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Every so often, David wins a round with Goliath, and that happened here on May 1 when District Judge Kenneth M. Plotz issued his ruling in a case brought against the Colorado State Board of Land Commissioners by Citizens to Save the Little Cochetopa School Section.
Both regular readers of this column might be familiar with this issue, since I've written about it before. The story starts on Aug. 1, 1876, when Colorado became a state. In the Enabling Act for statehood, the U.S. Congress gave the new state two sections (a section is 640 acres, or one square mile) in each township (a six-mile square, or 36 square miles).
The royalty or lease income from that land, or the
interest from a trust account that gets the proceeds of the
land if it was sold at public sale for not less than
$2.50 an acre,
was to be set aside for the support
of the common schools.
Thus there are land-grant colleges
like Colorado
State University, and all around the state, there are
school sections
-- mile-square parcels that are
administered by the State Land Board. Over the years,
thanks to exchanges and the like, some state parcels have
grown to be much larger than a section. Altogether, the
land board manages about 3 million acres of Colorado -- an
area a little smaller than Connecticut.
The Land Board has five commissioners, all part-time,
and a small full-time staff. Most of its land
managing
is done by the people who lease state land,
and state land isn't public land in the same way that
Forest Service or BLM property is.
For example, when a federal agency leases grazing rights, that's all the rancher gets -- the right to graze a specified number of livestock at specified times. The rest of us are still free to hunt or hike on that land. When the state leases grazing, the rancher essentially gets total control of that parcel, and the rest of us Coloradans could be arrested for trespassing on land that we own.
The relevant school section sits along Little Cochetopa Creek, about five miles south of U.S. 50 a few miles west of Salida. In March of last year, the Land Board announced that it would consider a trade with one Thomas Smith, a land developer based in Kansas City.
Tom and Margie Smith of Kansas City already owned the 210-acre McNeil Ranch, which abuts this school section on its south side. They also owned about 3,080 acres near La Jara Reservoir in Conejos County, which they proposed trading for the Little Cochetopa school section.
Never having seen the La Jara land, and not being familiar with real-estate prices in Conejos County, I had no idea whether their values were comparable.
But I can read dollars, and the Land Board's appraisal put the Little Cochetopa at only $1,560 an acre, when nearby land was going for $10,000 an acre and more. If the Land Board is supposed to be getting all the money it can for our schools, then it shouldn't be working with appraisals that are well under current market prices.
That attitude was shared by the four neighboring property owners who formed Citizens to Save the Little Cochetopa School Section, and hired an attorney, Alison Maynard of Denver.
They had other reasons for opposing the trade, of course -- most rural landowners aren't thrilled with the possibility of publicly owned land becoming private land that could be developed.
But they weren't the only ones. For instance, the Little Cochetopa School Section controls access to the 4,500-acre Cleveland Mountain area -- National Forest land where a lot of people hunt every fall. (The State Division of Wildlife leases seasonal hunting rights on that section from the Land Board, thereby providing access to the public land behind the school section.) Every municipality in Chaffee County, and the county commissioners, went on record in opposition to the trade.
This didn't matter to the State Land Board. Last July it approved the trade, but the deal couldn't be consummated because the court had issued a temporary restraining order until the judge could hear all the arguments.
On May 1, Judge Plotz ruled that the State Land Board
had failed in its duty to the schools of Colorado because
it relied on appraisals that do not consider the highest
and best value of the Little Cochetopa Parcel,
and that
the Court specifically finds that when the record is
considered as a whole, the findings of fact by the Board
are clearly erroneous and unsupported by substantial
evidence.
The Land Board could sell or trade the land in the future, Plotz ruled, but only if it gets a fair price for a public asset.
As I interpret this, it means the Land Board tried to make a sweetheart deal with a developer to dispose of our state assets at bargain rates. And the Board got caught.
Score one for David. But also wonder how much of this is going on elsewhere in Colorado, where nobody happens to be looking.
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