NOREEN: Utility plan a wolf in sheep's clothing
A report to plan for recreation on the south slope of Pikes Peak was unveiled by Colorado Springs Utilities this week with all the subtlety and finesse of a bulldozer.
The horrendously overpriced pseudo science in the document is being used to buttress the utility’s decades-long opposition to the 63-mile Ring-the-Peak Trail. A last segment of the trail, a top priority for the area hiking community, would be on the peak’s south slope, which utilities has locked away from the public for more than a century, ostensibly to protect water quality.
The truth is that Colorado Springs Utilities always has resisted being in the recreation business.
AECOM, a consulting firm, has done a fine job of producing a plan the utility wanted all along. It says the trail cannot be completed because it would go through a bighorn sheep lambing area.
The staggering price tag for this spin-control exercise is $262,000, half of which has been paid already.
It's true that bighorns are skittish animals and they need to be left alone during lambing season. That’s why, just a few miles from Pikes Peak, a trail is closed in Mueller State Park during lambing season.
Kirsta Scherff-Norris, a wildlife biologist for the utility, said eliminating the Ring-the-Peak segment "was a science-based decision." She said in addition to the lambing area, there were concerns about trails near alpine wetlands and through tundra.
Never mind that Colorado's alpine areas have hundreds of miles of trails.
The National Park Service imposes seasonal closures at Rocky Mountain National Park to protect the bighorns there, too. Another bighorn herd is protected with seasonal closures at Mt. Williamson in California.
The point is that elsewhere, seasonal trail closures are used to protect bighorns. Colorado Springs Utilities wants us to believe that it is a more diligent and competent steward than the National Park Service — which is absurd.
Tom Keith was the AECOM spokesman who foisted this nonsense onto a crowd of citizens who attended an open house Tuesday night, and without a hint of irony he said Ring-the-Peak “is not specifically shown in this plan.”
The utility’s corporate culture is mostly about money. It believes if it spends $262,000 on this jibberish, the expenditure itself will establish credibility for the process and many citizens will believe the utility is sincere.
Long-time residents know better. They know that after city voters directed the utility to open the north slope to recreation in 1967, it took 24 years for it to happen.
Trails advocate Lee Milner, who served on an advisory panel to open the mountain’s north slope to recreation, remembers it well.
“It was like pulling teeth,” Milner said. “Every meeting was about why we can’t do this, why we can’t do that. The planning process is basically a failure if it doesn’t include Ring-the-Peak.”
If a lambing area stood in the way of the utility’s next pipeline, you can bet there would be some bulldozed bighorns. Bulldozing the citizenry is just as bad.
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