Heartbreak, lost trust and wasted time — some residents on Wednesday expressed frustration about Boulder City Council’s decision to pursue lethal control of prairie dogs on agricultural land managed by Open Space and Mountain Parks.
Deb Jones, president of Prairie Dog Action, said Council’s approval of the new plan felt like a slap in the face to community members who spent countless hours on the Prairie Dog Working Group brainstorming nonlethal solutions.
Jones said she’s worried about how further reducing the prairie dog population will hurt Boulder’s ecosystem, particularly because prairie dogs are considered a keystone species.
“This is a level of irresponsibility and disregard that should not be tolerated in this day and time,” Jones said. “There’s too much riding on this and I am so fed up with the level of vilification of this animal, the irrational hate of this animal. They get blamed for every single thing out there.”
With Council’s 8-1 vote in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Boulder will expand lethal and nonlethal control of prairie dogs on 967 acres of irrigated agricultural land north of Jay Road and west of the Diagonal.
Council member Mirabai Nagle was the lone dissenting vote, speaking passionately against the plan to kill thousands of prairie dogs and at times tearing up.
But the vote was a relief to members of Health Ecosystems & Agricultural Lands, a group that supports prairie dog mitigation on agricultural lands in Boulder.
Elizabeth Black said she’s hopeful the decision will lead to the restoration of irrigated agricultural lands that have become unusable because of prairie dog colonies. Many of the fields slated for lethal removal will be used for growing hay and grazing animals, she said.
“Water is so precious here in the West and land with water on it is the only place we can grow food, and I just think it’s very precious land and I’m glad that it will be restored and go back to food production,” she said.
Starting in 2021, the plan calls for 900 to 1,200 prairie dogs to be relocated to other areas and 3,000 to 6,000 prairie dogs to be killed every year using “in-burrow humane lethal control” such as carbon monoxide.
The plan also calls for installing barrier fences, starting soil restoration and allowing agricultural activities to resume that could damage burrows.
More than 1,200 acres of irrigated land owned by the city is “at risk to no longer support an agricultural tenant or are already effectively abandoned in terms of use and maintenance of water rights” because of prairie dog occupation, according to a report written by city staff.
At the meeting, Nagle said she was ashamed that the plan was moving forward.
“It’s heartbreaking that this is what we’ve degraded ourselves to do. It’s heartbreaking this is what we’re using our tax dollars for,” she said.
Nagle proposed four amendments drafted by advocacy group Keep Boulder Wild to limit the amount of lethal control. While Council members and city staff discussed them at length, the amendments were ultimately rejected over concerns that Council was micromanaging city staff.
The proposed amendments included allowing stakeholders to review each parcel to see whether lethal or nonlethal control would be more effective and to collect baseline soil data; to terminate the plan’s special use permit in 2022; for staff to consider outside funding and resources to increase relocation efforts; and to engage in a “collaborative shared learning process” about prairie dogs led by people other than city staff.
Council member Mary Young, who made the motion to approve the plan, said most of Nagle’s amendments are already included in the plan. Nagle disagreed with that assessment.
Nagle also questioned city staff at length about what data is available to show that lethal control of prairie dogs helps to restore soil. City staff compared it to overgrazing of land — that once the overgrazing stops, the land is able to recuperate.
Staff members have collected soil samples from more than 100 sites to establish a baseline for soil health and to be able to determine how well the soil is sequestering carbon, according to the staff report. The project is Open Space and Mountain Parks’ first such baseline.
Wednesday’s meeting was the continuation of a public hearing on the prairie dog plan, after dozens of people spoke against the plan at the initial Aug. 11 hearing, causing it to go past midnight.
The plan doesn’t represent what the majority of the community wants, said Lindsey Sterling Krank of the Humane Society. Krank said she was heartbroken by the Council’s decision.
“I was grateful to the council for directing staff to work with us on ways we can reduce lethal control and enhance coexistence and relocation and study the impacts,” she said. “There are so many great nonlethal options out there that we haven’t gotten a chance to try and so many solutions that reduce conflict instead of get rid of it temporarily.”
Prairie dogs will continue to be protected on about 3,000 acres in Boulder, but Krank said the animals are vulnerable to the sylvatic plague, which could quickly reduce their numbers.
“We could lose our population any minute to an exotic disease and then what are we going to do?” she said.
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