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Six score and four years ago today, Colorado became a state and got a present from Uncle Sam -- about 3 million acres for the support of support public schools. Lease and royalty income go to the school fund, and if the land is sold, the proceeds go into an endowment whose interest goes to the schools.
This land, often in mile-square parcels known as
school sections,
is administered by five part-time
commissioners of the State Land Board, which has a staff
and an executive director, Charles Bedford.
Both regular readers might recall that in early April, I wrote about the Little Cochetopa School Section southwest of Salida. The Land Board then valued it at $998,000, or $1,560 an acre, even though nearby land was selling for $10,000 and more an acre, and this land controls access to at least 3,000 acres of National Forest.
The Land Board had proposed trading this parcel for about 3,080 acres near La Jara Reservoir in Conejos County, owned by Thomas J. and Margie Smith of Kansas City, Mo.
People who wrote to the Land Board then were told by
Bedford that my April 2 article did not fully capture
the guarantees that the Board has in place to ensure that
full and fair market value is received.
But for some reason the Land Board got another appraisal after that, and lo and behold, that section acquired a value of $1.35 million.
When neighbors asked, at the March 14 Land Board
meeting, whether there was anything they could do about
this land trade, Commissioner Jay Kennedy said Is the
local community prepared to pull itself together and come
up with alternative proposals than what's here on the
table? And that's really, from my perspective, what needs
to happen.
One alternative was having the Land Board designate the Little Cochetopa land as part of the state's Stewardship Trust lands -- property that can be managed for wildlife or scenery or something other than maximum revenue for schools.
The neighbors asked about that then, and Commissioner
Diane Evans said the other option, if I'm not
misspeaking, is that you have the ability to renomimate
this piece for consideration in the Stewardship
Trust.
No one disputed her, and the neighbors left the meeting with the idea that if they assembled a Stewardship Trust nomination, it would get fair consideration.
The Citizens to Save the Little Cochetopa School Section prepared the nomination, which was endorsed by the Chaffee County government and all three municipalities.
But then came the agenda for the Land Board's July 21 meeting -- and there was the Little Cochetopa trade.
The neighbors went to District Court. Judge Ken Plotz on July 14 issued a temporary restraining order forbidding the Land Board from making the deal with the Smiths. But the Board could still vote on it, and it did.
Here's the deal, approved unanimously on your behalf and mine. The Little Cochetopa School Section is still of comparable value with the La Jara land. So the trade happens, but the Board will keep development rights on all but one house on 35 acres, and the state will pay the Smiths $421,976 for those retained development rights.
After three years, the Smiths can buy the development rights for $540,000, and meanwhile somebody else can buy them. But who would buy the development rights while Smith has the surface rights? A public entity might stop development that way, but since Smith controls the surface, he could still forbid access to adjacent public land, so it's not a good deal for the public.
That deal can't be consummated until the court case is resolved. The court has extended the restraining order until an Aug. 17 hearing on the Citizens' request for an injunction.
Recall that in March, two Land Commisioners said the neighbors should pursue Stewardship Trust designation as an alternative. Now, though, Bedford has sworn in an affidavit that neither he nor any land commissioners ever even hinted that applying for Stewardship Trust designation would affect the trade.
He told me the same thing on Friday: I don't know
where they got that idea.
After reading the transcript of the March meeting, I
think they got the idea from the State Land Board, and they
persuaded all our local governments to support Stewardship
Trust designation by a Land Board that says it wants to
acknowledge local interests.
At the July meeting, Karin Adams, the local realty agent
representing the Smiths in this deal, said You need to
disregard those [letters supporting Stewardship Trust
designation], since they were written under extreme
political pressure in an election year and are not
sincere.
In other words, if local governments serve their constitutients instead of realty agents, they're not being sincere.
The State Land Board is being sincere, I guess, since it seems to be listening only to her and her clients, the Kansas City Smiths, rather than anybody else, like people who live around here. Forgive me if I celebrate statehood today with something less than enthusiasm -- if this is how our state government operates, we'd have been better off staying a territory.
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