by Aimee Tooker, American Policy Center, ©2025
(Oct. 5, 2025) — From the San Juan Mountains in Southwest Colorado the Dolores River flows through Montezuma, Dolores, San Miguel, Montrose and Mesa counties until the state line with Utah. National and local environmental and rewilding advocates had pushed for almost 50 years for a Wild and Scenic designation on the Dolores River. It never went through because over the course of the years it was decided by the generational locals, municipalities and tax districts that that was not the correct way to manage the river. The talk of Wild and Scenic designation (most restrictive designation for a river) caused public outcry in Southwest Colorado; at stake were future water development projects, private property rights implications, and all-around negative future operation capabilities to the agriculture and ranching communities in the watershed. The Colorado Senators urged the stakeholders to come to the table and figure out a compromise. That compromise consisted of decades of conversations and negotiations. Course change in good faith negotiations drove the Mesa County commissioners in 2011 and the Montrose County Commissioners in 2018 to remove their counties from the proposed area. The proponents, not wanting to negotiate anyway, spent their days at the table with the 3 counties and the stakeholders, but by night they created a proposal for a national monument for the entire Dolores River. The direction was to go over the heads of the counties and stakeholders and push for a President that would sign it with one swipe of a pen using the Antiquities Act of 1906. And that is the issue. This monument proposal of almost 400,000 acres was designed in a back room unbeknownst to the communities that it would directly affect.
The Dolores River National Conservation Area in Montezuma, Dolores and San Miguel Counties consist of 68,000 acres along the Dolores River stopping at the county line and has been introduced again this year to Congress. The Dolores River National monument proposal, while delayed for a while, is still being marketed for support by the proponents.
The public outcry against the proposed Dolores River National Monument and the other proposed national monuments like that of the 250,000-acre Mimbres Peak proposal in New Mexico should now be the reason why it is imperative that the Antiquities Act of 1906 be amended.
We need to get the nation, the states, the municipalities and the stakeholders on track with what was meant in land management policies. The municipalities lawfully have a seat at the table, not just a chair in the room when it comes to land management decisions and that is exactly where we need to get to and that is what the coordination process is.
The “coordination process” as directed by Congress is simply that: a process by which local government and federal agencies are to meet in a government-to-government dialogue in order to attempt to reach consistency between federal plans and actions and local plans and policies. Congress has directed every federal agency to engage in that government-to-government process with local governments.
It is important to note that there are differences in process between coordination, cooperation and collaboration. Coordination should be on-going and can occur at the same time as being a cooperating agency on a specific NEPA project. They are not mutually exclusive. One does get you access to pre-decisional info, and the other does not. It is a federal obligation to coordinate and determine where the consistency is (or not) between federal and local plans. It is not a location obligation.
Read the rest here.