What if Colorado Parks and Wildlife could expand 13 state parks – including Castlewood Canyon, Cheyenne Mountain, Golden Gate, Lake Pueblo, Roxborough and Staunton – without spending a penny

With the stroke of a pen, the Colorado State Land Board of Commissioners could transfer 8,817 acres of state land inside and adjacent to 13 state parks and one state wildlife area to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. But the land board does not want to give the acres up as it negotiates with CPW over a new 10-year contract for management of the land-trust owned acres that benefit CPW and not the trust’s education fund.

As the negotiations begin, there’s a call to transfer the property inside state parks to Colorado’s state parks.

“We are very much excited to permanently conserve lands inside the state park without spending any money and this contract negotiation is a good opportunity to do that,” said Gabriel Otero, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioner whose work with the The Wilderness Society and the Next 100 Colorado coalition has focused on making Colorado’s outdoors more diverse and inclusive.

Otero’s work involves engaging underrepresented communities and supporting the role of state parks in sparking outdoor connections. This negotiation for the land board contract could protect parkland close to cities and those overlooked communities for future generations as parks experience record visitation, he said.

The State Land Board does not want to transfer the land and prefers to reach a new interagency management agreement with CPW. The land is already part of state park operations so an exchange of ownership would have no impact on public access, said Kristin Kemp with the land board.

And Colorado laws governing how the state land board can sell land are more strict than those for other state agencies, Kemp said.

“That means that ownership by CPW puts the lands at possible risk of future disposition to a private owner whereas the parcels are far less likely to be sold under the constitutional terms of trust land,” she said in an email.

Chris Arend with the Department of Natural Resources, which includes Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said negotiations are underway and the agency is confident it will reach a solution before the 10-year agreement expires in June next year.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife was unable to comment on how often the state has sold land inside state parks.

The 13 parks under negotiation hosted more than 9.3 million visits in 2021, accounting for 60% of the record-setting 23 million visits to Colorado’s 42 state parks. The land board, which has earned more than $2 billion for Colorado schools in the last decade, has the right to lease the park acres to ranchers for grazing or energy companies for coal, oil and gas development. The board, per the 10-year “beneficial use agreement” signed in 2014, also has the right to sell the land.

The land board in Wyoming is reviewing a proposal to sell state-owned parkland in Teton County. The Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments is recommending that the state auction a 640-acre parcel of state land inside Grand Teton National Park, with a starting bid of $80 million. (The office’s board of commissioners – made up of Wyoming’s top five elected officials, including Gov. Mark Gordon – on Thursday delayed a final decision on  the auction for a year.)

That land in Teton County outside Jackson, Wyoming – it’s called the Kelly Parcel – generates about $2,800 a year for the state. It was appraised recently at $62 million. And Wyoming lawmakers expect the parcel will fetch more than $100 million by developers eager to carve it into 35-acre homesites with unfettered views of the Teton Range. Despite near-unanimous opposition to the idea of selling state land inside a national park to the highest bidder, the Office of State Lands and Investment projected a sale for $80 million would generate about $5.1 million a year in interest earnings over 10 years.

For state land boards that control millions of acres granted at statehood for the singular purpose of generating funds for education, the idea of selling off prime parcels to wealthy homebuilders could be a slippery slope as real estate prices across the West soar.

“Disposal of the state parcel appears to reasonably meet the beneficiaries’ short- and long-term needs,” Jennifer Scoggin, the director of the Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments, wrote in her recommendation to the office’s board for their Thursday meeting.

The Colorado State Land Board is reluctant to sell land but it does happen. In 2023 the board sold 717 acres to Boulder County for $13.4 million for open space protection. It sold an  office building park in Jefferson County for $4.7 million in 2022. The board is selling nearly 48,000 acres of ranch land near Ellicott for open space protection and this year sold 400 acres near Erie to a developer for $40.2 million.

The state trust lands inside state parks in Colorado are a bit different. Those acres benefit Colorado Parks and Wildlife through two trusts overseen by the land board. Last year the Saline Trust and the Internal Improvements Trust generated $757,959 in revenue for state parks. That is less than one-third of 1% of the total revenue generated from trust lands for schools in Colorado.

“It seems unlikely that the land board will sell land inside state parks, but I wonder if the folks up in Teton County felt the same way, thinking ‘They’ll never sell the Kelly Parcel, that’s crazy,’” said Matt Samelson, an attorney with Western Environmental Law Partners who serves on the Public School Capital Construction Assistance Board that helps distribute Building Excellent Schools Today funding from trust lands to Colorado schools.

Samelson is urging the land board to transfer the land to state parks, saying the contract negotiation “is a unique opportunity to permanently conserve and grow the existing state park system without spending a dollar.”

Scott Braden, a former commissioner on the State Land Board, said the end of the contract with CPW is “an opportunity for the land board to do the right thing for all Coloradans by strengthening the integrity of our state parks and wildlife areas.”

Braden pointed to the State Land Board and Colorado Parks and Wildlife seeking $2.2 million in Gov. Jared Polis’ proposed budget for 2024 to expand the board’s biodiversity work with a focus on habitat restoration and species conservation while also increasing CPW’s “capacity to protect biodiversity across all species.”

“We are in a biodiversity crisis and Colorado should do everything it can to preserve intact landscapes,” said Braden, whose Colorado Wildlands Project is working to protect land around the Dolores River as a national monument. “We need to look no farther than Wyoming to see how this can go badly wrong.”

Luke Schafer, a former CPW commissioner and the Western Slope director for Conservation Colorado, said if the board does not want to give up ownership of the park land, it should ink a management contract for “much longer” than 10 years.

He remembers several times that CPW negotiated short-term access easements with landowners and when those contracts expired, the offers from developers far eclipsed what the agency could pay for access.

“It’s not theoretical in Colorado,” he said. “This to me looks like it’s not really a change other than administrative. And with the Polis administration’s commitment to expanding state parks, this is an interesting way to do that without a formal designation of a new park that adds a similar amount of acreage.”

The land board has never suggested it would sell the park land. But if a future board of appointed commissioners ever did ponder an auction to the highest bidder, the bids would likely be an unprecedented windfall. It’s not hard to imagine what a neighborhood builder might pay for 640 acres in Golden Gate Canyon State Park near Golden or 470 acres inside Roxborough State Park near Littleton or 350 acres inside Lake Pueblo State Park, the state’s busiest park. Since the land is managed in trusts that support state parks, not the public education trust, any sale money would go to state parks, not schools.

“Politically it seems unlikely, but legally, the State Land Board can sell those lands and they are only going to get more valuable. So after another 10-year extension, the interest will only grow from developers eyeing that land,” Samelson said. “Why kick the can down the road when those lands will become even more valuable as the Front Range grows?”