates, they’re just not tenable for our very rural counties, but this one in particular … it just makes zero sense for our rural counties. We don’t even have a landfill in San Miguel County,” said Galena Gleason, a commissioner in San Miguel County.
Other commissioners voiced concern that the potential increase in landfill costs would lead residents to dump even more trash on public lands. They also noted that the bill did not include any considerations for the methane emissions unique to the geography and historical oil and gas industry of the Southwest.
The Four Corners is a nationally recognized methane hot spot, largely attributed to the extensive networks of abandoned gas and oil wells tunneling through the San Juan Basin, as wells as natural coal beds.
That difference should be acknowledged in a statewide bill that addresses methane admissions, a commissioner added.
State Sen. Cleave Simpson and House District 59 Rep. Katie Stewart also attended the meeting.
One goal county representatives brought into the meeting was to impress upon both Simpson and Stewart the toll unfunded mandates have had, and the general refusal of local governments to continue implementing them.
“No more unfunded mandates,” said Jim Candelaria, Montezuma commissioner. “We will fight back.”
While Simpson and Stewart were unable to immediately offer concrete solutions, they agreed – along with most attendees – that the problem largely stems from the urban-rural divide.
They said rural counties often struggle to project their voices loudly enough to be heard over large, urban delegations in the Legislature.
“I’m always amazed. I’ve met legislators that haven’t lived in Colorado for 20-plus years and have never been west of the Continental Divide,” Simpson said.
To combat this, Porter-Norton suggested a more unified messaging strategy to more effectively tell the story of the rural regions hundreds of miles from the state capital.
“Why would a legislator living in Denver actually know what it’s like,” she said, “unless we somehow paint that picture in a better way.”
jbowman@durangoherald.com
