The Republican “Big Beautiful Bill” has suddenly left Colorado in a $1.2 billion deficit. This means that our legislators in the General Assembly are having to scramble to cut this amount from the state budget in a special session that started on August 21.
This is a serious issue and should be taken seriously by our legislators. The two state senators responsible for this bill, Dylan Roberts (D-08) and Marc Catlin (R-05), are not taking this issue seriously. Instead, they are using this crisis as an opportunity to try to advance their personal grievances with wolf restoration efforts through a bill that they are introducing during a budget emergency.
25B-0010.01 is a petty, personal attack and an affront to the voters of Colorado who directly voted to put this program into place. A program that remains popular outside of a small group of livestock business owners who are in the end unwilling to share our public lands and take responsibility for properly tending to their valuable goods.
While other legislators are busy taking the budget crisis seriously, Roberts and Catlin are embracing the personal-grievance approach to legislation that today’s Republicans embrace. The very people who also are responsible for the budget crisis.
Roberts’ bad-faith bill is an attack on the direct will of Colorado voters and the ballot measure process, which gives voters a direct path to legislation that politicians might otherwise oppose. This includes reasons like lobbying influence from special interest groups such as livestock trade associations or the personal objectives of a small minority of special interests in their districts.
Roberts and Catlin are claiming that this is not an attack on the wolf program but their proposed bill is functionally the same as the petition to delay new wolf introductions submitted to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission. This petition was denied. It is also very similar to the deeply unpopular and almost sure-to-fail attempt at a ballot measure to delay future reintroductions.
Since they can’t win through democracy, they instead are choosing to attempt another sneaky attack on the program, this time during a crisis. Their claims that this bill would “save money” are nonsense. The amount that would be “saved” is trivial relative to the Republican-caused budget shortfall.
If these two want to save the state money regarding wolves, they should instead look to the outrageous abuses of the wolf compensation program, new voluntary funding streams for CPW, and encouraging their constituents that run cattle businesses to take advantage of all the resources that have been made available to them to make this transition.
These resources include the nearly $1 million raised over two years by the purchase of the Born to be Wild license plate: money paid voluntarily by individuals all over Colorado to ensure that the restoration of wolves is fair to folks that will have to alter their business practices.
This is on top of the compensation programs that pay livestock businesses market value of an animal if lost to wolves, a compensation program for losses due to other predators like bears and cougars, and this is all on top of deeply subsidized grazing fees on our public lands, cheap property taxes and funding of Wildlife Services that kill species that “interfere with the production of livestock. These subsidies are something most businesses do not get the luxury of.
Our legislators need to be taking this budget crisis seriously. Personal grievance bills make a mockery of the scale of this weaponized attack on our state’s budget. It’s time for Roberts and Catlin to acknowledge the will of the voters and accept the results of the 2020 ballot measure and the extensive work and money that has been dedicated to making this historic restoration project, a fair and equitable success that Colorado should be proud of.
Ryan Sedgeley is the Southern Rockies Representative for the Endangered Species Coalition. He holds an M.A. in Environment and Natural Resources and a J.D. from the University of Wyoming and spent nearly 10 years living with wolves, grizzly bears and bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
