Editor’s Note: This article is the second of three articles about Montezuma County’s noxious weed program. Part 1 on Tuesday provided insight into why the weed program, considered a model for Southwest Colorado, was cut back. Part 3 on Thursday considers the problem of roadside weeds. All three parts are published in Wednesday’s printed edition of The Journal.
After Montezuma County’s Noxious Weed Department lost its director at the end of last year and its advisory board earlier this year, all but one of the once flourishing programs were lost, too.
The Board of County Commissioners absorbed the role of overseeing the program, which historically had been done by experts in the field.
In their newfound role as noxious weed advisers, county commissioners cut programs and attributed the cuts to a tight budget, though the general fund grew by nearly $4 million in 2023.
“We were finding that expenses were outpacing revenues,” said Travis Anderson, the county administrator.
“Unfunded mandates from the state of Colorado are just tough to deal with, because where do we get the funds?” said Commissioner Jim Candelaria.
Between 2019 and 2022, the county’s noxious weed department was awarded $352,000 in grants, which were mostly matched by funds from landowners.
Grant money made projects like the Phreatophyte Project and Backpack Sprayer Loaner Program possible. Such funds paid for equipment and two additional full-time workers.
Priorities are priorities, though, and there really is only so much money to go around.
“Much like the counties, at the state level, there are so many priorities to focus on. To try to get legislators excited about noxious weeds is a bit of a challenge,” Sen. Cleave Simpson said.
“I’m hopeful through the Department of Agriculture there’s a mechanism or a tool or an idea or something to ring more sense of urgency to how the state deals with noxious weeds.”
At the state level, the Noxious Weed Act says that counties must appoint a local advisory board, which Montezuma County no longer has.
It also requires counties to manage List A and targeted List B species … and manage noxious weeds in public rights of way, said Olga Robak, the director of communications and public awareness at the Colorado Department of Agriculture in an email.
There are more than 300 species of weeds on the State Noxious Weed List. They’re divvied up into three lists: A, B and C. List A weeds must be eradicated, List B must be managed, and List C weeds fall under “recommended management.”
Under state law, though the county is supposed to have an advisory board. “The local governing body shall have the sole and final authority to approve, modify, or reject the management plan.”
“I characterize it as an unfunded mandate from the state that said ‘We don’t have any funding to help you.’ It makes it kind of hard to prioritize,” Simpson said.
Still, Montezuma County was able to create a program in years past that was exceptional enough to inspire other counties in their own weed management, said Eddy Lewis, an advisory board member for 26 years.
“A lot of it depends on county commissioners at the time. I’ve seen this in La Plata County and other counties too,” said Lewis. “If you lose their (commissioners) backing, the program is probably going to die.”
Oma Fleming, the manager of a mandatory weed control district in Dolores County, echoed Lewis’ point when asked how high of a priority weed control ought to be for a county.
“I guess that depends on your commissioners,” said Fleming. “I have commissioners that are farmers, they know what the weeds do.”
Noxious weeds outcompete native species and create a monoculture. Lack of diversity directly impacts wildlife, and so on.
“The reason they are noxious is because they are that aggressive. They can move in, take over your land. I wouldn’t say ruin your land, but completely change its ability to produce, forage or anything beneficial,” said Walt Henes, a former advisory board member and owner of Southwest Seed Inc.
When looking at noxious weeds that infest profitable land in Montezuma County – nearly 50,000 of 1.24 million acres – that’s used for things like growing wheat, corn, grass, hay, raising alfalfa, water, rangeland and forest, the county stands to suffer a $5.1 million loss.
“It impacts everybody,” said Miles. “From the small acreage landowners to the large farmers and ranchers. It’s not just, you know, the farming community it impacts. It impacts everybody.”
Cheatgrass, for example, “is highly flammable, and as it has expanded, the extent and frequency of fire in the Great Basin has increased by as much as 200%,” according to U.S. Geological Services.
Just last year, the county’s weed program had a Backpack Sprayer Loaner Program. Residents could rent the equipment for $20 – completely covering the cost of the program -- and do their own spraying.
The weed department went over how to use the sprayers to ensure landowners with small patches of weeds were spraying the right herbicides on their property.
That program was recently slashed.
The noxious weed department oversaw a nonnative Phreatophyte Removal Project, which mitigated the cost of removing Russian olives and saltcedar trees for landowners.
A private contractor doing the same kind of excavation and treatment work charges roughly $1,750 per acre; the weed department did it at $805 per acre. Costs were projected to drop further once the department secured more equipment.
Nonnative phreatophytes are List B species – which requires them to be managed -- are especially worrisome because the water they consume and their impacts on agriculture. They also increase wildfire danger.
A single saltcedar or Russian olive can consume nearly 200 gallons of water a day. Where Russian olives and saltcedars grow densely, they can consume almost 1.5 million gallons of water each year. Groups of saltcedars increase salinity in water and soil, creating agricultural problems, according to previous presentations from the weed department.
These phreatophytes promote mosquito breeding grounds, decrease bird diversity, change stream bank dynamics and harm native fish populations, the Colorado Department of Agriculture said in a letter supporting Montezuma County’s Phreatophyte Project on Sept. 22, 2021.
“The longer we wait to restore the land from these two species, the more difficult and expensive it will become,” the state Department of Agriculture wrote.
The roughly 7,800 acres of nonnative phreatophytes in Montezuma County take in an estimated 35,956 acre-feet of water every year, more than Narraguinnep Reservoir’s capacity of 22,000 acre-feet.
This project alone received $375,940 in grant funding from the Regional Conservation Partnership Program to target agriculture-designated properties since it started in 2019.
With this money, the team removed 60,566 Russian olives and 63,671 saltcedars from 595 acres in Montezuma County. That removal saved an estimated 4,754 acre-feet of water, enough to fill 2,347 Olympic-size swimming pools.
When left untreated, populations of Russian olives and saltcedars increase by 75% every five years. Montezuma County has 100,000 suitable acres for them to thrive in waterways, riparian areas and irrigated fields.
The last phreatophyte removal project is finishing up deep in McElmo Canyon now, said James Dietrich, the new director of the noxious weed department.
Once complete, that program will be slashed too.
In addition to those programs, the weed department in years past prioritized enforcement.
Though some counties have enforcement policies as part of their weed plan and others do not, counties are supposed to uphold the Noxious Weed Act, and enforcement is key.
Mapping noxious weeds is central to enforcement.
Historically, the department would map and then send notices to landowners whose properties were infested with noxious weeds. If the landowner didn’t reply within a certain window -- depending on the severity of the weeds – the weed department would get an inspection warrant and possibly spray the weeds.
This kind of enforcement is made legal under the state’s Noxious Weed Act and past county resolutions.
Anderson, the former weed manager, would use this GIS mapping to help landowners recognize and target weeds on their property.
“Some of the people she (Anderson) went and enforced, some of them came back and thanked her,” said Brad White, a former advisory board member and farmer in Pleasant View. “She saved their property.”
Complying with enforcement is made financially viable for landowners with the county’s Cost Share Program, which does just that: it shares the cost – up to 50% -- of the herbicide with the private landowner.
The program is made possible by a $20,000 Colorado Department of Agriculture grant and a $10,000 county match.
That program is the only one still up and running.
As it stands, there is no capacity in the weed department to go to people’s houses or send out notices requiring people to manage their weeds.
The county is also targeting only List A – not List B -- species, which must be eradicated, Dietrich said.
With Cost Share, landowners are expected to turn in a map of their property and circle where they’ve sprayed weeds.
This is the only mapping of noxious weeds happening now in the county.
“They sort of, sometimes do that. The mapping is just based off what I can determine from what comes in,” said Dietrich. “It’s just not going to be hyperaccurate. We’re basically relying on people to self-report and, as you can imagine how that goes, it’s not real well.”
At an undefined future date, the weed technician will start driving roads to do mapping, but it’s all ocular, Dietrich said.
“That’s kind of a problem, identifying things that are, say, 400 yards away from the road. That gets really hard. I mean, you can use binoculars but jeez, it’s pretty tough. Unless you’ve got a really big patch of something that’s fairly identifiable,” Dietrich said.
Robak at the state Department of Agriculture underscored “local programs are vital to an effective statewide strategy,” because the state depends on smaller county departments to submit annual maps tracking noxious weeds in its area.
Candelaria said it is property owner’s responsibility to manage weeds on their property.
“We need to do the outreach and the education, but it’s your responsibility, not mine,” said Candelaria. “If you purchased it and you own it, good stewardship starts with you.”
A 2014 county resolution echoed that “ownership of private property assumes management and stewardship of the land.”
“You could Google any weed you have, and you could probably find it. I fail to see people don’t have any avenues for knowing what kind of species that they have,” Candelaria said.
But for people who are new to the area or don’t have a keen eye to identify these weeds, they might not realize their land is infested or what that means for their property, Henes said.
“If you want to put a couple of cows on your 20-acre parcel and you find out that the vegetation is Russian knapweed or Canadian thistle, the value for your animals is gone,” Henes said.
As far as responsibility on county lands, the county still manages weeds on properties like the fairgrounds. Education remains a priority to help landowners manage weeds on their own.
This winter, the weed technician will get more familiar with the role and develop some programs to start working with people in spring, Dietrich said.
“To eliminate or decrease the current level of management makes it much harder and expensive to recover in the future,” the former advisory board wrote. “Going backwards would likely erase ongoing successes.”
