EAGLE — Colorado U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper is hearing a lot of frustration and anger as he tours the state this week. He’s telling people to organize and gather stories that reflect how public lands are suffering under drastic cuts at land agencies.
“It’s going to be a battle. It’s going to be a war. And the only real leverage that we have … in a constitutional democracy is to have people rise up,” he said, standing on the banks of the Eagle River on Tuesday at a small gathering of local officials worried about their forests.
Marcia Gilles, Eagle County’s director of open space and natural resources, who previously served as deputy district ranger for the Holy Cross Ranger District at the White River National Forest, said the busiest national forest in the country lost 43 full-time employees in the recent purge of federal workers, resulting in a 29% reduction — to 103 workers — in the forest’s full-time workforce. That does not include this year’s decision to not hire 50 seasonal workers in the 2.2-million-acre forest that generates at least $1.6 billion in annual economic activity in Western Slope communities.
Hickenlooper asked how the public will see that reduction in forest workers.
Projects will be delayed, especially those that require review by wildlife biologists. But mostly the public will see trash, toilets and fewer rangers on the ground making sure fires are extinguished and people are recreating appropriately, Gilles said.
“That public interface will be drastically reduced,” Gilles said.
Gilles, who began more than two decades with the Forest Service as a seasonal worker, said “there is really a disconnect” between what the Trump administration wants, with increased logging and energy production on public land, and the reduction of the Forest Service workforce.
One local business leader urged Hickenlooper to push for the Ski Hill Resources for Economic Development — or SHRED Act — that would allow local forests to retain fees paid by ski areas on public land instead of sending it back to the U.S. Treasury. The bill has failed to find traction in D.C. since it was first floated in 2021.
“It’s a straightforward concept: reinvest where you recreate,” said Anna Robinson with the Vail Valley Partnership.
The SHRED Act, which is supported by Hickenlooper, would more than double the White River National Forest’s annual budget.
The senator also got an earful from Eagle County officials who are worried that federal wildland firefighters may not respond to fires after local initial response. Local fire officials also expressed concern that federal wildfire mitigation and prevention work will slip in coming years. Eagle County and its towns have contributed $160,000 to fund a Front Country Rangers program of seasonal Forest Service workers who last year put out 32 fires and collected thousands of pounds of trash on Forest Service-managed land in the county.
Hickenlooper, fresh off a town hall in Grand Junction and en route to Breckenridge, urged the gathered people to collect anecdotes and share them with federal politicians. He urged everyone “to be more active on social media” and raise collective voices to share stories about how the federal slashing is challenging communities surrounded by public lands.
Gary Tennenbaum, the director of Pitkin County’s open space and trails program, wondered if “something drastic” — like the county closing its road and shuttles into the wildly popular federal Maroon Bells Scenic Area — could “get all the people who come to our community to know the impacts.”
Dan Gibbs, the director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, said his agency uses about 350 federal grants a year to fund all sorts of work, like dam safety, reclaiming orphaned oil and gas wells, water conservation, wildlife management and trail work. Gibbs read from recent edicts he’d received from the federal government that warned those grants would be cut if the agency did not collaborate with immigration enforcement officials or if it did any work involving diversity and equity.
“You will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws,” Gibbs read from the Department of Homeland Security’s new rules for anyone taking federal grants in 2025.
CPW’s innovative Outdoor Equity Grant Program has delivered $8.5 million to more than 140 programs that offer outdoor education and participation to overlooked communities.
“The federal government expects me to sign this,” said Gibbs, saying that similar Trump administration demands on universities are high-profile news.
Hickenlooper said it was “very, very frustrating” that the federal government was forcing Gibbs to quash diversity.
“The more diversity you have in people trying to solve problems, the higher the chances and the better the probability you are going to get an innovation and a good idea that somebody hasn’t thought of before,” he said.
Hickenlooper said the Fix Our Forests Act — which has passed the U.S. House and which Hickenlooper introduced in the U.S. Senate last week — will improve forest health by streamlining approval for wildfire mitigation projects. It will also force land management agencies to hire back people who were recently fired.
Hickenlooper said he knows the legislation “will be hotly contested” — it allows some forest restoration projects up to 10,000 acres to be exempt from review under the time-consuming National Environmental Policy Act — but it’s time for compromise.
“I think sitting around and debating it forever is worse than doing nothing,” he said.
Hickenlooper said the Senate has limited tools to thwart what he called “this new march of the horribles.” He seemed flustered by the Trump administration’s inability to align an understandable goal of reducing the size of government with sensible actions.
“So much of this is contradictory in nature,” he said. “What they say they want to do and then they act in a way that’s opposite and makes their goal unobtainable.
“I hope this is not true, but it seems like they’re trying to set up government to fail so they can say, ‘Hey, look at how the Forest Service has not done this or the Forest Service has not done that.’ And they are gonna say it’s a failure of government and government is the enemy. I believe most Americans feel we should be making federal government smaller but this isn’t the way to do it.”
