Garfield County commissioners recently issued a letter complaining about the latest round of wolf releases in Colorado, and pressuring Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) to prevent releases of wolves in their county. The commissioners were completely out of line in doing this.
The commissioners’ letter ignores the 37% of Garfield County voters who supported the ballot initiative to bring wolves back to Colorado and instead focuses only on the constituents who opposed, suggesting that the county ought to be able to opt-out of the wolf recovery effort. The 11,039 votes for wolves from Garfield County were enough to provide the winning margin statewide, putting wolf reintroduction over the top. Kudos to Garfield County residents for doing your part to support the recovery of wolves in the Colorado Rockies. Garfield County commissioners are doing a poor job of representing all of you, nor are they respecting the will of the voters throughout the state.
The election victory that brought wolves to Colorado overrode decades of internal agency politics that had corrupted the biological mission of CPW to suit the whims of a good-old-boy club that served county interests instead of serving wildlife and the public interest. Exhibit A is the scandal over disgraced CPW Regional Manager J.T. Romatzke, who famously got caught colluding with an anti-wolf county government lobby group to undermine wolf reintroduction in the state and to discredit Parks and Wildlife Commissioners perceived as pro-wolf. These toxic agency politics, which had nothing to do with biology, blocked wolf reintroduction for decades, until the citizens of Colorado voted to require wolf reintroduction under a plan “using the best scientific data available.”…