February 12, 2020 — City Council Regular Meeting

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:03] [Music] do [Music] so [Music]

[1:00] thank you uh i called to order the open space board of trustees meeting of february 12 2020. uh welcome to the many people who've come out to attend this meeting i want to just remind you all that we also have a meeting tomorrow night but that meeting will be at the open space hub on 55th street the first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes from our january eighth meeting i had a number of small typo type changes that i've already provided to leah does anyone have anything that they'd like to provide okay and do we have a motion i move we accept the minutes of january 8 2020. second okay all in favor that's unanimous the next item is public comment for items not identified for a public hearing there is no public hearing tonight so if anybody wishes to speak to us about any open space related subject

[2:02] this would be the time frame in which to do that i know we have a number of people who've signed up who probably have not spoken to us before so i'll just quickly run through the ground rules for your y'all's benefit i'll call off three to four names at a time and when your name is called if you could please sort of come down maybe stage yourself over near the easel or somewhere nearby so that we don't lose a minute or two as each person uh walks down to speak when it's your time to speak if you could begin by giving us your name and your address we'll follow our standard protocol for when we have more than 15 people signed up which is that each person gets two minutes or three minutes if you've pooled with someone else who's present when you have 30 seconds left the yellow light will come on when your time is up the red light will come on you'll also hear a beep and at that time we would ask you to please you know wrap up quickly

[3:00] i would for those who haven't spoken to us before just be aware two minutes can go by very quickly you don't need to spend 30 or 45 seconds thanking us or praising us it's always welcome but honestly our egos aren't that fragile it's much better get to the substance of what you really want to say because you'll be amazed at how quickly the yellow light comes on so um you know please feel free to just jump right into it without a lot of the niceties also be aware we do read the many many emails that we've received um we look forward to hearing from you in person as well tonight but please know we do have that background of having read that and you're always free to say you agree with someone else if you you know choose not to elaborate on what they've said and the last is that for members of the audience um and this is standard protocol at any city meeting we ask that you not audibly boo or clap or express an opinion this is a welcoming space for all points of

[4:00] view you're free to you know raise your hand if something uh you know strikes you with something you want to agree with but otherwise you know listen quietly to others as they will do the same for you so with that our first three people and these are you just we called them in order in which you signed up our barb fisher followed by nadine nadal helen braider and then dennis robinson so barb my name is barb fisher i stand with the concerned individuals in wanting to restore and preserve irrigated ag land this is a teasel i'm holding the seed head of a very prolific weed picked in the open space that surrounds our land on belmont road

[5:01] you see these plants all over boulder county they thrive with neglect in the road margins empty lots and in open space after prairie dogs have shipped have stripped all the available grass after the resulting dust decimation of the land after the soil becomes airborne in windy conditions after the prairie dogs have run out of available living space and the farmer has no crop teasel successfully grows when a farmer has to compete with prairie dogs to grow a healthy crop failure is inevitable in short time it's hello weeds goodbye farmed land this noxious weed amongst others is the tangible evidence of a farmer's losing efforts on boulder county's designated ag land it is time for the city of boulder open space to come to the aid of the farmers

[6:00] working these designated acres please take the necessary steps in restoring our alarming shrinking ag lands it will take a determined effort to get this to fix this mess and a far-sighted vision for an ongoing maintenance plan will be essential look again at this teasel don't let the spread of this weed be the sad legacy that dooms our ag lands thank you thanks barb nadine hello my name is nadine nadow and i'm here presenting a comment from taylor jones the endangered species advocate for wild earth guardians our address is walnut street denver prairie dog management is a difficult issue and we applaud the city of boulder for their avoidance of lethal control in the past and ask that you continue to the management practice into the future

[7:02] prairie dogs are a native keystone species and should continue to be treated as such on bolder open space land we support the long-term approaches recommended by the prairie dog working group which emphasizes non-lethal removal from conflict areas the city and the prairie dog working group have already expended considerable time and effort pursuing the goal of coexistence yet the recommendations of the prairie group are not integrated into the expended plan we are concerned that this expediated plan opens the door to potentially killing up to three thirty thirty thousand animals on boulder open space our members and constituents who are represent here tonight are dedicated to the preservation of wildlife and the preservation of unnecessary suffering and death when considering prairie dogs even when they are difficult to live with we must not lose sight of the fact that they are intelligent animals with strong social bonds and a complex communication system

[8:01] jeremy beth bent them with when considering the rights of animals said the question is not can they reason or can they talk but can they suffer i ask you not to discount the suffering of these 30 000 animals on public lands when making this decision and to avoid or at least at the very least minimize lethal control thank you very much thank you nadine helen braider followed by dennis robinson david hester and then teresa beck i'm helen brader 1200 sumac avenue in boulder um i have been boarding horses at boulder valley ranch now for 25 years so i've seen it quite as an amazing change over the past few years with the overpopulation one thing i do want to note is the past couple of weeks i noticed a sudden change in the soil in the first pasture which is being rapidly decimated completely decimated by the prairie dogs suddenly when that wind came through

[9:00] suddenly the soil changed it went from being clay to being sandy the soft the smaller particles were being blown away in that big wind when it was 70 miles an hour there is a rapid rapid change happening to the soil which really worries me i also attended the county open space meeting recently and i was very interested in how they changed their policy i really think that you should follow their lead half measures will not work the prairie dogs unfortunately need to be removed completely from agricultural land please don't inve please invest in equipment and personnel to move effectively against the the huge problem it makes little sense to contract the work out the county has invested in five trucks now and regular staff because they have realized that the prairie dogs need to be monitored and controlled over the long term they are a wonderful species a very

[10:02] impressive animal but they are really wreaking havoc on our land thank you thanks helen dennis my name is dennis robinson i live at 8850 belmont road in 1997 we purchased a lot there that's keyhold in the city open space uh irrigated farmland the day we closed we went to visit our lot only to find the city of boulder at planet prairie dogs about 30 of them on our land next door to us over the next 10 to 14 years the population grew to the point where it occupied at least 350 of the 400 acres of irrigated farmland six to eight years ago the plague came through and the prairie dogs all died off today 80 acres of the 400 have been repopulated

[11:03] within four to five years i'm certain due to the stress of the colony and the weakness of the immune system the cycle will repeat itself and the plague will kill them this is not only bad practice for maintaining the ground it is cruel to the prairie dogs they are in a vicious cycle that i don't think will stop because their boundaries are limited by private homeowners you cannot expect them to continue to occupy a small space of ground as they multiply it's not going to work long term furthermore the more these cycles go on the least likelihood the irrigated farmlands will recover thank you thanks dennis

[12:00] david hester followed by teresa beck cody orrick and then molly davis good evening my name is david hester and i'm the financial power of attorney for my mother adrian hester who currently owns 12 acres of agricultural land at 3505 nebo road in boulder county the hester family have been boulder county agricultural landowners at 3505 nebo road since 1968 and we have seen very many different land covers socioeconomic demographic environmental and land use management changes during the past 50 years james hester my father in 2002 sold the hester's 40-acre hay meadow in our adjacent northern land parcel to the city of boulder open space since the start of the 21st century the city of boulder open space has permitted their adjacent lands at 3517 nebo road to become denuded of vegetation due to hosting prairie dog colonies resulting in major erosion during wind storms similar to the 1930s dust bowl era

[13:02] due to the prairie dog overpopulation on boulder open space land and migration into our adjacent agricultural land the hesters have spent almost 7 300 in mitigation expenses since 2006 for our pastures that share a property line with boulder open space the hester family commends the city of boulder open space staff recommendations to amend city ordinances allowing lethal control of prairie dogs on their irrigated agricultural lands better prairie dog and land use management of boulder open space lands will hopefully reduce economic impacts to adjacent private agricultural landowners as well as enhance future sustainability of agricultural land use throughout boulder county thank you for the opportunity to address the city of boulder board of trustees thanks david teresa hello my name is teresa beck and i live

[14:00] at 809 11th street in boulder i'm representing the be chicas as residents of boulder beekeepers and founding members of the be chicas we are strongly against the use of delta dust on public open space lands the b chicas are boulder-based voice for pollinators organizers of the boulder pollinator appreciation month celebration and assisting in organizing the 2020 beyond pesticides conference here in boulder and we offer public and school-based workshops to educate on the dangers of pesticides we are in favor of humanely euthanizing prairie dogs with carbon monoxide and minimizing further poisoning of the land animals and insect populations we are strongly opposed to the use of delta dust to kill fleas which also kills pollinating insects especially our critically important and often overlooked ground-dwelling native bees it can also poison raptors coyotes dogs and ferrets if they eat treated prairie dogs mice or voles

[15:01] we encourage a swift resolution that removes prairie dogs from all agricultural lands in short and efficient time frame and minimizes costs and negative impacts on the environment any plan should come from an ecological approach that considers all facets facets of the ecosystem thank you thanks teresa cody orrick followed by molly davis joe donahue and maria watson cody orrick 203 morningside park road in boulder our community does not argue about climate change more and more evidence shows that regenerative agriculture techniques where livestock is integrated into intensively managed acreage to give back to the soil lands managed this way can sequester huge amounts of carbon it must begin with healthy soil soil that is home to millions of organisms the kind of soil created by herds of buffalo in the past as a community we taxed ourselves to own

[16:01] thirty some thirty seven thousand acres of agricultural lands this has created a unique opportunity and responsibility to address climate change with proper management lethal control of prairie dogs is an essential first step we must not continue to study or argue while this out of balance population proliferates literally making desert wastelands out of land that was once productive and healthy prairie dogs need vast tracts of connected grassland which we also own and where they could flourish allowing them to overcrowd land that is irrigable is quite simply irresponsible and makes us a very bad lessor and a very bad neighbor this issue was declared a crisis last may please can we support our staff in their learning from the county and recommend 100 removal of pds from irrigated ag land with a week of life trapping for raptor recovery and lethal control with perk machines the county's 20 years of experience is clear that

[17:00] this is the most effective and humane way to deal with pds on irrigated ag lands the 500 percent increase option is not fast enough we are lucky enough to have the young farmers coalition who have been trained in regenerative agriculture techniques standing ready to work as well as establish farmers and ranchers who could take this on were it not for the impossible prospect of restoring desert around pd's in our arid west this can take years but we can and must do this thank you for your leadership in doing the hard but right thing thanks cody molly i'm molly davis i live in quarry court boulder the pictures you see are a different kind of culture than some of us are used to in boulder these are the people who are part of the

[18:01] coors western show and the 4-h clubs of america they're a rare and unique brand of people they get up early they work long hours into the evening to make sure that the land is cared for and they've done it for decades they're our partner they are at leases and they are a huge part of the history of this valley the first pictures were taken at the van fleet ranch when we were doing brandon i cannot imagine how hard it would be to work a lifetime to build up a business only to see it go away each season with more pre-dark occupation if we let this group of people down they will leave we will not have the staff to replace this type of institutional knowledge to

[19:02] operate their irrigation and these vast stretches of land our charter purpose is to preserve agricultural operations we need to learn from the county employ the use of co2 in our properties overrun by the dogs and get them off our irrigated lands troopers preserve this valuable culture that we call agriculture thank you thanks molly uh joe donahue then maria wassen elizabeth black and then chris brown hi uh my name is joe donahue and i'm a young farmer here in boulder county i've worked and lived in boulder county my entire life i've seen a lot of the open space go from lush green grasslands to being poorly managed in only my lifetime

[20:01] i to seeing absolutely nothing left but rocks and dirt and as many people have stated before in any of these windstorms we have we just have dustable conditions just as like in the 30s that i remember seeing when i was a kid in school if we keep just letting just the decimation of how bad it is getting in certain these places um there's nothing left and in some places and the prairie dogs just moved to the adjacent places um i saw some of the irrigation stuff earlier on that i spent probably a whole day last week with the farmer next door with the trackhoe repairing a ditch that's a perennial ditch that runs all year round because a prairie dog burrow had caused exactly a you know damage a breach in it and who knows how much water was wasted much less time and energy just to repair from prairie dogs that come from adjacent open space lands

[21:00] um i just wish that we could have at least some more management on it to provide at least something to the adjacent farm owners that just can't get away from it we spend so much time just dealing with prairie dogs much less being able to actually grow grass or hay for our cattle or anything like that it would just be really helpful to get at least a little help on managing them thank you thanks joe maria good evening my name is maria watson i live at 105 94 north 65th street um i own west winds farm where i attempt to grow grass hay in 2003 the city of boulder acquired a 70 acre parcel of land you call it the oasis parcel unfortunately for me we've watched the land go from a beautiful grassland to a

[22:02] weed and prairie dog infested habitat i've written a letter to all of you regarding this land the city owns so i won't reiterate what's in that letter you can just go read it what i do want to tell you is what it has cost me in the last 17 years since you've owned the land i spend about five hundred dollars a month to keep my fields prairie dog free it's a losing battle that's six thousand dollars a year that's a hundred and two thousand dollars in 17 years since you've been my neighbor i would be really thrilled to put that in my retirement account or put it back into the farm the city is by far the worst neighbor i've ever had maybe the farmers bordering city open

[23:01] space could get a tax credit of six thousand dollars a year or maybe the city could consider being a good neighbor and a beneficial steward to the land instead of letting the prairie dogs destroy it your non-action in dealing with this huge problem is causing boulder county farmers to go extinct thank you thanks maria elizabeth black then chris brown andrew ogden and lindsey sterling crank hi elizabeth black 4340 north 13th street please support the 500 increase option even the 500 option takes far too long five years to clear our irrigated ag land you're losing tenants every year the soil is blowing away please go big and go bold please figure out some quick relief for

[24:01] your tenants neighbors and land it's a long byzantine city council process to an ordinance change we need immediate effective fast track solutions in the meantime please add bellgrove and mckenzie to the project area my heart breaks every time i drive by remembering their beautiful irrigated hayfields my favorite place to paint now dusty wastelands what a lovely location for a diversified vegetable farm this could be impossible now with the huge numbers of prairie dogs overrunning it please ask staff why they change the designation of formerly irrigated lands to manage lands will they remove irrigation water from these lands if so the lands will never recover because water is life without water these lands won't sequester the large amount of carbon our irrigated pasture can please use boulder county's prairie dog control program as a model

[25:01] over 20 years the county has learned the hard way what works you don't have to repeat their same mistakes please adopt the county's practices then change them later as needed the county knows how to minimize the numbers of prayer dogs killed how to clear land strategically to avoid expensive barriers how to catch costs with in-house seasonal crews how to get the most bang for your buck with limited budgets how to best work with neighbors how to train tenants how to set up cost sharing programs with tenants and neighbors how to set up holding facilities for live trapped dogs how to deal with paperwork paperwork and permitting efficiently please just ask them thank you thanks elizabeth chris chris brown 4340 13th street in 50 years or so that i've lived in boulder i've watched the prairie dog population explode and then in the last 20 or so years i

[26:02] have watched the city dump tens hundreds if not millions of dollars into trying to control the explosion of prairie dog population and i would like to thank you for finally considering lethal control to to stop this problem but we have a bigger problem in boulder and we share this with the rest of the world maybe it's going to be world war iii and that's climate change and boulder uh city and everybody in boulder wants to reduce our carbon footprint in this town and reduce carbon emissions and we're spending millions of dollars to try to solve that problem or at least contribute to solving it through the municipalization and all the other activities we have a resource in open space land to combat some global warming through um carbon sequestra sequestration in all of open space lands and uh those little microbes will be working for us 24 7

[27:01] every day of the year and while we sleep and so i would like to encourage you uh and have to encourage open space and the city council is to make management of carbon sequestration a high priority in how you manage uh open space lands it's one way we can contribute to solving uh that problem i would also like to commend to you to read the letter if you haven't from tim seested from from instar and from a scientific background he makes two or three very simple points that i think are most worthy of considering and i have another second he says the the prairie dogs have changed from a keystone species to an ecosystem transformer species and that's uh that's an interesting thing so i assume you all got this letter and i i totally agree with it thanks chris andrew ogden followed by lindsey sterling crank deb jones and stephanie

[28:02] rowe thank you android i live in south boulder i'm a public interest and environmental attorney but i'm appearing before you as a private citizen i submitted written comments which is a letter i sent the city council august or sorry april 13th 2019 which should you should arrive in your package after the meeting i don't support the open space process or to control the prairie dogs by lethal or other means we're dealing with leased lands and i think that the open space process is not adequately considering a number of points probably the biggest ones are the an analysis the ecosystem impacts contrary to what others may have just said the prairie dog is a keystone species and that as a keystone species they support a number of other species all of which of course are included in the wildlife protection ordinance but we're

[29:00] tied about raptors 20 raptors fledged last year up in the mountains they feed something so obviously they're food for raptors habitat for burrowing owls and so forth so if you're going to do it you need an ecosystem-wide analysis not just looking at the dogs in a particular area and what the removal will do in a limited area also you're not doing a cost benefit analysis of the cost of control versus a number of things for example what's the productive value of the land is this really worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars for removal compared to what the highest and best use of the land is wildlife habitat is we also talk about a relatively small amount of land versus the amount that the open space leases you're not looking at the economic other economic value of prairie dogs they contribute to the tourism economy of boulder as being a haven for wildlife and a haven for bird life

[30:01] ecosystem services they provide so there are other things to look at just than the cost of controlling them thank you thanks andrew lindsey [Music] lindsey sterling crank 210 brook road and i think that everybody in this room probably cares very deeply about animals and i see those examples in our community all the time today or i guess last week that video went around that was viral of the coyote and the badger waiting for each other and then going and hunting together and there was a story last week of the man who saved the crows eggs from the nest and put them back in the nest and the crows took them little presents every day and then followed them on their hikes from from here on out um and then there was the teenager who went hunting with his dad and got lost and ended up sleeping between these two elk who kept him alive that night and not frozen and today the article that caught

[31:02] my eye was that the animal intelligence is being decoded so that we can better understand the way that our pets and dogs and cats communicate with us and that entire study is based on the prairie dog's language and sophisticated communication system and i want to say that after 20 years of advocating for this animal they are a worthy species and they they deserve value and they deserve credit they they have characteristics just like the coyote and the badger and the crows and they deserve a due process not that your mind's already made up tonight coming in here but that we continue going through this process really looking at what we're doing and what the long-term effects are i have been really proud to live in boulder for a couple decades now and i have loved that we have had a policy that doesn't include a lot of lethal wildlife manage it it's management it's awesome it's part of what makes us special it's kind of what keeps bolder bolder and that's been neat it's it's not lost

[32:02] on me that what we're talking tonight is a big deal and that we're actually talking about affecting the lives of up to 30 000 animals and i don't think anybody else except for us in this room really understands that but they will because this is going to be a transparent process so to that end i ask that we reduce the size of the conflict area i ask that we limit the removal process to areas where we can prevent reoccupation of areas and prevent repeated killing i ask that we study what we're doing that we keep prairie dogs on irrigated aglants because we don't really know if what we're doing is going to increase carbon sequestration and improve soil health so let's leave some dogs on irrigated lands and study that too so that when our next generation comes around we can have data to say what our actions actually did um if we're going to be increasing removing animals we have a responsibility to increase the protection of the remaining animals in the northern grasslands in boulder if we want to do all this boulder county

[33:00] prairie dog management plan replication which i think they can be doing a lot better at they are doing a ton of plague management and we need to get on board and maybe include teresa with the b chicas to talk about what that really looks like for bees cannot support any of the packages that don't include at least 40 acres of relocation and after all of the review of the 450 pages of work that we've all done it comes back to really the long-term solutions are in the prairie dog working group so keep folder wild on our public lands thanks lindsay deb jones followed by stephanie rowe bryant and michael moss i actually wrote something down but i've changed my mind so i uh i worked with the prairie dog working group i am actually at 11307 cuevas way in westminster colorado but i'm the president of prairie dog action and i've worked with boulder for 20 plus years on prairie dog issues and management so

[34:01] i have a little background with these guys i look at this and i i hear all kinds of things about carbon sequestration and things like that the studies actually show that the prairie dog mounds are doing that very job they are creating new topsoil in that very thing you may not see it today because we have caused problems this carbon sequestration issue that we are having was not created by prairie dogs it was created by humans and we're going to have to address that and killing prairie dogs is not necessarily the answer to that i would like to see our prairie dog working group recommendations actually put into play we didn't really get a chance to act on any of that this kind of all came in and we were kind of blindsided by this because we spent two years of volunteer hours working meeting after meeting after meeting and trying to create something that we were

[35:00] asked to create which was the non-lethal and so then this comes along and we don't have all that action to be able to help with this as quickly as we would like to but i can tell you that the prairie dogs did not create all of these situations they did not create the dust bowl of the 1930s man created that and we need to remember that in that role they created our prairies they've been here for millions of years we are the new part in the equation here not them and they serve these prairie dogs in particular serve all of the boulder county wildlife they are still serving their keystones uh process here by creating habitat and providing food and on and on and on it's not just about that the little things okay thank you thanks deb stephanie hi thank you can you hear me my name is stephanie

[36:01] rowe i live at 631 west street and that's in louisville and i am up here tonight uh as uh part of a working group in louisville that is louisville currently has very little prairie dog management in place and for its open space it's vague and flimsy and ridiculous so this work at the louisville working group which is new is working on you know creating a humane management plan for our city that is very much modeled on yours on the existing plan it's a well respected admired and hopefully emulated plans so i want to urge you to keep the current plan in place and i just wanted to second what what deb jones said about carbon sequestration and that the prairie dogs are actually beneficial in that and not a deterrent so my request is that boulder continue to be a role model for us and something

[37:01] for us to emulate and also just i just wanted to mention that our working group is very much motivated by one of charles darwin's something that he wrote in one of his very last writings which was that in all of his years of study of all of the different animals in the world that he had come down to this idea that there really wasn't one thing that separated the human from all other animals unless it was this that the humans have the ability to broaden the circle of their compassion to extend to other species so and i can see that my time is up so thank you very much thanks stephanie [Music] jenny bryant then michael moss sabrina garringer and paula shuler good evening my name is jenny bryant 1952 steel street also in lewisville but i am actually here tonight speaking on behalf of dr karst puss mueller who's not able to be here tonight because her daughter is giving birth to her first

[38:00] baby the original intent of the expedited plan was to look at options to respond to two lease areas on irrigated ag lands that were experiencing high prairie dog occupancy osbt called it a crisis the two leased areas were boulder valley ranch 53 occupancy at 322 acres and axelson johnson at 50 percent 319 acres all other lease areas on irrigated ag land in the project area have prairie dog occupancies below 12 percent levels manageable with the working groups recommendations removing prairie dogs down to acceptable 35 percent occupancy levels on these two leases would only require removal of prairie dogs from 100 acres relocations that could be accomplished in two to three years but now the osmp packet materials state that the city's intent may be to remove all prairie dogs from all 967 acres of the irrigated ag lands in the project area and the media are reporting the prairie dogs are all to blame quoting ranchers who refer to the

[39:01] land they lease as their land and that it needs to be cleared of prairie dogs and that euthanizing them all is the only solution the scope of this process has gotten out of hand the intent was never to clear out the prairie dogs the intended result was never to have zero occupancy there must be some fair decisions made here these leased ag lands are public open spaces purchased with taxpayer dollars the ag leases state that prairie dogs use the land too and that all wildlife and wildlife habitat on the leased property must be protected while using our public lands for agricultural purposes is important these lands are also important native habitat for prairie dogs a native ketone species and colorado species of greatest conservation need they provide both prey and habitat for abundance of other species and benefit to the public please give serious consideration to nearing the focus of the expedited plan and focus on these areas having the greatest conflicts thank you thanks jenny michael

[40:03] good evening my name is michael moss i operate kilt farm a certified organic vegetable operation that is completely located on boulder county open space as an organic farmer on public land the issue of prairie dog management is one that it impacts the land that i manage and the viability of my operation with the ever burgeoning prairie dog populations on private and osmp lands that are in close proximity to my operation i feel under constant threat of local colony expansion as a certified organic grower and an open space tenant there are very few treatment protocols available for me to manage the encroachment of prairie dogs in my land what is allowed under the national organic program is very expensive and only moderately effective mistakes in the control of prey dogs on my land can result in the loss of my organic certification conversely a prairie dog incursion left

[41:01] unchecked will severely impact my ability to grow organic food for my community the loss of viability and agriculture can come from many directions the management of prairie dogs on our public lands should never keep a farmer from feeding their communities or their families i deeply appreciate the fact that prairie dog control is now a topic worthy of exploration especially here in the public space i'm also very pleased that the staff has recommended changes to allow for the lethal control of prairie dogs on irrigated osmp lands i implore the commission and boulder city council to move forward as quickly as possible to reduce the prairie dog pressure on our public ag lands while also working to improve the very degraded health of these lands the health of our farms farmers in the community that we serve depend on your actions thank you thanks michael sabrina garringer followed by paula shuler eric skoken

[42:02] and susan honeycutt hi i'm sabrina gerringer i live in unincorporated boulder county i actually live adjacent to the brewbaker property it's an irrigated ag parcel that is designated as a removal property however no prairie dogs have ever been removed the property has contiguous ownership with boulder county the land has become overrun by prairie dogs over the last dozen years i've witnessed the land become denuded by the growth of all the prairie dogs by not fulfilling your charter and clearing the irrigated ag parcels you own out in the county you are devaluing our soil devaluating devaluing the agricultural history of boulder county and you're being an incredibly rude neighbor the present policy is not working we're in this predicament because of the six-step process and non-lethal control please consider lethal control for all

[43:01] prairie dogs on aggregated agricultural parcels there will still be thousands of acres of open space mountain parks land for the colonies to multiply relocation is too costly the money spent on barriers isn't working and spreading delta dust it's not getting to the root of the issue we need to restore our soils on our irrigated ag parcels and implement lethal control please get in line with how boulder county is get is doing things i believe you should purchase perk machines and do as the county does get your tenants to help if you would clear our irrigated ag parcels of prairie dogs maybe we would consider you a good neighbor but right now you're quite a lousy neighbor thanks sabrina paula

[44:03] this will be interesting because i thought i had four so paula schuler boulder county i'm here tonight to ask the board of trustees to make a strong and decisive recommendation to protect open space agricultural lands we are in a critical conflict especially in the northern properties 1 000 acres out of 2 400 acres of irrigated ag lands are overrun and in conflict with prairie dog occupation not just two properties and not just two tenants the critical decline goes against the boulder city charter the boulder valley comp plan boulder's climate commitment open space master plan ag plan and grassland plan quickly i want to show you a few pro photos from the project area this boulder valley ranch photo from 2002 on the left versus 2019 on the right kind of sums it all up horses and cows did not do this the prairie dogs did these are some more photos all irrigated ag

[45:02] belle grove should be included as well as mackenzie in your project area solutions i support the 500 increase plan that staff has outlined with modifications i support lethal control on all irrigated parcels with the goal of being a goal to completely clear each and every parcel i believe it's important to get it done well but as quickly as possible five years is too long lethal control should be by right or an affirmative defense to fulfill the purpose of the open space fulfill the purpose of open space per the charter the borough destruction ordinance needs to be modified it's imperative that any ordinance modification not slow down this process i believe boulder could realize cost savings if they hired a staff person and then perhaps independent contractor employees as um so to not add headcounts um and buy several park machines it's easy

[46:00] to train staff and people to work those and additionally train your tenants who are want to participate um in lethal control use carbon monoxide in whatever form i don't i'm not stuck on perk but i think carbon monoxide is the most humane uh one point million dollars in barriers seems excessive open space does not need barriers everywhere one point million dollars equals 50 miles of wire mesh fence again independent contractors can be trained to put up fence i do it all the time it's not that challenging you can anyone can learn something um barriers should be put on the protected prairie dog habitats to keep them from migrating back to irrigated egg for example put wire mesh barrier on the south side of neva road at 39th street heading west to keep furry dogs on the beach property then clear stratton and brubacher with lethal control all the surrounding neighbors are mitigating prairie dogs from these properties the neighbors are your barriers i think 1.9 million dollars is excessive

[47:02] boulder county is doing a great job of lethal control as everyone said follow their lead you have abundant prairie dogs on protected lands so and irrigable lands must remain irrigated thank you thanks paula eric skoken followed by susan honeycutt andy brighter and susan summers uh hi there i'm eric skoke and my wife and i have an organic farm black cat farm we're we leased from the city we have several properties that we lease uh we it totals about 209 acres um of uh area that we're able to operate in but there's 176 acres that are part of those properties which have been taken out of our leases because of because of prairie dogs

[48:00] so some of the numbers that you hear about uh you know prairie dog acres and and whatnot there's it seems like there's some uh interesting accounting uh that happens um so i would encourage you to uh look through uh uh properties uh look through um uh areas with uh with prairie dogs and not the segway for that is um the map um that is uh shown in the in the um uh in the proposal from the staff has some interesting areas where a bunch of properties that are irrigated i know they're irrigated i've walked through the ditches show up as managed instead of as irrigated my concern is that when this uh that this map is a ship and when it leaves the dock that what is shown as irrigated

[49:03] and what is managed now all of a sudden we've decided we're not going to take care of some of the managed properties speed is of the essence my suggestion is that we part of the decision making for what areas get cleared first is areas with just a couple of prairie dogs when one or two or three new prairie dog holes show up in a property that that ends up being the most important thing it's just two or three prairie dogs instead of two or three hundred thanks thanks eric susan good evening my name is susan honeycutt i live at 1160 hartford drive here in boulder i'm here to address some concerns that i have about the prairie dog plan i have worked with prairie dogs for well over 20 years was around when we did the first prairie dog relocation for

[50:00] open space with clint miller the biologist at the time and have also been doing i was a ranger for open space and also i am now a wildlife rehabilitator my three concerns the first is genetic variability of remaining prairie dogs if you're allowed to kill the 30 odd thousand prairie dogs that your plan is mentioning i'm concerned about what the survival rate of plague will be if we eliminate that amount of gener genetic variability in the population i'd also like to know that the plan has considered a catastrophic plague event in the southern grassland reserves if that happens are you prepared how are you prepared to repopulate those if you've eliminated over 30 000 animals in the northern areas i'm wondering also i could not find anything mapped out about the plague in boulder county how many times this been through and what areas have plagued i know that the south has plagued quite

[51:00] a bit whereas the north seems to have more resilient colonies up there so that concerns me as it points back to genetic variability my second concern is the impacts to the colonies from climate change the ones that do survive you allow to survive how will these plague events uh impact them also drought we're going to see temperatures go out go up we will see drought that is going to increase almost double between 2020 and 2050. how is this going to affect all this irrigation that's going to go on where's the water coming from if we do start suffering drought after drought after drought snow events that lead up to large amounts of snow are critical during growth periods of the pups this can actually eliminate some colonies and then finally i want to just say i do not support any plans that don't encourage relocation and i would love to know how many ranchers and farmers voted to increase the open space tax [Music] [Applause] thanks susan andy brighter than susan

[52:01] summers raymond bridge and then francis hartog andy breiter 301 27th street i am the president of the flatirons young farmers coalition but i'm here tonight to speak on behalf of myself i'm also going to read to you guys a letter from one of our members who could not be here today city of boulder open space and mountain parks departments charter includes the preservation of agricultural uses and land suitable for agricultural production and the preservation of water resources in the natural or traditional state my biggest concern with the prairie dog issue is what is happening to our agricultural lands this past year i farmed on a property the andrus north property which is an osmp property and this year when it went up for new lease it was not there on the new leases it is no longer an agricultural use you're no longer preserving the agriculture uses of these lands that you

[53:00] guys manage a big part of this reasoning for not being on agricultural use is because of the peridoc infestation and have it not having the ability to manage those prairie dogs properly for that reason i'm in favor of the 500 increase option so we can speed up the process or adopting boulder county policies to adjust our management practices so that we can better deal with this infestation of prairie dogs the other lady that is not here tonight that i'm speaking for is marie lilia mullins she lives at 3645 plateau road in boulder county dear boulder citizens and city trustees i care deeply about the health of our ecosystem and all of its inhabitants including the prairie dogs unfortunately due to a long history of mismanagement we have ended up in a place where the the over population and infestation of prairie dogs in our publicly owned assets are open space lands that we as citizens have fought to protect from development and destruction

[54:00] are being destroyed by this prairie dog infestation this prairie infestation the fortunate thing for most of us is that the destruction is not happening in our backyard but it is happening but it is happening in my backyard it is happening on my farm and other farms in my community its impact its impacts our ability to bring you all quality local food coming from healthy thriving ecosystems due to the imbalance so i have a question for you all what do you do when there is a mouse infestation in your home destroying the foundation interior electric wiring and eating food out of your cabinets while potentially spreading disease you can use a live trap and relocate them a few blocks down for your neighbor to deal with or for them to come back to your house or you can use a more permanent form of mitigation for the infestation that is destroying your asset your home i urge you to consider this when you think of the prairie dog infestation that is impacting our open space lands in particular our agricultural open space we as a community are in strong

[55:01] support of local food however our action on prairie dog policy does not reflect this i encourage the city of boulder to adopt the boulder county policy on prairie dogs and agriculture lands to maintain the integrity of our local food system thank you guys thanks andy susan hi susan summers 46 36 55th street um i brought a picture along with me myself um to show you who we're talking about tonight these are not just ideas these are actual lives that we're talking about destroying potentially up to thirty thousand um i had something written as well but sitting here tonight listening to this it's so disturbing to me to have people come up actually advocating to kill anything um honestly it's just such a foreign concept to me when i drive through boulder i love seeing the prairie dogs i enjoy it i see

[56:00] people come into this community that moved into colorado and they come up to me going what what is that you know tell me about the prairie dogs they love them there was kind of a snicker when when someone talked about you know tourism related to prairie dogs it's a real thing people like coming here and seeing these animals they're important to the community in more ways than one when i drive by a hayfield i'm not i'm not in love with that i don't think that's wonderful what i see there is a monoculture what i see there is what used to be native grassland now turned into a monoculture that supports nothing except for cows and and horses it doesn't support other species it simply doesn't and as a matter of fact it removes you know grassland habitat for birds which no one's you know a gentleman mentioned the the bald eagles tonight you know i understand that we need agriculture i get that but you know this your charter is 34 years old i don't know that it's been updated since

[57:00] then you need to change what you're doing here we can't keep doing this same agricultural thing and expect a different answer tesol that was mentioned tonight that was introduced by humans the dust bowl that was caused by humans i'm a beekeeper i do prairie dog relocations and i use delta dust i would not use delta dust if i thought that that was a danger to my bees or the hives it's put way down into the burrows sure it affects some insects but the overall damage is very minimal you should not pursue lethal control i expect better from this intelligent group of people here thank you thanks susan ray i'm raymond bridge 435 south 38th street in boulder i'd like to commend the staff for an excellent job in describing the major problem we have in the northern agricultural properties the root problem of course is that we humans have appropriated nearly all of the historic black-tailed prairie dog

[58:02] habitat for our uses and we have fragmented what remains so that the natural system in which prairie dogs evolved is gone osmp has to try and manage viable populations on the areas of native grassland with that we have managed to preserve osmp's other charter mandate is to preserve local agriculture and when prairie dogs move on to land that has been purchased for agricultural purposes they interfere with that agriculture to such a degree that they make it impossible for the rancher or the farmer to maintain a viable operation prairie dogs are particularly incompatible with irrigated agricultural operations these conflicts only are only further complicated by the fact that the main threat to prairie dogs today is sylvatic plague and that too was introduced by european settlers and is not part of the ecosystem that prairie dogs evolved to cope with as a consequence of all this lethal

[59:00] control is required in some situations for osmp to manage for both preservation of prairie dogs and local agriculture having those agricultural lands deteriorate to weed patches that are losing near topsoil does not benefit anyone i'm going to go over my time so i will summarize by saying of the packages described in the staff memo i would urge you to adopt package e package d should be the very minimum that you should consider it would still require seven to eight years to get to where we need to be go packages a to c are simply inadequate to fulfill charter purposes never mind treating our agricultural lesses fairly thank you thanks ray francis followed by honor rivas jim howell and pam wonnick hi i'm francis hardtock 3186 galena way in balder i agree with ray

[60:01] bridge's comments i've sent you written comments so i won't go over all of those when i was on the open space board for five years we didn't have thousand page packets and two-day meetings so i don't want to take up any more time than i have to um i do agree with removal packages d and e with a preference for e our ranchers have waited way too long and we've lost too many of our historic ranching families already we're talking about a thousand acres we're not talking about our entire open space we just need to allow lethal control as one of the tools in our arsenal you who served with me on the overseas board of trustees know that i'm a total conservationist knee-jerk environmentalist and i'm standing up here saying that we do need to support lethal control as one of the options thank you so much thanks francis anna hi i live at 4501 nelson road wild animal populations all over the

[61:01] world are being decimated as we grab up their habitats essentially wrecking havoc on them by converting it to agriculture among other things and people have become so used to seeing these low numbers of animals which um you know they went from tens of millions to millions to hundreds of thousands tens of thousands thousands maybe and now maybe hundreds this is called the shifting baseline and it's a decline on top of a decline on top of a decline but people who are seeing what exists now think that's the way it's kind always been and they're so used to seeing that that any feeble sign of recovery is seen as an invasion or an infestation which is it's not i mean it started this is a very small number of what we started out with and it's just barely making a comeback so we have to get a grip and stop resorting to killing we need to learn to share the what what's left of their habitat and not just grab and claim it all for our human

[62:02] use um and i also wanted to point out that bef as uh deb jones said that before humans caused climate change um and we before we had to worry about um sequestration um we had the great plains which were covered with a lot of wide variety of forbs and grasses and a lot of animals including millions of prairie dogs they didn't cause this as i said and those before and after photos that were shown to you they were taken in two different seasons the trees didn't have leaves on them in the after so clearly that was not the spring which is when the other photo was taken so thank you thanks anna jim thanks for the opportunity to be here tonight i live off of 36 between boulder and lions i

[63:02] have a small ranching operation here in boulder county at least about 250 acres it's all private ground that i lease and run a small herd of cows and i also run a ranch management company and we have leased or run large commercial scale cattle ranches on big country uh in western south dakota eastern montana western colorado with the with the white-tailed prairie dog we've dealt with prairie dogs through management of well-managed grasslands if we do a good job managing our grasslands we tend to exist in balance with those prairie dogs and it's not it's not a huge issue that's not boulder county though boulder county is highly fragmented it is not a big intact relatively intact ecosystem like we've managed up there in eastern montana western south dakota where we have healthy populations of predators and all the natural dynamics can happen in in boulder county obviously that's

[64:00] not the case highly fragmented because of human influence um and we've created excellent prairie dog habitat not habitat for much else other than prairie dogs that's an exaggeration but um we've obviously created good prairie dog habitat and my little ranching deal here in boulder county about half the land that i lease is is is colonized by prairie dogs grows very little grass if that and that the trend is negative we're losing ground to prairie dogs my little operation is not going to be viable very much longer under the current situation we are adjacent to city of boulder leases i could spend a lot of money trying to mitigate prairie dogs but it would be totally for naught because those prairie dogs can run across the fence or across the road right back onto our place onto our places as soon as we as soon as we get rid of them on our own place so it's it's a conundrum it's a big problem i am not anti-prairie dog i'm ecological balance and i think we have a lot of work to do i deeply appreciate everybody's perspectives here obviously all come

[65:00] from different contexts we all deeply care and we just want to find solutions so that all these values can be accounted for thanks a lot thanks jim pam wonick then robert o'donnell john brown marcus mccauley then sherry siebery hi my name is pam monic my dress is 2251 west 154th place broomfield i've i have over 20 years of field experience with prairie dogs and i'm the creator of reverse dispersal translocation which is a non-lethal control method in your packets i am really into plants as well and one of the things i want to talk about is carbon sequestration and one of the goals of carbon sequestration is to increase below ground fungi so um naturally we think the photosynthesis through the leaves is the best way to increase biomath and that include that increases the fungi under the ground but prairie dogs and other burrowing animals actually through their burrowing and digging up to three to four meters down into the

[66:00] ground they create these um they reduce the below ground compaction and they increase airflow and this allows for easier pathways for other animals and even arthropods um to move this underground soil underneath and it nourishes the fur the fungi seeking minerals also want to briefly talk about prairie dogs and vegetation the teasel is non-native and i i'm tired of it too i'm tired of the napweet i'm tired of the teasel i'm tired of all the stuff i'm seeing out there the curly dock and i would like to see the city to become very aggressive on reintroduction of forbes that are resistant or resilient to prairie dog grazing and i can give you 15 of them right now as far as each one of the conflict properties i propose that we develop a matrix just to kind of help everybody be on one page that matrix would include the feasibility of removal reclamation and prairie dog exclusion the longevity of the conflict of the colony and conflict and since i'm already running out of time i would like to look at this in relation to a meta population along the landscape

[67:00] susan hunnicut also mentioned we should be looking at the southern grasslands if there's a plague collapse or a climate change collapse of prairie dogs we shouldn't be poisoning prairie dogs up on the northern grasslands and finally i would like that the city manager has the retention of the ability to halt all operations immediately and i would like to see what those triggers would be thank you very much thanks pam robert o'donnell thank you i'm robert o'donnell i live at 7634 north 41st street for those of you who responded to my letter thank you very much i live in the middle of the brubacher sorensen stratton property i moved there in the late 80s when the brew bakers owned the property fast forward mid 90s they sold to the city in the county the prairie dogs moved in fast forward to 2000 the strattons

[68:00] sold their property the city came in bought the strattons property i am really surrounded by a dust bowl and the letter that i wrote to you all is the collateral damage and for those folks that have spoke i'm not a prairie dog killer but i'm going to tell you right now the prairie dog is killing my property i'm out there i've broke my hip i can't get out there right now my wife's out there i have horses she's out there every day trying to fill holes last weekend we're out there chicken wire bombs whatever we can do i will say one thing you guys have to follow suit with the county the county open space has at least helped me a little they've given me some options as far as trying to manage for those of you who haven't seen the damage i also encourage you to come out i'm sure you guys don't even know where we live i'm sure you don't know what these properties are so it's important that you guys come out and please take a look look at the brubacher sorenson stratton is turned into a dust bowl and i'm just asking for some kind of help i'm asking help

[69:01] for my property and i'm also asking help for the farmers that need it thank you thanks robert john john brown then marcus mccauley and sherry siebery thank you so much for having me tonight i'm john brown brown's farm we sell vegetables at the longmont farmers market and as an advocation i'm invested in regenerative ag and i have a consultation on soil health and soil amendments and soil testing we have a keystone endangered species in our boulder county city of boulder area that is the men and women who are going to farm here the prairie dog represents a hurdle that we may not be able to overcome i've done a lot of work on trying to do passive and aggressive regeneration of

[70:02] of grounds that have been degraded by the prairie dog and i'm not having very good luck uh i think our first goal is to keep both rangeland and irrigated land that does not have prairie dogs on them at bay and work from those perimeters backwards because once the prairie dog makes itself present those lands go into geological time for their recovery per square meter wherever the prairie dog is we have lost the biome once the prairie dog makes itself present the lightest fraction of the soil is the most fertile and is taken away with the wind and then we are left with a stony ground that has no possibility for any carbon or regeneration without human input at a high level of cost i invite you all at any time to come on

[71:02] and walk about with me into the local areas along left hand creek and i can show you the impacts that the prairie dog has had over time and the implications for your neighbors who abut your properties i graze cattle right next to your property and i can show you exactly what the repercussions are thank you again so much for hearing me thanks john marcus good evening i'm marcus mccauley i'm a farmer uh i live on 63rd street in north boulder county um so i've i've not been afforded the opportunity to to be in a working group or sit on a committee or commission but i do care deeply about this land

[72:01] and the soil and this planet and i have as you know been on the ground trying to heal these lands and i've dedicated hundreds of hours over the last eight years on our farm and the last couple of years on the been open space property and thousands of dollars of my own and of the cities and trying to regenerate broken open space grasslands and trying to regenerate a functioning prairie ecology a place where grasses and rodents and birds and ruminants and insects and fungi and humans can all thrive i have been attempting to do this without lethal control of prairie dogs i have given everything i can to achieve this and we've made some successes

[73:02] that have been wiped out by the prairie dogs i'm a reluctant advocate for lethal control of prairie dogs but i do not believe that you can regenerate these ecosystems without it i ask that you make regenerating these broken broken ecosystems a priority i recommend a more aggressive strategy than the 500 increase and i recommend considering filling in holes so that we're not back in this place again soon yes it is expensive to do this but it will be more expensive to remove prairie dogs from these lands in the future thank you thanks marcus sherry shree seaberry 4748 and place much of the degradation of soils in the urban environments that have prairie dog

[74:01] colonies is the result of considerable human disturbance over long periods of time the soil arranged erosion we tend to see is often due to overgrazing by cattle black-tailed prairie dogs prefer open patches of grassland and will move into heavily grazed patches of grassland this tends to cause the observer to blame the prairie dogs for the degraded state when in fact the conditions were present prior to the presence of the prairie dogs prairie dogs and bison coexisted for thousands of years throughout the central grasslands of north america prairie dog burrows act as aquifers that prevent water from eroding land while helping to cool it managed grasses and flowering plants atop a prairie dog town are higher in protein and nitrogen and are favored for large animal grazing a prairie dog burrowing can be beneficial to the soil because mixing soil types and

[75:01] incorporating organic matter enhances soil formation it also helps to increase soil aeration and decreased compaction in short grass prairies the number of plant species particularly forbs increases because of the digging and scratching activities of the prairie dogs that till the soil these patches of bare soil provide excellent sites for annual forbes to become established long-term use of an area by prairie dogs appears to promote buffalo grass and grandma grasses efforts to simply eradicate prairie dogs from urban areas are short-sighted and do not contribute to the conv conservation of our native grassland ecosystems extermination efforts cause a long and inhumane death and is not something that should be condoned in a civil society additionally extermination efforts indiscriminately kill not only prairie dogs but also other native wildlife thank you thank you sherry

[76:09] okay leslie cushman then bobby lover and nicole hugo [Music] hi good evening i'm leslie hitchcock cushman i live in hygiene so first of all i think that the city and county deserve an attaboy for what they did and there's a lot of different events that occurred throughout the like within the last quarter century of the history of the prairie dog and its demise and what the city and county have done for its return to colorado i think is commendable and and how they've led the example and our other communities are following it now the city deserves another attaboy for

[77:02] its investment in the prairie dog working groups plan which is being modeled now for as a prairie dog coalition's management plan and i was a member of the working group and i was actually on the economic subcommittee and two things that come to mind first of all i was talking with deb jones in the bathroom and i think that there's a lot that can still be done working together and getting this situation stabilized and getting it out of the irrigated hay fields which i don't even know how they ended up in the middle of the grassland plan but it was a bit of a conflict and um but as far as the i heard something at the county prairie dog meeting afterwards that not much has surprised me through this but it actually stopped me in my boots i was talking to mark locke who neighbors the

[78:00] imo city and county jointly owned property and he has a agriculture tax classification and they they'll graze our cattle in the summer like 35 head just to keep that agriculture designation they have 23 thousand boroughs on a not very big property and they try to knock them back all the time there and they had our cattle over there for seven days this year that's all the grass they had they are in danger of losing their classification their tax classification is agriculture thanks leslie just say one more thing the economic and social thresholds have reached emergency status as well on this along with the ecological and we do need to talk about that thank you thanks bobby lover then nicole hugo bob lover 3700 longhorn road boulder valley ranch uh the lady that talked before ellie i think cheryl was her name

[79:00] i agree with her 100 that there is overgrazing on our ag lands but it's not by cattle it's by prairie dogs you can see that just by driving down the road and uh behind the house there at our place this will be the be 32 years since we put up hay behind there because the prairie dogs have taken over start taking over that hay field and no sense in even going out there with our equipment we're gonna irrigate and just graze it then uh hesters and campbells you got prairie dogs moving in on the north they've started let's jump on that and i don't know why we're still talking about this two years later i guess a year after you guys you have approved lethal control and the city council approved lethal control we're still sitting here talking about this let's uh get some let's get the wheels turning let's get out there and do something before it's it's already too late it's going to be really bad if we keep on waiting so that's about all i got to say thank

[80:01] you thanks bobby nicole good evening i wasn't really thinking about speaking but when i hear all this stuff i just wanted to make a comment nicole hugo 1717 folsom street um when lewis and clark came over here we had billions of prairie dogs we had vast grasslands that were full of bison billions of prairie dogs they didn't come over here and find a moonscape what's the only variable right now which is humans so please consider this this is not the paradox fault thank you okay thanks nicole um if anybody else wishes to speak this would be the very short window in which to do so um okay well in that case i will close the public comment unless anyone has anything that we need to deal with before we break into the study session and looking i think i see none okay well then i will adjourn the meeting and um

[81:02] we'll proceed immediately to the study section explain what that means so we're going to move to the rectangular table and there won't be any further public participation but we'll be discussing we'll be voting tonight but we'll be discussing that have been raised here and certainly you're all welcome to stick around or watch us on television or enjoy the rest of the evening however you see fit yeah i also just wanted to add i appreciate the amount of thoughtful material that people squeezed into the two minutes that they had it was really impressive and well very much appreciated all right

[85:23] thank you okay [Music]

[86:14] [Music] yeah we can clarify that i have that on my list of things here we're ready to go tom yeah okay okay great um my name's mark gershman uh and i'm the um project manager uh for this expedited management review project um that the board makes recommendations to counseling council directed open space staff to undertake regarding uh irrigated lands occupied by prairie dogs um i'm here

[87:00] with a group of folks who are members of the team and a lot of them are important knowledge holders that you'll be hearing a lot more from in terms of clarification and answers to your question but i'm here to help us facilitate our way through the evening the other members of the team kind of go around here john potter heather swanson val mathison andy pelster allison eklund our community relations coordinators in the audience another member of the crew affiliates our communications um guru is also here and has been helping a lot with this project we also have tori poulton uh tori by looking right at you she's here tori's joined us recently as the prairie dog conservation and management coordinator her focus is on implementing the prairie dog working group recommendation and she's also helping us with this project because of the relationship to much of that work

[88:00] i'd also like to acknowledge to the board members karen hoeg and dave kunst who have served as advisors in terms of process on this project and have helped us keep in touch with the board and make sure that as we develop the process around this expedited process it's got board involvement we also have rob alexander from boulder county parks and open space uh joining us tonight all right rob gets a a round of applause that's excellent uh he's generously offered to come to a meeting that isn't his uh department meeting uh to answer questions that may arise regarding the county's approach that we've heard a little bit about from the community already tonight so thanks rob for being here so having said that just wanted to take a look at the agenda as you can see we're about an hour off on the agenda we had initially anticipated about a half an hour of public comment we're we're up to about uh um 7 30 now so the proposal that is on

[89:02] the table is that we would just kind of advance these uh an hour and plan for adjourning at 10 o'clock so if that's okay with the board um that's how we'll proceed um say again okay yeah so we've got uh we've got uh tested approval at least to move forward with that and if we can conclude more quickly than that great we do want to make sure that there's an opportunity to have uh questions answered and for um us to get the input that we think would be useful for us as we move towards bringing forward a recommendation in in march oops sorry um uh so starting off uh the staff presentation we're gonna take a moment here to to go over the agenda um very quickly go over the direction and process summary a lot of that material is available online we'll have links on the presentation so folks who may be following this on channel 8 or on the internet or even with their devices in the audience

[90:00] can look look onto the what project website to find stuff our focus tonight is to hear from the board members responding to a certain study session questions we'll get to in a second and also to respond to your questions the kind of information you need to make those decisions we want to be strategic in how we spend our time and so i'm looking to work with the board and help support the idea of trying to keep things focused at a high level where we're informing the broad questions that we've got at this point if we do need information additional information for the march meeting we'll also have an opportunity to get those questions uh written down so that in the intervening time which isn't huge we have an opportunity to respond to those um we also are going to take a moment uh to spend some time uh clearing up points that came up repeatedly uh

[91:01] community conversations here or in the copious amounts of input that we've received during the first engagement window and thus far into the second engagement window and we'll have a little time also during that that first part to uh direct questions you may have right to rob so if he wanted to he could go home you're certainly welcome to stay rob and be available for the for the rest of the night as well um after that we'll move into the study session questions um so having said that i'll just um go down into kind of the the issue quick recap back in may city council provided some direction based on a board recommendation uh looking at uh the population levels of prairie dogs uh on our irrigated lands especially in the northern portion of our system uh creating or being involved in i should say conflicts with our ability to

[92:00] have viable agricultural operations uh council expressed a concern that these conflicts have become serious enough that they may have or have affected open spaces ability to fully meet the charter purposes of open space especially those around agricultural uses and the conservation of agricultural lands and that prairie dog's occupation and the activities of prairie dogs on these lands had resulted in soil degradation and loss on these irrigated lands that had some cascading impacts and concerns for the climate crisis and emergency that we're in and so both the board and council shared concerns that the situation is unlikely to improve um based on our past practices of relying completely on non-lethal means of managing prairie dogs at least not in a timely or economical fashion so the idea was to go ahead and look at the agricultural uses on these northern grasslands look at the ecological context look at soil health

[93:03] look at the way that these lands support ranching farming and support wildlife habitat and then provide an evaluation of land management tools that could include things like keyline plowing soil amendments lethal control and other methods um for uh addressing this conflict uh and the situation that we're in so those are um kind of our our marching orders uh from from council um real quickly we um had our first visit with council with the board excuse me back in august after getting this direction may um meeting first with karen and dave to pull together some process ideas did a couple of updates with the board actually our first visit was in june and we continued the updates through august we started our first public engagement in october with the community open house that engagement lasted providing

[94:01] opportunities for online input through questionnaire through november 15th i won't say a whole lot more about that there are summaries of this public engagement available online and in your packet for today having an opportunity to um describe the situation um i'll just kind of jump ahead to this summary first engagement window was really an opportunity for us to describe the situation um that was out there with the public try to foster a shared understanding as you can hear there are a lot of different perspectives about what's going on out there identify community values do some value exercises and then begin the kind of conversation with the community how might we improve the situation out here in collecting those ideas um that window as i said concluded in mid-november we got considerable amount of input from the community as you can see from the results and

[95:01] we put together some of the initial ideas of what we had heard from the community in terms of a general approach and an evaluation of specific methods published that in early january along with a summary of the input as well as the detailed input from that first engagement window and then asked the community for ideas and further input on how we might improve the situation this engagement window is part of the expedited process was intended to be online um and we've also had opportunities as we just had uh prior to um prior to the study session for public comment at open space board meetings this study session is also part of it and in a way part of our ability to ensure that we've got um an opportunity to check in with the board before the next step which is coming forward in march with staff's recommendations about how to proceed on improving the situation with regards to prairie dog

[96:01] occupancy on irrigated lands so far we've we've got a lot of responses to the engagement window that opened on january 6th we extended it through the study session and then passed the study session so that people had some time um and the proposal is that it will close or the closing date of the engagement window is february 16th so that's where we stand kind of in the community engagement i'm going to hand it over to heather uh to um provide some clarifications on a number of issues as well as andy uh on on the last of these so as mark said um after we put out the evaluations of the various strategies through public comment it became clear that there were still some issues that people still had questions on or maybe weren't all that clear on so we just wanted to run through a few of those briefly just so that we're all kind of on the same page with those moving forward

[97:00] mark so the first of those is just looking at growth of colonies in the study area and i should make clear that we measure acres occupied not population numbers so when we're talking about populations we're using sort of an average to calculate those so looking at acres occupied there's been some question about how this was calculated so essentially it's just calculated using a pretty typical growth formula where you take the the number of sometime in the future minus the time current over the time current to find out what the growth rate to get to that would be so looking at 2018 and 2019 so a one year period we take the 2019 numbers minus the 2018 numbers to get the difference between those two divide by the 2018 numbers and you come out with the percentage of growth so the percentage growth between those two years was just a little bit over three percent and that's within the study area system wide that was actually closer to seven percent

[98:02] also plague management we've heard about delta dust we've heard about plague management the city does participate in plague management so i just wanted to make sure that we were clear on where and when and why that's happening so as part of the prairie dog working group recommendations vaccine so the sovatic plague vaccine is used and has been used for the last two years at all active colonies only in the southern grasslands and that's happened in the spring and in the fall the vaccine has been used on limited areas within the study area only for those prairie dogs for which we are planning relocation to southern grasslands so they re receive that first dose in the spring on the colonies where they reside in the north before they're captured and relocated to the south where they'll receive that second dose in the fall yes heather can you just briefly say how the vaccine is administered oh certainly yeah it's um contained within a small

[99:02] hard pelleted bait it's a little looks like blue dog food essentially and so it's spread in the colonies it apparently tastes like peanut butter i haven't tried it but we work directly with colorado parks and wildlife who we we actually purchase the liquid vaccine and then they put it into the bait for distribution and does that bait have any non-target species implications no they did fairly extensive research with that and it didn't seem to it certainly will also protect against plague in other small mammals but as far as any you know bad side effects or impacts on humans or dogs or anything like that they didn't see any problems with that and the city also is undertaking putting together a plague management plan that came out of the prairie dog working group recommendations and so we have just started to to sketch out the scope of that in the process and we're hoping that that will um be something that can be completed by the end of quarter two

[100:01] of this year and so that will kind of give more extensive long-term direction on what the city will be doing on plague management and then there is some insecticide use that occurs on open space and that has been delta dust which is the the dust insecticide which goes down into the holes and that has been done only on colonies where we are actively relocating the prairie dogs so the state permit requires that that's done before capture starts on those sending site colonies so so those have last year been within the study area and then when the prairie dogs are captured as part of the state permit they also are treated with liquid insecticides directly onto the animal and that is is largely a effort to keep plague from being spread across the landscape and transported from one place to another heather while you're on that subject can you respond to the concern about the effect of the dust on pollinators yeah i don't think that i'm the best person to do that but as part of our

[101:01] plague management plan certainly rella abernathy our ipm coordinator has been looking extensively into all different types of impacts benefits of delta dust as well as potential impacts to arthropods and any other species certainly it is a broad spectrum insecticide and so there is the potential to impact other arthropods that come in contact with it i do think that the method of putting it down into the borough to some extent limits the exposure on the surface but that's certainly something that we have concerns about and something that we plan to look at pretty carefully as we're putting together our plague management plan i don't know val if you have anything else to add to that part of our ipm goals in the city and we're looking to reduce or eliminate chemical controls particularly with insecticides and so when its youth is authorized it's its scope is very limited and very specific so the city now only allows

[102:01] delta dust to be used in those boroughs before prairie dogs are relocated because we can't relocate without that use but we're encouraged to and continually look for is there any way we can do that or achieve that goal without that chemical use um so yeah thanks so so val and heather are those applications a maximum of two for relocated prairie dogs or is there kind of the delta dust that would just be once it's completed at least seven days before trapping begins and then the insecticide is applied directly to the prairie dogs and that that's a different liquid insecticide that's not delta dust and what are the implications of the other insecticide other than delta dust so with the second one you're taking the the prairie dog and spraying it individually so um there seems to be less environmental

[103:00] concerns for that um pyramid or that flea spray onto that animal in terms of lasting effects in the land so the concerns are still some for the animal who who is exposed there's some but in terms of environmental impacts much less and so there's no multiple or additional application for individuals after that no and i think it's also important to recognize that some of these are requirements as well as indicating of the colorado division of parks and wildlife for relocation permits and then also there was some some question about conserving prairie dogs on open space and how that relates to what we're talking about now and so i'm not going to go through all of these numbers but generally we have three categories of management designations where we're not in general looking at

[104:00] removal of prairie dogs there is an exception here where we're looking at irrigable acres some of which do fall within these categories but generally speaking system-wide we had about 3431 acres occupied within what we would consider to be sort of protected lands and we can certainly later if you're interested get into some of the grassland plan conservation goals and where we stand on those and what impacts there might or might not be to those of um new actions but i just wanted to kind of show you that we have that information available if you'd like to go through it in more detail and black-footed ferret reintroduction was also something that was brought up through the engagement one and i just wanted to sort of clear that up that really introduction of black-footed ferrets as a limitation tool for prairie dog populations really is not consistent with the goals of the current evaluation so ferrets are not really reintroduced in order to reduce the numbers of prairie dogs in fact in

[105:01] order to reintroduce ferrets you need to have plans in place to protect your prairie dogs and maintain your prairie dog populations because when prairie dog populations go down the ferrets don't do well so that's not really all that consistent as a tool for our current evaluation and also the north is a complicated area to look at for that it's a patchwork of private and public ownership subdivisions roads so it's it's not a super simple landscape to look at for something like fair conservation um and also there's been quite a bit of discussion about prairie dog contraceptives this is certainly something that we're keeping a close eye on currently there are none that are approved for use in prairie dogs um so there really aren't any available to us as a current tool there are current studies going on for a couple of potential contraceptives looking mainly at the effectiveness at this point some of them may be very feasible if they're approved they're in bait form others may be less so where you have to capture each individual animal and inject them the effects on any non-target species

[106:01] either predators probably mostly predators really hasn't yet been studied but we are providing funding this year for field trials that are occurring not on osmp properties but for field trials that are going on outside of our properties from the prairie dog working group funding and then also there's been some discussion about prairie dog relocations and where they've been put and where they've come from so in the last 20 years all of the prairie dogs that open space has relocated have gone not into the study area so there were some very limited relocations many many years ago prior to the last two plague epizootics up north but in the last 20 years all of the prey dogs that have been relocated have been taken to the southern grasslands preserve so the red circles are the sending sites and the blue circles are the receiving sites down south by the county line can i ask a quick question is it fair to say then that you believe

[107:00] there is genetic diversity in the southern grasslands um i don't think that we have any data to really speculate on that i would say that the prairie dogs there have come from a number of places some previous studies looking in boulder county at genetic diversity showed that overall genetic diversity was not all that high and that the difference within a colony was actually as big as it was between colonies and really that at the time the researchers thought that that was because there had been so many relocations in the past that it had all sort of just been mixed up now since that study we've gone through another plague episodic and so those dynamics may have really shifted quite a bit but we don't have any specific information and i on this map i can't tell where 128 is oh sure um but right down by the southernmost blue circle so 120. it is a little hard to see kevin but my fingers okay so the large prairie dog town that's on the

[108:00] west side of 93 at the 128 intersection that re was a receiving site it was not no they're all east of highway 93. okay so do you know whether it has ever been a receiving site i don't believe so but certainly not so it's rebounded on its own it did okay thank you so we did want to take a look at our boundary interface in the project area we've heard a lot from the neighbors and so we did a quick gis analysis to take a look at that in the project area we do have 77 miles of property boundary which is a lot of boundary out there i do have it broken down by grassland preserve or the management designations um [Music] and that the colony boundary is where a prairie dog colony butts up to our boundary within 100 feet so that's that's direct

[109:00] interface that's what these numbers show and if we look at that we have 24.3 miles of colony that border or bound uh one of our neighbors and if you look at that as as a percentage or part of um the total project area that's 30 32 of that 77 miles has some prairie dog interface to it the irrigated agricultural areas that we're talking about are removal and transition areas that's one of the main reasons they get that designation uh and if you look at if we look at how much that boundary interface is 50 52 of the boundary interface in the project area comes from those transition and removal errors and that's important for us to know because in the places where we are going to take action we we will be addressing uh quite a bit of some of the neighbor neighbor conflict there um

[110:00] there's plenty of information on this slide i'm not sure how much we want to go through that but the important thing i wanted to point out in doing this is that we are going to take care of quite a bit of the neighbor conflict if we would proceed with in the removal and transition areas at some point is somebody going to clarify the questions and comments about changing irrigated lands to managed lands and and do they are they largely in transition areas or removal areas or i mean all this categorization of lands is my question let me just respond to that the um what people saw on our map was the title managed osmp what that refers to is is all the open space and mountain park's land on that

[111:02] map that we manage which is really kind of the arena of significant action so we don't we weren't showing conservation easements or jointly owned properties that are managed by the county so that wasn't a new new designation of any kind there are portions of those managed lands that are irrigable and portions of them that are not that wasn't uh a new decision or a new determination that we made or changes too so that could just of well have read open space and mountain parks lands um it's kind of a typical thing that our gis maps show are you know to define what some some portion of all of our lands are being shown on the map so i apologize i can see how that could be confusing to folks it might look like a new kind of designation where we're taking things out of irrigation or something like that and just giving them a new uh definition there are lands however that have been taken out of um

[112:00] there are lands that have been taken out of um agricultural production and those um show up on uh page four of the agenda item in the acreage descriptions there's so thanks that's helpful and the other thing that i'm wondering is whether in fact at this point based on this sort of analysis that andy's showing us whether there's a map that shows where the checkerboard squares are that our transition area and where the areas that our removal are just so we can get a sense of how cohesive the land layout is yes we have we definitely have that map so we can get back to that when we're discussing this and um that is actually shown on this this map here and um certainly one way to get out but we can also provide that in other ways the board mark i'm still a little confused on the managed irrigable dichotomy sure so on the on the map

[113:04] um so you said that there are some man's lands that are irrigable but there is a there is a designation on the map of irrigable land and that's what's intended to be shown so if you will the uh managed lands are the the base of the pallet that's the open space land we're talking about right some of the lands that are open space managed by open space are irrigable and those are the ones that are shown with the stippling so when the assertion is made that um that some of these designations have been changed from irrigable lands to managed lands is not accurate i think by and large no there are some instances where on that map it shows as irrigable but we did not buy water rights with that property so in those cases they do not show up as irrigable and also uh amy will height the water resource

[114:01] administrator we created definitions because there was a lot of confusion around irrigable irrigated right and that did in fact change a couple that we they're historically irrigated but because they weren't in that 10-year period of what that definition was so there were a couple of parcels that did change that may have changed i'm not sure in the maps that i was looking at i didn't catch any of that um so there could be a possibility that some small parcels did change and and there also is an interpretation when people or people from the public may believe the parcel is or has been irrigated but we actually don't have water rights to do so um so those those may not be perceived or they may be perceived to be irrigable but we don't consider them that way andy so you want to talk specifically about anders because that was mentioned as something that someone believed had been irrigated and

[115:02] was no longer being released but that could be for many reasons it's not a reclassification of the property right the andrew's property uh we have not we are not going to lease it until we can get it in better shape that is one where staff will likely take over management but i don't think we depict that on a map anywhere we can work with the individuals who pointed out these discrepancies but they're probably pretty small scale compared to kind of the questions that we're trying to get today however there's certain things that ford needs to know that then please let us know sorry to move back real fast but i guess we're in clarifying question mode you did a great job presenting the acreage and i see density averages do we have any data on change in density averages we really don't so what we have for densities is published literature as well as the densities that we found when we've actually relocated a colony so how

[116:01] many per acre there actually were once we've captured all of them doing density counts is incredibly labor intensive because it requires repeated above ground counts because with an animal that spends a lot of its time underground it's very very difficult to get accurate counts um on the the acreage and the number of colonies that we manage which is well over 150 colonies and about 400 acres it's just not a feasible thing to do so we don't have any um real data on changes in densities you know anecdotally some properties are a lot higher density than others that certainly is the case but um we just don't have the ability to measure that so the three percent number it's possible that the total growth of the population is larger than three percent potentially if density is rising again that is just a spatial growth of acres occupied not individuals and the the seven percent is obviously more than double the three percent

[117:00] so where are the high density areas if they're not in the northern uh project area so again we're not talking about densities we're just talking about acres occupied and what we've seen is that plague moved through the southern half of our system far more recently and those populations are still recovering and so growth rates tend to be far more rapid after plague than they are once prairie dogs have sort of filled in the you know suitable habitat so we see growth rates on some of those colonies in the southern half of our system that are far higher and so that brings up that system-wide average in the north where prairie dogs are occupying what is probably a lot of the suitable habitat already those growth rates are a little lower thank you and heather this is probably obvious but when we're counting acres occupied that's only on our land that's right we have no data on on private lands oh yep a colony can expand on a neighboring land that's not captured in our growth rates necessary that's exactly right thanks and so

[118:00] heather just to be clear on the average uh the population average i think i'm okay that's yours it's 30 is that that's so that's the number that we're using as the average system-wide yes again that that's very much an average and we will come back again and again tonight to the fact that we've had to make a lot of very broad assumptions so that we could compare apples to apples and come up with some numbers to discuss um in some colonies that will be low in some colonies that will be high um but looking at the colonies in irrigated ag lands that we've relocated over the last couple of years that's that's been pretty close to what we've seen thanks okay so we're ahead about it we have one more item for this uh this part of the agenda which was uh questions for ron and so um we can do that now and

[119:02] try to make up the time as we move into the other parts of things you folks have questions i do uh and i this is from attending your meeting a few weeks ago would you just describe as succinctly as you can you talked about a change in strategy that you folks have sort of arrived at after a lot of years and maybe you could encapsulate that for us because i thought it was pretty interesting uh yeah the um boulder county went through a revamp of our prairie dog policies and and plans back in 1999 and it's evolved over the last 20 years and what we have learned is that early on our primary means removal and we designated we have a designation for irrigated well any cropland dry land or irrigated that we call no prairie dog areas and that is it's agriculture land there are some rest

[120:00] restoration areas re-vegetation for grasslands but but overwhelmingly 99.9 of the land is agriculture land dry land or irrigated cropland so our initial methods of removal was it was almost all products ended up being euthanized but it was through live trapping we would live trap and then euthanized with co2 those prairie dogs were donated to the ferret recovery program and the bird's prey program down by broomfield a very small number of those were were kept alive most most of them were euthanized so we had an internal policy did not come out of the the um official policy that thresholds for we would live trap first and to a threshold of 50

[121:02] approximately 50 animals per colony if we could get it down to 50 animals then we would initiate poisons and at that time it was fast toxin since about six years ago we eliminated foss toxins for all kinds of good reasons what we found out was we were coming back year after year after year to the same properties we developed a database that tracked every action we did with regards to prairie dog removal trapping any poisoning um back filling holes everything the hours it took the dollars we associated with it we had to buy property we could sort it all kinds of ways and we just saw that we were coming back

[122:01] year after year after year to the same properties because we could not get them cleared so long story short we we discovered that and there's good reasons for that going through the development of the of the planning process for the for the policy um that was not long after the plagues of the the plague of the 90s where product populations were decimated not only in the county all over eastern colorado and frankly we we came out of our planning process he processed just being amazed that we would have the ability to do lethal control at all we didn't want to blow that so we didn't want to go too fast too quickly and and start a lot of mistrust we wanted to be careful in retrospect i think we were careful to a fault i can give you some numbers and this

[123:00] this kind of tells the story so here's just a number of properties um and this is from our the database where we track information but one property lagerman reservoir up by the lagerman reservoir we trapped for 12 years and in that time we trapped a little over 1500 prairie dogs by that time we were also using in the beginning when we when we started we we had fostox and it was the last resort we also had carbon monoxide cartridges and those were for areas where it just didn't make sense to to trap small numbers of holes that type of thing so we we've used cartridges all along as well but over this 12 year period on the loggerman property

[124:01] 1500 prairie dogs were trapped 6 100 spin on cartridges 9 800 boroughs treated um 1260 staff hours we spent 68 thousand dollars roughly um the imo property which we co-owned with city over 12-year period very similar number seventeen hundred prairie dogs trapped twelve thousand dollar spin on cartridges fifteen thousand boroughs treated fifteen hundred staff outer hours and um the worst thing was it was exposing many thousands more prairie dogs to lethal control than if we had the ability to just go in in one year and remove all the prairie dogs and it was not until we started putting this information together and really analyzing that we knew that was happening and frankly

[125:00] it's the reason we put this database together but the extent to which that was happening was was appalling so we have determined we eliminate the thresholds we had for trapping there's a couple things that have happened over time um we've realized we realized for ourselves that live trapping was not very humane when you see a prairie dog in a live trap it is not it's extremely stressful for the prairie dog and even though we held them for as small amount of time as we as we could before we euthanized them it's it's just not humane um a lot of folks in the public realize that as well the onset of or the out when the perk machine came along which is basically compressed carbon monoxide

[126:01] it is much more in the in our view and in the public's view it is a much more acceptable means of lethal control if you've got to do lethal control um it's much more acceptable than foss talks we got rid of fox fostox poison baits much more acceptable so we started implementing using the carbon monoxide machines rather than trapping we still trap and there's places where it's very productive but trapping is very productive in the beginning and as time goes on it becomes less and less effective less and less efficient especially if you're trapping the same property uh in subsequent years and there's they learn they roll the traps over to get the bait they're very smart and they would avoid the traps so we still use live trapping in certain instances where it's it's

[127:01] very productive and we still we're the main source of providing prairie dogs to the ferret recovery program and for birds of prey can you just briefly describe those very productive what what a very productive area looks like i mean a very productive area you you're trapping i'm talking about productive in terms of traveling that's right yeah it's it's it hasn't been trapped before okay yeah the prairie dogs haven't learned about that could you talk a little bit about a different strategy you're considering in terms of defining the areas you're going to try to control in a year yeah we you know it's it's very critical that um through experience we discovered that you have to treat it pretty much as a battlefront a property is a battlefront you have to have behind you a place where there's no where there are no prey dogs and you have to go forward

[128:00] in and just every property is different depending on the geographic features irrigation ditches lakes ponds and basically we don't want to have to go back and start over again so we start from one end and clear the property and continue if bread dogs come back we're we're pretty good at coming back and and keeping them from establishing again leveling the boroughs is critical um we have properties right now that have been cleared this year and we have already uh the tenant has been out we have leveled the burrows we're going to be planting grass it's going to get irrigated again so we we don't want to start that that cycle over again that is working where we're doing it and there's a complex of properties up around the imo property about

[129:01] i think it's about 1500 acres and we think next year we're going to have it in 2020 that we're going to have it entirely cleared because we've used this strategy of of basically treating it as a battlefront and moving forward and not not jumping around can i problem with that is that other properties don't get you have to let other properties go and the populations are increasing um so it's clear that some shovel work is required regardless of the methodology can you talk about why you chose the perk machines versus cartridges the material we've been presented suggests the cost could be 4x higher for the machines tell me about that that's not our experience cartridges

[130:02] are are effective early on as well but again pre-dog behavior that we see is they learn to avoid the cartridges they all i can think is that they backfill the hole they learn that when that smoke starts they learn how to backfill the hole because we see it happen the first several times you come into a colony and use the cartridges it's very effective and then the effectiveness tapers off um part of that i think is their learned behavior that's my opinion and and some of our staff that are out on the ground all the time doing this the other thing is that with dry soil conditions and certain soil types the pore space in the soil simply absorbs the gas and you just can't get enough fat for whatever reasons though we observe effectiveness of the cartridges goes down and to depend entirely on

[131:00] cartridges we've never been able to to clear a property so we find the effectiveness the efficiency with the perk machines to be much much higher it's slow have you ever experienced any community conflict related to the presence of the machines their their visual presence nothing significant no and just to clarify vocabulary you're saying uh when you use perk machines it's carbon monoxide when you use cartridges it's carbon dioxide no it's all carbon monoxide all even with the cartridges yes the card it's smoke it's a smoke bomb there was some confusion in the community on that i'm glad you put it yeah and that's that's a common misconception that we've been dealing with for years now we have tried carbon dioxide we've been experimenting with carbon dioxide it is um even more acceptable in terms of uh

[132:01] humaneness according to the american veterinary association the problem with that is we have not been the volumes necessary we haven't been able to find a way to practical you know logistically to get the volumes of carbon dioxide into the field in in it would require very large tanks on trucks it just doesn't seem to us to be plausible we haven't given up on it but rob can you talk real quickly about the staffing requirements uh from your perspective on both relocation and the use of the perk machine and at the meeting uh in january you mentioned that the county was working with less ease to enable the lessees to also lethally control can you just talk real briefly about how that's working and

[133:00] what your sense of that is up until 2019 we had a a seasonal staff that we hired of of three individuals basically for um about six months of the year led by a person who's full-time their three-quarter time permanent and amy schwartz has been doing that for us for 18 years she's been working for us so she leads a seasonal crew at the beginning at the end of 2018 we could see the need that we just spinning our wheels and so we changed our strategy we also went to the commissioners and described what was going on um that we we were just we were making gains but not very fast and we still we wanted to get away from the the cycle of of of repeat lethal control on the same property

[134:00] last year 2019 the commissioners basically told us to go ahead and double our labor they said what are the alternatives and we offered a number of alternatives including treating during the moratorium they chose one of the alternatives was we we just need more hours of of lethal control and they said well let's go with doubling our labor so they gave they didn't give it to us but they instructed us to put more labor resources toward least control so essentially we doubled the hours that we put toward lethal control and that includes trapping that includes the co2 machine it or the the carbon monoxide machine the carbon monoxide cartridges they also do mapping so it's it's everything they put up a little fence but we doubled

[135:02] the resources and we about we did double the removal and that's i'm just going to jump in rob i think so much i just also want to be mindful of our time we're about 15 minutes into kind of our next section of that we had about 25 minutes scheduled for about the assumptions associated with this i don't want to if the board still wants to move forward i just want to make sure that if we can also work with rob if there's questions that we want to jot down get those back as part of the packet in march as well thank you i want to hear a little bit more about um i didn't get to the tenant control yeah that's what i want to get to where we're at we have we have 25 000 000 acres of land under agricultural leave 17 000 acres of that cropland we have between four and six percent it's a moving target that is uh we have prairie dog colonies on so

[136:02] we we want to see that we're seeing at the rate we're going now it's going to take us six to seven years to have removal done completely because our goal is it just becomes a maintenance issue to remove prey dogs and we're not subjecting large numbers of prairie dogs to lethal control and that money can go toward something better we need more hours and one of the things we're doing is i mean with the spending the money that we've been given we've gotten very efficient we think in in what we do and how we do it um one of the ways that we increase the hours of lethal control is is basically through the tenants so essentially we have a training we have a permitting process which involves training and we permit prayer or permit the tenants to treat prairie dogs under our

[137:01] direction our methods the place i mean it's pretty tightly controlled does that include both parking cartridges yes it does yes it does we have five machines um at any one time one of them might be down for repairs but we make those machines available usually on the weekends to the tenants but there's exceptions to that um and what does your oversight consist of we we tell them we work with them and we write it down in black and white how they do it when they do it they have to report back to us you know how many burrows they treated that's that's a condition we indicate on a map where it's okay to treat where it's not it's pretty pretty tightly controlled the other the one issue that is important is when we first made the perk

[138:02] machines available to the tenants we had everybody was volunteering to do it and we saw pretty quickly that they realized hey this is expensive they were paying folks to do the treatment and it was getting to be significant costs thousands of dollars so now we are taking part of our budget our operating budget and we're paying the tenants they've got to have some skin in the game we're not paying entirely but for the most part they're paying 20 bucks an hour and we're paying 15 for them to pay their employees it's expensive and the people that can do this are strictly the lessees your lessees the lessees or their employees as long as they've been trained by us as long as they've undergone the training so it can be people other than the lessees that the tenant could bring

[139:02] they're hiring other people with them if they were present under their direction they could yes family members hired people neighbors it could be we haven't seen that okay it's not her preference how many instances have you seen tenants reporting back burrowing owls and cancelling treatments um our tenants uh our prairie dog crew has reported many of the most of the burrowing owl sightings on our irrigated or on our agricultural lands they're uh they're pretty well trained and amy has been around a long time she she has discovered boring owlness many times yeah and when we discover a broad nest on it on

[140:00] on cropland we we stop we have a whole process for dealing with that okay i'd like to suggest if there are other questions for for rob or for the county that uh maybe we can get those from the board members and then uh get with rob and um and get those responses uh as part of the packet in for march sure and thank you so much [Laughter] so a couple of things uh as we move into the study session questions i wanted to make sure that people who may be watching or people in the audience are aware that there are handouts that include not only the agenda but also include information associated from the packet materials with the particular questions that will be going over it just might be an easier way to kind of follow what we're doing here the information will also be up on the screen if you like but

[141:01] uh there are handouts over on the table and you're certainly welcome to use those if we run out i just ask that people share so that um given the boarding council's direction to expedite the process um we are uh about a month between now and our next meeting where we'll be coming with final recommendations and uh it was the um i think the board and the process group's recommendation that at this study session we have an opportunity um to start interacting around some of the intermediate work products associated with uh what you'll be seeing in march and get uh have an opportunity for dialogue about those and so we have a set of assumptions some potential prioritization factors a couple of packages that you've heard some members of the community reflect on spending and staffing levels and then also we want to make sure that if there's other information that the board is expecting to see that we know what that is so that when we come in march

[142:00] that we're prepared to do that um so this is uh kind of the the opportunity we've got for that the first part of that are the key assumptions if you if you're looking at your packet you'll find these in agenda item three page nine and these are are the areas where um the staff has kind of the highest level assumptions about what we're doing and what we're some of the things that we're trying to achieve through this project you'll also note that there are assumptions associated with estimating costs and putting together the packages so those are kind of finer scale assumptions so these are 13 assumptions that that staff put together want to make sure that these make sense and we're interested in seeing if the board can affirm these or if there are others they'd like us to consider or if there's some on this list they'd like to see changed or even potentially removed so we can go around

[143:02] it might be useful to know if they're if i show hands if they're board members who have something to say um about these assumptions okay so dave and kurt and tom and uh so maybe it would be useful just to start with um with one person and and see which ones those are and maybe they'll address some of the other person's concerns as we go along um dave do i start and just tell us which ones tom should have tomorrow sorry the first is that the public should be this is the keep the public informed make sure this is a transparent process particularly on the back end to make sure we have good reporting on what we've done where we've done it um so both sort of a transparency keep the public well informed about this assumption the second um

[144:01] relates to making sure that the receiving sites i think everything we have here at least appears to be the sending sites but just reaffirm what i think is probably obvious that we need to make sure that we are being sensitive to the ecological health of the receiving sites maybe that's built a little bit into i but i would specifically call out that you know any relocations needs to be done with an eye towards the health of the receiving site and the third is to uh has to do with the prairie dog working group to make sure that we are you know not entering into any conflict with the prairie dog working group to sort of affirm and support the the activities that they are engaged in or if there is some conflict to make sure we've specifically kind of called that out and been thoughtful about why we're proposing something different but absent that to assume that you know we want that process and you know to continue forward

[145:01] so if i could if i could piggyback on that real quickly i have told people that actually the prairie dog working group recommendations that we reviewed and approved so those kind of priority one recommendations that were going to be integrated in the 2020 work plan were actually the foundation of the management plan for prairie dogs and then these subsequent or additional potential package options were based on on that so the uh the priorities that we agree you know agreed on um were would be in place and then these packages would be you know um added to those efforts and so i think it would be worth providing a little clarity that that's the expectation and so the way i did that is i said well the

[146:00] status quo uh may be perceived as the foundation and then you know if we want to do additional uh efforts then the package options uh come into play that i think i think that's exactly accurate um and um you know hiring tory was was in an effort to have the capacity to move those forward this year um so that's certainly our intention now as you said the status quo has funding and staffing to move forward with it as you'll see as we move through the packages there are some potential impacts to that as we increase the scope um of the potential packages just because resources are not infinite right so those potential increases then would be for staff in board review as far as additional funding and staffing requirements yes okay

[147:00] are you did you have anything else done i should i have a couple david are you done [Laughter] well i and again this is springboarding off of kind of where tom was going um i was a little perplexed in the in the board memo i've written down you there's associated species i i'm just a little that we be a little more specific so we we had you know wrapped you know some some kind of uh identification of what those would be so there would be kind of a spectrum there there may be mammals there may be birds there may be you know insects there may you know so that we would give an example some examples of what those might be so that there's more clarity on what that is and then in addition to that on the

[148:00] restoration um i think it's worth putting in um you know that some of these areas may be the effort made to restore to native grasslands others to you know agricultural production which would be hayfields or cropland or whatever it is so i think any additional specific clarity that you could bring to the assumptions would be helpful so with regards to the associated species we do have in the grassland plan for example management indicator species associated with several of the prairie dog and associates which is none of that conservation targets um uh management objectives so that might be a place that we would go for those that'd be great i just think mark this is kind of the the context for this is kind of public counsel and so we probably ought to include some of that information because

[149:02] um there there will be people who haven't read the grassland plan or or maybe not so familiar with exactly what's being referred to yeah and i think we can make sure that that's included in all future material um there definitely is a list of associated species and sensitive associated species and it doesn't have to be exhausted but i think there should be kind of examples absolutely thanks i've got a couple suggestions for additions and the first one could actually be an extension of b b says quite appropriately we want to be efficient uh so that we're removing or applying lethal control to as few prairie dogs as possible over the long term i think an ancillary goal there is that we want to reduce over the long term the out migration of prairie dogs and resulting lethal control by osmp neighbors

[150:09] the other goal that i would add here and i don't know where you would want to do it but i'll just read what i've got i i would say it is a goal to ensure that osmp's continued efforts to conserve black-tailed prairie dog species and suitable habitat are not diminished by control of prairie dog on irrigated lands that's just something we need to keep an eye on it's similar to making sure we're not affecting the associated species that you talked about and i guess one you know a specific example that would be that um if we need to keep repopulating the southern grasslands then we would maintain some amount of trapping and relocation going on all the

[151:02] time probably in order to make sure we'd met that goal i don't know any other assumption related changes editions recommended deletions yeah i'm looking at item k work with existing staff if possible and also i want to tie it to your point tom related to transparency i want to express to my co-trustees that i think given the emotional and spiritual import of these types of decisions that it is important for the community as a whole to bear these responsibilities and the involvement of lessies is an important part of such an undertaking if we do authorize it um i think it relates to kay i think it's wonderful to exist to work with existing staff if possible certainly but i almost feel more importantly an element of uh

[152:01] making uh an effort to work with our lessee community who knows the land upon which uh we'll be acting most intimately related to your point on transparency i also feel somewhat strongly that it is our responsibility as some of the leaders in this conversation to take responsibility for this public process that we're engaged in i do think that if we bring community members into the process we should also be respectful of the level of paperwork and disclosure and public recording that is going on related to individual parcels i don't feel that we want this to become a tomato throwing opportunity on the internet in public records and that it is up to us sort of in this public process to take some of that weight so hal if if there is a way that we

[153:00] could address that through changing the assumptions i just might ask for something a little bit more specific how about work with existing staff and the lessee community okay we got that right okay great it was the second piece about the the board's response it was just related to the topic of transparency i know there's a lot to discuss there but great mark i have one other i guess suggestion in c uh so if we choose to remove prairie dogs they that is effective efficient and humane you know i we've had some comments about uh that notion should be incorporated in the purpose statement um and so i think that um if we can kind of weave that into what we're saying because you know i think the comments that you know staffing and you know some of the more bureaucratic uh elements of the purpose

[154:00] are are from the departmental perspective but in fact from the community perspective this is i think really important um it's the suggestion that this be elevated out of uh well i think we keep it in the assumptions but it's uh you know kind of also in the purpose statement okay um so that there's that that continuity or thread between you know that people can see you know purposefully this is what we're doing and then assumptions are that that's what we're going to do at this point i don't think we have a purpose statement but we can certainly work together in that case i suggest we should have one we have yeah we have the the council motion which we you know we can we can append this to as as part of the feedback that we got if that's what the board liked i'm happy however you kind of think it's appropriate right and i want to go back and raise my hand and ask about something that i think is included in the transparency but i want

[155:01] to make sure it is overtly and that is according to the prairie dog working group recommendations we have an annual meeting to report what's going on and i think it's really important that what we're doing in this project be part of that annual reporting to the public about what we're doing as both as part of the transparency as part of the evaluation of what we're doing and and it should include in my mind not just the treatment area that we're talking about tonight but the receiving sites and what's going on in the southern grasslands as well as part of that reporting back and giving everybody a view of what you all learn when you massage the data in your regular work life but to make that overtly public great so it's an annual report on prairie dog conservation and management broadcasting the whole thing

[156:01] yeah whole thing at large yeah and i think that was fairly consistent with what staff did this year as a part of october right 23rd meeting yeah as long as we're all correct is agreeing to that yeah we can include that right well um can we move on from assumptions to the next thing and just uh just so folks know that what was on the screen here um we're summary we couldn't fit it all on one screen and and on page short of the summary where the verbatim assumptions that appear in the materials from the board and they're the same as what's in the packet right exactly the same yet what's in the packet the um the staff recommendation that that you'll see in march is is going to be strongly shaped by the factors that are most important for prioritization as you can imagine so consequently we're interested in hearing from the board members about which factors should be most emphasized as we develop a set of on-the-ground actions

[157:01] staff will use this information to inform how actions can be best implemented and also work to ensure that actions address more than one of these prioritization factors so in addition to wanting to know which of these are most important to the board we will also be looking uh for strategies or on-the-ground actions that address as many of these prioritization factors as possible uh so that's those are both ways that we hope to achieve you know high leverage or strategic action on the ground um so what we're looking for here again kind of similarly is uh whether these you know are the right prioritization factors and get an idea about which of these or others the board would like to see staff emphasize uh to inform our implementation and maybe you should clarify whether the prioritization factors themselves are prioritized or is it just an unknown yeah we probably should have lettered them or

[158:00] given them stars instead but no they are not currently i would just add that um you know part of the purpose of really wanting to discuss this with you is that when we do look at implementation and what will actually happen on the ground in some cases we can hit multiple ones of these on the same property in other cases one prioritization factor would lead us to do the removal in a different place than a different and you know i think the county found that with the most lessees versus the area that you can actually keep them out type of a trade-off and so i think that there are you know those types of trade-offs between all of these that in some cases we can we can meet multiple priorities but in some cases they would lead us to different action plans is it would it be fair to say that the meta factor is effectiveness because you can't achieve any of these other goals if you're ineffective if you're having to do it over and over again and so

[159:02] i would just share that for comment by the board i think we based on the experience of the county and everything else we know seems to me the first goal has to be when we have a plan we want to make sure that we can effectively accomplish the plan and that we won't be doing it over and over and over that that well i would just move it to the you know to almost be a meta factor that uh the first thing you have to evaluate when you're putting together a plan is are we able with the resources we have and everything else we know to use our resources effectively and efficiently there because it may be the highest area of neighbor conflict but if it's an area that we can only clear and re-clear and re-clear you know there's there's no point so i'm just suggesting that the initial screen has to be on our

[160:02] ability to be effective and then beyond that you can prioritize areas or groups of areas based on some of these other factors and again that's just my view of the problem and i'd like to ask a question that's based on several of the comments in public testimony plus what what i heard rob saying and that is the concept of going from an area with no prairie dogs or very few prairie dogs on into an area with high density occupancy and i'm wondering if you agree with that concept or not well i think to the degree that you don't have prairie dogs coming at you from all sides where you're removing them that's certainly helpful so that notion that behind you you don't have prairie dogs re-invading certainly makes a lot of sense to me i think on our

[161:01] landscape that notion will make sense in some places and not in others some we have contiguous areas where you could be doing something like that others it's individual colonies and the the area that they are likely to move back in from is not open space and so i think in those that notion we'll have some limitations and that idea came clear through some of the public comments and some of the things you heard today initially i think we were looking at kind of a simplistic and linear remove exclude restore model or approach there may be times when exclusion is accompanies or you know maybe a different kind of exclusion accompanies or has to precede removal because as heather said you can't be removing if there's just a constant inflow and there's there's nothing stemming there and i think as mark said in all of our packages those do include installing barriers after the removal there may be some situations in which

[162:01] that's not necessary or it needs to be done before or it may need to be done before certainly with our removals this past year one of the properties we were able to remove all of the prairie dogs the private landowners to the east don't have an interest in doing control on their property and so that's one of those situations where a more significant barrier will be necessary long term so that will be sort of the metal barrier option versus the less substantial barrier so i suspect there are probably other areas where that will also be the case thank you and and i think we'll run in our system might be a little more bounded than the counties so to speak we have more neighbors i think but also as we push back towards some of our protected areas we'll have to be strategic about barriering in those locations um a couple thoughts one was uh priority number six properties where prairie dogs have recently colonized or expanded to me is just an example of a broader

[163:02] concept which is really where the properties where for this probably the smallest number of prairie dogs whether we're moving them or killing them we can get the greatest benefit um i think it was you know to the point that eric skoken was sort of making that there may be a property which has a relatively small current occupation and the thought being g you might get that back down to zero at relatively low cost star cells and to the prairie dogs that certainly makes sense to me as a priority but it's part of kind of a broader point that where you can get the greatest benefit for the smallest impact to the prairie dog that that's the priority of which number six is probably an example but maybe not an exhaustive example so i think what you're saying is the metric isn't just how many dogs you remove but how much area you prevent from occupation and that may be stopping a

[164:00] small occupation early yes but the whole thing depends on the whole map right yeah i i think uh the point though you're getting at tom is sort of maybe the difference between an overhaul and sort of maintenance and i think these smaller areas where they're going to pop up that's a maintenance kind of as rob was alluding to it's an ongoing maintenance need that we're going to have forever potentially with uh with in-migration coming from areas that we have no control over for example um but it's the question on this priority is whether that should be something that we focus on is is on the is some component of maintenance or do we go attack the major areas that are affecting our tenants with the largest problems and that sort of thing first and that's sort of what we were trying to hoping to get a read on a bit on that one

[165:01] this is a fairly standard issue even with weeds it the spot fire versus the blazing inferno but which where do you invest your effort so what's the answer to that so before we go into the proverbial weeds in that regard um on on this question um i i have a couple of thoughts i mark i think there's there's remains confusion out in the public that we're talking about a thousand acres and three thousand prairie dogs um kind of right off the bat and i i think what we want thirty thousand well then the thousand acres and thirty thousand prairie dogs no no yes oh yes actually yes thank you sorry okay so i think we ought to still make some effort to be clear on what it

[166:02] is we're talking about so in that regard i think potential factors for prioritizing removals probably shouldn't say on irrigated agricultural lands because that is the focus and i'm not sure and we heard some comments this evening that i think people really aren't uh understanding that completely and so i think let it take great pains to do that and so in that regard and i may be confused on this as well in in table one in our our board memo um on page four it says uh acres of irrigable land no longer leased and occupied by prairie dogs acres in the project area are 254 right so the question was well is is that going to be the target

[167:00] for removal and i may have leapt prematurely to the affirmative and part of that was because in uh proposed package e it it says up to 242 acres and so in my mind it's like well you know maybe we're targeting you know those areas like the bennett property for instance that you know have kind of the most resource degradation as the highest priority and so i think we ought to take some pains and probably the discussion in the next few minutes will help do that as far as okay what are the priorities because what i heard is well we thought cushman and lover were were the priorities and and so i i said well yeah those are priorities um so i think

[168:01] we got to be clear on exactly what we're talking about and i think that's exactly what we're hoping to get from you because i think that there are a number of those priorities all of which have merits right and certainly one priority factor which i don't think that we had up there would be looking at those acres that aren't currently leased and starting there so that would be another way that you could because we made some efforts on bennett you know to kind of do a number of you know management actions you know evaluate the effectiveness in that so i guess i made the quantum leap that some of those areas would probably be priorities simply because of the resource degraded resource situation okay so based on your quantum leap do we want to add that as a priority um prioritization factor is to prioritize those properties that right now are not under lease that would get back under leaseholds because that i don't think is captured is that it's not

[169:00] no and and i think as long as you're saying not just that you made that quantum leap but that it seemed like a good quantum leap then we should go ahead and add that so i guess well i guess we'll see if anyone thinks that my question would be i mean to argue the other side yes it's good to get ag lands that are no longer being farmed or ranched back into production but we've got a left seed that's trying to work existing lands and to me that would argue the other direction right so but i don't know well so kirk would i would i was going to go with that if we add that on then i was going to demonstrate why it's really important that you guys try to help us determine of all these what is higher priority because those two approaches would land out a whole a different strategy yeah i guess i would come out where kurt came out that is other things equal i would rather if we can save a currently operated land from sliding out of uh agricultural use that other things equal as a higher priority than

[170:00] one that's slid out now i don't mean to say that restoring bennett is not important but if we're just prioritizing i think i'd come out in the same place so if it's important should it be important enough to prioritize and then it could be down below or not even put it on the prioritized list we have grassland plan goals that suggest that all irrigated lands should be leased so that's that's their supporting not taking it completely and we have marcus out there trying to re-vegetate it and restore the soils i mean precisely that was important enough that we made an effort and invested money to do that and so what i'm seeing is that yeah there's probably got to be a mix that you know there's there's maybe some properties that you know need to get some attention because they aren't in production or aren't being irrigated and and then yes there are other properties that i agree that you

[171:00] know kind of are currently producing but um are kind of declining in production capability and that brings reality to me to the acreage numbers on pages 11 and 12. um because if bennett is 240 acres is that correct is that i don't i think it's a 60-ish i think it's several 60 okay or 70. okay somewhere in there i was hoping to i thought this was a beautiful slide and very well done but as i do hear the conversation i do think it is worth mentioning um that the revenue uh generating potential of an opportunity probably should be considered by this department yep the level of restoration effort is going to be important i think you know as you're suggesting we did go through some restoration

[172:00] efforts in the last plague event like in 0 5 or 6 where we were able to take areas that were recently occupied and get them back into production very quickly yep places like oasis plagued out and we tried to take action by removing you know killing removing burrows but they reoccupied so quickly that we didn't have opportunity to get it restored so it will be we will i'm sure look at some kind of condition assessment to to inform that so not to make it more difficult but just within those least acres we also have a couple of different approaches that could be taken there it would be focusing on those most heavily impacted leaseholds or trying to have the benefit have an impact on the most lessees so just something to consider there or doing for any one of those lessees that has large acreages to remediate or

[173:01] get rid of the move the prairie dogs from an part of the acreage that was still productive but being invaded so that that less he would have that land to use i mean there's just and the other variable that i keep coming back to is contiguously con contiguous land so you have to look at what's next door right and and to to build off that i know we keep adding priorities so i would de-prioritize number two in the following sense that i think the mere head count of how many tenants it affects i don't want to do something superficial because we can do it for a lot of tenants that to me is that kind of head counting operation is not what we're driving towards and certainly if you had a piece of property that's we said well we're not gonna we don't think this is a

[174:01] good candidate but if it got subdivided so that we now had two tenants that wouldn't to me change the priority just because you now had you know two different constituents i'd be much more interested in the property and the context of the property um the contiguity that karen was talking about in the sort of happenstance of whether you've got how many different tenants are working that like that may i ask is is the point of this that when you come back in march you will have a map that shows your approach to how to proceed so their level of specimens yeah so and and there are a few reasons for that i mean one thing that's always very challenging with this is that prairie dog populations change very very quickly and so even the mapping information that we're using now that was collected in september of 2019 is out of date and will be even more so next month after pups are born so but then you have to

[175:00] apply for permits that are going to take place that's right that's right and certainly our relocations we are starting to look at where we might be doing those this year but we look the year of that so looking out at a several year plan it's very difficult to get as specific as which property because those conditions just change so much so once we get some overall guidance and just like we did i believe this fall we came to you and said here's what our plans are for 2019 2020 and we that's where we were able to lay out specific areas in an annual sort of look and so the the the ask today is so that we can include these prioritization factors maybe the thing to do would be to look for a top three and then the others you know are somewhat equal and one of the things that i'm starting to hear is that um the keeping things in agricultural production and revenue generation both um they go hand in hand because if something's in production there's there's some level of revenue generation so that that that one seems to be um kind of bubbling bubbling up from a

[176:01] number of the board members um and then just for reference those are numbers what i think they're both actually uh maybe new um yeah and then yeah so then the the effectiveness writ large and probably closest to number three but maybe expanded beyond that is sort of the top level i think we want to make sure what we do is going to work we want to make sure it's going to work for existing agricultural operations that are generating lease revenue yeah so i think that's uh i think that will be a lot actually i think if you're trying to do too many things you end up with scattered efforts and efforts that aren't as effective as others i think maybe just the one then to clarify is that since we heard so much about neighbor conflicts that that would not

[177:01] be one of our highest priorities if we can get the mutual benefit like andy described in in his table we would certainly do that but it wouldn't we wouldn't seek that out just to kind of confirm that yeah i think where it's an ancillary benefit right um that would you know be certainly appropriate and i think we also heard that from a lot of the neighbors is that they're just expecting us that there's an expectation if we take some action it will have some cascading benefits to others i think that so so mark i have a another question or suggestion um all of the listed um prioritizing factors all are properties it it strikes me that we ought to have some kind of system-wide you know element it may be the contiguity component that karen's talking about but but a more landscape level you know kind of

[178:01] notion woven into these these priorities so that it's not entirely you know production revenue uh related but there's also a landscape element to consider as far as determining where in fact some of our efforts might be isn't the main landscape factor primarily to avoid soil degradation i mean because we are working in a specific i mean otherwise i'd like to be educated about what the landscape level import is well i i think yeah soil erosion is certainly one of the factors but for me it's looking it's looking at i guess prairie dog colonies so there's kind of a more of a biological element to it rather than simply a property component you know many of these colonies have been around for a while and they they've

[179:01] kind of especially in the southern part have you know kind of acted or interacted you know at least somewhat appropriately and i think if we weave in you know some kind of uh ecological element to the consideration that's important um you know and so in a fragmented landscape where there are possibilities you know to have more of a contiguous or more of a kind of ecosystem uh notion that we ought to we ought to be considering that and not diminishing the the lessee you know economic impacts but also making sure that we consider um some of the uh ecosystem elements as well you wouldn't want to treat part of a large prairie dog town and not the prairie dog town right that goes that away for right and i think i think maybe one two

[180:01] of the things that came to my mind as you were saying that is rather than necessarily even use the word properties we might talk more generally about lands or colony complexes if we're trying to focus in on the prairie dogs but both from the standpoint of the ag landscape so that we have we do have there are agro ecosystems around these irrigated fields they're not they're not devoid of any values you know there are prairie dog um ecosystems if we remove the prairie dogs but to to try to create that fuel mosaic of these agro ecosystems and then the surrounding other ecosystems that'd be great in the northern grasses that's sort of what you're talking about i think we can come up with some language uh like that well it's exactly nine o'clock which would put us uh very close uh to being um on on schedule to start talking about the action packages themselves if we're ready if we're ready to move on uh from prioritization criteria and mark could you give us just a quick little intro there um

[181:03] council wanted an expedited expedited approach whatever that meant uh and so some of our discussions have been around near-term and long-term and are we proceeding with that thought in mind i mean again um that's right um i think there was urgency for the process for the process an extradited process right i'm sorry right and so i'll just to give an example and this may be completely naive and unworkable but one thought was well what can we do under all existing rules and regulations because we can implement it tomorrow and then the next question is well what is going to take some amount of time but not a year and a half and i'm just wondering what your view of the sort of implementation landscape is as you guys have struggled with this that's a great segue into actually the first element of our implementation packages because in developing the preliminary

[182:00] implementation packages um if you if you remember in the january 6 packet material um it kind of concluded with the idea that there would be some uh implementation packages based upon the percent removal in these quartiles 25 50 75 100 removal i think as staff um went forward uh to kind of come with on the ground options they they saw that taking the status quo and moving in these increments wasn't particularly going to be the best way to communicate or actually figure out how to work on the landscape it didn't particularly provide for an annualized approach it kind of just looked at one big honk how do you get rid of um how do you remove all of the prairie dogs from an area or 50 or 75 so um that that led to um a kind of different approach uh that that you see um uh on

[183:01] in the attack in the handout um where we have scenario scenarios a through or a through e as as well as the status quo so they're the same as in the packet right yeah they're the same as in in the packet materials just a little bit different though than what was initially seen as part of the um scene as part of the january sixth uh general approach so part of that though is doing exactly kind of what or approaching the question that kurt i think that you just phrased is that we recognize that there might be some common elements uh or need to be some common elements in order to support um these these scenarios or these packages and those are what show up here is the common elements i and and correct me here heather and jump in andy too if if we have you know what we could do with the exist without um these common elements say one and two uh

[184:01] for example you know we haven't approached it that way at this point you said one and two i'm sorry i'm sorry on these uh implementation uh packages the common elements so that would be in the handout uh on page three three and then in the packet on page 11. so this is kind of the first part of talking about the implementation packages um there are these common elements that we want to make sure and we're being transparent about these are our elements that uh apply in all scenarios except for status quo except for the status quo and i think that let's just conclude then that you guys have thought about this a lot and your conclusion was it's so limited what we could do today even with more money that we really need to start looking at structural changes is that yeah yeah and that was part of the direction well it yeah i know but we're always worried about time and how long

[185:00] things take although certainly the spectrum of those changes varies okay and so you know what it would take to to accomplish one and two here you know val can speak more to but as you move down in the table you are more likely to pick up other elements that would need to be changed as well to allow for that and because we provided five options and there are however many you want to be between those options that we could look at we don't really have a full evaluation of what those changes would be because until we know exactly what they are it's currently kind of too broad of a spectrum of options to really nail down what those changes would be but once we know where we're focusing then we can really nail down and for march have information on exactly what we think it's going to take to accomplish that i i asked a few really specific legal questions and was well convinced that there's a variety of strategies they can use

[186:00] um i want to throw a small monkey wrench here i think we're get you know once you have a structure we're back to thinking about these efficiencies and i've just heard a number of things and read a number of things in the packet i don't believe we're accurate on these financial estimates and i think we need to take a closer look for the next meeting because the county just sort of sort of testified in the packet we printed a 4x difference between monoxide cartridges versus perc you're talking about an asset that's on your balance sheet that has depreciation maintenance costs so i feel like there's more important drilling down there that needs to be done you may very well be right and we can take a look at that there is one really key assumption though that's very important to these which is we are looking at using contractors to do this which is a fundamentally different model than what the county does we don't have the equipment or the

[187:00] expertise on staff currently to do that work in-house and so the differences between hiring a contractor to do that and what the county does with staff internally is very different can we dig into that a little bit is is the philosophical underpinning there that it is more expedited to use a contractor because yes at least initially initially so heather can we uh you know that what hal saying concerns me a little can we uh when we present this to the board and the council it strikes me that we might want to have a wayne of you know what those benefits or costs are with those two approaches because i think you know the county probably faced the same dilemma that we're facing they didn't have equipment and they didn't have staff and and they didn't have any of that stuff

[188:01] initially and so the decision was made okay that's how we're going to do it so it strikes me that that would be a worthy conversation to say okay you know here's one approach that you know that we know works and here's another approach that we know works and so there's an ability to weigh what those costs and benefits are and i think in the past we've gone both ways not just with prairie dogs but with other things that we've innovated around when we first did visual barriers we figured out how to do them ourselves by trial and error and then we worked with a fencing contractor who kind of got an idea of what our experience was and then learned how to do that and then took that as part of a business model and took it broader um i think that we've also got the ability to start here where there are known contractors who who do this if we want to see how it works with them

[189:00] and just that that fundamental prioritization factor that you're talking about kurt is it an effective tool for us and our conditions would they for any reason be different than what the county experience is because of soil type or landscape type or or who knows what else get that experience and then we could feather in the development and training of our staff capacity over time and the infrastructure investment might also have to be phased in overtime that's why i think it's worth being explicit about the time frame that we're looking at here this is not our forever package right i mean are we really looking at well this is what we're going to do for the first two years and it's a separate question about whether we should be in the meantime planning to hire staff all those things yeah you think you're on the exactly at the right track there kurt because some of these packages they are would be a more or less our forever approach right because they might take 40 years if we do it

[190:00] that way yeah the others are much more short-term so we need to get a sense from you are we looking at a super short-term deal or are we looking at a you know eight to 13-year deal or where where do you think we should be in this framework that will allow us to then you know think a little bit more about what the approach looks like um how it phases and what the cost would be so we're looking though john even at at the 500 percent package at a five-year you know more or less a five-year effort and so that a maintenance effort after that right forever yeah right so it's again i think some people are thinking you know all of a sudden the prairie dogs are going to disappear in in a year or so and you know that's not accurate at all it's going to take time no matter kind of what we decide in order to you know accomplish what we're

[191:01] talking about yeah i mean um yeah we heard some of the comments tonight that we need to be more than the 500 percent increase that's a huge lift that is even that one if if if you want us to move in that direction that that is an extremely large amount of work if we're going to meet all the assumptions about being efficient excluding them restoring the land i mean that's just that's just an enormous amount of work and and we were making the assumption that contractors would be available for this but we that that might not be the case we might not be able to get enough contractors to do this in four years you know that these are these are there are some unknowns and they're going to be some unknowns uh and you know we're just going to have to give you the best information that we can in march and i think something to keep in mind as well is in in the table with all of the different tools you know like john said we have up to like 100

[192:00] removal all at once and we have to kind of remember where our starting place is which is status quo and so anything beyond status quo is really a fundamental shift for open space over the last 20 years and so keep that in mind as we're deciding you know how much different we're comfortable with as a community and certainly you know that we've been hearing very varied voices on that from the community and so that's not an easy question to answer one of the concerns that i have in the budget the budget estimates are it looks and i don't know about if this is a revised budget estimate from the the memo but in any event in the memo it looks like there's still a deficit or a disparity in in accomplishing several of the packages where the funding sources have been identified and so in fact my question is okay where is the additional money coming from in

[193:00] order to accomplish those um identified fact increments we have so just just again to be clear just we we do have this as kind of we can jump here now but we have this as kind of a third phase of the the conversation around uh these packages the first one was just to make sure whether these um uh whether the kind of common elements were understood um we weren't like we weren't looking to prioritize them um but we just wanted to make sure that that the role that these play as a fundamental component of going beyond the status quo is understood so can i um on implementation package item three i think there are one i would break this into two there really are two quite different things going on here one is who does the work the second is what is their goal i think i i strongly agree with the goal of 100 removal for the reasons we discussed before that you know you know

[194:00] you want to solve the problem at a particular location not just keep going back year after year after year that goal is the same regardless of who's doing the removing as to the question of the who does it frank i'm relatively agnostic um that is if if it's more efficient to use contractors and often in an early stage as it is or you don't want to make an investment in properties that physical assets that may just sit unused for large portions of the year that's fine if you make the judgment that you know no long term you can do this more efficiently than contractors that's fine but i kind of feel like that's largely a staff call on um what's the most efficient way to proceed that's sometimes at a level that we're not very good judges of of whether to contract it out or do it in-house and there may be some learning that the answer to that may change over time so separate out i i think those are two different things and frankly i'm as they say i'm relatively agnostic as to whether you do it in-house or contract

[195:00] it out you know tom i think generally i agree that i'm a little nervous about us telling you what's possible i think you need to tell us what's possible given the resources and maybe we weigh in on questions of well are we comfortable taking all the money away from the prairie dog working group projects i mean that's more of a policy question and we're getting there oh okay uh so um i guess where i am is you tell me what you can do with certain amounts of resources and maybe we can weigh in on priorities for asking for more money or you know stealing from other programs or something like that and i think that's what in a way that these common elements are these are more us telling you um if you will gently uh and and saying you know is you know they were trying to be transparent that this is the way that the cost estimates and the scenarios or the packages were developed and so we can move on from this piece um kind of the next question we had was

[196:01] wait wait wait just a second hal has a question yeah i i um i just want to reiterate a little bit uh for the public you know as soon as we get to uh package b we are talking about an annual cost that is competitive with the line item in the full year 2020 for the entire trailhead maintenance program so i think it's it's really important people understand the size of the commitment and i'd really think that we owe it to ourselves uh by march to dig deeper into the financial questions here um i do think there is an error in the packet i i think we need to go back talk to the county because it said 40 to 45 dollars i believe it was an acre on cartridges versus 230 on the perk machine that's something we need to know the answer to because it's a 4x difference um it's not a marginal difference so it could well be that that first number is low or the second one's high but i think those are are really important questions

[197:02] rob is still here i'm wondering if he could clarify it all because i'm not sure that i completely understood his thoughts on that i'm just looking at these numbers briefly it's it's quick but i think they're very high based on our experience in in thinking about the sizes of properties and how much effort time um and again we've we have the data that shows costs and hours and for the size of the properties and i think the thing to do with me if our staffs could get together we could go over that especially with with amy the the lead person who's out there every day i think these cops are very high keeping in mind though that you probably have some economies of scale that we may never have and i i do want to point out that i actually have sat down with amy and i do have that information from her so i know kind of per acre what your

[198:00] costs are our costs include removal exclusion which is barriers on each removal area and restoration following removal so that is very important the largest bucket here is barriers post remember not the removal and i'm that's going to say it's on attachment f but no that's just while we're on that topic the table is the calculations are based on the following yeah and so can we talk about that quickly it says um when it says cost estimates do not include additional staff time required and then fte full-time equivalent 2000 hours is that 2000 hours in or out none of the costs include staff time we often do not include the costs associated with current staff that are doing the work so that's not in here and those additional ftes that you see listed at the edge are not in those

[199:02] dollar amounts that would be if those were new staff that would be added to that and the cost of that would vary widely depending on whether those were temporary employees or standard employees and our contractor costs included yes okay but um yes i think that some of those conversations sounds like some of those conversations have already been built in and some of the cost differentials as you know as rob probably knows from experience that those barrier costs are real high and um and can really elevate things in the distribution yeah but i would really benefit from understanding the gas cartridges because i did not get any information from amy on that it was just on trapping and then on perk yeah and if we can start to zero in on one or two packages we can go back and work with additional information if there is any and sharpen our pencils and really show more i think to what you're getting at hell is just like how does that break down a

[200:01] little bit more and and explain it better and also i mean i think um you know one of the interesting things about being a board member you don't have the inside experience and to my particular mind which is financially backgrounded when reading the packet the cartridges look obviously superior so i'm really curious to know in march what and we have truth is on that we have had some experience with cartridges as follow-up following relocations because we do do very limited lethal control after relocations our experience with that has been that it's a repeatedly applied technique in order to be effective so that was our thinking behind not including it as the preferred method most public land agencies have really moved towards perc as their primary in-borough lethal control technique because i think of that much higher effectiveness i say this with all due respect but a lot of municipalities love to buy nice equipment and buy maintenance streams into the future and i just sit here as a

[201:01] community member trying to keep an eye on it and that is one of the reasons we were focused on contracting as opposed to buying assets that was not what the assumption was and if i could just speak to the city's experience with lethal control we used to use gas cartridges and what we found and there's some great papers on there 97 effective they're 90 effective but what we found in practice they were more like 65 percent effective so we went back to the same spot three times and we had not gotten rid of those prairie dogs and when we went to perk we didn't have to return so we moved away from the cartridges just from effectiveness which is hard to read from the financial spreadsheet just purely effectiveness aside from uh costs so the the labor cost is going to be the big element in that as well

[202:03] then you have lots of retreats with the cartridges so they're very useful to a point and then for the same area the efficiency will go down efficiency is high to begin with it goes down and i would say that that's pretty close at 65. percent efficiency but yeah it seems like we have some work to do kind of explaining you know what are how the cost and efficiency relate to each other with the gas cartridges and perk and that's that's great and that's a good thing to be transparent about as possible and you've heard a little bit about some of the thinking on that i'm going to try to before we move on i i have a question that keeps being sidetracked by other questions and it has to do with this question of if we really if our goal is really zero occupancy in transition and removal areas

[203:02] then to what extent do we have prairie dog populations in the northern tier to relocate if there's a lot of plague in the southern area and we need that relocation to repopulate in the southern area and and i'm assuming that that when you do your maps that show which properties you're planning on putting in what categories that that will show up on the maps if that's true i'm fine with going on otherwise that issue based on what we've heard tonight is important a couple of points there first of all we do have prairie dogs occup occupying agricultural transition and removal areas outside of the study area so those populations would still be targets for relocation and not part of the packages that we're talking about here it's it's not nearly

[204:00] the scale that we have within the study area it encompasses the the vast majority of them but there are others the other thing to keep in mind is that not so what we are talking about is removal of all acres on irrigable land within the study area those are not all transition and removal areas there are also irrigable lands within the grassland preserves grassland preserve singular there are a couple of multiple objective areas and there is one prairie dog conservation area that are irrigable lands so as we've defined the scope it is not focused just on transition and removal areas so there would also be those grassland preserve acres if we only focused on transition and removal areas that do have the ability under the grassland plan above 26 occupancy to be removed or at any time in irrigated lands so if those weren't included we would still have those populations as well but

[205:00] certainly outside of the study area there are other conflict areas on our properties that could be sources and as any of these scenarios have a time frame and the and the occurrence of plague is unpredictable it if if it happened that plague came after um the years to 100 removal had elapsed then i think all the things that heather say are absolutely right if it happened before then we would certainly be in in the midst of a time where we were we had other options where we would no longer have to use lethal control we would be able to use relocation but again there'd be costs associated with that but there so there's okay source there are also as we know from experience source populations outside of the open space and mountain park's land system we've worked very hard to create a priority for our own relocations but if we ever got into an extremely dire situation

[206:00] that also would be the potential there's quite often people looking for receiving and in fact mark as you say that if we were getting to a point where we were getting close to that goal of full removal in the study area we likely would have dropped below that threshold of which the board said that our properties should be the priority for relocation and so we would probably be going back to the prairie dog working group prioritization for relocations which would not have osmp property on the top of the list so we would probably be looking at those outside colonies thank you okay well mark i have uh one other question and not wanting you to successfully move this conversation along too rapidly [Laughter] you know process is my product so heather um so this relates to restoration and the restoration cost

[207:00] estimates do we have some success restoration success examples and i'm concerned it's kind of similar to what house talking about as far as the lethal control measures i'm concerned about kind of the restoration estimates as far as success rates and so are we in fact talking about a more prolonged restoration effort than we're actually uh you know budgeting for and i'm going to punt that to andy because that would be that would be his world yes all right uh yeah so the restoration will come come out of the ag stewardship group um we did do some restoration on boulder valley ranch in the johnson properties after the last plague and we were successful in returning some of the acreage to production that

[208:00] the challenge that time is we we did we were not able to clear the property fully so we cleared where they plagued out and restored those areas but there were still seed populations on the property so that will be restoration will be effective if we're strategic about how we do the barrier and do the removal but i think it's fair to say that years to removal does not also mean years to complete restoration right right a significant number of years in some cases before things can be restored especially if we've seen catastrophic losses of soil in that area right you know we have techniques that we're looking at at bringing in a lot of carbon and improving things but you know it's going to depend on the state of the landscape but certainly the day we get removal done and even if we get our barriers up at that point it's there's still going to be a lag for restoration time and so there's going to be a budget

[209:00] there's going to be so can the budget so i think if we can add some clarity on restoration to the budget um so there would be a you know a footnote that that says something you know that the restoration costs are are meant for x and you know but in fact why is you know realistically what we're looking at as far as uh ongoing uh restoration efforts we did try to account for our costs but not necessarily the timeline so in a way if those costs are born over a longer period of time it might attenuate them but you can look more at that to see what's okay great it's fine more complicated i'm sort of on that and this is my last i promise um don't promise approximately 400 000 is currently budgeted for prairie dog management including relocations uh prairie dog working group and other items

[210:02] the way tell me if i'm reading this right funding transferred from prairie dog working group projects at the maximum level was a 130 000 but the right way to think about this is to take the total annual cost estimate add 400 000 and then i know what i'm looking at for system-wide prairie dog elements yeah how does the 400 000 mesh with the numbers in that column so until you get to the point where you have exceeded the available funding the status quo is that 400 000 and that's inherent in all of this so that money will be i mean we will be doing those relocations we will be doing the prairie dog working group items with that 400 000 and so um let's say we chose option b is the total system-wide prairie dog budget 450 or is

[211:02] it 850 it's currently 400 000. uh you give me this if if we took on package b then the total budget of doing relocation plus this new stuff would be an um would be 250 to 350 000. so that is um i'm sorry i was looking at a right yeah so that 350 to 450 is the removal the exclusion the restoration yep and we're still doing the the other so the total is closer to eight correct 8.90 well that depends on whether we would shift funding from like this paradigm working group project line some of that whether we which top trends or or took the funding reallocated from that effort

[212:02] okay where i'm driving is for march um i for me personally and i hope i have your support to just get a more full overview of the the system-wide breakout what that is what this new spending looks like what it all added together is um just because if it is if it is uh 800 plus 4 at 1.2 million we're talking about a big chunk of the reauthorization we just had and and i think if we can focus in so that we have far fewer packages that we're analyzing we can do a much deeper dive on them this was definitely meant to be just a very surface look at it is that mark do you want to take us to the packages sure um hearing no more about the common elements so so as we mentioned we've we've got i think you've read enough in the packet about the idea behind um

[213:00] the programs here so the status quo uh is is described also in the package material that you've got on the last page along with the various so page four of the eight and a half by eleven sheets uh status goes in that shaded box um and you're probably familiar with that from reviewing the packet materials and and then the scenarios kind of vary in in regards to a couple of factors one is the degree of increase in lethal control um and then whether or not um there is any uh relocation at all so it's kind of it's kind of a um if you will a range of of lethal control versus the use of relocation and uh by the time you get to options d and e there is no funding at that point being allocated uh for relocation and those projects are fully uh based on lethal control

[214:01] and then he has kind of the idea of getting a lot done immediately and as john said is a huge lift but the idea being that we could get to a rapid restoration of the agricultural lands uh heather and largely heather um but with input from other folks including county pull together a table four which provides information um kind of taking into consideration uh a number of factors that we thought would be of interest to the board how like the total annual cost estimate the time it would take um for removal and then you know matters of great concern to the community what are we talking about in the in terms of the number of prairie dogs that would be relocated or that would be killed under these um under these scenarios estimates based on those densities dave that we talked about earlier 30 30 30 burrows 30 animals and uh so that's that's what we've got what what um we're

[215:02] looking for here um as as we've been talking about to help us in the time we have before the march meeting to to take these deeper dives and provide a little bit more specificity on the implications is to narrow um to narrow this to a package or maybe two packages where we have more indication guidance that that's general air generally in terms of hearing what we've heard thus far from the community about where we'd like to go heather looks like you've got something i do but i will wait okay jumping back um so that is um oops sorry that is uh the intention there so so before we move to that i would like to return to hal's question which i did a terrible job of answering and i apologize so if you look at the status quo we will be spending 200 to 300 000 on the status quo which is the relocations and the barriers and the restoration

[216:00] associated with those projects so that's kind of the same number as called out below yes so that's two to three hundred of the four hundred the remaining money will be spent on other prairie dog working group items so things like cost sharing with neighbors on barriers other items the plague management plan other items that we're going to be working on in 2020 that are not part of the scope of this so if you then look at package b the difference between 200 to 300 000 is the adder that includes the status quo plus what we would do new and so we would then at that point be having to dip into the prairie dog working group money plus if we're at the high end of that also some additional money the one caveat to that is that once you get down to um package i believe it's d that no longer includes the status quo because the scale of the work and the money is getting so substantial that we then are no longer doing relocation so the money that was available that we

[217:01] were using for the relocation is now available for the lethal control okay so that's why you see an actual reduction in costs at that step from is that the entire 400 000 then at that point it would be because we would need to be taking the i mean the entire 400 000 is not included in that annual cost estimate it's still assuming that about 130 of that is earmarked for prairie dog working group stuff however this is so expensive that we would then need to take that hundred and thirty thousand from the prey dog working group implementation in addition to an additional you know if you're looking at d hundred and twenty to two hundred and twenty thousand dollars from other department so what is the parenthetical all funding that's all of the funding earmarked for the prairie dog working group so at lower levels if you're only taking 50 000 from the prairie dog working group implementation you would still be doing some of the prairie dog working group implementation once you hit 130 that's the full funding identified for that and so you wouldn't be implementing any of

[218:01] that so at that in row d you're saying there would be zero money for prairie dog working group projects right another alternative would be you continue to do the prairie dog working group projects and find a hundred and thirty thousand dollars somewhere else in the department but i was attempting to keep prairie dog money with prairie dogs to the degree that we could and then only go above that when right we ran out so that next column the funding reallocated is that is that what you're talking about then that that would then be in addition to using all of the prairie dog working group money for this we would then need to also find another hundred and twenty to two hundred and twenty thousand dollars right for a march if we could just uh parallel present in the options what the working group is and what that is and then total you know is in the prairie dog as opposed to transferred from and again hopefully we'll have a collapsed set of options

[219:00] because i was trying to fit it on one page before i can deal with this table as a whole i need to deal with one of the columns and it's the one called uh total prairie dogs relocated per year and for me to um deal with that i need to know about the receiving sites and the degree to which it's feasible to accommodate 1164 additional prairie dogs every year in the receiving sites every year for 20 years or whatever so we've committed that as long as it's possible to accommodate those prairie dogs we will be doing the relocation i cannot tell you how long that will be plague is unpredictable population increases in the southern grasslands are unpredictable it may be that we have plagued move through the eastern

[220:00] grassland preserve and suddenly we're looking there at potential receiving sites so the uncertainty with that is just too high to really predict it so the way that we went to at least be able to compare apples to apples here is huge assumptions there's assumptions that there's no plague in any of this so we're looking out to um you know 41 plus years of removal and plagues never happened in that time frame is that reasonable probably not you know is five years reasonable it may not be but we just have no way to factor that into our evaluation and so we just are holding it constantly so given the conditions now can you imagine there being receiving sites for 1164 dogs per year i would say at least for the next couple of years yes and after that is too far out for me to know what we're going to be looking at climate uh drought can radically affect the conditions on sure the sound grasslands or any of the

[221:01] grassland preserves we've seen that happen before some of the pictures that you've seen that a lot of the dust blowing just happened after a couple of year drought period and high prairie dog population levels but not necessarily population levels that were exceeding the standards in the grassland plants so we um you know i get it a lot of uncertainty i'm wondering if we should add that to an assumption that the criteria for receiving sets in the grassland is able to be met as an assumption just so it's we could have that as one of the bullet points thank you i am um happy to kick off the hard part of the conversation go for sure um i think you know the decision of doing ecosystem engineering or not is a bigger question but once you have decided you're going to engage in that presuming you decided it um the i'm convinced by what we heard

[222:00] tonight and also in the significant work in the packet that um in some of these lower tiers you are wasting money ultimately killing more prairie dogs and that it's a worse use of taxpayers funds and also worse for the community if we've decided that there are certain goals we're trying to achieve i think we want to kill the least number of prairie dogs and to do it as efficiently as possible given all of our other goals so i am comfortable looking basically we know that the relocation is traumatic to the animals it's extremely expensive i don't like the idea of the delta dust in our earth i i understand why that approach makes a lot of sense for non-irrigated lands and special situations in and around boulder when you're working with a smaller group of prairie dogs but when you're talking

[223:00] about this level of acreage this much land i think it becomes a bit of a non-starter with that said uh the costs are exceptional on those higher levels and so i hope we can sharpen up the pencil and think about it one element you know that we heard was we are being requested to do this by our lessees i believe they're willing to help in figuring out how that factor can lower the cost of the project sort of like this this uh paying of the lessee cost sharing program i heard about at the county i think that's interesting to explore um i'll leave it there and let others and which rows were you alluding to uh the the getting towards uh d and e and doing less or no relocation so the other argument for that i'll just tail end on yours is the idea that when you've got a population that's growing the longer you take to control it the more animals you have to kill

[224:01] the other thing that i would just allude to and i would even argue to add a column here is we have a column that says prairie dogs lethally controlled per year but it really should say prairie dogs legally controlled by osmp per year and there should be a column next to it that's the estimate and i know these aren't easy numbers to come by it's the number of prairie dogs lethally controlled by osmp neighbors per year because i think that's a big number and then it happens every year and so again the longer you take to clear irrigated lands and get to a equilibrium if you will the more years you have what i think are thousands of dogs being killed by our open space neighbors many not through humane means and i would say tens of thousands based on the emails that could be and to me that's a big driver towards trying to move quickly if you're trying to reduce the

[225:02] overall number of dogs that are dying and i think that's what we're about so and that's why i'm arguing to put something in there because without it you might think well why don't we just keep going the way we're going we're only losing 40 dogs a year this is the best way to minimize loss of prairie dogs to lethal control but i would argue the opposite of that and without the numbers it's very hard for the public to understand that so i'm going to argue beg plead with staff to try to come up with some kind of estimate there because i do think it really matters and i think as you said it's a very difficult thing to do because it's we've talked a lot about that we know that um i think it's i think there's very strong inference that there is immigration from open space mountain parks to surrounding

[226:00] private properties even if we don't have empirical proof of that there's a very very strong inference i don't think anyone's going to doubt that the degree to which those prairie dogs the the landowners on which on whose property they end up choose to use lethal control is very difficult um for us to substantiate that level ever we could ask we've heard from people they've told us how much they've spent right but um surveying you know all of our neighbors that would be a critical effort so we could we could come up and i think john's done some some look at you know what immigration might look like and we could come up with some proportion of those but even coming up with a proportion of those that are lethally controlled there'd be a lot of would be difficult to come up with and i don't want to push you in that direction i i guess what karen's saying and i feel the same way is that it might dwarf the numbers in the column that we have now

[227:01] i mean it might and if it does that's on us as you know councilwoman young said this we need to recognize it we need to own it and so if it is a big number and i think there's a lot of evidence that it is that's a significant part of our goal to reduce lethal application to prairie dogs which would argue again just moving as quickly and efficiently as we can so that we are no longer a contributor to that amount of lethal control and i you you might just put an asterisk or something that acknowledges that this could be a fairly large dynamic but we can't estimate it i think might be enough we um we've talked about some theories about to try to get to what you're after and i'm not quite ready to um share those tonight but um uh

[228:00] i understand what you're what you're getting at kurt and even if we can't whatever we did there there would be many large assumptions around it and sure i don't know how helpful it would be that's one of the things i want to kind of confirm with the team before we we talk about that too much more but i totally get your point and if we can't address it in a column in the table we can certainly address it anecdotally based on what we've heard yeah i think i think that's what we need to do if we can do more great but something that acknowledges that that's a driver of our decision making right now yeah and it's not just numbers of dogs killed by neighbors it's it's other things like poisons used and impacts to the environment from what i have read over the last two or three weeks um i i i sense i may be in the minority

[229:01] on this one but so be that i would not support dre i think that going to 100 killing of prairie dogs as our only means of removing them uh is and will certainly correctly be perceived as a really radical change in policy and not we've been relocating it's not perfect but it seems like it's a successful policy and i would certainly want to continue using that if 1164 is with all the caveats that heather gave us if that's the logical number that's the cap i would keep that in place and not say well we're going to take that down to zero i totally get the point that it's a lot cheaper to kill a prairie dog than it is to move it but um i don't think that's well certainly not where i am and i don't think i don't think that's where

[230:00] the community is um so to the extent that's the policy behind dne i wouldn't do that i also think a couple other points that are related to this one is just tom can i interrupt just for a second um so the hundred percent i'm confused you're only killing there's no moving though i'm confused you're you're suggesting you're implying that that's prairie dogs but it's actually acres that is the hundred percent well what i meant was so the strategy in dne the 100 percent of the tool is killing there's no it's not a mix of relocating and killing it's all killing in dne but i thought you were talking about b no no i was just i was just trying just saying you know before we get to the question you know from my perspective i wouldn't do d or e then there's the the choice between say b or c is um

[231:00] partly resource driven but i was trying to articulate why i would not shift the mix so that the only tool in the toolbox is killing i don't i don't support that just as a as a kind of a personal ethical stance i also think it would be you know a rather radical move where where we stand in the community i also think we ought to step back and remember how we how we got here was we said that there was a crisis really concerning two properties um that they were the ones that were of greatest significance and that were you know at the greatest risk here and to sort of and that was the story that we told to city council and i think to a large extent it wasn't the sole basis on which they authorized this to go forward but it was certainly it was a huge driver of that whole discussion with council and then to go from that proposition you know that there are a couple properties that are really in urgent need of some attention

[232:00] going from there to saying well let's just go to a program of 100 killing seems pretty far from where we were last april in our description of sort of what is the problem that we're trying to address and even i mean at that time proposing any killing seemed like a pretty big move um and the last point i would make is i think kurt and hal are right that we don't want to get ourselves into a cycle where we've incompletely removed from a property and then you're just going through the endless cycle and we just sort of discussed that back on key assumptions and priorities but i wouldn't jump from that proposition to the proposition that we need to go to a program that uses only killing as the tool in the toolbox rather that strikes me as an argument that we need to be smart about which properties we identify saying well here's one that we're gonna where we

[233:00] believe we can get down to you know zero percent as close to zero percent prairie dogs as we can be selective about that be you know smart about that and then be effective in implementing that yes that does mean we're not going to be uh working on does you know a lot a huge number of properties certainly at any you know over a small number of years we're going to have to be concentrated but you know speaking for myself obviously i would rather pick a few properties where we make can be successful make a big difference rather than sort of more broadly using killing prairie dogs as a much blunter tool so i'll leave it at that i want to go back to what i recall as a table i thought that andy put together of all the properties and the percent occupancy of those properties is it one of the uh factors in the slideshow

[234:01] yeah yep i can always hold it up high so we can all read it and that incl that includes the non-manage now or the self-managed lens too i believe self-managed the ones that we can't lease out anymore i think there's a bottom of that table like those properties where it's no longer at least property but my recollection was that it's more than just the uh boulder valley ranch and uh mark if you go to the october 23rd the presentation i think highlights the ones that are in the project area and i think there's five or six tenants in the project area that are impacted and i will try um and the the two lease areas are highly impacted um [Music] the other one is at 12 percent 10 percent

[235:00] uh and eleven percent and do those numbers hold for the 2019 census these are 2019 numbers okay so you've updated that table that i'm referring to yes and that that and that's right that's the most and and that's by leasehold so those numbers may sound low that's not how many are on the brubaker property or the stratton property those are the kinds of properties i'm thinking of right so how do we the person that leases depth of the problem of high occupancy acreages if it's not by leaseholder is it by we have it quantified also by a number of fields i believe mark i think you did some work with that um yes

[236:01] hold on just a second bringing up the conceptually a small incursion of 10 of somebody's hayfield hay fields in total isn't a huge uh impact to his or her operation financially so that's why we kind of look at it that's perspective is by operation right now that being said that 10 could all be on one property so one property in his in his or her leasehold right could actually look pretty poor and be pretty problematic in terms of right as mary young says exporting the problem to other people right but it's also true when we went through the exercise of defining the 35 threshold that was at the leasehold level recognizing that many of our lessees have multiple properties and the property boundary is somewhat of an artifact of

[237:00] when did we buy the land and may not have any real connection to the um how it's actually operated on the ground or sort of functions as a landscape right um i think it's important to just note for the public i mean the the expedited review does pertain to a specific area it is not a system-wide discussion and i think it's a little bit misleading to say a policy of 100 percent killing it's a policy of lethal control in a small subset of the system um and so i just want to add that and i just really just meant a policy that the only tool we're going to use in those properties for removing prairie dogs is to kill them so i think there's two things here one is relocation to support our other conservation goals and i think we always

[238:00] have the option to do as much of that as we need and we should and that's why i suggested adding to our assumptions that we're not going to let this program interfere with the conservation of the species and the habitat there's the other question though is if we want to reduce the number of prairie dogs we're going to kill in some ways every dollar you spend on relocation means you're going to kill more and so that's an ethical dilemma for me because you're also exporting more prairie dogs each year and they're being killed by neighbors so my assessment has been that getting to equilibrium as quickly as possible reduces the total number of prairie dogs that we kill and that others have to kill often with non-lethal means so in the interest of moving the conversation along it strikes me that we ought to look at the top three the status quo and a and b

[239:01] and from my perspective those should probably go off the table uh because for a variety of reasons but probably the key one is that they take too long and i think that we ought to actually look at cd c and d primarily and e for purposes of conversation i think e i'm not interested in bankrupting the open space program in order to accomplish this particular goal so i think c certainly takes into account tom's concerns and i think we all have those concerns so there is still a relocation component to see right and then d is also is then you know complete eradication and so i think that will give us the perspective that we need and that we can then make recommendations to council so they can also weigh

[240:01] you know again the pros and cons or benefits and costs you use the word complete eradication and if i understand all of these are complete eradication from irrigated lens they just take different times yeah right that's what i meant right in in that time frame and just the difference between c and d in terms of the number of prairie dogs uh c would be about 4 100 prairie dogs a year and d would be 43.50 so there's an additional the difference in c d is an additional 250 prairie dogs but this you know then but all of them are being killed whereas in c there's a mix of some killed some removed in the aggregate they're not that different in terms of the number of prairie dogs but they differ a lot in the means by which that's accomplished and if the excuse me the number of years is roughly the same right which is relevant

[241:01] for myself i encourage the public to send me some emails in the next month my my reading on relocation has a lot of downsides the co2 is decidedly less humane according to the research we've been given the trapping we've heard from first-hand people who've actually conducted this work is stressful on the animals it does leave a chemical in our agricultural fields called delta dust which i don't even like the name of it um i and and then last but not least it's really hard for me uh you know i go to dinner and pay the sales tax like everybody else and when you look at the idea that it it takes uh 300 000 a year to move 1100 prairie dogs i just really can think of some better things to do with that money so c and d though then give us the option of having that conversation in

[242:01] more depth right yeah and e then is kind of an add-on that you know if you really want to kind of go to one end of the spectrum that's basically where you're headed but now you're outside our budget probably yeah that's the concern is everyone good with us exploring c and d further for march thank you very good so both c and d do include um transferring either all or most of the prairie dog working group implementation money as currently presented is that how you would like to see them developed in march as well or is a different alternative preferably i was seeing c as being only a partial transfer and so i do think that um that we probably or i don't know i won't speak for the whole board but i i think

[243:01] that we want to look at you know transferring some of that 400 000 isn't there isn't the relocation in keeping with the prairie dog working group yes it is yes so that's part of that money right right it is it's part of the 400 000. that 130 000 that was all the rest of the prairie dog working group but how i've presented to people that i've talked to is that the relocation is actually it is part of the paradigm group recommendations and and just for clarification prairie dog working group is a system-wide effort as opposed to in this particular part so re removing all funding from it would be a system-wide impact not just in the space that's true i would say that a lot of the items that we were going to be working on first related to conflict anyway would also be in this same area so it was addressing barrier cost sharing with neighbors but other system-wide efforts like black-footed ferret reintroduction evaluation plague management plan those are all system-wide efforts yeah i i um

[244:01] under no circumstances want to go back on what we're doing system-wide but as a specific protocol for the irrigated lands in the study area i think it's a different thing do you have something to say about that next column too about funding reallocated from other osmp priorities this was our kind of last uh last question was about the staffing and funding implications of the scenarios as they talked about how that that was like right on exactly the kind of comment we were looking for are we leaving the the leased properties chart that was up there for a moment um we le we did leave it uh we had moved on from it uh do we need to go back to it well i want to get some clarity about whether what what acreage we're talking about and it goes back to this question of are

[245:00] we talking about looking at this from a lessee perspective or looking at it from a heavily occupied acres perspective because i think that's kind of two different it's apples and oranges and it goes back to tom's question as well and and for me i don't think we're talking about just the cushman's and the older valley ranch well if you look at the column second from the right second from the right from the right is acre irrigated irrigable ants that have prairie dogs on the various so just read to me that what it says there in the top square on the second from so 322 acres on boulder valley ranch which is acres of prairie dogs irrigated land with prairie

[246:01] dogs okay and so that that if you if we were looking at sea and we focused on boulder valley ranch that's like uh two two years and we're getting close to clearing boulder valley ranch then it would be two years on well we've already done some on excellent johnson but you know that's kind of how if we did going back to the priorities that we talked about if we prioritized these folks um that that would kind of go be how it went it'd be like four years on the on the highest ones and and then we're getting close to the rest of it is um that's where the majority of it is those two properties well what about the stratton brubacher kind of uh complaints we've heard are that are they not heavily occupied yeah the brubacher that's a slight anomaly but the brubaker property is in the axles and johnson

[247:01] lease area so it's part of that 319. it's part of line two okay unfortunately the stratton property which is right next to the brubaker property is leased to somebody else so that even though we likely map that colony as one it's in two leaseholds which confuses some of them have been brought up by dave and others that you know we want to take a look at this in a way that we might be cutting across um leaseholds and paying attention to what makes sense in terms of these agro ecosystems or just the fundamental and overarching prioritization criteria of what's going to be effective yeah so we're on the land contiguity we're getting back to the prioritization i don't think anything anyone said is inconsistent with the things that have been prior the prioritization criteria that people have asked but lease holdings may not

[248:01] be either the highest or the only priority though that's right or the best cut right through which to look at it right okay we've heard that um we do we do know that the fact that something is in a leasehold is important because of its right yes that it's currently you know somebody's livelihood and then you're getting um least revenues from it as well right those are factors that have been identified as priorities i think having some of that on the ground perspective in march would be very helpful for people to gain an understanding of what the it is um and what do you are you what do you mean by that i understood what we were doing tonight was conceptual

[249:00] and that's an important step but to communicate with most people a concrete example is a much clearer way to communicate rather than a broad amorphous concept so what i'm saying is in march even if all you can say is here's one example of what could be done in a year here's another example of what could be done in a year i'm not asking as i did earlier as a question earlier in the evening of in march are you going to give us a map with the whole plan but i think i mean we can get that concept a little bit by talking through some of this information on this chart tonight but i'm asking for something even more concrete

[250:00] i think i think the difficulty is we could do an example of a situation now what this might look like these are some examples of how this might play out by the time we're ready to implement things things may have changed also of course and that's and raising expectations through an example of real people's leaseholds etc you know would could raise some concerns so that's just something that if we could we think about that and come back with uh and maybe it's maybe it's two or three different examples of what could be and then clearly you're not promising any one thing because we don't want to raise expectations that we can't i understand and that's important karen does it need to be attached to properties or what the could the examples be text where we say in one example it could be abstract blocks of a of a fictional property

[251:01] or to just say here's an example in this approach we would focus on leaseholds but that's inefficient so we think it's more likely it's going to cut across leaseholds etcetera etcetera but it's going to have to be areas that can be contiguous but i'd like to see it in an image i i would really rather than just words but it doesn't have to be a real place no it could be fictional proper case gotcha but the concept would be a graphic on to illustrate the concept things are a little slow because there's the bennett property yeah [Laughter] we finally got [Laughter] i'm ready for a kayak and something to drink [Laughter] [Music]

[252:00] from every location or a snorkel would do fine you see all the paradigms on top of that no crops that's the target property [Laughter] yeah when we think about it and we'll okay call and see if we can get something in okay i think we but i do agree examples would be illustrative and probably helpful if we can kind of figure out a good way of doing that yeah we'll um we we do actually um the ris the uh folks that do the computers came up with a good map that uh we think we might be able to use to show some examples we can't quite bring it up here right now today but um maybe in march we can zoom

[253:00] in and look at some areas and get to what you're after karen and here's a plug for tomorrow night you'll be hearing from the ris group tomorrow night there you go and lots more fun stuff this is super helpful yeah thank you val so the last the last piece i know we're we're at 10 13 now but the last piece was a really a request for oh if there's other information um outside of the assumptions prioritization criteria um the scenarios including the basic assumptions opposed and and the staffing and funding levels that you would like to see brought forward things that you've been thinking about that you feel like would be important for informing is that the question you were going to ask was there a pr okay there wasn't a

[254:02] precursor to that okay i think we were taking notes right along on a number of things sorry tom part of it is i don't know that we need to resolve this now but i think we're going to need to be clear in march on what we're doing that is changing ordinances versus what are we doing that is within the scope of ordinances and you know it's just kind of that more an implementation level of details that may have already been something that was on your list but at this point i'm not entirely clear on what the output of all of this will look like but i think at the least that we ought to have some proposed ordinance language that you know we could consider as far as um you know the agricultural boroughs on agricultural land and and uh permitting and that sort of thing so that there there is some

[255:01] context for the policy or procedural regulatory discussion and i would suggest that it's still valuable to counsel for us to start by saying what we can do tomorrow and what we will do tomorrow within the existing resources we have and the existing regulations and then also that leads to a conclusion about what we can't do but i think you do need to start by saying here's what we're going to do tomorrow because yep unlessies want to know council wants to know and then that sets up i think pretty well your discussion about it makes it clear what the limits are of what we can do and then you get into an incremental discussion of okay if you can do something about burrows it'll be this helpful but it's probably going to take you this much time i don't know if you've had discussions with the city attorney about

[256:00] emergency measures i mean we've had discussion that if any ordinance changes would be made what would the time frame be and after council meeting which would be april 21st that we would think that we're looking at probably a june time frame before we would be able to go back to council with with changes and then there's i think a 60-day waiting period after the adoption of an ordinance so even if we were on a good time frame working with our staff in the cio's office and we made it through june mid-june public hearing on final on the second reading yeah then we'd be looking at 60 days after that and that is all if everything goes well so we probably need to say up front when we're talking to the public that at the best if we're talking about structural changes they'll be next fall and that if we're talking about things besides status quo um we're probably not implementing them until next fall is that i mean i think we need to lay that out yeah i think

[257:02] that's part of the issue here is that we have an existing ordinance that would allow lethal control a response to a permit issued by the city manager and so one of the i don't know if it seems like there's sort of a fundamental question here if we said we believe that at property x the conditions uh prerequisite to the issuance of a permit have been satisfied is are there things that need to also change in an ordinance i would think the answer is no but maybe i'm missing something that would inhibit proceeding on that track recognizing ultimately there's two tracks that there's things that need to be changed in ordinance but we you know the ordinance obviously anticipated that permits could be granted as things now stand but the reason they're not being uh granted is that you know we think we've understood that there's this

[258:00] broader process underway that's going to address that question but that's sort of like yeah i just wanted to add just clarifying the 30-day waiting period is after the second reading so it'd be about 60 days for a new ordinance but under our current ordinance um the department could apply for lethal control under our current ordinance it would be a minimum of 90 days processing from the point at which the application was submitted but there is a process for applying for lethal control under our current ordinance and the 90 days would be for so the ordinance has built in lag times um so there's um you know 14 days after it's received before the next step can happen then there's a 30-day sorry 60-day public comment period so that the community can offer relocation alternatives for whatever number of prairie dogs and

[259:00] acreage is being proposed for lethal control and then there's another 14-day lag time after the closing of public comment so that's where the 90 days come from in the ordinance that it can't happen quicker than that it's it strikes me given that have you looked at a dual track approach to make the application as soon as possible to get the the clock running because i think the long in my opinion the long-term appropriate outcome is for the department to have a policy that applies strictly and only to agricultural irrigated lands that is more adaptable that allows us to really keep learning you know as the county has adjust without having to go through ordinances and legal so to make sure we we do the ordinance correctly for the long term of what works right but to perhaps get the clock turning if we've got regulatory windows like that

[260:02] right i'm not sure that right i don't think that we necessarily need to wait for this whole process through council to run before you all could apply for the permit and start the clock running oh even if we end up not going that direction you can always hold on yeah you can always stop the clock or say no um um there is an issue of funding and staff time and a lot of other things involved in that sort of a decision we are set up to do status quo right now that's what's in our work plan in our budget if you if you i mean we really would need some direction to change that all around right now so um i don't think we can do it this meeting that is potentially something we could discuss in march but it's that's a significant decision to make for this year yeah i think that's the principal component of the march discussion

[261:01] and it strikes me that we've made commitments at least that we want to move this process along and it's expedited theoretically and so i think you know if we're and now this isn't meant directed at you but if we have a 90-day you know in a 30-day and a 60-day you know else next fall the public can legitimately ask what happened to the expedition and it just strikes me that we the we the board needs some suggestions as to how we can meet you know near-term i don't want to use the term emergency but near-term priorities as we kind of address some of the longer-term needs but i think that and i don't know karen may not feel this way but i think i think we at least let the lessees know

[262:00] that we're looking at trying to get something in place where there would be addressing some of the concerns you know this growing season so you know by late spring and and i'm a little concerned that um you know we're talking about that not being possible and that also leads me to ask what kind of paperwork if any in your mind is being submitted to the state for permits and when that will be happening so we would be starting to focus on that project now this is taking significant time from the same staff that do that and so that's been usually february is when we would be making those choices about which properties so we would still be hoping to do that now if there is direction to be taking this parallel process of the cities the state permit is only for relocation

[263:01] is that correct right okay um so during the time frame that we would be going to city council we would typically be submitting the permit for relocation and then working with that through the next couple of months with the state you know if next month there's direction to to take the resources that would otherwise be working on that and turn them towards this parallel process we can certainly do that but then if the decision is made not to pursue that we will be behind the ball on our relocation permits so that that's kind of the trade-off i i also have to add that preparing for council is the same staff that will be preparing any of these applications yeah and preparing for council and preparing for these meetings is a huge huge lift and i know that that woman over there is

[264:00] totally above her head so i um i want to be cautious that even running this expeditious process and getting ready for council and getting ready for march is a huge undertaking while we're trying to take care of the status quo and if we're going to you know add on some things then um i think we got to be really cautious about that i assume no lessee has applied for a permit in recent years so the only the only body that can apply is the landowner for lethal control that's the way the ordinance was written we can't apply is what you're saying uh the leasi can't apply we can apply but the leasing another challenge with doing this before a structural change is that we have relocation sites so if we start to go through the six step process

[265:00] val is probably going to tell us use the relocation sites which is the status quo which is what we have in the work plan and the budget for this year i also just want to highlight when we do lethal control because each individual is trapped and subject to carbon dioxide it's very it's a very expensive process because we do that to at least the 95 of that colony so when you talk about you know 40 acres you're talking about 160 thousand dollars from our chart it's not an insignificant cost to add on to whatever else we're planning as well so val i think you're saying there's no emergency way to move quickly to any of these new methods practically yeah i mean everything that's consistent with the new methods have some sort of ordinance change

[266:01] well and if that's if we thought about it hard and that's what we think we need to be upfront with council about that that we've we've tried to consider every way of moving quickly on this and we just don't think it's possible and so we're coming to you with this package but it's going to take so many months and that's not going to be a happy news to our lessees etc etc etc we just have to be clear about that in our in our messaging let's not in our messaging let's not underestimate that it was city council who wrote the original ordinance and let's leave it open to their creativity about what might be possible to help us um i think that's uh that's a great way to frankly i would like that if there's no other materials i guess what i just do is to say next steps um the engagement will close on sunday

[267:01] february 16th the third ingredient window is really us bringing the preferred alternative package to board and to council so that will happen uh march 5th when the board package materials are released so that's soon um and then we'll have the march 11th meeting right now we're currently scheduled to visit with council and to make the voice recommendation and whatever information that we move forward to council from that point at which point uh there'll be public hearings at both the boarding council meeting and that kind of constitutes the canadian engagement for that third and final engagement i want to add before we leave that in addition to the thanks to all the public comment that tom has already given to the public i want to thank the staff for the obvious substantive work that you've done in the

[268:00] last month we do appreciate we do and we're not sure when the miracle is going to occur but it's pretty soon and i was away for january so really it's this team right we knew that rob [Laughter] thank you very much thank you thank you [Music] live from paris office [Music]