Editor’s Note: This article is the first of three articles about Montezuma County’s noxious weed program. Part 2 on Wednesday considers some of the impacts of the lost program, and Part 3 on Thursday considers the problem of roadside weeds. All three parts are published in Wednesday’s printed edition of The Journal.
Montezuma County’s noxious weed program once struggled to meet the bare minimum required by Colorado’s Noxious Weed Act, then with financial help grew for nearly a decade to become the envy of Southwest Colorado.
Between 2019 and 2022, the program was awarded $352,000 in grants, which were mostly matched by funds from landowners. Bonnie Anderson, the weed department director, was selected as 2022 Weed Manager of the Year.
That all ended in March.
Anderson was fired in October. And this year, the Board of County Commissioners approved a weed management plan so unpalatable to its noxious weed advisory board – made up of six weed experts – that the entire board resigned.
“The county commissioners weren’t responsive to our suggestions,” said Steve Miles, a former advisory board member named Conservationist of the Year in 2008.
“Our role was to advise, and they weren’t interested in what we were having to say. That’s why we all resigned.”
The resignation forced the Board of County Commissioners to absorb the role.
“Any time there’s a board not functioning, the commissioners basically end up having to take over that task. We’ve got so many other priorities, that it’s kind of fallen very low, to the very, very lowest priority that you could possibly deal with,” said County Commissioner Jim Candelaria.
Before the advisory board resigned, Bonnie Anderson, the former noxious weed department director named Weed Manager of the Year in 2022, was fired.
“She had such a terrific program going,” said Brad White, a former advisory board member and farmer in Pleasant View. “We were hoping we could find someone to step in her shoes and keep it going, but it completely went flat.”
The new noxious weeds director is James Dietrich. He doubles as the natural resources planning and public lands coordinator.
There’s one full-time staff dedicated to noxious weeds – the only applicant for the role – and he has little to no experience in the field. Dietrich said he holds promise, though.
“That’s the biggest milestone right now, because we were just flat no-capacity when everybody left,” Dietrich said.
In the wake of the department’s exodus, its once successful programs were cut.
“We were finding that expenses were outpacing revenues,” said Travis Anderson, the county administrator.
Last year, it spent about $12,000 less than it was expected to.
As far as individual programs go, in 2023, the Phreatophyte Project got $96,963 in grant funding; its expenses were just under half that. That project even made the Road Department about $10,000.
“Unfunded mandates from the state of Colorado are just tough to deal with, because where do we get the funds?” said Candelaria.
The noxious weed department got its funding from three sources: the county road department’s mill levy, the general fund and outside funding such as grants.
Previous resolutions specify that 1% of the Road and Bridge department’s mill levy is dedicated to the weed department.
Between 2019 and 2022, the county’s noxious weed department was awarded $352,000 in grants, which were mostly matched by funds from landowners.
“When Bonnie got in there, she ... got a lot of grant funding and increased the program without a burden on the landowners or the county” said Eddy Lewis, the owner of Southwest Weed Control and an advisory board member for 26 years.
In March, the county decided to take the program back to what the statute says.
“That’s where we’re going with the program,” said Candelaria. “It’s just to what the statute says we have to do.”
The county has other, pressing priorities to spend its money on. Public safety, for example, ranks higher on the agenda than weeds, said Candelaria.
“We are the second-lowest-paid agency in the state of Colorado,” said Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin. “I am 17% behind the number of deputies for the per capita that we have. I’m only running two deputies a shift, and they’re working 12-hour shifts.”
The board recently cut the public safety budget by more than $1 million.
“When they found that Kinder Morgan and other taxes were dropping, and they couldn’t meet the budget with the amount we had to have, they decided to make major cuts,” Nowlin said.
One source of revenue for Montezuma County is property taxes, which makes up 18.11% of its total revenue. A little over half that 18.11% comes from Kinder Morgan.
In other words, about 9% of the county’s total revenue comes from Kinder Morgan – not over half its total revenue, like Commissioner Kent Lindsay mistakenly said at the Dec. 28 board meeting when discussing the county budget last year.
“You’re just saying hey, I want you to grow a program, and I’m saying, well, I don’t have enough money to grow the program,” said Candelaria. “So we just washed our hands of the whole thing.”
What’s more, the county’s general fund brought in $3.7 million last year.
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.
“She (Anderson) was pretty zealous in her job there,” said Lewis. “It ruffled some feathers, and unfortunately it was some of the wrong feathers. The whole program got squashed by it.”
