Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
President Joe Biden stands with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, October 12, 2022.
President Biden flew to western Colorado recently to unveil the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument, a World War II Army training site in north-central Colorado where the 10th Mountain Division troops learned to ski in preparation for fighting in the Northern Apennines in Italy. Biden could have signed off on the proclamation from the comfort of the Oval Office. But Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) is facing a closer-than-expected race against his Republican challenger Joe O’Dea, a political neophyte, and the presidential visit helped burnish Bennet’s credentials by peeling off a win from broader environmental legislation that has stalled in Congress.
“It’s a really big deal,” Jim Ramey, Colorado state director of The Wilderness Society, told the Prospect. “It had been a long while since we had significant acreages of federal public land protected, and Coloradans, by and large, want to see more of their federal public lands protected.” According to a Colorado College survey of Rocky Mountain West voters in January, 86 percent of Coloradans support the creation of new public lands to protect natural, cultural, and historical resources.
Over the course of his 13-year tenure, Bennet has emerged as one of the Senate’s key environmental leaders.
In addition to the monument, the administration also proposed protections for another piece of federal land, the Thompson Divide, which covers over 200,000 acres and contributes millions of dollars to the regional economy through outdoor recreation, agriculture, and ranching. As the area was opened to energy production the early 2000s and the negative consequences of expanded oil and gas drilling appeared across the country, local residents and environmentalists organized efforts to protect the area. Together, the Camp Hale monument and the Thompson Divide will protect over 275,000 acres in Colorado.
The designation did draw criticism from the Uncompahgre Band of the Ute Tribe in Utah, one of the three independent Ute tribes that have ancestral lands in the region. They said they were not consulted in the lead-up to the Camp Hale monument decision and called the process “an unlawful act of genocide.” Colorado’s Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe supported the proclamation.
Bennet and Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) originally envisioned the Camp Hale and the Thompson Divide protections as parts of the broader Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy (CORE) Act, which was a combination of three previous public-lands acts and added protections for the Curecanti National Recreation Area. The CORE Act, in all, sought to protect over 400,000 acres of land.
The contours of the broader CORE Act emerged after ten years of negotiations between federal, state, and local officials and ranchers, landowners, and gas and oil companies. Under the CORE Act, previously granted oil and gas drilling permits in protected areas would be respected. However, the act also contained provisions that would allow the companies that had accepted leases within the Thompson Divide to swap them for other approved leases elsewhere in the state.
Over the course of his 13-year tenure, Bennet, a former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, has emerged as one of the Senate’s key environmental leaders, helping to negotiate $4 billion in drought relief funding in the Inflation Reduction Act. He has also introduced legislation this session to clean up orphaned drilling wells, slow the movement of invasive mussels, and require oil and gas operators to pay for damage and restore lands at drilling sites and pay for those damages before they can obtain Department of the Interior leases.
CORE is also incredibly popular with Coloradans, with a Center for Western Priorities Winning the West poll showing over 80 percent of voters supporting the protections. “There are so many folks from all sides of the political spectrum that rally behind the CORE Act,” says Melissa Daruna, executive director of Keep It Colorado, a nonprofit coalition of conservation organizations. “Because it really isn’t about a political party or a political ideology, it’s about creating a sustainable future for everybody.”
The act, however, is in limbo: Having passed the House four times, CORE ran into significant opposition in the Senate. When the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources considered the bill in May, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) attempted to prevent the limits on oil and gas leasing, arguing that “we should be looking for opportunities to increase production, not to restrict it further.” With Republicans opposed to granting further protections, the remaining CORE provisions currently have no clear path forward in a lame-duck Senate.
For his part, O’Dea repeats these GOP talking points and would seek to increase energy production in the face of rising energy prices and inflation, even though energy companies are baldly focusing on stock buybacks and paying dividends to shareholders, rather than moving to ramp up domestic production under the thousands of leases that companies already hold.
A poll released last week by Democratic groups ProgressNow Global and Strategy Group had Bennet leading O’Dea by ten percentage points; an earlier October Marist College poll showed Bennet up by seven.
“I still believe Coloradans want the whole thing, but that is a fight for another day,” says Wendy Wendlandt, president of Environment America, referring to CORE. “You’ve got to start where we can get support, and in this case, that is the Camp Hale designation.”
