Nicole Rosmarino was weeks out from taking over as director of the Colorado State Land Board when people started talking about her connection to the Earth Liberation Front, the radical environmental group that set fire to multiple buildings and chairlifts at Vail Resort, just before dawn on Oct. 19, 1998, to protest a planned expansion the group said would have threatened lynx habitat.
Rosmarino last spring was the sole finalist to lead the agency that manages 2.8 million surface acres and 4 million mineral-estate acres primarily to fund Colorado’s public schools through leases for things like agriculture, recreation, commercial real estate, renewable energy and oil and gas development, the biggest moneymaker. School trust assets in fiscal year 2023-24 generated $282 million for the state’s public schools, according to its 2024 annual report.
At the time, she was Gov. Jared Polis’ policy adviser for wildlife, agriculture and rural economic development, where her greatest accomplishments, she says, included working with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the Colorado Department of Agriculture and bipartisan legislators to create laws to combat wildlife trafficking, create sustainable agriculture tax credits and establish the Division of Animal Welfare at the Colorado Department of Agriculture.
She has also sat on the leadership council of The Rewilding Institute, which works to restore ecological integrity and biodiversity through things like reintroducing and protecting endangered species (read: wolves and lynx). She’s the founder and former executive director of the Southern Plains Land Trust, which has conserved more than 60,000 acres of Colorado prairie lands with a goal of “restoring the American Serengeti” on the Eastern Plains, replete with “massive herds of bison and pronghorn … prairie dog colonies, and lesser prairie-chickens conducting their ancient and provocative mating dances.”
And she was once the wildlife program director for Wild Earth Guardians, another environmental group focused on rewilding, which legislators from Colorado’s 17-member rural caucus have described as an ideological land-use approach that could harm ranchers who are already weathering the impacts of wolf reintroduction, another rewilding goal.
But the nails that should have sealed the coffin of her appointment, according to people including Lori Diversy, who serves on the Eagle County Republican Party executive committee, were statements and actions she made after the Earth Liberation Front’s $12 million arson and comments she’s made about cattle in the years since.
“(The arson) was one of the most beautiful acts of economic sabotage ever in this state,” Rosmarino told Mother Jones magazine in 1999. She said she was “jumping up and down with delight.”
But Rosmarino has some thoughts about things she said and did when she was a 29-year-old doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, she told The Colorado Sun.
And she calls claims that she’s opposed to agriculture, “a complete mischaracterization” born of the fact that none of the outlets reporting them “ever actually talked to me directly,” she said.
So when she offered an interview ostensibly to clear the record, The Colorado Sun accepted — and solicited input from others on how they think she’ll do as Colorado’s newest state land landlord.
“It would be quite unfortunate if I hadn’t evolved my thinking”
Rosmarino said her comments in the Mother Jones article are true and attributable to her, but added the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote “The years teach much that the days will never know” exemplifies how she’s lived her life since then and that her earlier comments “do not reflect how I think currently.”
Her recent role in the governor’s office required her to work closely with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, she said, “which advocates for agriculture across Colorado every single day,” something she champions.
And during her years helming the Southern Plains Land Trust, she said she lived in rural southeastern Colorado, where the people she saw every day, her livestock-ranching neighbors, ”were and are her friends, which is an example of folks that I’m happy to link arms with to come up with really good approaches to the kinds of issues that arise regularly at the state land board, where, obviously, agriculture is central to its operations.”
Eric Washburn, a Routt County energy consultant, founding director of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and advisor to the Polis administration on wildlife conservation, told The Sun “the unique perch Rosmarino occupied in Polis’ office, where she gained an understanding of Colorado’s wide range of natural resource issues, from wildlife to grazing to timber management and renewable energy,” also made her an ideal candidate — along with her “emotional intelligence” and knack for raising large sums of money.
From the time she joined the Southern Plains Land Trust as executive director, in 2011, until she left for the governor’s office, in 2022, she grew annual revenue to $3.4 million from $10,000. “And as you know, in Colorado, if you look at the demand for funding for school infrastructure improvements, the demand far outstrips the amount of money we actually raise, so having someone with this entrepreneurial ability I thought would be really important,” Washburn said.
Rosmarino also has “the personal skills and the social skills to both manage people and engage with the state land board and existing lessees in a way that makes sense and is compelling, and everyone can see there’s a logic to it,” he added. And that’s important because rules, regulations and processes related to leases can be hard to untangle.
Leases, leases, leases
Oil and gas leases generate 70% to 80% of the land board’s revenue, but only when such a lease goes into production, Rosmarino said. Yet even with only 12% of these leases in production, the royalties they generate “are the engine” behind funding the Colorado Department of Education’s BEST program, which provides competitive grants to school districts, charter schools, boards of cooperative educational services, and the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind for the construction of new schools as well as general construction and renovation of existing school facility systems and structures.
Meanwhile, grazing leases make up 98% of all leases the land board manages, but there are several types of grazing leases. There are long-term leases and short-term ones. The agency’s website also lumps dry land crop production and irrigated farming in with agricultural leases.
And a separate type of grazing lease was created in 1996, when Colorado voters passed Amendment 16, which significantly altered the mission of the state land board from solely maximizing revenue to optimizing revenue while also emphasizing sound stewardship of natural resources.
The change set aside 300,000 acres, or 10% of its total land, for Stewardship Trust leases, which Rosmarino said are “designated for properties that have particularly important attributes such as biodiversity or outstanding geology.
“But there are also standard agriculture leases that can be on Stewardship Trust lands or Non-stewardship Trust lands,” she said.
And complicating matters further, around a decade ago, the state land board implemented a policy whereby outdoor recreation leases and agriculture leases were “bifurcated” to allow a single parcel of land to be leased for agriculture, recreation or other purposes simultaneously, with each lease outlining the specific activities that are allowed.
So that could also have some ranchers and agriculture supporters worried about the future of grazing, even if Rosmarino insists she “has no intention of doing anything to harm agriculture as the head of the state land board.”
In fact, she said, she has “a lot of ideas for how to help agricultural operators,” including finding ways, with the Colorado Department of Agriculture, to “encourage new producers to get involved through leases on state board land, because I think everybody is quite aware that if we don’t bring the next generation into farming and ranching, there will be dire consequences for the future of agriculture in Colorado.
“We know that in a lot of the areas of the state where agriculture is the primary driver, those populations tend to be aging, and we’re not always seeing the next generation take over the family ranch or farm,” she added, “and I think there are actions the state land board can take to address that really important issue.”
Not to mention, “agriculture is in the Colorado Constitution as being a central issue for the state land board, and it’s also in our state laws, and there’s a commitment on the board and among the staff that we can continue to have agriculture be central in our leasing portfolio,” she said.
A spokesperson from Polis’ office said Rosmarino “gets” that the state land board “plays an important role in our state for agriculture and education” and that she’s “more than qualified” for her new position.
But as a conservation and recreation working group created through House Bill 1332 studies opportunities to advance more conservation and recreation activities on state trust lands, with recommendations to be made in September, Gaspar Perricone, chair of the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project, has this message for the state land board and Rosmarino:
“Our hope and expectation is that the director and the board will remain mindful of the underlying value that agricultural lessees have offered the state, both in terms of social and financial contributions,” he wrote in an email. “Moreover, Colorado sportsmen and women have played a critical role in supporting and advancing the mission of the state land board for generations. Any action that would restrict hunting and angling access or weaken the standards of wildlife habitat protection are likely to be met with resistance.”