DENVER – A Colorado Senate committee this week delayed voting on a public-lands bill after witnesses brought up a possible legal conundrum.
Senate Bill 39 would allow Colorado to exercise authority along with the federal government over federal public lands.
Brandon Siegfried, director of the Public Land Access Association, pointed out that the vast majority of public lands in Colorado are held in what is known as a “proprietorial interest only,” meaning the state already has authority.
“We don’t have to pass a bill to prove fact,” Siegfried said. “The fact of the matter is 97.2 percent of the public lands in the state of Colorado are held in a proprietorial interest only. We’ve never seen a concurrent or exclusive jurisdiction. There is no gray area as far as who the top police power is in those areas.”
After a brief recess by the Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee – where the bill was being heard – the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, acknowledged the situation.
“What Mr. Siegfried is saying is we already have supremacy and jurisdiction, and we probably need to take a look at that again and see what we can do to clarify that,” Lambert said. “If that’s actually the case, we may want to take another track on this.”
Lambert ran the bill in an effort to give local jurisdictions a seat at the table when it comes to criminal investigations and fighting wildfires on federal lands. He said the federal government blocks local intervention, which wastes time during precious moments.
He pointed to Old Fort Lewis as an example of the jurisdictional confusion. There originally was a land grant for the property where the college was built, but then the school moved, leading to jurisdictional uncertainty.
Lambert originally was going to tackle the issue in the legislation, but he said the attorney general’s office would investigate instead.
Meanwhile, sportsmen and conservationists lined up to testify against the bill, suggesting that it is a slippery slope toward transferring federal lands over to the state’s authority, which they fear would result in a mismanagement of the lands acquired by the state.
“As private-hunting access increasingly becomes limited to the wealthy and well-connected, public land remains the only safeguard that, no matter what profession you choose or what family you marry into, you will always have a place,” said Tim Brass, southern Rockies coordinator for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. “It’s time for politicians to drop this unpopular rhetoric.”