Boebert says her wolf bill defends rural Colorado from “leftists and ballot box biology”

Sneak Peek of the Week

Boebert’s Livestock and Pets Protection (from wolves) Act debuts before the House Natural Resources Committee

Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert invoked all the ways wolves, leftists and ballot box biology are hurting Colorado’s “rural way of life” when she brought up her bill that would remove wolves from the endangered species list and return management to the states. The bill was discussed Tuesday during a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing on it and a bill that would amend the Endangered Species Act to do the same.

House Resolution 845, or the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, which was introduced by Boebert in January, would restore a 2020 Department of the Interior final rule to delist the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act, so management activities may be determined by affected states “using the best available science.”

The bill is backed by the National Rifle Association, the American Farm Bureau and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and is a direct response to Colorado’s voter-mandated wolf reintroduction efforts, which started with the release of 10 wolves from Oregon in December 2023 and continued with the release of 15 from British Columbia in January.

Currently, 29 wolves are roaming the state, including five born into the Copper Creek pack, which last fall was trapped and removed from a location near a ranch in Grand County where the adult male and female had repeatedly preyed on livestock. The male died shortly after the pack was relocated to a private holding facility, from a gunshot wound inflicted by an unidentified shooter.

Boebert on Tuesday said Colorado’s “ballot box ideology” caused the state to “rush through the importation of the Canadian gray wolves, and set them loose in our state, despite numerous protests and questions about the legality and dysfunctional and chaotic approach to prioritizing predators over people.”

She told the committee Colorado Parks and Wildlife released wolves without notifying landowners, livestock producers or other reasonably concerned constituents during the first release and that five of those wolves had come from packs with a known history of chronic livestock depredation.

And she called out a situation where a gray wolf from the Great Lakes region was trapped and killed in Elbert County in April and a recently released British Columbia wolf was shot and killed by USDA wildlife services agents after killing five sheep in Wyoming last week as examples of why the states, not the federal government, should decide their management.

But Defenders of Wildlife had some serious issues with Boebert’s plea to the mostly Republican subcommittee, starting with her “general lack of understanding of how the Endangered Species Act works and why gray wolves are on it in the first place,” according to Maggie Dewane, communications director, who spoke with The Colorado Sun after the hearing.

“One of the most stark illustrations of that lack of understanding was when the congresswoman said that gray wolves have been listed since 1967 and the Endangered Species Act hadn’t even passed at that point,” she said. “So, unfortunately, the entire hearing was riddled with some of this blatant misinformation, some fabrications and embellishments that, from our opinion, don’t do the cause of protecting imperiled species, endangered species any good.”

Boebert has also called for an end to Colorado’s wolf reintroduction program, and supports a proposed ballot measure that would ask voters to do that in 2026. The proposed ballot measure passed its first hurdle in February. Defenders of Wildlife says it’s not a big concern for them, however, because they expect wolves in Colorado to be “fully reintroduced” by the end of 2025. Not everyone is convinced of that though.

Tracy Ross will have more on the hearing, responses from groups supporting Boebert’s bill, and more on the chances of full reintroduction amid the pushback, over at The Sun, next week.

In Their Words

A rebranding of the Flight for Life livery has some seeing red

It seems innocuous at first blush: CommonSpirit Health, which took over Colorado’s Centura Health in 2023, last week announced plans to change the color of its six Flight for Life helicopters to purple from orange.

But the March 17 announcement on Facebook spurred hundreds of comments opposing the shift.

Think of the things CommonSpirit could spend money on besides painting helicopters and ambulances a new color, Dave Repsher told Colorado Sun reporter Jason Blevins.

Repsher is a ski patroller turned flight nurse who was severely burned in 2015 when his Flight for Life helicopter crashed in Frisco, killing pilot Patrick Mahany. Repsher says the money should be spent on “medical equipment and training and safety upgrades to helicopters or crew quarters at bases.”

Karen Mahany was a flight nurse for Flight for Life in Colorado from 1998 to 2005, where she met her husband, Patrick. Since the fiery 2015 crash, the Repshers and Mahany have been tireless advocates for helicopter safety. They pushed for federal legislation in 2018 that requires crash-resistant fuel systems in helicopters manufactured after April 2020.

That legislation changed regulations that allowed older helicopters to fly in the U.S. without modern-day safety upgrades. The pair remains vigilant in advocating for mandatory energy-absorbing upgrades to the structure and seating of helicopters.

“What killed my husband was not the fire that burned Dave. The main reason my husband died was blunt force trauma. Flight for Life still does not have higher-standard crashworthy structure, seating or restraining systems,” Karen Mahany said. “For them to be spending, by my estimate, at least $1 million to change the paint without putting in new safety seating and structure improvements or even buying new helicopters, it is reprehensible. This is nothing more than a vanity project. I do not see how it makes patients and crew any safer.”

Others are comparing the change to “Coke changing from red to purple” — and not in a good way. Read all about it in Jason’s story over at The Sun on Friday.

The Outsider has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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The Playground

A rancher from the oil and gas biz is using capitalism to help elk

280,000Estimated elk population in Colorado

A rancher who fashions himself after Aldo Leopold, the American ecologist and author of “A Sand County Almanac,” just signed an agreement that will let gangs of elk hang out on his ranch in exchange for a conservation organization paying his cattle grazing fees on other private land.

When we last checked in with Dave Gottenborg and his Eagle Rock Ranch in Park County, he was quoting Leopold about every four sentences and laying down fencing so the elk could migrate through during the winter.

Now, the rancher, who bought his 3,000-acre spread with money he made in the gas and oil business, will keep helping those elk while also saving a few bucks he normally has to pay other private landowners to let his cattle graze during the summer.

The organization picking up those fees — the amount of which Gottenborg isn’t disclosing — is the Property and Environment Research Center, which believes access across private land for wildlife like elk and grizzlies is key to their survival.

PERC started as a group of conservation-minded economists during the height of the Cold War asking if capitalist markets could produce bread and cars, why couldn’t they produce environmental quality?

They found their answer in market-based solutions to environmental problems like connecting willing buyers and sellers of water rights to resolve competing demands, and convincing policymakers direct user fees toward the National Park Service’s $22 billion deferred maintenance backlog.

The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust — the third party in the agreement — will monitor Gottenborg’s grazing rotations via trail cameras, drones and satellites to make sure he isn’t grazing his cattle when or where he shouldn’t be, he wrote in a text.

The agreement will pay Gottenborg less than 90% of his lease rate, year-in and year-out, for five years no matter if he’s “resting the ground or actively grazing it in alternate years,” he wrote. “We agreed to keep it less than 100% so it would still be more profitable for landowners to keep in agricultural grazing usage.”

That’s an “extremely important point and one that took a LONG time to negotiate to where it was satisfactory with all three parties,” he wrote.

“Let’s say my PERC payment was 100% of my lease rate. A third-party landowner might look at that and say ‘screw the cattle rancher! I don’t need cattle on my property! I’ll just lease for elk!’”

That would hurt not only him “but all other cattle ranchers,” he wrote, “so it HAS to be less than 100% in order to keep private landowners in the grazing game.”

It’ll be business as usual for the elk, which Gottenborg gives no supplemental feed, “no ‘salting’ or other minerals,” he wrote.

But he’s waiting for the flack from elk hunters to fly, so Tracy Ross is going to give some of them a call and report back with the full story at The Sun next week.

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Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

This newsletter was updated at 10:45 a.m., March 31, 2025, to clarify that the National Park Service’s $22 billion dollar maintenance backlog refers to needed maintenance at all National Park facilities, not just Yellowstone National Park.