Three Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioners are headed into state confirmation hearings this week amid fierce opposition saying the governor’s appointees threaten to shift CPW’s focus away from hunting and fishing.
John Emerick is a retired professor of environmental biology from Redstone representing the general public, Christopher Sichko is a small-game bowhunter and research economist from Boulder representing hunters and anglers and Frances Silva Blayney owns a fly-fishing shop in Colorado Springs and represents hunters, anglers and outfitters.
Hunting groups are focused on Emerick, who was treasurer of ColoradoWild, a wilderness and wildlife advocacy group, and, they say, signed a petition to make ranchers prove they used nonlethal mitigation tools before they could collect payment for livestock losses from wolf predation. They also oppose Sichko, a former proponent of rewilding, or restoring ecosystems by removing human pressure and reintroducing animals like bison, wolves and beavers to the landscape. And some question Silva Blayney because she has only operated her fly-fishing business since 2023, not long enough, they say, to qualify her to represent outfitters.
Emerick told The Colorado Sun he resigned from his position with ColoradoWild immediately upon appointment to commission, and that his voting record shows he supports the wolf depredation compensation program. Silva Blayney said she has been a professional fly fishing guide for nine years and “anyone in the fishing industry knows that guides must either have their own outfitter license or work for an outfitter in order to guide in Colorado.” Sichko didn’t respond to a request for comment about claims made about him.
The three will answer questions from the Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee at the state Capitol on Wednesday. Their hearings come amid heightened scrutiny from groups that believe Gov. Jared Polis has been stacking the commission with extreme animal rights and anti-hunting appointees since taking office in 2019, with the aim of turning Colorado into a nonhunting state.
Now, a current member of the traditionally tight-lipped commission is speaking out, saying changes on the commission over the last few years could drive that perception, an observation Polis strongly rejects.
“Commissions reflect the views of governors”
Jay Tutchton is vice chair of the CPW commission, in his second four-year term, representing outdoor recreation, parks and “non-consumptive wildlife” or Coloradans who don’t want to kill animals.
“That’s kind of a misnomer, though,” he told The Sun, “because you could wreck an elk herd just by putting a mountain bike trail through its calving area, just like if you over hunted it.”
Tutchton said “governors matter, so when people voted for Polis they were probably voting for a commission with more animal rights types on it.
“So some of these groups opposing Polis’ choices feel the commissioners are nonrepresentative. But since we’re all screened by the governor, we are reflective of the governor’s viewpoints. And I would say it’s been much more diverse in all the standard categories, like color and gender, but also viewpoints, and that’s probably what people are upset about.”
The current commission includes three representatives for agriculture, three for parks and outdoor recreation, three for hunting and fishing interests, including one outfitter, and two at-large positions all mandated by state statute after the Colorado Division of Wildlife merged with Colorado State Parks to become Colorado Parks and Wildlife in 2011.
Among those commissioners only Sichko and Gabe Otero appear to be hunters and Tutchton says that’s a big change from a decade ago, when “the commission would have had seven or eight big-game hunters across those positions, reflecting the interest of the governor at the time,” John Hickenlooper. Tutchton views what Polis has done positively, “because the commission is more representative of all of Colorado,” where most residents aren’t hunters.
The commission “is no longer as representative of just hunting and fishing, because Polis has appointed people who that’s not their primary focus,” he said. “If I had to pigeonhole myself, I’d be a biodiversity guy, you know, worried about more than game species, so they have observed something that I think is real, but I don’t think it’s inappropriate.”
But a letter from the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project signed by 15 hunting organizations and several former CPW employees and commissioners takes criticism of the commission further.
It says Polis’ choices have resulted in commission decisions that “directly conflict with principles of science-based wildlife management, holistic conservation efforts and collaborative stakeholder involvement in the service of fulfilling CPW’s mission” of perpetuating wildlife and that appointees don’t meet statutory minimum qualifications of their positions. It also notes that several current commissioners “have appeared to have the primary objective of advancing personal animal-rights priorities,” and that appointments have come at the expense of thoughtful representation of CPW various constituents and “a sufficient experiential knowledge base” to properly inform necessary regulatory actions commissioners must take.
But Eric Washburn, a hunter, natural resources policy advisor and founding director of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which lobbies for access for hunters and anglers, says “the bigger picture” of what the criticism reflects is “a culture war between hunting groups that have evolved in a system that has advantaged them” and wildlife conservation and environmental groups that “recognize the current system of wildlife management … is failing our wildlife and ecosystem.”
Current wildlife management: “kill predators, build herds, kill furbearers”
Washburn says the system has long given hunters an advantage “in the sense that they have overwhelming influence on CPW’s historic and even current wildlife management.”
That leads to three things, he says: killing predators wherever possible, building up big herds of elk, deer and moose for their members to kill, and the unlimited killing of beaver and other furbearers.
Hundreds of hunters opposed the commission’s approval of a petition brought forth by the Center for Biological Diversity banning the commercial sale of 17 furbearing animals at its meeting in March, claiming the decision ignored CPW’s science-based wildlife management in an “embarrassing” display of incompetence.
Commission supporters said they showed deep care and determination in using science to parse a complex issue.
But the letter from the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project said the commissioners’ actions contributed “to the Commission’s current dysfunction, which fails to best serve Colorado citizens and fish and wildlife populations managed in the public trust.”
Washburn balks at the group’s insistence that CPW manages wildlife with “the best available science,” however.
“When they talk about science-based wildlife management, what they really mean is, it’s the agency looking at a species like deer or elk and saying, ‘Here’s how many you can kill next year if we’re going to keep having a sustainable population,’” he said.
What people like he and Emerick and Sichko mean by science instead, he added, “is examining Colorado’s ecosystem as a whole and taking into account critical concerns like CPW’s recent study showing that half the species in Colorado have declined so greatly they need very special conservation help if they’re ever going to recover.”
“So people like Emerick and I are saying, ‘you know, let’s take a step back.’
“We’re saying, ‘look at this ecosystem which is now fraying and getting weaker and very vulnerable to collapse in the coming decades, because of climate change, further habitat destruction and so forth.’ And let’s think about it scientifically: What should the target populations of these species be, and shouldn’t we be managing to achieve those?”
As an example, he pointed to beavers, a species “that could store lots of water on this parched landscape.”
“They provide better trout habitat, better songbird habitat and firebreaks,” he said. “But right now, Colorado’s Beaver Conservation and Management Strategy plan shows we have 53,000 beavers in Colorado on a landscape that could probably contain 2 or 3 million. And a 2022 study said Colorado could host 1.36 million beaver dams, enough to store 450 billion gallons of water, which is a quarter of all the water we use in Colorado in a given year.
“So we need beavers. But you have people out there who kill beavers for a living or love to kill beavers, and so they’re upset that this commission wants to put limits on the killing of beavers and the 16 other furbearers.”
Then there’s big-game management.
Hunters’ contributions to conservation
Colorado has the largest elk population in North America with around 300,000 animals.
Around 400,000 deer also live here, spread across 105,000 square miles.
And the revenue generated from resident- and nonresident elk tags — the primary economic driver for CPW — is around $50 million (with $45 million coming from nonresidents) according to the CPW.
In the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project’s letter, signatories say their objection to Sichko’s confirmation is founded on “inadequate representation of big-game hunting expertise on the commission.”
They also said, “big-game hunting is the most viable and ecologically sound tool to support wildlife management,” with hunting funding roughly 85% of CPW’s annual wildlife budget, valuable hunter opportunity, rural economies and a wide array of CPW partnerships.
And while they said they respect Sichko’s interest in hunting and commitment to conservation, they added “he does not currently possess the depth of experience or knowledge required to represent the hunting community effectively” and encouraged members of the General Assembly to vote against him.
Hunting groups say the signatories’ weigh-in is important because there is no constituency in America that has led to a greater recovery of wildlife than the hunting community, pointing to the creation, by hunters, of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation after market hunting in the 1800s drove many species to near extinction.
That led to the establishment of state game and fish agencies responsible for the management, conservation and protection of fish and wildlife populations and their habitats within their borders, they say.
“And that led to a regulatory structure and a permitting scheme that ensured wildlife moving forward would be preserved in perpetuity,” said Gaspar Perricone, a former CPW commissioner and chair of the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project. “What’s absent in that narrative are the contributions the sportspersons’ community makes to nongame species as well. They are, proudly, the primary financiers of the protection of nongame species — not to mention they pioneered the national conservation framework that ensures habitat protections are in place.”
Perricone was the legislative director for the Department of Natural Resources when parks merged with wildlife to become CPW in 2011. And he says there’s a reason there’s “a nonconsumptive seat on the commission — an equitable balance between agriculture and sportsmen and outdoor recreation.”
Under the new administration, many believe the hunting constituency has been overlooked or dismissed in seeking candidates with qualifications to advance a single issue.
But “this is not a war against the Administration, this is simply the sportsmen community seeking to restore balance and bona fide experience to the commission,” Perricone wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun. “This is about ensuring there is a qualified crosscut representation of all Parks and Wildlife constituencies. It feels neither inappropriate nor out of bounds that the sportsmen community should expect legitimate hunter and science-based representation on the commission.”
What Polis says
The question that remains is, is the CPW commission stacked with animal rights and anti-hunting Polis picks?
In an email to The Sun, Polis said the claims in the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project’s letter “are mistaken” and that he’s “excited about the way CPW is working to protect the future of hunting in Colorado.”
He also called himself “a strong supporter of Colorado’s hunting community and our great outdoors” citing as evidence “work to open up over a million acres of state-owned land that had previously been closed to hunting as well as overseeing the successful acquisition of Colorado Clays Shooting Park” in Brighton.
And he said building a strong and forward-looking team of commissioners to govern Colorado Parks and Wildlife is important to protect access for recreationalists and hunters, natural resources management and wild ecosystems, which played into his appointments of Sichko and Emerick, who, he said, ”both hold mainstream views on hunting, angling and other key priorities of the commission,” and therefore “neither should be controversial.”
Whether they are or not will become clear at their confirmation hearings.
But Tutchton has an idea for leveling the playing field among consumptive and nonconsumptive users.
“We have to broaden the financial support base of CPW somehow, and bring those nonconsumptive users in as paying advocates and enthusiasts. The hunting guys might not like it, but it can’t just be hook and bullet people doing all the wildlife conservation for the other 90 or whatever percent of us that aren’t financially contributing.”
That doesn’t solve the immediate issue of perceived imbalance on the commission.
Emerick said he looks forward to making his full record clear on Wednesday.