Polis' "Colorado for all" means environmentalists and animal rights advocates? Lots of numbers in SB25-242, but only a few are critical for taxpayers. Cacti and their vestigial leaves.
Gov Polis' "Colorado for all" sure seems to have lots of environmentalists and animal rights advocates.
I wrote about Polis advisor Nicole Rosmarino being the sole finalist for the directorship of the State Land Board recently. That newsletter is linked first below if you want or need context.
On the heels of that newsletter, I got a message from a reader alerting me to the other two appointments that Governor Polis made to the State Land Board--this is the same board mind you that makes decisions on grazing leases, mineral-extraction (oil/gas) leases, and provides revenue to schools--Mark Harvey from Pitkin County and James Pribyl from Louisville. Harvey was appointed to fill the agriculture seat on the board and Pribyl the citizen-at-large seat.
If the name Pribyl sounds familiar, you're not alone. He was a former member of the CPW Commissioners (see the picture heading this post whose text was taken from Pribyl's Linked In account), a wolf reintroduction advocate, and one of the three co-authors of the op ed in support of Prop 127, the big cat hunting ban.**
You can get a sense of Mr. Pribyl's orientation to wildlife and Ag by the following gem quoted from a December 2024 op ed he penned about wolf reintroduction (see the second link below):
"It’s time for truth-telling about Colorado’s first-state-in-the-nation, publicly mandated wolf restoration program. Stockgrowers, following the playbook they established during federal wolf restoration 35 years ago in the northern Rockies, are promoting the false narrative our wolf recovery is a 'catastrophe.' That fiction, promoted by the anti-wolf coalition of big game outfitters, hunting advocates and some politicians, ignores well-proven facts: Wolves are the least threat to Colorado’s livestock industry. Consider two facts: Colorado has been home to about 2.6 million cattle and sheep for decades. Exactly 25 head of livestock have been lost to wolves since last winter’s introduction, mostly in a limited area, attracted, in part, by a carcass pit, and a few ranchers reluctant to employ conflict minimization tools offered by CPW. Though any loss is regrettable, two dozen animals out of 2.6 million is hardly a 'catastrophe'. Moreover, last week, nearly 200 head of cattle were reported “rustled,” that is stolen, near Meeker. That’s 10 times the loss to wolves."
Now that's what I call sympathy! I wonder if Mr. Pribyl ever took the time to fly down from 35000 feet to actually talk to a single rancher suffering depredation. Had he done so, I wonder if he still would have held that it wasn't a "catastrophe" to them.
And this doesn't bode well for his role at the State Land Board where he'll be dealing with small outfits and ranchers who would like to lease state lands to run their herds (while putting money into state schools).
I have looked into the process to offer comment at the June 11/12 meeting of the State Land Board, and I will post on that later (along with what I intend to send in and then say when I attend the meeting virtually).
If you share my concerns, be watching for that and please consider sending in your own comment or attending and speaking up. The State Land Board members are not responsible for who sits on the board but this is a great chance to get your thoughts on record and not have them ignored if you bothered to send them to Polis.
One last detail. State law -- CRS 24-6-402(3,5) -- requires public notice of the finalist(s) for certain state jobs. The reader that alerted me to the two appointees mentioned above, also hinted that the governor is doing the bare minimum at giving this public notice; saying, to put a fine point on it, that the "notice" consisted of two typewritten sheets on a couple of bulletin boards, one of which is behind a locked door in the State Land Board Office in Denver.
I would not put this past Governor Polis, but I did reach out to his press person as well as the press person for the Colorado State Land Board for a statement. As of this writing, I have heard back from the DNR (where the Land Board is housed) spokesperson.
That response is quoted below with the links left intact:
"The hiring process for the Director of the Colorado State Land Board kicked off with a nationwide competitive job announcement that was open from February 5, 2025 to March 24, 2025. The State Board of Land Commissioners conducted its search in a collaborative process with the Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Governor’s Office. Per the 14-day statutory requirement, the State Land Board and DNR have made public Nicole Rosmarino is the sole finalist for the Director of the State Land Board. A written announcement is posted on the front doors of the State Land Board Building at 1127 Sherman St. and DNR building at 1313 Sherman St. and inside both offices. The announcement is also posted on the State Land Board’s website on the “Public notices’ page: https://slb.colorado.gov/public and the DNR website on its “Notices” page: https://dnr.colorado.gov/about-us/notices. The State Land Board will consider the appointment of the next Director at its next regular monthly Board meeting on June 12, at 1127 Sherman St. The State Land Board will post the agenda one week prior to its meeting on its website: https://slb.colorado.gov/public-meetings."
I had run a site search on the Governor's press release website (linked third below) and the State Land Board site (linked fourth) for the name Rosmarino. Neither returned a single result. With this new information, I ran a site search on the SLB's public notices page and got no result. This seems to indicate a problem with Google site search, because the link is there on the public notice page when I looked this morning.
I have written in the past about Governor Polis quietly surrounding himself and filling government advisor and board positions with animal rights and environmentalists, national searches and collaborations notwithstanding.
Rosmarino's getting the nod, is part and parcel of that. It's also more. It reflects Polis' his none-too-quiet indifference to (disdain for?) Ag and those that do this vital work in Colorado.
If you are growing tired of it, I urge you to join me in speaking up about it. More to come.
**The other two authors being sitting CPW commissioners and whose names being on that op ed resulted in settlement over open meetings law violations by the two board members.
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/another-governor-polis-extreme-appointee?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.coloradopolitics.com/opinion/time-for-truth-telling-about-colorados-collaborative-wolf-reintroduction-podium/article_7d395a38-c22b-11ef-80cc-1b05a12acad3.html
https://www.colorado.gov/governor/news
https://slb.colorado.gov/
There are lots of numbers to in SB25-242, but only a few are critical for you as a taxpayer
I didn't get around to SB25-242 during the legislative session (the bill is linked first below), but now that the governor has signed it into law, I will post on it.
The bill is complicated. Quite complicated. It deals with funding related to Unemployment Insurance (UEI) in Colorado and how that gets funded.**
There are too many details and too much complication here to go line by line through what this bill does. If you own a business, you may want to dig in a bit to see what will be changing about the money you send in for UEI.
For you and I as taxpayers, however, the end result is pretty simple. Screenshots 1 and 2 from the bill's fiscal note spell it out pretty plainly.
As they did with other legislation (which, as of this writing, were either signed or awaiting Polis' signature--see the second link below), the Democrats running the state have sought out creative ways to spend down budget surpluses and also to reclassify revenue so that it can avoid the limits from TABOR.
The attached screenshots clearly show SB25-242 is another one to throw on the pile, though an interesting note on this bill is just how few Republicans voted against it: not a single Republican senator voted no. I think it's safe to say that politicians as a class prefer keeping your money; that is, it's clearly not just a Democrat thing.
The takeaways here are old themes on this page.
Lots of attention gets paid to the big attempts to undo TABOR, but just as important are efforts such as these. These small bills flying under the radar, taking little nibbles out of TABOR will have the same effect over time and with multiplication as the big ones.
Pay attention to what your reps and senators are doing, even if you think you're in a "safe" red district.
**Our state has a God-awful UEI program and the people running it would make clowns look organized and sophisticated. If you run a business, have ever needed UEI, or have read this pay long enough, you know.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb25-242
Cacti and their vestigial leaves
That time of the week again. The last post til Sunday and thus time for soemthing for fun and not related to politics.
Been waiting a long time to write this post. Mid-Winter I was reading a book on cacti (their biology, etc. --see the first link below if you're interested in reading it yourself) and really enjoyed it.
Around that same time (see the second link below to my earlier newsletter), and based on reading that book, I wrote about the unique type of photosynthesis cacti have. I had another post I wanted to do on cacti from the book, but it had to wait until the cacti had started to wake up and grow.
We've now hit that point.
Botanically speaking cacti are stem tissue. They may not be lignified (woody), but they're not a big leaf. At some evolutionary junction years back, cacti took a right turn and figured their best chance of survival in areas where water was scarce was to not grow leaves and instead photosynthesize in their stems. Leaves have more surface area to produce energy from light in, but they can be costly in terms of water loss.
So, the leaves were lost to time. The buds that used to grow into leaves converted to spines (spines which, incidentally, do more than just protect cacti from being messed with---they do provide some minor insulation against heat and cold both).
Some trace of the common plant blueprint remains; the leaves aren't erased completely out of the genes. Evolutionary remnants in the form of vestigial leaves still show up on cacti. I see them on mine, but only when they're growing.
The two pictures with the red circles (to highlight the vestigial leaves) are from the internet, but the others are of my tater cacti and some prickly pear this Spring. The nubs you see are not baby spines, they don't harden and thin out or something, they are little leaves that will fall off as the new growth matures.
These vestigial leaves also show up on other cacti, though you need a microscope to see them (check out the third link below if you'd like to read up more on that).
When trees or other plants bud out and/or flower, they do so at growth nodes along the stem. Cacti are no different. I said above that the spines on a cactus are its leaves, but another way to look at it is that they are also the places where the growth nodes are located.
Meaning, that when cacti flower, they do so at a bud with spines sticking out. I can already see my cacti budding out to flower and it looks like a good year for cacti flowers again. If that pans out, I'll be back with some pictures to share.
That is it for today. Hope the rest of your day goes well and back at it Sunday!
The Cactus Primer (with Dr. Art Gison) (1986)
https://faculty.eeb.ucla.edu/Nobel/books.php
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/battery-trains-no-not-battery-powered?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2007/08/22/2011787.htm
Related:
Who wants some cactus jerky?
Every year I prune back my prickly pear cactus (that stuff grows like a weed), and inevitably find some rotten, broken, and dehydrated paddles.
The picture here is one such example. Pretty crispy!
The "for all" language is identical to CA Governor's Newsom's slogan save for the state.
Thanks