Two Cortez community members spoke out at a recent meeting of the Montezuma County Board of County Commissioners to bring to light a dissolved program that would have removed Russian olives from their property.
Gina Montoya and her husband, Abdel Berrada, used their cumulative public comment time – nearly six minutes – to talk about the Russian olive problem on their property that the county never addressed.
Berrada said they first heard about the county’s once booming Phreatophyte Project in a Journal article published online March 18, 2023.
“We were excited about it. I thought it was a worthwhile program given its implications on soil and water conservation and management in the county,” Berrada said at the Sept. 24 meeting.
They said they contacted the county on March 19, the day after they found out about it to enroll in the program, which removed Russian olive and saltcedar trees at a lower cost – nearly $900 less per acre – than private contractors doing the same work.
By early August last year, a technician from the weed department surveyed their property.
And on Sept. 19, 2023, Montoya signed a contract with the county to do Russian olive removal work on their property.
That was more than a year ago, and nothing has been done about it.
When left unmanaged, Russian olive and saltcedar populations increase by 75% every five years.
So as time wore on, the weed problem on their property grew worse.
Each time the couple contacted the weed department to see when it planned to do the work, they were assured it would be soon, Montoya said.
In September this year, nearly a year after she signed the contract, Montoya received an email saying the work wouldn’t be done.
“This memo is to inform you that Montezuma County has run out of funding for the removal of Russian Olives and Salt Cedar on private lands and has therefore suspended the program indefinitely,” Noxious Weed Department Director James Dietrich said in an email.
“Had we known that there was an issue or a problem with this being honored, we would have looked at other options. Meanwhile, these Russian olives have outgrown us,” Montoya said.
Montoya said the county should have upheld its promise to do the weed removal, or to at least have let them know sooner so they could have had a different contractor do the work.
To that, at the meeting, Commissioner Jim Candelaria said, “Unless a contract has been signed by the board, it’s not valid.”
In Colorado, local governments have the authority to cancel contracts if they run out of money to do the work, according to the state’s non-appropriation clause.
Still, they wish they had found out sooner so that they could have targeted the weeds before they could multiply, Montoya said.
“We don’t understand why Montezuma County would abandon such a great and worthwhile program despite the grants it received for it,” Berrada said.
The county made major cuts to its noxious weed department after it fired its former director Bonnie Anderson last October and the entire noxious weed advisory board resigned earlier this year.
Anderson had won weed manager of the year in 2022 for Colorado and helped the department secure $352,000 in grant money between 2019 and 2022.
The county attributed cuts to budget, but some of the programs they cut were most, if not all, grant and user funded.
The Phreatophyte Removal Project was one of those cut programs, and it wrapped up in McElmo Canyon in September.
“I really couldn’t tell you what they finished up on it. I know they had told me they ran out of funding and that was as far as they were going to go with that particular part of the project, and that was it,” said James Baker, a former Phreatophyte Project worker.
Baker said he was let go sometime around Sept. 20.
“I did not quit, but on my last paper that they give you … it said that I had resigned. I did not resign from the county. And even with that, I would have thought that if I had resigned, that would have been written and signed by me,” Baker said.
He said dissolving the program the way they did left some people without follow-up sprays, which are necessary in controlling weeds after they’re removed. And it left others, like Montoya and Berrada, without work done at all.
“There were several landowners we were supposed to follow-up on and a few even paid, but I don’t know if the work ever got done,” said Cyndal Sutch, a former weed technician and office manager in the department.
“Now we find ourselves in a dire situation where the number and size of Russian olives on our property has more than doubled … due to the extreme delay in the county informing us that they were not going to honor their contract with us,” Montoya wrote in an email to Dietrich.
When The Journal asked the county’s public information coordinator, Vicki Shaffer, how many contracts it had to break, she repeatedly said, via email, “The phreatophyte program has been discontinued. I am not able to answer questions related to the program.”
“Like anything else, they’re big huge weeds. If you don’t keep doing something to them, they keep coming back,” said Baker. “That whole deal was just kind of weird with me, the way the county left it.”
