House Agriculture, Water & Natural Resources [Mar 23, 2026]

Representatives Garcia-Sander.

Goldstein.

Johnson.

Lindsey.

Lukens.

Martinez.

Smith.

Stewart.

Story.

Zucla.

Winter.

Morrow.

Madam Chair. Here. Great. Thank you all for joining us this afternoon. We are hearing two bills today. We're hearing House Bill 1323 first, which is wildfire resiliency prohibiting taking of beavers. We do have, for those of you in the room and listening, we do have an overflow room right next door, room 109. If you are here for House Bill 1310, feel free to be in that room if you'd like. There is a street live stream happening, and you can hear all the goings on in this room. If you get a little too stuffy or crowded in here, there is that overflow room. So with that, we'll start with our bill sponsors on 1323, Representative Lindsay.

Thank you, Representative Velasco.

talked about the wetlands stopping wildfires are you seeing any reduction in these wetlands so is there any data showing that you're actually seeing a reduction in beaver dams that would warrant legislation like this representative lindsey

face representative johnson thank you madam chair um thank you sponsors my question and i know we're looking at wild uh fire um but without any kind of management on these beavers what happens if we see any diseases spread or they overpopulate the areas, do we have numbers on how many beavers can be in a square mile? What kind of resources they need? What happens if they have any overproduction or disease aspects? How do we keep the other ecosystem alive if we're not having abilities to manage? Representative Lindsay. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Rep. Johnson. I think,

Thank you, Madam Chair. And maybe it's in the booklet I didn't read through yet. How many beavers, are there records on how many beavers are taken annually and over the last 5, 10, 15 years? I'm just curious, is there a need to limit the culling of beavers? And how many are taken each year? Representative Lindsay?

data scientists. Representative Garcia-Sander. Thank you. I will ask that of somebody else. Hopefully there's an expert that can answer that. I'm also just curious about the, and I don't know if that's something that you can answer or somebody else, the impacts of just shifting one, what seems to be one small thing in the big ecosystem. If we have more beavers available, what is that, happens with the larger ecosystem as far as predators and what they're eating. Bigger impacts than just preserving wetlands and growing wetlands. What's the bigger impact for other wildlife?

representative lindsey thank you madam thank you madam chair i also just wanted to add that um when colorado um you know before like in the 18th century um the beaver population was you know perhaps in the millions at that time um so our naturally occurring environment um was you know had millions of beavers living in it. They were virtually hunted to extinction in the 1820s through 1840s. And so that obviously impacted the environment. And so now as we, I mean, we are nowhere near those numbers as having the same amount of beavers as we did before, you know, the state was colonized. And so I think that we are nowhere near like the way the land was before we got here. And so I think we have made some progress in repopulating beavers But I think that even if you comparing numbers from early 20th century from like the 1940s to now that the number the increase is not where we'd like to see it. So I think that we really have a long way to go before we had a beaver overpopulation problem. And then again, if we did get to that point, CPW has discretion and how to deal with that.

Madam Chair, committee members, I'm Suzanne O'Neill. I'm the Executive Director of the Colorado Wildlife Federation. And, yes, we're opposed to the plan. Specifically, what we are in favor of is the beaver conservation and management plan strategy developed by CPW. And by the way, the 2024 avocational take was 380 beavers, so well under 1,000. And it was 2% to 4% of the beaver population. That's found in Chapter 4 of the strategy. You know, well before the strategy was developed, there were extensive shareholder group presentations and meetings. Beginning in August, there were 11 diverse share stakeholder groups convened, which continued in September. And then we all had an opportunity to comment on the draft strategy as well. You know, it was an extensive, really an extensive process, and we believe very important. CPW's expert wildlife biologists consistently explained to us that the take on, the avocational take on public lands is biologically insignificant. And so that's the expertise on it, and we value and respect that. and request that the committee carefully consider that this bill is unnecessary It would shred important parts of the strategy and we ask that you not move the bill forward So thank you.

My name is Tim Gablehouse. I am here as a board member of Colorado Trout Unlimited, and I chair the advocacy committee. I'm a lifelong resident of the state. I was born in Boulder and living now in Grand County. I spent my life fishing in beaver ponds and other kinds of environment. Nonetheless, we oppose this bill for very many of the same reasons the last speaker does. We have a scientifically based beaver management strategy put together with extensive stakeholder process in which various members of Colorado Trout Unlimited participated extensively. that strategy should work and should be given an opportunity to work rather than taking a brute force approach of just banning removal of beavers it's a sophisticated process there's a lot that goes into understanding recovery of beavers dealing with problem beavers or otherwise managing this we do not need this approach colorado tu asks you to oppose this bill and

members of the committee. My name is Kathleen Curry, and I'm here today on behalf of five West Slope water entities, three irrigation outfits and two domestic, and they have taken a position in opposition to the bill. I want to thank the bill proponents and the bill sponsors for their upfront work to try to exempt water providers. Unfortunately, there's still language in the bill that's problematic, primarily the rulemaking language that, and I understand it's optional, but as noted in the fiscal note, that it's likely to be a contentious process. And CPW is instructed if the bill passes to ensure that wetlands are protected. And we're not sure that that might conflict with water providers that are trying to make sure that their infrastructure is protected. So that's a problem. The other issue that they raised with me is the fact that we have a bill at all. And frankly, the previous comments already targeted that. page 45 of the Beaver Strategy Plan that you have in front of you states, frankly, that the development of CAPS is the preferred recommendation, and they recommend that for implementation. So I think there's a couple places in the plan that you could reference there. With that, Madam Chair, I know we have a lot of people signed up. I just wanted to respectfully request that the committee vote no and that primarily the water providers their needs were not met with the department of natural resources proposed amendments and we wanted to thank the sponsors for sharing all of that information with us up front but we respectfully request a no vote

Forester for the Rocky Mountain region at the US Forest Service the last 10 years of my career and so I had responsibility for all of the National Forest System lands in this state and then I became director of Colorado Parks and Wildlife under Governor Hickenlooper I here opposing the bill because it misleading The connection to wildfire that made in this bill is frankly absurd Riparian areas, which is where beavers live, occupy 1% of this state's land area. 1%. So let's take one of the sponsors talked about the East Troublesome Fire and the Cameron Peak Fire in 2020. Collectively, those fires burned 400,000 acres, 404,000 acres. If you took out the, if there were beavers on every drainage in that fire area and you deducted the acreage, 4,000 acres, you'd still have a 400,000 acre fire. So as a fire mitigation measure, as a fire resiliency measure, it's ridiculous to think that beavers can play a significant role in that space. the language in the bill even the title of the bill is misleading and it's dangerous because people believe it they believe that if you have beavers on the landscape we won't have big fires concerning wildlife resiliency through the prohibition of taking beavers the title is misleading language in here it implies it says recognizing the state's budgetary constraints beaver provide a cost-free measure that provides extensive economic benefits to the state by assisting the state in fighting escalating and destructive wildfires. It's not true. Lastly, I would say that beavers impound water in their dams. And again, I'm not against beavers. I like beavers. Beavers play a good role in the ecosystem. But when they impound water, they may reduce water going into a lake, a small lake or a stock tank, which could be accessed by firefighters to fight a fire. So they're not benign in that context. Thank you very much.

I manage the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District, and I'm also here representing the Colorado Water Congress today. The Water Congress opposed this bill for numerous reasons, some of which were addressed by the amendments from the sponsors. And so I would like to acknowledge the continued conversations and work on this bill. However, the changes do not fully address the Conservancy District or the Colorado Water Congress's concerns. The bill seeks to regulate wildlife management through legislation rather than through science. Colorado Parks and Wildlife recently spent significant time and effort facilitating a robust stakeholder process that led to the creation of the beaver conservation and management strategy. The legislation is not consistent with the strategy. Further, the implementation of the bill is not fully defined within the legislation and will require Colorado Parks and Wildlife to complete a rulemaking. Specifically, the bill requires the commission's rules to ensure that the role of beavers and beaver-created wetlands in the wildfire resiliency of public lands is protected. While the bill seems to be quite narrow in limiting recreational take, this language about rulemaking is much more broad considering that wetlands aspect. And so given that a rulemaking with vague instruction puts the commission and the public in a very awkward position, Water Congress continues to oppose this in the absence of being more fully understood. Thank you for the opportunity to testify remotely.

Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Kevin Terry. I am the Southwest Program Director for Trout Unlimited National based in the San Luis Valley, and we oppose the bill. I represented Trout Unlimited National in the stakeholder process led by CPW for the management strategy. I thought it was a robust process. It took many months and a lot of stakeholders. And we strongly support the purpose of the management strategy, which is to increase and sustain the prevalence of beaver and beaver-influenced wetlands and suitable habitats for the benefit of Colorado stream and wetland ecosystems and the array of wildlife species that utilize them, which obviously include trout. I will note that as part of one of the stakeholders in that process, I found that the one consistent data-driven message on harvest in Colorado was the avocational harvest of beavers. CPW had really good numbers for the amount of beavers that were harvested statewide from these license sales and license holders. However, the remaining take of beaver in the rest of the state of Colorado is really unknown and there is no data. So out of the data that we do know, we know that the harvest rate is 2% to 4%, which is far below that 20% threshold that we heard earlier. So I just wanted to acknowledge the robust, good process for developing the management strategy, and we just hope that that strategy gets a chance to be proven out on the ground as it is brand new.

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Reese Melton, the Natural Resource Director for Rio Blanco County and the White River and Douglas Creek Conservation District. As dedicated stakeholders to CPW's beaver management strategy, we firmly oppose House Bill 1323. This bill is unnecessary and circumvents CPW's ongoing strategy to improve this species in Colorado. Over the past year, CPW has led an extensive stakeholder process to develop this strategy and consulted over 300 diverse stakeholders across the state. The result is a science-based balanced strategy that already addresses the very concerns this bill seeks to solve. Wildfire resilience, watershed health, and improvement of the species, while also still respecting the needs of all stakeholders through adaptive management. A statewide ban of recreational take of the species on public land is not adaptive. 1323 would override the work with a one-size-fits-all management mandate. The beaver strategy calls for gathering of more robust data to guide management. Science first, then decision making, not the other way around. This bill directly contradicts how CPW biologists have and continue to manage our wildlife statewide. And very successfully we might add We encourage you to read recent articles regarding the elk herds in northwestern Colorado after the devastating 2023 winter A perfect case study of why science management works while legislative ballot initiative and petition mandates do not Again, science first, then management decisions. Further, this strategy allows the management at the watershed level using the best available science. It includes both non-lethal tools and targeted restrictions where and when appropriate. It ensures decisions are made by experts with on-the-ground knowledge, not through broad legislation. We are at a critical juncture with the management of wildlife in this state. This committee has a unique opportunity to reaffirm the management of our wildlife in the hands of the best biologists and the best available science by voting no on this bill. We respectfully ask this committee to uphold science wildlife management, respect the stakeholder process that's been completed, and allow CPW the full opportunity to implement the strategy.

Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the committee. My name is Scott Fitzwilliams, and I recently retired after 34 years with the U.S. Forest Service. The last 15 and a half, I was the forest supervisor on the White River National Forest here in Colorado. Throughout most of my career, I was extensively involved with wildfire management and wildfire mitigation. And for what it's worth, I'm not a trapper, and I've never trapped or killed a beaver in my life. Listen, beavers are absolutely essential, and they play a valuable role in our ecosystems. They contribute to wetland creation, improve water quality and quantity, and their presence can benefit riparian habitats in many ways. However, recognizing that value does not mean we should support policies that overstate their impact, especially when it comes to wildfire mitigation. This bill suggests either directly or indirectly that expanding or promoting beaver activity will meaningfully reduce wildfire risk. The reality is there's no credible evidence showing that this will approach will have any measurable landscape scale impact on reducing wildfires in Colorado. Wildfires are driven by complex factors, weather, climate, fuel loads, force management. And while beavers can be beneficial locally in a riparian zone, they don't address these broader drivers. And most frustrating for me is to present this bill as a wildfire mitigation strategy is very misleading to the public. It risks giving communities a false sense of security and diverts resources and attention from measures that we know are effective. That's forest thinning, fuel reduction and community preparedness. Public policy should be grounded in clear evidence based outcomes. And this bill does not meet that standard for wildfire. In short, I support thoughtful conservation and the ecological importance of beavers, but I suggest we should not support legislation that overpromises and misrepresents its impact on one of the most serious issues facing our state.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to preface this with I definitely have a PhD in obvious statements, but I'm going to go ahead anyway. So we're facing an unprecedented year of warmth. I live in a place of the state that has multiple ski areas and it rough out there So you know shoot I mean Missionary Ridge Fire was where I represent the 416 Fire, and I know we have a long list in the state of Colorado of fires. And so I guess my question for Mr. Cables is, I assume we're going to have some folks that are firefighters out here testifying in support of this bill because of the perceived impact that beavers have on fires across the state. And I just would like if there's more information, something more concrete that can be offered as to how this isn't part of the strategy. This isn't one of the tools in the toolbox. That would be helpful for me.

The Forest Service has a national wildfire crisis strategy, and it does not mention beavers. Because beavers, in the scheme of the fire problem in the West, they're just insignificant. Beavers are significant in terms of riparian area habitat, retaining water, having willows and great vegetation, and there's extended benefits to wildlife. But in terms of the wildfire issue, the beaver restoration efforts or whatever just simply are insignificant. I've seen wildfires jump a six-lane freeway with the wind. the width of a riparian a creek in colorado or a river might be 75 yards in the the wind it just blow right through that in a new york minute it would not have a material effect in terms of wildfire and as as scott fitzwilliams said to to to represent that it does and even worse to imply that it saves money for the state on wildfire mitigation work is just ludicrous. The science, if you will, that in this bill, there's language that says, according to the United States Forest Service, a lack of beaver populations across the western United States has contributed to increased wildfires in dry landscapes. Those words came from a PR publication written by a young woman that worked on the Gunnison Ranger District, who's neither a scientist nor a researcher, nor a firefighter who has no credentials to make a statement like that, yet that statement is picked up from this article and it's carried into legislation in the state of Colorado implying that beavers are going to help us with our fire problem. And they just won't.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This question is either for Ms. Curry or Trouts Unlimited. How will this beaver bill affect water compacts? I know along the eastern plains, if we don't deliver the water volume per that compact, we have to pay a monetary sum to make the difference. So how will this be? Do you know or can you estimate what this beaver bill will do to our compacts?

Thank you Madam Chair and thank you for the question I think that the sponsors of the bill made an effort to set aside the water community and they did that with the way the bill was introduced by allowing for the water community to maintain their infrastructure What's problematic is the depletion issue that Mr. Cables raised. Whenever there's more impoundments, there's more depletion, and that could conflict with the wetland language in the bill that would mandate protecting wetlands. So we have two potentially conflicting measures. In your part of the state, I think that the compact issues are so incredibly controversial, and they're about to get there on the Colorado River. But in Division I and II and out on the Republican, every drop really matters, and we're about to hit that point, but I don't think I could quantify how it would relate to compacts other than there's a huge sensitivity when there's more depletion loss and potential

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm wondering if anybody on the committee can just answer my question regarding the overall impact to the bigger ecosystem, and it might be you, Mr. Cable, since you were with CPDW, just what about the other animals and plants that are in the ecosystem? How would this impact them?

Thank you. As I said, riparian areas in the arid west are rare. One to two percent of the landscape has water or water-related vegetation. And that area, those riparian areas are incredibly valuable for all wildlife, not just beavers. So restoring wetlands, restoring stream courses, having healthy riparian areas are good for wildlife, which benefits the greater ecosystem. Critters have to drink. So this is where they go. So, again, there is an expanded role of riparian areas on the greater ecosystem because it is such a critical place for wildlife to get water and to sustain their populations.

Did the discussion around recreational take come up in that discussion, since I know it went for months and months, and what was your impression of how that piece or that tool was discussed? Mr. Terry? Yes, that discussion actually did come up in several of the meetings I participated in. And CPW took quite a bit of time to really go through the historical data records of harvest. And again, they only have harvest data from license holders and public harvest. They don't know the extent of harvest beyond that. But they took their time. they did a really good job demonstrating decades worth of harvest data and they've demonstrated that to the group that the current harvest rate is way below the sustainable threshold based on their their strategies and their models thank you um any other questions from

that are with Trout Unlimited, Mr. Gablehouse and Mr. Terry, does Trout Unlimited, are they working towards in other states, you know, beaver restoration, because it's known that that increases trout population? Is that happening in other states? Mr. Gablehouse? I think Mr. Terry.

Absolutely. We work around the clock, kind of everywhere that we work in the West to mimic beavers. Nature-based solutions are a huge part of the restoration work that we do across the West. We are looking to make sure that there's sustainable habitat, suitable habitat for beaver. We're working with the agency partners to figure out if there are good ways to relocate these animals to watersheds that have suitable habitat but are not occupied by beaver. We need to be really cognizant of disease transmission. We need to be really cognizant of doing that correctly so that we don't have any unintended consequences or negative impacts of relocation. But that's really what this strategy speaks to, is how do we get more beaver out on our landscapes in Colorado and sustain those populations? And so we really just want this strategy that was developed with a lot of input and a lot of really good thought to be implemented on the ground. We are pro-beaver. We really support what beavers do for our landscapes and our ecosystems in this state and all states in the West.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Cable, just real quickly, if the experts thought this was a great idea, can't they just do that? I mean, do they need legislation? If they needed to implement any of this or wanted to, there doesn't need to be legislation to do that. Is that correct? Mr. Cables.

to the next panel of folks that have signed up against the bell mr brandon melnikoff gasper parricone brett moore and dan gates are in person and then i have mr bill wambacher Scott Horak Ben Frickett and Ivan James remotely All right. Thank you all. I will start on my left again. So when you're ready, you have two minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee for the opportunity to testify today.

Thank you for your testimony. Go ahead, Mr. Moore.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Gaspar Perricone, and I am here today on behalf of the Colorado Wildlife Conservation Project, which is the state's largest alliance of hunting, angling, and wildlife conservation organizations. We stand in opposition to HB 1323. CWCP is a strong supporter of science-based wildlife management, and we do recognize the ecological benefits beavers can provide. And to that end, we were active participants in CPW's recent stakeholder process to develop the beaver management strategy. The eight-month process produced a report approved by the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission just last March and has not yet had an opportunity to be effectively implemented. HB 1323 finds itself in direct conflict with science-based wildlife management and circumvents CPW's beaver management strategy itself. According to CPW biologists' recommendations incorporated in the management strategy, as well as current U.S. Forest Service policies regarding wildfire mitigation programs, banning the relatively few legal harvest of beaver on public lands in Colorado will not result in significant population increases, increases, nor have a meaningful effect on wildfire reduction efforts. Further, the bill provides no funding, monitoring, or habitat enhancement matrix to ensure that it would expand wetlands and critical drainages and help with wildfire mitigation. What it will do is divert scarce resources from proven mitigation work and curtail a statewide application of the beaver management strategy. The bill strikes us as a thinly veiled attempt to prohibit human harvest of beaver under the guise of wildfire mitigation. This is simply an attack on our hunting heritage and science-based wildlife management itself. If the legislature's objective is to increase beaver abundance and the wetland benefits they provide, it should simply let CPW implement its own management strategy. HB 1323 achieves none of those objectives and is driven by sentiment against hunter-harvest at the expense of science-based wildlife management, proven ecological forest treatments, and at the expense of Colorado Parks and Wildlife itself. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members. My name is Dan Gates. I'm the Executive Director for the Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management. I'm also the President for the Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association, and I am a wildlife control operator. And I would probably say that I have proof that I would probably fondle, touch, feel, eat, trap, transport, translocate more beavers than anybody in this room combined. I've been doing this for the course of the last 40 plus years, and I can tell you honestly what has happened in that time period. Since Amendment 14 took effect in 1996, the restricted harvest, because of the avocational take essentially being taken off the plate except for cage traps, has been something that has dropped the harvest of beavers over the course of the last 40 years from what it was historically at highs of around 8,000 to 10,000 at one point in time to roughly 380 to maybe 1,000 beavers over the course of the year. That is not an exorbitant number when you look at the total beaver population that we have in the state of Colorado. What we do on the wildlife control side of things is effective because of what happens on the recreational side, the recreational side on public land. When people take public land opportunities, opportunities for recreational or avocational harvest, A lot of times they solve the problem for private land owners by doing it recreationally Because the beavers there the populations are decreased enough to where they don expand in their territories and get onto private property and create problems for waterways and irrigation companies in a variety of different locations and so forth. We would urge you to take into consideration what Colorado Parks and Wildlife has done with their statewide beaver management strategy and totality that includes recreational lab, publicational harvest of what CPW is trying to do to make sure that all wildlife is appropriately managed. Voting yes on this bill only creates a harder job for CPW and landowners and recreationalists as well. So we would urge a no vote. Thank you.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Bill Wambacher. I'm a water rights attorney for Arapaho County Water and Wastewater Authority, East Cherry Creek Valley Water and Sanitation District, and Legacy Water. And I'm here testifying in opposition to the bill today. The bill has evolved a fair amount since the early drafts. And while we appreciate the at the stakeholder meetings and the evolution of this concept, we are still concerned about the potential for this to frustrate the operation and maintenance of water infrastructure and to cause complications for the administration and operation of water rights. Beavers build dams near intake structures and around reservoirs that can redirect water flows and impede water collection. Beavers also cause water quality problems by introducing Giardia, which can be an issue for municipal water suppliers. When these situations arise, it's absolutely crucial that they be addressed immediately, whether that be in the form of the removal of beaver dams, relocation of beavers, or if absolutely necessary, the lethal taking of a beaver. Given the significant role that water service fees and tap fees play in the cost of housing and the current housing crisis in Colorado, it's imperative that this bill not increase the cost of water suppliers to operate their systems because all of those costs get passed on to consumers. We're also on the precipice of an historically dry water year, and any interference with the administration of water rights or delays in addressing injury to water rights caused by beavers will exacerbate the effects of the drought conditions. The bill fails to include express exemptions for the operation of water infrastructure and the protection of water rights, and this is too important of an issue to be silent on this topic. We also have other concerns, including the definition of public land, which we think should exclude land owned by cities, counties or special district. We don't understand the need for the rulemaking terms of the bill and are concerned about scope creep through rulemaking. And as other speakers have noted, the legislative declaration has concerning terms like the statement that beavers provide a cost free service, which is not consistent with water suppliers experience. And so as a result of the foregoing, I would respectfully ask that you vote no today. Thank you.

Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Ben Fickett. I'm a member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. I believe one of the greatest success stories in the history of our nation is a North American wildlife conservation model. One of the bedrock principles of that model is scientific management OF WILDLIFE. I WORRY WITH THE RECENT BALLOT INITIATIVES IN COLORADO AND THE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS ON THIS PARTICULAR BILL WILL DESTROY THE PUBLIC'S FAITH IN SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT OF COLORADO WILDLIFE. ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE, AS A PUBLIC LAND HUNTER IN COLORADO, I KILLED MY FIRST BEAVER ON JANUARY 17TH OF THIS YEAR. THAT BEAVER PROVIDED FIVE MEALS FOR MY FAMILY. I WAS amazed by how delicious beaver is i was able to to tan the hive myself and make a baby blanket for my friend's first porn and i've made several dozen pairs of earrings out of the tail that i tanned also myself i was able to render about two quarts of beaver fat and make hand cream that i've been able to give to my friends and family. Given the testimony we've heard that recreational take of beaver has no impact on the beaver population, I'd like to continue hunting these beaver and utilizing as much of them as I possibly can. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your testimony.

Thank you, Madam Chair and Committee. My name is Scott Horrock. I'm representing myself as a trapper, a long-life trapper. As long as the grass shall grow and the water shall flow, we shall be able to hunt, fish, trap, and gather in open and unclaimed areas. That is the National Treaty, not the Brno Treaty, that was made not only for the Indian, but for trappers and settlers and pioneers. And my livelihood was impacted drastically in 1996 with the passage of Amendment 14 that disallowed any kind of management techniques other than using cage traps. And if anybody's ever seen a cage trap to trap a beaver, it's very heavy and very big and very awkward and it doesn't work. Trappers are the true wildlife managers and the original game wardens back in the early 30s, 40s. I'm at a standstill here to hear all the mismanagement that goes on right here. Beavers are independent mortality. They can adjust the size of population by absorption of their young or having more young. And the assumption here is that all beavers build ponds to mitigate wildfires. It's not true. Beavers' den in banks along rivers that are really deep. And when you harvest a beaver the harvest data right here is based on beavers being shot And I have never I haven even have yet to reclaim a beaver that I shot that flowed down a river They sink and you can tell the difference between a beaver and an otter and a muskrat and a mink, even on damage control. So thanks for your time.

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Ivan James. I represent myself today here. I'm retired from a 40-year career with the U.S. Geological Survey, where I worked as a hydrologist, research hydrologist, research advisor, and research manager. In addition, for 29 years, I owned and managed 260 acres of timber property. There was a three-acre beaver dam on this property when I bought it, which had grown to 17 acres by the time I sold it. In short, I have a lot of professional experience with water science and a lot of practical experience with forestry and beavers. In this morning's paper, I saw a quote from that great conservationist, Gifford Pinchot, Learning is the gradual replacement of fantasy with fact. I would suggest that the claims in HB 26-1323 that beavers help prevent wildfires is in the fantasy phase unrelated to fact. Here are my points in opposition to this bill. The existing take of beavers in Colorado is so small as to be inconsequential to the overall beaver population, as evidenced by the Colorado Parks and Wildlife testimony at the last Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting. I know of absolutely no science that would support the claim that beavers prevent wildfire spread. Crown fires move forward, throwing burning pine cones and embers for a half mile or more, jumping streams, ponds, lakes, beaver dams, and restarting fires well past the barriers. This bill is an attempt to hang an anioning measure under the guise of a connection that is not only tenuous, but is probably an outright lie. Beavers are not an unmitigated blessing. They change the habitat in both positive and negative characteristics. While beaver dams attenuate some spring runoff for later release, this is done at a cost of much higher evapotranspiration, reducing overall water supplies. Beaver dams increase water temperature, threatening some of our trout species, which are already facing water temperature issues related to climate change. In Colorado, beavers feed heavily on aspen, allowing pines and spruce to outcompete them at a time when we're already having problems with aspen regeneration. Thank you.

Mr. Perricone. Thank you, Madam Chair. I believe the beaver management plan was first presented at the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission in January of this year It had concluded its stakeholder process prior and late last year I think you raise a good point with respect to the legislative overlay and application of their interpretation of the beaver management plan and the impacts that might have on Colorado parks and wildlife. I can tell you, for one, if there becomes a pattern or a belief that participation in a stakeholder process with Colorado Parks and Wildlife has the effect of being nullified by the General Assembly or otherwise circumvented by stakeholder engagement beyond the scope of that working group process, I think that the agency is going to have an awful tough time recruiting individuals to come to the table in earnest and believe that their involvement will result in meaningful science-based wildlife recommendations and subsequent implementation.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Representative Winter. While I don't profess to speak on everybody's behalf by any means, because I don't want anybody speaking on mine, I would say that it was perplexing to the participants of multiple stakeholder engagement. And I sat on the furbearer recommendation group for about five months and at the same time was a participant from the sportsman side of things on the Beaver Management Plan stakeholder process as well. We found it, some of us found it perplexing that we weren't discussing all furbearers in one conversation. We found that kicking one species out to a specific conversation, because they are under Chapter 3 of Colorado Parks and Wildlife, was a confusing component. As you then saw how things kind of translated out over the last four or five months on the commission level. I think it's confusing to the general public enough that do not participate in the management and or the recreational opportunities advocation will take or the conflict resolution of fur bearing species to be able to decide why this is any more important or less important than that. And I think just leaving it up to the experts to be able to make those appropriate decisions, as they have done for so many years at a variety of different levels, when they can turn around and make the decisions about specific species for specific reasons at specific times and specific methods of take. I hope that answers the question.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is a question for any of the trappers or anybody else who feels like they want to answer this. A lot of the emails that I've received on this topic have addressed the purpose and intent of the bill to address wildfire mitigation and the repairing of riparian wetlands. but also there's a lot of um a lot of support for this bill because it will um it means that there less taking of beaver and there mention of um one person in particular said you know i don want this to be a fashion thing And it kind of like the days of your where there were beaver hats I just curious is there a market for beaver pelts Is that a huge market? Is that part of, I guess, for the advocates of this bill, is that part of why they should be advocating for this is because there's such a huge market for beaver pelts? I see Mr. Gates is ready to go.

I'll go to Representative Johnson.

Thank you very much, Chair McCormick. And thank you again, Representative. I think over the course of my career, my lifespan, and there's historical proof to go along with this, and I'll reference that. Beaver populations have increased substantially since when I was a kid. And I can say that unequivocally, because back in the day, up until 1997, Colorado Parks and Wildlife used to do actual quotas per drainage, per tributary. and any beaver that was recreational harvested, you had to have a tag or a seal put on that beaver. They stopped that in 1997 because after Amendment 14 in 1996, when a lot of those tools were taken off the plate, they didn't feel a need to be able to do so. And then the market crashed. The viability of people being able to turn around and utilize the proper tools to be able to do so were much more expensive. There's not a place or a drainage that I don't see beavers at this point in time from when I was a kid and we see them in large proportionate numbers. And actually, we see them in locations that we hadn't seen them in over the course of the last 40 or 50 years. While the one representative indicated that they're mostly mountain, yeah, they are because there's typically more drainages, tributaries in the mountains that all then come into a main drainage than you have beavers that live in on those rivers and so forth. I can honestly say from a wildlife control standpoint and a recreational standpoint, there's no shortage of beavers. Could we have more? Possibly. Are we going to get back to the days where we had $10 million or $5 million or $2 million? not given the people and their tolerance levels or what they would want to do on private property, but we didn't have the people in the state of Colorado at that time either. So, yes, ma'am, I think that there would be a lot more beavers now than what there was in the last 40 years, and I think the way CPW has continued to manage them, there will continue to be an increase without forcing legislation on them to make decisions one way or the other.

I'll go this way this time. So when you're ready, you have two minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the committee. My name is Landon Gates. No relation to Dan, who was just at the table in the same chair. I'm here today on behalf of the Colorado Woolgers Association and the Colorado Cattlemen's Association, who are both in opposition to this bill. It should be no surprise that my clients are very active partners with DNR and CPW on most issues related to our state's management of our wildlife resources. As private landowners, we are proud to provide habitat to our state's wildlife. I know this bill is looking at the take of beavers on public land, but we do know that activities on public land can have impacts on adjacent private land and vice versa. The wool growers and the cattlemen have historically opposed bills like this that have been introduced in the legislature. we oppose inserting a very political process into what ought to be a science-based decision left up to experts at CPW. We view this bill as an anti-hunting and trapping bill cloaked in the very real and important need to prevent wildfires and reduce wildfire risk. We, however, along with many others that have already testified today, do not believe this bill accomplishes that goal. We're also disappointed that we are seemingly ignoring a very extensive stakeholder process to revise our beaver conservation and management plan. Madam Chair, you just asked a question a few minutes ago about the impact on future stakeholder meetings with the department and CPW. If this bill were to pass today, why would any stakeholder engage with the department on any future wildlife conservation efforts if that process and stakeholder input is going to be abandoned? Our executive vice president, Aaron Carney, along with several of our Cattlemen's members, did participate in the stakeholder process. And I think it will be very hard to keep them coming to the table continually, working with the department on similar efforts.

My name's Jennifer Burby. I'm here for the Colorado Outfitters Association. All of my points have been made prior. Thank you, representatives and chair, for listening today. This bill comes with a solution to a problem that it didn't cause. Smokey the bear was wrong. We have a fuels and a drought and a dying forest. As important as beavers are, they cannot bring that back. As important as this body is, we cannot and should not be managing wildlife from this room or this building. That's done by 1,200 paid volunteers, volunteers, employees, at a world-renowned wildlife agency in this state. It's funded, and the entire process is taken care of through the North American model, on the backs of sportsmen, on the wallets of sportsmen, who show up every year multiple times to pay for every program and for every animal that is managed in this state. Please, we respectfully ask for a no vote on this bill and a positive vote for the Parks and Wildlife Agency to do their job, which they do very, very well. Thank you.

My name is Sam. Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members. My name is Sam Karkoff. I am representing myself. I may have jumped here rather quickly, but I'm very excited to be here. I'm just kidding. The same. Everybody said what I had to say. As a business owner, organizational leader, et cetera, I look at 150 page document from the CPW, the best wildlife organization probably in the United States. And then I see an eight page bill that contradicts that. And I, as a leader, I don't know how I could I could move forward with something like this. when I look at both sides of this issue. That just doesn't make sense to me. I certainly wouldn't move forward with the language in the bill, like others have mentioned, and ignore what the CPW does and what they do best. As a hunter, sportsman, angler, all those things, the fact of the matter is the numbers are we have, I don't know, 50,000 beavers in the state. I don't know. The allowable harvest is around 10,000. We only take about 1,300. Those are numbers from the CPW. I may be off a couple on those. So once again, this is not an issue. This feels like an attack again on hunters and sportsmen who are not the issue here. Listen, I like beavers too. I think we should be talking about reintroducing them and not banning more things from the communities that exist around this state. So yes I respectfully decline or excuse me I respectfully urge you to decline this bill and move on to other priorities that are more pressing in this state Thank you all for your time Thank you for your testimony And for our folks from CPW if one at a time I have you introduce yourself

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. My name is Mike Kortuch. I'm the Assistant Director for the Policy and Planning Branch with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Thank you. And then Mr. Vieira.

Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Boyd Wright. I'm a Native Aquatic Species Coordinator with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. All right. Thank you all for being here. This is our panel, so I'll entertain questions from the committee. Representative Johnson.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I can start with that. Thank you, Representative. You know, the two, the beaver conservation management strategy, as well as the bill, they do share some similar goals, and we do appreciate the intent of the bill, which is really to bolster wildfire resilience. CBW's beaver management strategy specifically, though, lays out six really broad goals and many recommendations kind of under those and strategies that are going to do a handful of things. It's going to help bolster the beaver population, increase suitable beaver habitat, encourage coexistence, emphasize beaver translocation to unused and suitable habitat. And it also allows for sustainable recreational harvest. So, again, like this plan was released about three weeks ago. We're already thinking strategically about how to implement some of those recommendations from it. You know, several of which we believe will help the agency make the most informed and kind of scientifically driven decisions possible. and I don't know if my colleagues wanted to jump in as well.

Representative Garcia-Sander. Thank you, Madam Chair. This is a question for Mr. Wright with CPW.

All right. I have a question for Mr. Vieira. I'm curious to know if CPW has targeted different areas of our state on public lands that do need restoration of beavers that may be part of the overall management plan, that if a ban on recreational hunting on all public lands would significantly target the areas where we need restoration of beavers?

Thank you. Thank you for your answer. Representative Johnson, you had a follow up question.

Mr. Gates.

Representative Story. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Who would like that? Mr. Vieira?

Thank you. I think we have time for one more question. AML Winter. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Vieira, if you instated a mandatory check, would that drive a fiscal note to the state of Colorado? Mr. Vieira.

All right That ends this panel Thank you all so much for your time and testimony today We appreciate you showing up We going to move into folks that have signed up in support of the bill next And I have some preferred panels here. So I'll call up Jen Clanahan, Joanna Hamburger Delaney Rudy Eric Washburn and Elaine Leslie Okay, great. Well, I'm going to start with the folks that are here in person, and I'm going to go this way this time. So, Ms. Clanahan, you'll be up first. Your mic is on. That's great. Give us your name, who you represent, and you'll have two minutes.

Your next little tiny button where it plugs into the table. It's a gray button. Teeny tiny. There you go. Give us your name and you'll have two minutes. Good afternoon, Chair McCormick and the honorable members of this committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of this bill.

Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Yes, when you're ready, the tiny little gray button, you got it. Two minutes. Good afternoon, Chair McCormick and the Honorable Members of this Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of HB 261323.

Thank you for your testimony. We'll go online to Mr. Eric Washburn.

Next up is Dr. Elaine Leslie. Go ahead when you're ready. You have two minutes.

provides a measured response, and I urge you to support it. Thank you for your testimony. So, committee, this is our panel of witnesses. What questions do we have? Representative Johnson.

Ms. Clanahan.

Representative Johnson. Thank you. And then, yeah, because you said restoring beaver population. From the testimonies we heard before, they said we actually have more beaver population now than we did prior. So I'm just curious, you know, you say restore, and then we're also looking at this for fire mitigation, not for beaver restoration.

Thank you. Thank you for the question. So the strategy the beaver strategy that CPW put out gives an estimate of the population in 1941 of about 50 beavers in the state They did a study back in 1940 whatever it was and they estimate that today population is also about 50 beavers So it has not grown since the 40s and that's part of the concern. I have a question that I'd like to pose. We had heard earlier about in the plans of what CBW is going to move forward with next with their mandatory checks on where so they can map exactly where and how many beavers are taken in different watersheds and then be able to strategically implement caps where needed and to identify the particular watersheds that may need help and those that don't. So my question is for that to move forward sounds great, you know, as far as restoring beavers, whereas the bill contemplates really just eliminating recreational take but doesn't have a specific targeted area necessarily. So that alone does seem to bring up a little bit of a conflict with a broad stroke versus a very targeted strategic spot.

Thanks. Thank you so much, Chair. My name is Delaney Rudy. And I think that something that is maybe misunderstood is that this is in conflict somehow with CPW's management strategy. I was also a stakeholder in the development of that plan. And we really see this as a complement to the strategy. There are parts of the strategy that are really terrific. I think that sort of in response to your question, I think that if this legislation doesn't move forward, the strategy of identifying areas that have concentrated take – that information gathering is terrific and frankly overdue. But the context here is if we have beavers who are being restored naturally through their natural mechanisms or the investment in beavers being put out into some ecosystem, if we have no restraints on trapping and hunting, we could make that investment and have that ecosystem be investing in itself in a way and immediately lose that benefit. And even where there are beavers and there are beaver structures, the removal of those beavers, if those structures aren't maintained, they will disintegrate and then those benefits are lost to the landscape. So it really is complementary to the plan in that the parts of the strategy that are really robust in helping with nuisance beaver coexistence and relocation are bolstered by when beavers make it to those stream reaches that we really need them on public land. They're able to stay there and continue doing their good work.

Thank you for that. I see Representative Smith and then Representative Story. So is that me?

I don't think we have time for everybody to answer it. Ms. Clanahan.

Representative Story. Thank you, Madam Chair. My question is directed to Ms. Leslie. And I'm sorry if I didn't catch your potential title.

Dr. Leslie. Thank you. I assumed so much. So I appreciate you being here and your historical work with National Park Service. CPW has mentioned that the recreational take is far below their threshold. And but even if that's true, like what is that based on if it's, you know, not mandatory reporting, it's voluntary. And then also, how is that impacting, you know, the beaver population in terms of it having not grown in decades?

We have time for one more question. Representative Sucla.

All right. Representative Sucla.

Johanna.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you all for your time and testimony today. We appreciate you showing up. I'll move on to the next panel. I have some folks I'm going to call up for in person. Aubyn Royal, Nova Snow. I have also remotely Allie Henderson, Steve Kudron, Charles Seymour. I'm going to get a couple other people that are signed up in person to come forward. Genevieve Jacoby, Anna Sondheim. Hopefully we can fill all four chairs. Great. Great. All right. I will start on my right again. So if you – it looks like you're so ready. You'll have two minutes. Go ahead and introduce yourself and give us your testimony. Great. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony. Tony, you're up next. It looks like your microphone's already on, so go ahead and give us your name, and you'll have two minutes to testify.

Thank you for your testimony. And yes, when you're ready, yep, you got the right button. Go ahead with your testimony. You have two minutes.

And when you're ready, it's actually where the plug plugs into the table, a little tiny gray button. There you go. Thank you. You might want to pull the microphone closer to you, though.

thank you. My name is Allie Henderson. I'm a Gunnison County resident, and I represent the

please vote yes thank you thank you for your testimony next we'll go to Steve Kudron

your support of House Bill 1323. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And next up is

Thank you for your testimony. Committee, questions for this panel of witnesses? Looks like you all are off the hook. Oh, wait.

advisor is Dr. Joanna Lambert in environmental science studies, and I also am getting my certificate in hydraulic science as well, which is its own graduate department. Thank you.

Ms. Snow Robbins-Wallstein. Absolutely. Thank you so much for providing the opportunity to conceptualize more of these thoughts. I have a lot to say in a short amount of time, so apologies that that was coming through. I want to pull up my notes just to keep us on track. What I was going to show here, friends, is that, for example, let's just start here. During the 2020 Mullen-Cameron Peak East Troublesome Fire, right, this was something discussed before, but I don't think we're really putting the full scientific weight onto the fact that these beaver-influenced stream reaches physically remained three to five times greener than any other stream reach without beavers. And this is not just one representative case. This is also shown with current of my research in public land corridors throughout Boulder County, Western Slope, where I went and did my undergrad in Fort Lewis College. we clearly saw the filtration capabilities, sedimentation, and in turn, wildfire resiliency. Very, very interestingly enough. I also wanted just to bring weight to the fact of how much these human-led restoration efforts really cost taxpayers and just the scientific data on there and how much money we're actually getting from these fur-bearing permits and kind of comparing that science. Thank you so much for your time.

This bill is talking about avocational or for commercial take. So they're for live traps.

Ms. Jacoby. Thank you. Genevieve Jacoby, thank you. I have gotten more involved in wildlife advocacy in the last year, and it is well known that beavers are drowned. I've said this in front of CPW. Nobody disputes it. I am not a scientist. So I don have studies that I besides the ones I read before me to tell you about it but it is occurring and it is a commonplace occurrence Perhaps others of you that have a science background can speak more directly to those articles I don see any takers any other questions from our committee for any of

for all of us that aren't super familiar. It's put into the water. They go in there. Beavers can only live under holding their breath for 15 minutes, so then they drowned, right? Thank you.

If that population grows, where do they go?

Are you directing that to Ms. Jacoby? Anyone on the panel who wants to?

Go ahead, Ms. Goldstein.

Okay. Just go ahead and give us your name so the people listening can know who's talking.

Representative Johnson. Last question, I promise. So follow up on that, how much of that is public because that's what this bill is addressing and how much is private?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Seymour, can you share with us what beaver dams do for summer runoff, runoff flows, flows of water?

Thank you. And that ends our time for this panel. So I want to thank all of you for showing up and for your testimony. We appreciate your time. I'm going to call up the next panel. In person, I have Rhonda Dern, Christina Clayton, Mr. Roland Halpern, and Sherry Tippie. online, Mr. Rainer Gershbosch, Peter May, Brenda Lee, Jeffrey Hirsch. Somebody that signed up online actually here in person, is that what's happened? Okay. There will be one more panel, so maybe I'll wait until there's an easier chair for you to get to. Then I'll also call Mr. Sheehan Meager online. All right. We'll start with our folks in person. and I'll go from my left to my right this time. So when you're ready, make sure your microphone is on, that tiny little button, and you'll have two minutes to testify. Thank you so much.

It goes really fast. So if you'd like to just wrap up with a closing statement.

Thank you for your testimony. Go ahead when you're ready, your mic's on.

Beavers modify habitat, which enhances fire resiliency and creates refuge for other species. Beavers improve water security, sequester carbon by storing massive amounts of water and carbon. A new research study shows in Switzerland a beaver wetland stored over 2,240,000 pounds of carbon, up to 10 times more than areas without beavers. Fewer beavers means increased wildfire risk, and we're in a climate crisis, which makes it urgent that we increase waste to sequester carbon, and beavers provide that. Beavers are a keystone species. They hold our ecosystems together. They're water engineers and they're herbivores. Therefore, beavers are a part of the solution to the climate crisis. It's mind-boggling to me in this state, in 2026, You allow beavers to be killed for around $30 for every one of their lives taken. It's absurd, non-sustainable, and ethically and morally wrong. The powerful trapping lobby should not be the deciders on something that is this important to the health of Colorado's ecosystem and the values of the majority of Coloradans. Trapping on public lands is against the public trust. Public lands belong to the public and the wildlife that live here. Reasons trappers have given for wanting to allow for trapping and killing of a sentient species are, it's fun, it's part of our family wreck, we want to sell these pelts to people in Russia. The cons for killing this worthy and beneficial species far outweigh the reasons to impose such cruelty. This should be a part of history that ends today. No more trapping and killing of beavers on public lands. And livestock, not beavers, cause giardia. So whoever asked that question. As an old nurse, I'll say there's lots of giardia from livestock. I haven't seen any from beavers. Thank you for your testimony. Mr. Halpern. Chairman McCormick, distinguished committee members, my name is Roland Halpern. I'm the executive director for Colorado Voters for Animals. You may already know that beavers are a keystone species, meaning many other species of animals, plants and people in the environment, depend on them and the habitat they build. But did you know that they also might be the key to helping reduce our wildfire crisis? That's a direct quote from the U.S. Forest Service. There are hundreds of studies documenting the benefits of beaver populations on the ecosystem. Here is one. It's titled Smokey the Beaver. Beaver dammed riparian corridors stay green during wildfire throughout the western United States. These ribbons of fire riparian corridors may be particularly important for species that are unable to physically escape wildfire They can provide temporary habitat for fish amphibians reptiles small mammals wild and domestic undulants and birds that are unable to outrun or outfly the spread of flames. We've heard a lot about water rights, but don't beavers also have water rights? I mean, after all, they were here before we were. I previously passed out a photograph of the aftermath of the Mullen fire that was taken by Dr. Fairfax, who was mentioned earlier. And on the right of the Beaver Dam, there is total destruction. On the left, there is no destruction at all. To say they have no impact doesn't seem to bear up the photographic evidence. I don't know if they teach history in school these days. One class on the American Revolution that stuck out in my mind introduced Thomas Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense. Payne insisted political decisions should be judged not by customs, not what is convenient for the powerful, or attached to old habits, but by reason, justice, and the common good. Applying that concept here, if a native species creates public ecological benefits such as water storage, wetland restoration, drought resilience, biodiversity support, and reduced wildfire intensity, then protecting that species is not sentimentality but common sense. Please use your common sense in voting for this bill. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And yes, ma'am, when you're ready, there's a little tiny... Yes. Wait. I need you to turn on your microphone, which is a tiny little button. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Halpern. That's okay. You might want to bring the microphone a little closer to you. It moves. All righty. And then give us your name, and you'll have two minutes. My name is Sherry Tippy, and I have an organization called Wildlife 2000. I've been life trapping and relocating beavers since 1985. And humans cause giardia, by the way. there's such a good story with that anyway when I first started live trapping beaver I had never seen a beaver it was a big thing beaver taking down trees on a golf course and then I hear that there's a chance that Rocky Mountain National Park would take some beaver and I talked to David Stevens took some beaver up there and I was sort of off and running because it was all over the news and everything. I got a call from a fishing club, 12-mile fishing club, on the other side of Fair Play. They wanted beaver because they wanted to fish. Something had happened to the beaver, they died, and they called a human engineer, wanted $20,000 to make ponds. when they saw me on TV, they called me and I gave them, my God, eight, nine beaver for nothing. And I kept getting calls like that. People wanting beaver. A lot of people realize the benefits of these creatures. And beaver do not live in colonies. It just irritates me. Beaver do not live in colonies. They live in families. They breed according to the availability of food. They've got a mom, a dad, and they are very territorial and protective of that space. They're just the best. They do all these phenomenal things, but they're also so cool and just nice nice animals There just so much I have cards If anybody wants to know about beaver please call me at home you can even go live trapping with me this year Thank you for your testimony I go online now to Mr Renier Gershbosch Go ahead and you'll have two minutes. Thank you, Chair McCormick, members of the committee. My name is Renier Gershbosch, and I urge you to support HB 26-1323. CBW has invested real work into beaver conservation and management and occupancy and harvest data do provide useful information. CPW's own data do not fully resolve abundance, trend, ecological resilience, and total mortality across all pathways. Permitting continued killing of nature's most effective water engineering for avocational or commercial purposes on public land based on a narrow public biological threshold assumed by cpw is not enough and increasingly difficult to justify in an area of rising water stress worsening drought and wildfires the necessary standard is protection of ecological function and the public benefit based on best available science peers are unique in their ability to reshape entire river valleys through their effects on hydrology habitat and ecological resilience. HB 26-13-23 is practical and measured. The bill is a forward-looking approach to protect the public at large through protecting the hydrological work beavers do. The bill is supported by best available science to help steer public lands stewardship into the 21st century. Public lands are 80 percent of Colorado. In an area of rising water stress and this year's record low snow park. The bill is not only sensible, it is necessary and certainly past due. Thank you. Please support this bill. Thank you for your testimony. Next up is Mr. Peter May. When you're ready, go ahead. You'll have two minutes. Hello, Madam Chair and Committee. Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Peter May. I'm the Fire Chief and Executive Director for programs for E3KFM, Punalini Fire Management near the Sand Dunes in Crestone, Colorado. We began in 2003 as learning about fire, and in 1993, I became a firefighter, and we learned to put the wet stuff on the red stuff. We learned very quickly there's not a lot of wet, and so we developed a different perspective, and that's balancing the elements on the landscape. When we learned about this, we started to see that beavers would retain the moisture and slow down the water. We then started to rehydrate the landscape in the best way we could. We began putting more effort into seeing what beavers lived here. In 2012, we did a survey with Colorado College. We found that there were beavers on several creeks, not too many, but some. Now there are none. And we are starting to do the surveys again, and we're not seeing any in our area. This is in the San Luis Valley. We have the compact. We have the closed basin project. We have open agricultural lands in the winter. We have a lot of factors going on. I want to urge us to not just look at wildfire that beavers will support the resiliency to, but also flooding. If you look at the floods that happened in Durango and Pagosan, if you look at the Colorado beaver maps, you'll see there's not a lot of beavers upstream of those in those in those drainages, possibly causing the high intensity flooding. When we look at fire, we're looking at high intensity and low intensity. We also know that the mycelium can pair with the beaver to start to hydrate and rehydrate and become a lot of the landscape to become much more resilient than it is right now. now. So there's a lot to say with that, but I would just urge us to do. There's a lot of good points made on both sides, but I really feel this is important to protect the people, and if we're restoring them, it doesn't make sense to kill them. Thank you for your time today. Thank you for your testimony. Next up is Brenda Lee. When you're ready, go ahead with your testimony. Thank you, Chair McCormick and members of the committee. My name is Brenda Lee, and I'm here to urge you to vote yes on House Bill 1323. Beavers play a critical and cost-effective role in ecosystem management. Their presence supports water retention, carbon storage, improves habitat, and helps mitigate wildfire risks. benefits we receive without expensive human-engineered solutions. Too often we try to manage our way out of challenges that nature already knows how to address if we allow it. We are facing increasing environmental pressures. Rising temperatures and reduced snowpack are contributing to pine beetle infestations and heightened wildfire risk. In this context, removing beavers, one of the few natural systems that help buffer these impacts, work against our efforts to protect communities, forests, and watershed. When a licensed trapper takes a beaver from public land for commercial gain, one person profits. But the loss belongs to everyone. The wetlands that beaver maintained, the water it sustained, the fire-resistant riparian buffer it created, those are public goods. Every Coloradan downstream of that decision bears the cost. The ecosystem services beavers provide are no longer a nice-to-have. They're an urgent public need. Beavers have a right to exist independent of their usefulness to humans. But even if we focus solely on human benefit, the case is clear. Removing beavers eliminates a proven natural tool for reducing environmental risk. The short-term gain for an individual trapper comes at a broader cost to public safety and ecosystem health. This bill is an opportunity to make a thoughtful, forward-looking choice based on the realities of the world we live in today. I respectfully urge you to vote yes. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And I'll go to Mr. Sheehan Meeker. You're up next. Thank you, Madam Chairperson and people of the committee for letting us have our time to speak on this. My name is Sheehan Marr. I've lived in Colorado most of my life on the Front Range and on the Western Slope. And what we know, I'm representing Roaring Fork Autobahn here today as a human beaver conflict mitigator and also somebody who does repairing and restoration and former U.S. Forest Service employee. And I just want to say the wild – these public spaces and these public lands that we have here in Colorado are very often Forest Service and BLM lands high up in the watershed in these mountains. And those are our water towers that deliver water to Grand Junction and Denver later on in the year. And because of the public land and the beavers' ability to hold that water and slow the flow of it, it is imperative that we ban the killing of beavers on these public lands where we need their beneficial benefits the most. Also this bill is not calling for any it not banning the killing and trapping of beavers in the state There is still plenty of that that goes on on branch lands and on private lands So hunters can work with private landowners if they want to continue to harvest beaver. That option is still available to them. But really, the ecological value is to keep them higher in the watershed as much as possible. And even if we do have a conflict beaver that moves into, let's say, a landowner that one of the representatives brought up, we can still use nonlethal mitigation factors in trapping and relocating them. And that's what I do. We're partnering with the Forest Service this year to build beaver dam analogs where there are not beavers, but we want beavers. So a lot of land management agencies realize the benefits of this. and I hope that you guys can pass this bill and this committee and forward it on to the General Assembly so that we can protect these beavers going on in the future. And thank you everyone that spoke about all the ecological benefits and are here benefiting and advocating for our beaver relatives. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Committee, any questions for this panel? Representative Story. Can't let a whole panel go without questions. Thanks so much to all of you for being here, and I appreciate your perspective and your thoughts on all of this. Ms. Dern, you were going to say a few more remarks and just wondered if you might be able to complete what you weren't able to share. Ms. Dern. It's not on. You have to do the little tiny button. Yeah. Thank you, Representative Story. I appreciate you asking me to go on from there. And I was listening to some of the people that were talking like retired from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. One of the guys that said they hadn't heard any research on how beavers mitigate fires and how they can help do that. No research. I think he's been retired too long because if you look at the research, There's lots of peer-reviewed research that's out there that answers that question and that shows that beavers do help mitigate fires. And the guy that said, oh, it couldn't get across the road, well, it might have stopped it at the road. And the moisture around the area where the beaver dam was most likely helped the fires not spread as much. Also, the guy that said the only thing that is good for fire mitigation, one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service guys was like, thinning trees. And a lot of the newest peer-reviewed research says that thinning trees increases wind tunnels and increases fires, whereas the new research that's coming out that says increasing beaver dams helps to mitigate fire research. So sometimes research is old, and those were the extra couple things I wanted to say. Thank you. Thank you. Representative Johnson. Thank you, Madam Chair. This is to anyone on the panel who sees fit. We've talked about how beaver numbers have stayed consistent, but fires going up. Most of the panel testimony is on the preservation of beavers themselves. I didn't care much on the wildfire aspects of things. Really trying to wrap my head around if the beavers have stayed stable with what we're already currently doing and with CPW coming out with what just was released three weeks ago if they staying stable but the fires are raising where is the data that the beavers are helping with the mitigation of fire And this isn just a way to try to limit hunting on beavers and we putting wildfire at the forefront of this bill. Maybe we're not doing all that. I have to wait. Wait. You have to be called on so that the people listening can know who's talking, and it would be great if you raised your hand. Mr. Halpern. Yes, thank you. Thank you for that question. Two that I didn't get to. One is impacts of beaver dams on riverscape burn severity during megafires in the Rocky Mountain region. Our results indicate that riverscapes with a high degree of manipulation by beavers have significant resistance to burning during megafires. This resistance may also provide valuable secondary benefits in positive ecosystem health, water quality, and biodiversity. Another one, fighting fires one beaver dam at a time put out by the U.S. Forest Service. a lack of beavers has resulted in an increased intensity of drought and wildfires in the west as fires spread rapidly across parched landscapes. Wetlands Act is a natural fuel break, giving firefighters a chance for containment. And I actually had, there's like 200 that I didn't bring. There's that many. Representative Johnson. I guess I'll try my question in a different way. Beavers have stayed consistent in number in Colorado, but fires are still going up. So I'm curious with why we're pointing out that the beavers are what are going to help change with wildfire mitigation when they're the stable factor and not looking at other mitigation efforts. May I anybody want to I see I saw online first, Mr. Mar. Yeah, if I may, that's a great question. And I think we should be looking at as many tools in our tool set right now to fight fires. And for us to say, you know, beavers have a small influence on it and negate it and having it in our tool shed and our toolkit is kind of short-sighted. One of the things that I forgot to mention was sedimentation from wildfires. So after we have wildfire and then we get our spring rains, those rains bring in a lot of sediment. And then that sediment impacts our water quality. The Hyde Park fire in 2012, when I was living in Fort Collins, the runoff the next following year was impacting the Fort Collins water supply. And if they didn't have Horsetooth Reservoir, they would have to bring in water for the residents. But by having beavers and a series of check dams and creeks up and down the watershed holds that sediment so that it's not massively released into the water supply. So an after effect of fire, a way that this can be, you know, saving us money is through the beaver's ability to prevent that ash from running into the watersheds and impacting our water quality for our residents. I also see Mr. May. Thank you. There's multiple levels to an answer to your question. And one is we haven't we didn't see a lot of fire for a long time and the fuels have built up. That's one of the main things in across the West. We didn't have either the prescribed fire or the lightning strikes or we didn't allow the fires to burn. The second thing is the hydrological cycle of the West is also impaired in that sense of the beaver dams will allow the water to then evap or transpire, which often is a bad thing in the watershed, but is nevertheless a very important part of the watershed. And what we seeking to do in our local area is to get the beavers back so that the mycelium can then hold the water when it does stay So hopefully that answers your question about why do we have the same amount of beavers but more fire There a lot of factors going on here And I think it might be more than our time here today, but I think beavers are a very, very important part, mainly because look how many of us are paying attention now. That's probably the biggest deal. We're also using prescribed fire when we can when it's good. And I think you can see, like in Nebraska right now, if you don't have fire in a fire-adapted ecosystem for a long time, you're going to get these hundreds of thousands of acre fires. And what we're looking for is actually mosaics and not all the forests burn like East Troublesome. And it was amazing that the beavers actually were able to, like, hold off the fire where they were established. So I don't want to keep going, but thank you. Mr. Gershbosch. Thank you, Chair McCormick. I just want to introduce a new concept, which is not really that new. It's been started in the 1970s by the Potsdam Institute of Atmospheric Science. They established nine safety zones for planetary safety zones for this planet of ours, which is the only one we know at this stage. Seven of these safety zones have been broken. The hydrological cycle is part of that. The reasons are multifold. The absence of beavers certainly has added to the lack of hydrology. Climate change is moving on. Temperatures are increasing. Beavers are staying steady or declining throughout the United States. So the impact is, yes, we have less water. We need to store more water. So I believe that beavers are essentially tool in our toolbox. And at this stage, we need to really employ all the tools we have, not just data, which might be incomplete or twisted in some form of action to support a heritage type attitude towards continued trapping and hunting. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Oh, Miss Lee, did you also want to answer that question? Yeah, I was just going to be really quick. I think really the question is not so much as if beavers are the one that's been constant, the population numbers. The question is, if they were increasing, how would that have an impact, given all these increasing reasons that we have such high wildfire risk? So the fact that the land once held so many more beavers and no longer is holding that same number and we're just keeping it constant really isn't giving the beavers the benefit of, well, whoa, what have we doubled or whatever that number is that scientists came up with. then what impact really would it have given all these other human factors that are or factors that are increasing our wildfire risk right now? So I think the question is not so much because it's constant. How come that hasn't changed things? What if we increased it? What change would we see? So that's all. All right. Thank you all very much for your testimony today. We appreciate you showing up. I have a few more people to call before we get to our last panel. So I will call up, I think, Mr. Jeffrey Hirsch. Yes. And I have Valerie Hunter-Goss online and Deanna Meyer online. I have five names that are going to be on the last panel. So if you know you're on the last panel, don't jump up now, but is there anyone else in the room that wanted to testify in favor of this bill that's not Delilah, Malone, Renee, Marotti, Kristen, Heckendorf, Vincent, Sue, or Michael Saul? If there's anybody else not of those five names I just named, come up now. All right. Great. you're up. So make sure you, yeah, turn it on, give us your name, and you'll have two minutes to test it. My name is Jeff Hirsch. I actually have a year toward a master's in environmental science from University of Toronto and York University, although probably you'd never know it, but I do. Okay. The case for all the positive effects that beavers bring by their very existence as the beneficial animal they are already are well known by this panel. From water quality improvement to creation of wetlands in a more diverse and healthy biodiverse system, this state couldn't afford to hire enough people to even come close to what a population of beavers do for free. That alone by any measure of common sense should direct and support any law and regulation to protect the beaver as much as humanly possible. Whatever negative effects you have heard in arguments against protecting beavers are easily mitigated by readily available cheap and non-lethal measures, such as beaver deceivers, pond levelers, culvert exclusion fencing, and tree protection. It is known that with or without these regulations, beavers will be killed by farmers, ranchers, and so-called wildlife control officers who remain unregulated, unlicensed, and don't even have to report the number of beavers they kill as so-called nuisance animals. Given that fact, it makes even more sense to protect beavers wherever and however they can be protected for the benefit of the land and water of this state, particularly given the current and perhaps future drought Colorado is experiencing. This is as close to a no-brainer as this panel is ever going to get when it comes to animal protection. I should also add that even if you want to discount fire mitigation, There are so many other myriad benefits that have been shown in beaver habitat from insects and then birds and then mammals increasing and becoming a much healthier ecosystem where there are beavers. That's it. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. We'll go online to Valerie Hunter-Goss. Is something wrong with this? Yes. Yes, there's something wrong with your video. If you'd like to just turn your video off, we can just have your audio testimony. There. Gotcha. Okay. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Valerie Hunter-Goss. I'm here in support of House Bill 1323. Beavers play an important role in wildfire mitigation. They act as a natural firefighter by constructing dams that create wetlands. The lush green slows or stops the spread of wildfire. The wetland increases water storage, and it raises the water table, reducing wildfire severity. Effective wildfire mitigation is about what we restore. with healthy riparian areas and wetlands we have natural fire breaks Mountain communities can be greatly affected by wildfires They should have a voice in minimizing the devastating effects of wildfires I don't believe CPW invited homeowners associations and mountain communities to their stakeholder meetings. This bill would benefit every resident living in Colorado. Even urban area residents are affected by wallfire smoke. I thought the plume of smoke in the sky coming from the High Park fire in June 2012 looked like Armageddon. My friend lost her home that first day. Eight years later, the Cameron Peak fire in 2020 had a huge smoke column that could be seen for miles. It burned for two months. Then we have the flash muds following wildfires after the burns. Currently, hunters are allowed to kill an unlimited number of beavers on public lands. This is outrageous given the serious drought we're facing. Please think holistically and protect our natural water saver on our public lands by passing House Bill 1323. It allows science-based wildlife mitigation aligned with Colorado parks and wildlife values. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And we'll go to Deanna Meyer. Thank you, Chair McCormick and members of the committee. My name is Deanna Meyer, and I'm the Executive Director of Prairie Protection. I live in Douglas County and have devoted my life to protecting land and keystone species. And I thank you for the chance to speak in strong support of House Bill 1323. The opposition claims beavers can't slow five After all, flames jump freeways, so how could a pond stop a megafire? But that's missing the point entirely. No one says beaver dams halt every crown fire in its tracks. What the science shows, and it's overwhelming, is that beaver-engineered wetlands create fire-resistant refugees that stay green when everything else burns. Peer-reviewed studies from Colorado megafires like Cameron Peak and East Troublesome across the West prove it. Beaver dammed riparian corridors burn three times less severely than similar areas without beavers. In one analysis of recent megafires, 89% of beaver-modified riverscapes act as fire refugia, intact green oases versus only 60% without them. These saturated zones, raised water tables, and lush vegetation don't just resist burning. They slow spread in the riparian corridors that matter most for water quality, wildlife, livestock and community safety. Entire river stretches stayed unburned because beaver dams turned them into living fire breaks. Too wet, too green to ignite. Now contrast that with the so-called solution of aggressive mechanical thinning pushed as the fix. Thinning is often destructive insanity. It rips out canopy shade, exposes the forest floor to scorching sun and drying weeds, leaves behind piles of slash that become explosive new fuel, and carves roads that ignite ignitions. It dries everything out, making the landscape more flammable, not less. Studies show poorly done thinning can increase fire intensity and spread, turning once-shaded moist forests into tinderboxes. It's expensive, temporary, and harms biodiversity. While beaver delivers permanent self-sustaining protection at zero cost to taxpayers, public lands are our last best chance to preserve keystone wildlife that enhances resiliency against the fires we all fear. Don't let trappers remove beavers from these fire prone areas. Let them stay Let them build Let nature engineers protect our water our lands and our communities far better than chainsaws ever could Pass House Bill 1323 Thank you Thank you for your testimony. Committee, do we have any questions for these three witnesses? All right. Seeing none. Thank you all for your time today. We appreciate you showing up to testify. I will call up the last closing panel on this bill, which is Delia Malone remotely, Renee Mariotti in person, Kristen Heckendorf remotely, Vincent Hsu remote, and Michael Saul in person. And again, if there was anyone else in the room that wanted to testify, this is your last chance to come forward. All right. I will start with the people that are here in person. So who's ready? I'll start with you. You look like you're going for the button. So if you'll give us your name and who you represent, and you'll have two minutes. Hello. Okay. Hi, everyone. Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members. You've all been very, very gracious to give us so much time today. I had no idea it would be so long, but thank you, and I can tell everyone's been very attentive still in asking so many questions, so I really appreciate your time. I'm here today representing, I am a volunteer, and I am representing 60,000 members of the Colorado Sierra Club. We are made up of passionate activists who are here through my representation today. The Sierra Club of Colorado strongly asks that you vote yes in support of House Bill 1323. I currently live in Broomfield, but I previously lived in Louisville during the Marshall fire. I personally saw the house, the fire raging towards my home. Thankfully, I was not one of the people who lost their homes. But our community was forever changed.

Wow, that goes fast. Darn it. It does go fast. Go ahead and wrap up, and then tell us your name. I have your name written down, but the people listening need to have your name.

Thank you for your testimony. Yes, sir. When you're ready, go ahead. Give us your name and you'll have two minutes.

Thank you for your testimony. We'll go online to Delia Malone.

We can hear you.

Can you wrap up, Ms. Tom?

Thank you for your testimony. And next up is Mr. Su.

Thank you for your testimony. And then, Ms. Heckendorf, you're up next. Go ahead and give us your testimony.

Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Committee, any questions? Representative Stewart.

Sorry.

Representative Zucla.

Sure.

Representative Story.

Absolutely. Thank you for the question.

natural critters in Colorado. Thank you. AML Winter? No? Any other questions from our committee? All right, I'm not seeing any, so thank you all very much for your time and testimony today. We appreciate you showing up. So we already had last call for testimony, so that does end the testimony phase of our hearing, and we will go into a very slight recess to wait for our bill sponsor to come back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Back to order. We have our bill sponsors, and we're ready for the amendment phase. Bill sponsors, do you have any amendments?

Would you like to move your amendment, and then we can discuss it?

I need a second.

Second.

We'll go with Story.

Representative Velasco, tell us about L001.

Thank you. I have just one question about the penalty fines that you have reduced with this amendment. That previously I think it was on the level with similar to the take of endangered species. And now it's on the level with what? I don't know. Like, was this some targeted amount that's more on level with other species? I know there's all kinds of different finds in there, and I didn't look into what you were lowering it to. Representative Lindsay.

Any other questions on this amendment from the committee Any objection to this amendment from the committee Seeing none l zero zero one is adopted are there any other amendments No madam chair are there any other amendments from the committee seeing none the amendment phase is done and we're to the wrap-up stage bill sponsors Representative Velasco.

Thank you. Representative Lindsay.

you like to move your bill as amended to the Committee on Appropriations?

Seconded by Representative Morrow. Committee, any closing comments? Representative Lukens.

Representative Martinez.

Representative Story.

Representative Smith. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I want to thank the bill sponsors.

Representative Goldstein.

Representative Sucla.

I just want to say that I love that you're on this committee, Representative Lindsay, and I'm glad that you have maintained wanting to be on this committee because it is important that we do have voices from all over our state. These issues that come before us do touch us all. We all love these parts of Colorado. As you know, I am a big animal welfare person. I've spent my entire life in this space. I've never been a hunter. I'm not really keen of killing animals, but I understand that it is a tool that can be used and should be used and that our hunters and anglers are a really important part of our conservation efforts across our state. I have learned so much in the last few weeks. Didn't even know there was a management plan for Beaver in existence and spent the last week and a half or so reading the entire plan. It's very good, very comprehensive, really impressed with all the voices that went into that stakeholder process. Just wow. I did hear from some of our earlier, and I do really appreciate all the people that testified today, I love the passion that people come tell their stories and their whys. Earlier today, we did hear that there was the intention and the plan to start to have this mandatory check on collecting where beavers are taken. We really do need to know where they're being taken, and that was told to us today earlier. and then have that information to know whether or not caps need to be implemented on take in certain areas, and then to be able to have the opportunity to identify which watersheds really need more care and restoration projects there. So all of that is really important. this could or could not be a potential tool, your bill, what your bill contemplates, for a plan. But I think all those other steps are very important to make sure that that targeted response, that really well thought out holistic look at things is an important part of what we should do next. I agree completely. I celebrate the beaver. I recognize the importance in our state and across the nation. I am not anti-Beaver. But for today, I won't be supporting your... bill because I really do want to see these next steps and that data collection. And we can hold them accountable for that to make sure it does come before us.

Representatives Garcia-Sander.

Goldstein.

Johnson.

Lindsay.

Lukens.

Martinez.

Smith.

Stewart.

Story.

Sukla.

Winter.

Morrow.

Madam Chair.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to present House Bill 26-1310. This bill ensures Colorado provides the necessary funding for home hardening as a critical pillar of our state's wildfire mitigation strategy. And before we get very far, I just want to acknowledge for everyone or share that L002 that you received via email and probably on your desk as well is also with you in a packet with the fiscal memo. So it's behind the fiscal memo, I believe. And it is a strike below. So it's imperative that you focus on the strike below and not the introduced bill. So just wanted to share that Communities across Colorado faced an escalating threat due to extreme wildfire risk 17 of our 20 largest wildfires have occurred since 2012 and in just six of those 12, over 2,700 homes were lost. With weather events intensifying, the primary conditions for mega fires, including unseasonable heat, extreme winds, and dry landscapes are becoming our new normal. These fires are not going to stop. Without a shift in strategy, we will continue to lose hundreds or thousands of homes because residents simply cannot access the help they need to protect them. Imagine a fire like Cameron Peak moving toward a community. In disasters like the Marshall fire or the fires that claimed 12,000 homes in Palo Alto and Altadena in California, the devastation was primarily driven by a lack of home hardening. When 80 mile per hour winds carry embers from a fire as far away as two miles down the road, it does not matter how far a house is from a tree. If that home is not hardened, it becomes fuel. We have to address the reality of how these fires move. Currently, we are often left with just evacuating communities and crossing our fingers, hoping for the best. What's more, our current infrastructure does not allow for effective fire suppression on the ground or in the air once a mega fire reaches a certain intensity. Another serious consequence for the increasing prevalence of wildfires is the impact on insurance rates for homeowners across our state. Data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners shows the average premiums in Colorado have climbed 65% over the last five years. Our state is now ranked among the 10 most expensive in the nation for homeowners insurance. Climate experts attribute this trend to the increasing frequency of weather and climate-driven disasters that are the result of high winds exceeding 70 miles per hour, unseasonably high temperatures, and lack of humidity. These challenges present an acute safety and affordability crisis in our state. We saw a different outcome recently with a couple in the Stone Canyon fire who shared their story with CPR News. They were initially told their insurance would not be renewed due to risk. They performed extensive mitigation, creating a five-foot buffer and fortifying their decks and other strategies. When the fire ripped through their neighborhood, the flames receded when they hit their defensible barrier. Their homes survived, alongside the other nearby homes that were certified as mitigated, while five others that weren't mitigated did not. This story proves that when we give homeowners the tools to prepare, we can actually change the outcome of a disaster. In discussing solutions with stakeholders, one theme was constant. Wildfire survival is dictated by actions taken before a fire starts. This proactive approach aligns with the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, the gold standard for fire policy, which relies on three independent pillars. First resilient landscapes which involves forest thinning and prescribed burns Second fire communities which empowers residents through home hardening And third safe and effective wildfire response While Colorado has invested heavily in the first and third pillars, we have a massive gap in the second, home hardening. To date, less than $60,000 has gone to state home hardening grants. compared to 6 million allocated annually to landscape resilience. This gap is specifically highlighted in the 2025 Colorado Fire Commission report, which recommends hardening homes through a system of scientifically developed and verifiable actions. Without hardening structures against embers, even homes far from the forest, remain at high risk of fueling the kind of fast-moving fires that destroy entire neighborhoods. The primary funding mechanism for landscape resiliency in Colorado is the Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program, or COSWAP, and I sure wish more of our members were here. Its mission is to protect life, property, and infrastructure. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on the landscape, this program cannot fully carry out that mission. We must also fund the fire-adapted communities where people actually live. House Bill 26-13-10 addresses this by rebalancing our priorities and dividing grant funding among the essential priorities that accomplish the department's ultimate goal. Specifically, it transfers $600,000 for fiscal year 27-28 and $2 million for fiscal year 28-29 from the Wildfire Mitigation Capacity Development Fund to the Wildfire Resilient Home Grant Program. COSWAP was created in a collaborative effort to utilize wildfire resiliency strategies to protect life, property, and infrastructure. It is stressed in the homepage and throughout the website. Protecting life, property, and infrastructure is the driver for resilient landscapes, home hardening, and suppression. This is a three-legged stool of necessary pillars. Leaving out a leg means the stable stool collapses. That's where we are now in Colorado. And this is why it's most appropriate to utilize these funds toward this end. While we all know that funding is excruciatingly tight, putting off investment in our highest risk areas is a gamble we cannot afford to take. Every home that survives a mega fire because it was hardened is a victory for that homeowner, their community, and the entire state. Waiting for a more opportune time, as the opposition will suggest, will simply not work for the people of Colorado. Further, this bill stipulates the program prioritize income-qualified homeowners as well as those unable to perform the work themselves due to age, disability, or illness. This prioritization is a necessary shift in how we approach safety. To date, much of the limited state funding offered for home hardening has been through rebate programs. For a family living paycheck to paycheck or a senior on fixed income, a rebate is not a solution. It still requires the homeowner to have thousands of dollars on hand to pay for a remodel up front This creates a financial barrier that leaves our most vulnerable neighborhoods at the highest risk By moving toward a grant model that prioritizes those with the greatest need, we ensure that safety is not a luxury reserved for those who can afford the initial bill. By performing community-wide mitigation, we do more than just stop houses from burning. We take a concrete step toward lowering insurance premiums. Landscape projects are vital, but they rarely change how an insurance company assesses a specific home. Home hardening does. Many companies now offered renewed coverage or potential discounts specifically for homes that meet these scientifically developed hardened standards. This bill is vital for ensuring a comprehensive and securely funded wildfire strategy. First, it gives our residents the best chance to reduce the risk of the loss of their home. even in a mega fire when most homes are lost. Second, it importantly addresses insurance affordability, which is of great concern in high wildfire risk communities. Thank you, and I'm happy to address your questions. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Representative Story. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for the question, Representative Winter. I don't have a specific number, but I know the COSWAP has been working on that sort of element as well relative to their funding.

Representative Story. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the question, Representative Smith. It's my understanding there was $54,000 in it recently. Perhaps $48,000 had been spent or something in that neighborhood. It was about $100,000 that was granted originally. And originally it was a grant program where an individual submits an application to do a certain amount of work at a certain cost and they receive the grant and then utilize that money for that purpose. But somewhere along the way, it changed from being a grant program to a rebate program where individuals had to do the work first and cover the cost and then submit for a rebate. And that's when the stall happened, and that's when no more dollars were utilized because people that were applying for those grants couldn't afford to front the cost up front. And so the grant program, which was a grant program, but became a rebate program, stalled out. And it's my understanding that there was $54,000 left in the program, and the Division of Fire Prevention and Control offered that up as, you know, a department agency offering to help with budget balancing. And so that's how that all occurred.

Representative Story. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the question, Representative Garcia-Sander. Yes, that's the whole point. We don't have unlimited money, and so we're trying to restrict the use to be focused on high fire risk areas. So, you know, in general, foothills up and down the Front Range and Western Slope, there's a whole map that shows the highest fire risk areas. And then also that simultaneously looking at homeowners who are income qualified or lack the ability to perform the structure hardening because of age, disability or illness, because those are the folks that are going to need the help. Folks with higher income levels generally could invest in their own home hardening independently without a grant.

Representative Story. Thank you, Madam Chair. I believe those questions were asked during the fiscal process, so I guess I'm just sticking with the fiscal memo.

Schlossberg I'm Josh Schlossberg my backyard's public lands unfortunately over the years Colorado's land management agencies have clear cut or aggressively logged these ecosystems, supposedly in the name of protecting my home and community from wildfire. The ecological impacts aside, while the agencies use the cover of community protection to log, their own studies disprove this myth, which I won't have time to read from. Facts are these logged former forests are much hotter and drier than unlogged forests. Slash is scattered around left in piles. Sorry, I had audio problems there. Left in piles for years. The cuts are strewn with countless trees knocked down by the wind since they're no longer protected in denser stands. This makes the risk of wildfire ignition exponentially higher. These denser, cooler moisture stands have been hacked open to wind, making fire more likely to spread to my home and community. Boulder County Open Space acquired Tucker Ranch, and the first thing they decided to do was cut it down. to protect, to prevent Nederland from burning down. Fortunately, this fall fire already destroyed one third of the town's businesses. The fire came from the buildings themselves. The consensus science says that home hardening is the most crucial step to take. But nearly all the state of Colorado's funding for wildfire mitigation is paying for industrial forest logging. Instead of reimagining the purpose of the capacity development fund, this bill would just require Department of Natural Resources follow its mandate to, quote, prioritize those projects with the greatest potential to protect life, property and infrastructure. That's home hardening. And I'd like to conclude with an email from a CORA filing. This email was written by Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, which advises Colorado's land management agencies. They told the agencies not to publicly acknowledge the science contesting the efficacy of fuel reduction. They said quote engaging in toe to toe trench warfare with competing science papers would result in stalemate and win for the opponents unquote And lastly CFRI admitted that their quote concern the wildfire crisis strategy over promises what forest density reduction can actually accomplish vis the lofty objective of saving homes and communities from catching fire. What additional density reduction could have reduced the impacts of the Marshall fire, unquote. Two minutes, I did it.

Okay, thank you. Would you like me to begin now? Yes, go ahead. Okay, so Rocky Smith says, I'm sorry I could not testify in person today. I write this letter to support HB 1310. I have reviewed information on various aspects of forest management, primarily in Colorado for the last 45 years, and worked hard to protect and maintain our forests. Forests are essential for all life on Earth, from microorganisms to charismatic animals like elk and black bear. They are also critically important for storing carbon and reducing the possible impacts for climate change. It is vitally important that we maintain our forests. At the same time, fire, especially in a warming climate, is a considerable threat to homes and other infrastructure that lie within or adjacent to forests. I believe HB 1310 is good for our forests and for protecting structures. Research conducted by the U.S. Forest Service and others shows that fires do not directly ignite structures from a distance of more than 30 meters. Such structures can still be ignited by burning embers from fires some distance away. But if the home and surrounding area are protected, burning embers will not likely be able to ignite the home or other structure. Thus, removing flammable material from homes in the immediately adjacent area, i.e. hardening the home, will provide a high level of protection from any wildfire. HB 1310 would directly address this issue by moving some money from the Mitigation Capacity Fund to Wildfire Resilient Homes Program. The former fund does not provide money for home hardening. The latter is specifically designed to give grants for such. In awarding grants would also order Division of Fire Prevention and Patrol to prioritize grants to low-income homeowners. than those physically unable to perform the work needed to harden a home. This will help ensure that all property owners will have an opportunity to harden their homes and related structures. In short, HB 1310 would put money where it's more effective in reducing home susceptibility to fire. For this reason, I respectfully request the committee pass this bill. Happy to respond.

Madam Chair, members of the committee, confirm you can hear me?

Great. Hi, my name is Mark Novak. I'm the fire chief in Vail, Colorado. I'm here to testify in support of House Bill 261310 as amended by L002. Over the last several decades, we have witnessed the acceleration of the impacts of wildfire on communities across Colorado. Addressing our wildfire problem requires a commitment and investment in all three tenets of the National Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy, which are resilient landscapes, safe and effective response, and fire-adapted communities. As a state, we have made significant investment in the first two tenets, yet we have not made a significant investment in creating fire-adapted communities, particularly in the area of reducing structural ignitability through home-hardening measures. The 2025 Colorado Fire Commission Annual Report included two recommendations related to the creation of fire adapted communities through insurance related initiatives Both of these recommendations focused on encouraging home hardening and home ignition zone work with a common framework of a system of scientifically developed verifiable mitigations such as those found in the Wildfire Prepared Home Standard and other verifiable standards that exist in Colorado Both of these projects will require funding for home hardening for those homeowners participating. House Bill 261310 would allocate significant resources towards the implementation of home hardening and existing structures. Not only will this support the recommendations of the Colorado Fire Commission, it will also advance the goal of reducing structure loss while increasing the availability of home insurance. While landscape-level mitigation is incredibly important, and I can't emphasize that enough, we need to continue to do that work, preventing future loss within our community's demands and investment in home hardening. For this reason, I support HB 261310 as the proposed amendment states. Thank you for your time.

And when you're ready, your microphone's already on, so go ahead with your testimony.

Chair McCormick and the honorable members. Oh, and Vice Chair Morrow. Hi. Thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of HB 261310. My name is Delaney Rudy, and I'm the Colorado Director for Western Watersheds Project. As I mentioned in my earlier testimony, I previously worked for years as a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, and I live on the western slope. I responded to fires across the state and across the country, and one of the tasks that I regularly undertook in that work was preparing neighborhoods within the wildland-urban interface to survive an oncoming front of fire. There are specific protocols in place that we were trained on to quickly assess homes to plan the work that we would do to try to save them. These criteria include access, MRCAS risks, home structures, survivability, and defensible space. When first responders have a limited amount of time to take action to save structures, they have to consider whether it is possible to make the house safer before fire arrives. This also takes into account firefighter safety so that firefighters don't get engaged on a structure that poses a threat to their safety and that resources and time can be devoted to savable structures. Homeowners receiving the support that they need to implement defensible space and home hardening is crucial to protecting structures and making the wild and urban interface safer and more resilient. I want to emphasize some points from the research that support this legislation. With regard to the home ignition problem, research shows that most homes are destroyed by embers and small ignitions near the structure, not a large flame front. Preventing home ignition is the most effective way to prevent home loss. Extreme fire weather. Research shows that during extreme fire weather, when most homes are lost, large landscape fuel treatments often do not prevent structure loss because the fire spread is driven by wind, which can easily jump fuel breaks. Fuel treatments alone cannot prevent wildfire disasters. Home hardening works. Research in post-fire studies show homes with ember-resistant vents, non-combustible roofs, and maintained defensible space survive at much higher rates. Scale problem. Home mitigation is more scalable and more permanent than forest thinning and other mitigation tools. A hardened home remains hardened during every wildfire, while vegetation grows back and fuel treatments lose effectiveness over time. Therefore, home hardening is a one-time or infrequent investment. Vegetation management is a recurring cost. This bill is a known-nonsense solution to help communities be better resilient to fire. Thank you so much for your time and vote.

AML Winter Thank you, Madam Chair. Question for you, ma'am. You said that you assess these homes as you would go through. So when you talk about this home hardening, just, I don't know, just spitball a figure, what would it cost to harden an average home that you saw? So as we talk about these grants and people being able to afford it, I was just kind of wondering, on average, what you would say, have you seen over the years, what it would cost to harden that home to get up to the specs that you're talking about? Yeah.

And it's one of those parts of this bill that really makes a lot of sense in the equitable proportion or dispensation of those funds because people who live in older homes are more likely to – or in many ways more likely to not have the money. Like if you're living in a newer home, you're more likely to have bought it more recently and it was more expensive. And so that's an indicator that you might have more resources to update it versus older homes that might have more work. And something I didn't have time to speak to in my testimony is the way that once fire makes its way into structures to begin with, those structures, the science shows that those structures ignite one another. And when I was working in fire, once the fire reaches a structure, you have to disengage because we don't have the PPE to protect us from those chemicals and whatnot. And so it really has to be the equitability part of it is really important because it has to be a community response where the whole neighborhood has to be implementing this stuff. Because if one home is hardened and another isn't, the hardening loses a lot of its efficacy if the neighbor's home is not hardened. Any other questions for this panel? All right, I'm not seeing any. Thanks so much for your time and testimony today. Next I will go to a panel of folks that signed up in opposition to the bill, and I will have whoever comes up pull up a chair. I'm going to get five in-person people. Emma Donahue, Benjamin Yellen, Brett Moore, Aaron Ray, Courtney Young, online. I'll call up Jean Lim, Jarrett Ellis, Alexander Guerra, Jamie Bernstein. Great. So I'll start with the folks that are here in person. I'm going to start from left to right. So when you're ready, just make sure your microphone is, it's a, there you go. Give us your name, who you represent, and you'll have two minutes. Thank you so much, Madam Chair, McCormick, and members of the committee. My name is Emma Donoghue, and I am here on behalf of the Colorado Municipal League and our 271 municipal members. We have concerns about House Bill 261310 and removing funds from the Wildfire Mitigation Capacity Development Fund and moving them to the Wildfire Resilient Home Grant Program Cash Fund. Fire mitigation efforts are very important to our members and to our communities. But the large programs that municipalities are able to run through these grant programs provided by the WMCD fund is vitally important to their community mitigation efforts Taking this funding away from local governments and moving it into individual homeowners will not be as effective as mitigation efforts. As we've heard that as long as all homes are mitigated, there is a higher success than against fire. But that doesn't always happen. Not every neighbor in a community will take those funds and mitigate their own home. Doing large-scale projects through the community, through the municipality, will have a much greater effect across the board for fire mitigation efforts. Municipalities and fire districts have received about $15.9 million in grant funds through this program so far and through the COSWAP. and COSWAP is used as a resource for many of our municipalities looking to improve their wildfire resiliencies. They offer low or matching grant programs, which are generally needed and vital in our rural and small communities in order to do these large-scale projects. Fire mitigation efforts are very important, and these funds allow municipalities to do the large-scale projects that are needed, and removing this funding would be detrimental to wildfire resiliency. While our board has not taken an official position on this bill, We thought it was very important to share our concerns with the committee today. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And before I move on, I want to just, if Jamie Bernstein can hear me, we're trying to promote you to a panelist, so please accept that invitation online. Next up, Mr. Ray, when you're ready, give us your two minutes. Good evening, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Aaron Ray. I'm the Director of Policy at the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. The Department opposes House Bill 1310. The Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program, or COSWAP, was developed collaboratively with the Division of Fire Prevention and Control and Colorado State Forest Service. COSWAP has demonstrated the ability to fund essential projects and deploy work crews on the ground, obligating all resources on an annual basis. COSWAP's most recent workforce development grant cycle saw an unprecedented level of interest, with 35 applications requesting over $13 million. dollars. Our workforce development partners, the Colorado Youth Corps Association and Colorado Department of Corrections, have partnered on 77 projects and would also be negatively impacted by this bill. I want to be clear, the department recognizes the value of home hardening, but that work needs to be complemented by strategic wildfire mitigation efforts. Sacrificing wildfire mitigation for home hardening may benefit a small number of homeowners, but will leave entire communities at risk. The state has made considerable investments in wildfire mitigation and resilience, including boosting our firefighting capacity with new firehawk helicopters, extending tax credits for wildfire mitigation efforts, and adopting a WUI code. We also know that wildfire mitigation works. Strategic fools reduction next to communities has stopped, slowed, or allowed firefighters to safely and effectively respond to wildfire. Just last year in Summit County, the Wellington Fire burned in a treated area adjacent to hundreds of homes and did not enter the neighboring subdivision. Strategic fuels reduction work also stopped the 2018 Buffalo Mountain Fire from burning a community. That $2 million investment in fuels reduction saved over $900 million in assets. In closing, we firmly oppose reducing CoSwap's funding. Doing so would put our communities, watersheds, and critical infrastructure at unnecessary additional risk. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. I'd be happy to answer questions you may have. And I have colleagues from the department here to answer questions as well. Thank you for your testimony When you ready make sure your microphone is on a tiny little button and you have two minutes Thank you You can pull the mic closer to you It moves on the table Excellent. I'm the administrator for the Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program, Courtney Young, and I'm just here for questions. Thank you for that. Yes, sir, when you're ready, go ahead, and you'll have two minutes. Good afternoon, chair members and the committee. My name is Benjamin Yellen, and I serve as the Deputy Chief with Elk Creek Fire Protection District and the Conifer Wildland Division. I also have a background with wildland firefighting at the national level and a master's in land use planning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak in opposition to House Bill 1310. Wildfire in Colorado is not a one-size-fits-all problem, and in our fire district, cannot be solved with a one-size-fits-all policy. In the foothills communities we serve, wildfire risk is driven by complex, localized factors, including some high-risk neighborhoods in some of the highest-risk neighborhoods in the state, built in the wildland-urban interface over many decades, with steep terrain, dense fuels, and limited access. Because of this, most effective mitigation strategies are designed and implemented at the local level, all guided by three legs of the National Cohesive Strategy. We've seen firsthand how this works through our use of past current and Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program funding. Through partnerships at the watershed level all the way to the individual homeowners, we've successfully implemented targeted science-based projects that directly reduce risk to our communities. For example, we've used co-swap funding to support strategic forest thinning, and through these carefully planned projects, influence fire behavior, creating opportunities for firefighters to safely engage. I have a successful example of this just last year in my district. We also leveraged CoSwap funds to expand roadside fuel breaks along critical access and egress routes in the Conifer and Evergreen area. These projects improve visibility, reduce flame impingement near roadway, and help ensure that residents can evacuate safely during an event. Coastwap funding also supported a multi-year multi-agency planning process that evaluated current land use and building policies resulting in significant and holistic recommendations for Jefferson County we are now seeing these recommendations implemented at the county level ensuring that new development and redevelopment are aligned with wildfire risk reduction strategies thank you very testimony we'll go online to oh sorry sorry sorry Mr. Moore I had you come up here and then I just completely ignored you. Sorry. When you're ready, go right ahead with your testimony. You bet. Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the House Ag Committee. I'm testifying in opposition to 1310 tonight on behalf of the Colorado Association of Conservation Districts. This is not in opposition to home hardening, but primarily due to the cuts to the CO-swap program, which others on this panel have laid out with great detail. Colorado's lower elevation forests didn't become dense by accident. A century of fire suppression has created conditions that are far more flammable than what historically existed. Research from CPW and decades of studies across the West show that these forests were once more open and diverse. CoSwap helps restore that natural structure, which in turn reduces the intensity of wildfires before they ever reach homes. And we've seen the results. in the White Hawk Fire in Jefferson County, the Cameron Peak Fire in Larimer County, and the Buffalo Fire in Summit County, fire slowed dramatically when they reached areas that had been proactively managed. These projects gave firefighters the opportunity to protect communities and in several cases prevent a disaster Home hardening can be helpful complement but it cannot replace the broad public benefits of landscape scale mitigation. CoSwap strengthens entire communities, protects watersheds, and supports long-term ecological health. It's an investment that pays off not just today, but for future generations. CACD urges the committee to continue strong support for CoSwap so we can keep reducing wildfire risk where it matters most across the landscapes that sustain our communities. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you for your testimony. I'll go online to Mr. Guerra. Hi, everybody. My name is Alex Guerra. I'm representing Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, and I would like to testify in opposition to the House Bill 1310. I understand the value of this bill presents, but I would like to speak of the value Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program provides to young people we serve and the communities across the state and the entire country. COSWAP has funded two projects with RNYC. One was in the Arkansas River Valley outside of Buena Vista, where over 10 acres were treated to reduce wildfire risk, and one in the Yampa River Valley, where a first-of-its-kind National Guard crew treated 15 acres outside of Steamboat Springs. Thanks to COSWAP, we've been able to serve on these projects and reduce fire risks for adjacent communities and those downstream, while engaging 87 young adults. All of these young adults went through chainsaw training. Many went through wildfire courses to be able to participate in active wildland fires. The National Guard crew was able to assist in the 2025 Krosho fire outside of Yampa, pretty local to us, thanks to this training. Many of these 87 individuals have also moved on from our organization to work in wildfire, wildland firefighting fields. We have alumni who currently work at the Storm Peak module in Steamboat Springs, Silver Creek module in Yampa, Parks Ranger District in Walden, and the BLM Northwest Fire District in Craig. And many others outside of Colorado. All fighting fires that impact communities across the state and the country. In 2026, we'll have another crew of National Guards working on wildfire mitigation projects in Moffitt and Routt County. And COSWAP has been an invaluable resource that has funded fire mitigation projects impacting entire communities in the state and allowing youth engagement, which has fueled careers, continuing in this sort of work. I believe our state benefits greatly from COSWAP and we should not be reducing their funding. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'll go to Jean Lim next. Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. I'm Jean Lim, Mayor Pro Temma Broomfield and the Legislative Committee Chair for Colorado Communities for Climate Action. I'm testifying today on behalf of CC4CA and its 48 members who are local governments representing one-third of Colorado's population. I'm testifying on the bill as introduced, but CC4CA is happy to review any amendments. We want to thank the sponsor for her leadership in advancing critical climate resilience initiatives, and we agree that increased funding for wildfire mitigation at the individual homeowner level is critically needed. However, CC4CA has adopted a position of oppose on this bill because it would displace other critical landscape-scale wildfire mitigation and workforce development programs that are also urgently needed at the same time. Unfortunately, as proposed, HB 1310 would divert funding from the Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action, or COSWAP, program, which has successfully supported workforce development and large-scale wildfire resilience programs. in many of our Colorado communities. The funds would instead go to individual home hardening. This bill also appears to ultimately defund this CO-SWAP program in favor of individual home hardening, which would mean an end to this funding for holistic wildfire mitigation efforts that benefit communities and prevent large-scale fires. We are all deeply aware of the reality that funding is needed for landscape-scale programs and home hardening. While we appreciate the sponsor's prioritization of income-qualified homeowners and homeowners who are unable to perform the work, CC4CA can only support proposals that do not negatively impact existing programs. There is no evidence provided that the current programs are ineffective or that this proposal would have a greater impact on reducing wildfire risks in Colorado. We would be more than willing to sit at the table with the sponsors and other stakeholders to discuss this. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your testimony. Next is Jarrett Ellis. Good evening, Madam Chair and committee members. My name is Jarrett Ellis. I'm the Budget Director with the Department of Natural Resources, and I'm just here to answer any questions that you have this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we'll go to Jamie Bernstein. Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members. I am opposed to HB 1310 because for the same reason that Jean Lin mentioned the movement of the co-swap funds to another project that I don't think is going to have the same impact on our communities. I live in the foothills, and I'm a homeowner, and we had forest work done. And Officer Yellen mentioned the White Hawk fire. That was just barely south of our property line. And because we had done the forest mitigation, our home was saved, plus all of the homes in our neighborhood. So I do believe that the forest work is important because it suppresses crown fires, which are catastrophic. We know that forest work is difficult for individual homeowners. We would not have been able to have mitigated our forest without the help. Oftentimes, people are able to mitigate homes and do wildfire protection easier than they could do any forest work. We also believe that the forest work protects the watershed, and we know how expensive it is to dredge reservoirs. We've seen that. In addition, the Rocky Mountain Pine Beetle right now is out of control in the foothills, and so therefore forest work is more important than ever. Forest work helps return our frequent fire forests. We live in a frequent fire forest, say that three times, to their historical ecosystems because of all the suppression. We do have insurance. Our insurance agent said, no problem. We looked at your property on satellite and we will insure you. We've never had any disruption in our insurance and it hasn't gone sky high. So our lived experience here in Conifer is that by doing the forest mitigation, not only was our home safe, but probably tens, if not dozens, if not even a hundred homes, because we live on a ridge and everyone on our ridge did the forest mitigation and we were saved. Thank you very much for your testimony. This is our panel. Any questions from committee for this panel of witnesses? AML Winter. Thank you, Madam Chair. This question is for you, Mr. Ware. I had asked somebody earlier that dealt with fires, when it looks at hardening homes I think that most of the newer homes whether they already are within code or they might be in a better situation to be defensible When you look at the amount of money that is sitting here I mean how many homes do you think can be hardened when you look at a statewide approach to this Mr. Are you Benjamin Yellen? Yellen. Okay, that's what I thought. I was confused because he called you something else. That's okay. Okay, Mr. Yellen. Yeah, so in terms of cost for home hardening specifically, it varies completely. With our defensible space, we also look at the structure itself. It's a two-hour homeowner education, but a lot of what we can do with existing homes is small adjustments, and that's a lot of removal and creating gaps, specifically about six inches in many different places, vents that's been talked about before. A lot of the bigger ticket items that drive up that price are decks, are some of the bigger components to the housing market, especially depending on where it's placed within the property. A lot of the issues we have in the conifer area is the steepness of slopes and the density of vegetation. So even structure hardening within that, if you don't attack the defensible space and even extend that, you still have that radiant and convective heat impinging the home. There's been a lot of studies that do look at home hardening, specifically out of Montana, and looking at some of what we can and cannot do for existing housing. But what this funding has done for us is also looked at the land use planning to, and it's hard to quantify, but to remove that risk before you even build it. So smarter land use planning and policies in particular is what my passion is about and what COSPAP has helped us do in Jefferson County. Representative Garcia Sander. Thank you, Madam Chair. And this is for the person from the DNR. I'm just curious, do you already have staff in place to verify income and eligibility? and if not, how much of each, or I guess if so, how much of each dollar that would be shifted into the home hardening program is expected to go into the overhead versus on-the-ground mitigation? We have a person from DNR online. We also have the co-swap person here in person. Madam Chair, if I could start. Yeah, go ahead, Mr. Ray. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Representative. I want to be clear. I'm here from the Department of Natural Resources. We have the CO-SWAP program. I can't speak to the capacity at the Department of Public Safety where the home hardening program is. I cannot speak to their capacity or their ability to assess income eligibility. Any other questions from the committee? All right. Thank you all very much for your time and testimony today. We appreciate you showing up. All right. I'm going to move to the next panel, which are folks that have signed up to support the bill. I have Jennifer Mueller in person, Thomas Rust online, Deanne Meyer online, Crystal Markovich online, Jeffrey Hirsch online. All right. Well you here in person We start with you Ms Mueller When you ready go ahead and turn your mic on introduce yourself and tell us if you represent anyone You have two minutes Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. My name is Jennifer Mueller. I represent the Ember Alliance, a Colorado-based wildland fire management nonprofit. I am here to express a neutral position with respect to this bill. My team works with both DFPC and CoSwap as valued partners because of the overlap with our mission. The Ember Alliance's mission is to restore the relationship between people and fire on the landscape. The intersection of DFPC and DNR's missions is virtually identical, protecting the people of Colorado and our way of life. Prescribed fire is essential to our shared mission. The strategy to protect our way of life is multi-pronged. One prong of this approach is outlined in DFBC's Fire Commission's 2025 Colorado Statewide Strategy, which considered input from a diversity of partners. CoSwap's pillars of wildfire mitigation, workforce development, and community protection directly support the implementation of the statewide strategies by providing critical grants to entities such as the Ember Alliance. With co-swap funding, we have jump-started the City of Greeley's prescribed fire program. The City of Lafayette is going to follow in 2026. We have brought together 20 agencies, including DFPC, to de-silo the workforce and build collaborative programs to support landscape scale, treatments, and burning on private lands. A reduction in co-swap funding would be a massive setback to our momentum. him. Similarly, DFPC's WRH grant program is critical to protecting our communities and empowering homeowners. The Ember Alliance frequently hears from landowners during our community wildfire protection plan process that homeowners need help making their homes resilient to wildfire. We must not decouple home hardening from landscape level treatments. Both must occur to prepare communities for wildfire. This bill does not address systemic issues stemming from leadership and legislative actions taken after the unfortunate outcomes from the 2012 Lower North Fork Escape prescribed fire. The effects are still felt today. We cannot effectively protect our communities due to the current systemic issues within the state that stymied prescribed fire. This bill promotes scope and funding turf wars between partners and the scarcity mindset at a time when we need to build bridges and enhance collaboration. Thank you for your time. I welcome any questions. Thank you, Ms. Mueller. And just to be clear, you had signed up in a neutral position. Yes, ma'am. You're still in a neutral position. Yes, ma'am. Great. Just wanted to clarify that. I'm going to go online to Crystal Markovich. When you're ready, go ahead and give us your two-minute testimony. Hi, everybody. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Perfect. Scientists like Jack Cohen and his colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service found that high-intensity flames more than 100 feet away from the house are largely incapable of igniting the house directly. Umbers and firebrands are responsible for igniting the house. That work shows that 100 feet close to a house is the critical zone for landscape fire mitigation. Science demonstrates that home hunting is vital yet it is underfunded At the same time large sums are invested to forest thinning projects, even folk residents of Colorado Christian, some of these projects, because the later science does not support them. We have to remember that the trees beyond 100 feet from our homes plays a critical role in keeping the soil shaded, cooling it, retaining moisture, and thus protecting us from drought and helping prevent wildfires. These trees absorb water to prevent erosion and protect the residents in the plains from flooding. By releasing the store water through transpiration, they cool the environment, helping shield us from heat waves. During this process, trees also emit bacteria that form clouds and trigger precipitation locally and elsewhere. In extreme weather conditions, trees slow down the wind. Finally, this forest provides habitat for wildlife and well-being for all of us. The forest beyond 100 feet from our homes helps us cool the planet and supports biodiversity. Please support HB 261310 as home gardening should be a greater focus and better funded as it works to protect our community. Thank you for your testimony. Tony. Next up is Deanne Meyer. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Deanne Meyer. I live in the wildland urban interface surrounded by the forest I love and chose as my home. But I am horrified by the aggressive thinning happening on neighboring lands. Machinery shredding native plants and trees, compacting and eroding soil, severing ancient mycelial networks and destroying habitat for countless species. Science shows these mechanical treatments disrupt ecosystems, leave slash that fuel hotter fires, open the canopy to drying winds and can actually increase high severity fire risk towards homes like mine. I accept living in the forest, which means accepting wildfire risk, but I refuse false solutions that sacrifice the ecosystem while failing to protect my home. Decades of rigorous research by USDA Forest Service scientist Dr. Jack Cohen through modeling, experiments and real wildfire case studies proves one irrefutable fact. Home survival depends almost entirely on the home itself and its immediate surroundings, the home ignition zone within about 100 feet. Embers, not wildland flames, ignite most structures. Hardened homes with fire-resistant roofs, ember-proof vents, clear defensible space, and non-combustible zones survive crown fires and ember storms. Distant forest thinning does not. This is not a debate. It's established science. House Bill 1310 is a science-based path forward. It redirects a meaningful and growing share of wildfire mitigation capacity development fund dollars to the proven Wildfire Resilient Homes grant program, prioritizing low-income families, seniors, and those with disabilities who need help hardening their homes. It protects people without destroying the forests and habitats we cherish. Committee members, we can have resilient homes and healthy ecosystems. Pass HB 1310 without amendment. Focus resources where the data shows they work on the home ignition zone. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Any questions for this panel of witnesses from our committee? not seeing any, so thank you so much for your time and testimony today. I'll move on to the next panel, which are folks that have signed up against the bill. If you're here in the room, please come forward. Andy Hill, Brendan Witt, Rob Addington. Online I have Brian Webster, Kent Maxwell, Marsha Porter Norton, Jody Shattuck-McNally, Leslie Dahlkemper. And if there's anyone else in the room that wanted to testify against this bill, there's an extra chair up here, so come on forward. All right, well, I'll start with the people that are here in person. I will start with Mr. Hill. When you're ready, give us your two minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the committee. My name is Andy Hill. I'm the government affairs manager for Denver Water, and on behalf of Denver Water and Colorado Water Congress, I'm here to testify in opposition to House Bill 1310. We're concerned, like others, that this bill's proposal to shift funding away from COSWAP, wildfire mitigation grants, and toward home-hardening work. Wildfire is the biggest risk to Denver Water's raw water supply. We serve 1.5 million people, and that service depends on healthy forests and watersheds. Proactive forest management reduces the severity of wildfires and helps forests withstand insects and disease. And it's also one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to protect our water supply. Our collection system covers about 4,000 square miles, but Denver Water owns only about 2% of that land. And so partnerships are essential to protecting our source water. We work with state agencies, research institutions, fire managers, and other front-range water providers to identify and prioritize high-risk watersheds. We oppose this bill because our local partners rely on CoSWAP grants for wildfire mitigation and forest health projects. Ending that funding would jeopardize future partnerships and future planned work. Denver Water matches CoSwap grants through our From Forest to Faucets program and over the last three years our partners have received about $1.6 million in CoSwap funding and Denver Water has matched that amount up to $1.2 million. That investment makes a real difference and if CoSwap funding is eliminated or reduced, future projects will be put in jeopardy. At the same time, a hotter, drier climate is increasing wildfire risk. So, to close, Denver Water does not oppose home hardening efforts, but it should be funded in addition to, rather than at the expense of, effective wildfire mitigation and forest health work supported by CoSwap. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much. Mr. Witt, when you're ready. Good afternoon, Chair McCormick, Vice Chair Morrow, and members of the committee. My name is Brendan Witt, and I'm a policy advisor at Western Resource Advocates. I'm here today in opposition of House Bill 261310 because, as introduced, this bill would erode and eventually eliminate a critical and popular source of wildfire resilience funding that supports effective workforce training and critical landscape-scale fuel reductions efforts. This bill would put Colorado at greater risk of exposure to the impacts of catastrophic wildfire. WRA, along with our partners in the wildfire resilience work across the state, recognize that home hardening and defensible space maintenance is an essential component of ensuring our communities are adapted to a world with more frequent and more severe wildfires, and that greater funding to support this work is needed going forward. However home hardening is just one strategy in a multi approach required to achieve the goal of bolstering wildfire resilience And in a future where wildfire risk is increasing we need every tool in the toolbox to address these threats House Bill 261310 as introduced would effectively remove one of these critical tools. It would not only divert funding from a popular and trusted program that has proven success in bolstering wildfire resilience, but it would also impose a regressive cap on the funding available going forward, diminishing the program until the funding is functionally ineffective. We cannot allow this to happen. The Wildfire Mitigation Capacity Development Fund is what funds grants for Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program, or COSWAP, as you've heard today. COSWAP grants support work to reduce wildfire risk, as well as fund workforce training and skills acquisition in fields where few people are currently applying to do this critical work, skills that transfer to defensible space maintenance. By diverting funding for workforce development, this bill would reduce the state's capacity to complete essential wildfire resilience, both in the home ignition zone and at landscape scale. Rather than diminishing one successful program in favor of another, the state should look to fully fund all aspects of wildfire resilience, including co-swap and home hardening. But both are critical. This bill is simply not the way to protect Colorado's communities. Thank you for your attention to this important issue, and we urge you to vote no on House Bill 26-13-10. Happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you for your testimony. Yes, when you're ready, go ahead and give us your testimony and tell us who you are. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, members of the committee. My name is Rob Addington. I'm the Forest and Fire Program Director with the Nature Conservancy's Colorado program. I'm here today to voice opposition to House Bill 26-1310. Nature Conservancy is a global conservation nonprofit focused on protecting the lands and waters on which both people and nature depend. We've been working here in Colorado for 60 years, and as part of our overall conservation portfolio here within the state, we are focused on improving forest health and reducing wildfire risk through forest management. We recognize the important values and services that our forests provide for us here in Colorado. Water, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration and storage, recreational opportunities. We're concerned about the trends we're seeing in wildfire and the effects that they're having. Here on the Front Range, we're involved in several forest collaborative groups, which bring together federal, state, and local land management agencies, local fire departments, water utilities, and non-governmental organizations in advancing land management to support and promote healthy forests and watersheds. Many of these collaborative groups have adopted a management framework known as the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, which we've already heard about some today. This strategy promotes an all-hands, all-lands approach aimed at safely managing wildland fire, reducing risk to communities and restoring resilient landscapes and has the three core pillars that, again, we've talked about previously, resilient landscapes, fire-adapted communities, and safe and effective fire response. We really need all of these pillars working in concert to support forest health, protect our watersheds and our drinking water supplies, as well as our communities. House Bill 26-1310 proposes to significantly draw down funding from the Colorado Department of Natural Resources Co-Swap program. I've seen firsthand the value of this program in bolstering the forest and fire workforce and in advancing science-based forest restoration, fuels reduction, and wildfire risk mitigation. We are directly involved in a Co-Swap project in southwestern Colorado where these activities are taking place and value this funding. Let me be clear, we are in support of home hardening, but it should not come at the expense of COSWAP For this reason we cannot support House Bill 26 Thank you Thank you for your testimony I go online to Kent Maxwell When you ready go ahead and give us your testimony for two minutes Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee. My name is Kent Maxwell. I'm appearing today on behalf of Colorado Fire Camp, a nonprofit wildland firefighter school in Salida. I served Chaffey County for 33 years as a volunteer firefighter. I'm speaking today in opposition to this bill. Colorado Fire Camp has partnered with DNR and the Coastal Health Program to provide vocational training and to carry out on the ground wildfire mitigation, utilizing both the Conservation Corps and inmate firefighter crews with our partners to reduce hazardous fuels around neighborhoods, along evacuation routes and in critical watersheds. This work is not theoretical, it's measurable. We are thinning forest, removing ladder fuels, building and burning the slash piles, creating shaded fuel breaks that directly protect homes and improve firefighter safety. But CoSwap does something even more important. This builds the workforce. It trains the next generation of sawyers, forestry technicians, and wildland firefighters, people we urgently need to, as wildfire risk just continues to worsen. Home hardening is important, as a number of speakers have said, but it cannot replace landscape scale mitigation. My concern for this bill is that we are setting up firefighters and communities for failure. Homes are just flat out. They're not the only things at risk. High severity wildfire can destabilize entire watersheds, leading to the post-fire flooding, the debris flows, all that long-term damage to drinking water systems that you've heard about. Programs like COSWAP reduce fire intensity at scale, protecting not just homes but entire communities and watersheds. Reducing COSWAP funding by half and then nearly eliminating it, that will just significantly weaken Colorado's ability to effectively carry out mitigation and develop the workforce we need. From both a firefighter and a practitioner perspective, COSWAP is one of the most effective tools we have in this state to address wildfire. I respectfully urge you to oppose this bill and thank you for your time. Thank you for your testimony. Next up is Marsha Porter Norton. Yes, can you hear me? We can. Yeah, all right. Thank you, Madam Chair, and committee members. I am a La Plata County Commissioner and am testifying on behalf of our commission in opposition to this bill. We have had too many... Ms. Porter Norton, I'm going to have you... For this reason... Hang on a second. Hang on a second. If you would go ahead and turn your camera off, your signal is a little choppy and it might improve if you just have the audio portion on. All right. Is that better? So far, it's better. So go ahead. All right. Sorry about that. For this reason and many others, we are a strategic focus area for CoSwap. This county has made very good use of the money and we're grateful to the state of Colorado for it. We oppose reducing money for the CoSwap fund for home hardening grants, but like many others, completely underscore the need for home hardening. Our county just passed the statewide WUI code last week We know home gardening is important and more of it will continue for new homes and remodels In 2022 we received a grant from CoSwap Landscape Resilient Investment Fund These funds have allowed us, via a very unique partnership with the Durango Fire District and the City of Durango, to do what a lot of communities wish to do and want to do, and that is mitigation work on a landscape scale. Working on a landscape scale is not clear-cutting. If anybody would like before and after pictures of the work our project has done, please find me on the Internet. You can Google Marsha Porter Norton La Plata County Commissioner. We have a lot of before and after pictures, and the beautiful forest landscapes have resulted. Through COSWAP, we have set up water quality monitoring, and we have mitigated over 1,100 acres. I want to note, though, the amount that needs to be done in La Plata County is 17,000 acres. So we are not doing clear cutting with COSWAP dollars. We've done 211 site visits, 24 defensible space projects, and seven more. Several years ago, our road and bridge and our emergency management were assisted by crews from this Department of Corrections. And I think those folks got good job skills for the future. This type of thoughtful landscape scale mitigation is not industrial forest logging. It not only reduces harms to lives and property, it brings our forests into a much healthier state. I would like to work with a sponsor and others through CCI to find a funding source for home hardening, but I urge us not to cut the CO-SWAP program. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. Next is Leslie Dahlkemper. Go ahead when you're ready. Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members. I'm Jefferson County Commissioner Leslie Dahlkemper, and I'm here on behalf of the Jeffco Board of County Commissioners testifying in opposition to House Bill 1310. Wildfire resiliency is a top priority for our county. While we strongly support Representative Story's effort to expand homeowner grants for home hardening, we oppose any initiative that threatens co-swap funding for mitigation. Earlier today, I was at Elk Meadow Park in Evergreen, and Evergreen is one of the highest risk wildfire areas in the country. And Elk Meadow is the beneficiary of co-swap funds. I was at Elk Meadow with the hope that I could show you in real time the impact of the state's investment. But let me share a little bit more with you about it. JEPCO has mitigated more than 150 acres of this forested area with the help of CoSWAP funds. Our goals are simple. Protect lives, save homes, enhance forest health. Near Elk Meadow is a school, an apartment complex, and assisted living facility. Forest mitigation, as you've heard, helps to slow a fire spread. And this work is especially urgent. Jeffco is one of the hardest hit counties in Colorado, thanks to the mountain pine beetle. Unseasonably warm temperatures coupled with record low snowpack contribute to high wildfire risk. To date, CoSwap has supported four completed projects in our county, covering more than 300 acres at 1.2 million. Four more projects are underway this year, representing 200 acres of mitigation and nearly 1 million in investment. Combined, these eight strategic science-backed projects account for all of Jeffco's CoSwap dollars. Redirecting these funds now would undermine existing mitigation projects that are delivering measurable results. We ask you to preserve CoSwap's strategic investments to ensure our forests and the communities that depend on them are better prepared for wildfire. Thank you so much. Thank you for your testimony. That's all of this panel. Any questions from the committee for this panel of witnesses? All right, I don't see any, so thank you very much for your testimony today. We appreciate you hanging in there with us. I have one more panel to call up folks that signed up in support of the bill. They are all online, so if there is anyone else in the room that wanted to testify in support of the bill, please come forward. Online we have Allie Henderson, Alex Markovich, Scott Hatfield, Mike Rallouk. and Carol Walker. Okay, great. I will start with Allie Henderson. Go ahead and unmute your microphone and you'll have two minutes. Thank you. Can you hear me? We can. Great. Good evening, chair, vice chair and committee members. My name is Allie Henderson. I'm a Gunnison County resident and I am the Southern Rockies director for the Center for Biological Diversity. We have thousands of Colorado members and supporters. The center has a long history of advocating for forest and fire policies that prioritize community and infrastructure resilience, are grounded in sound science, and ensure when actions are taken on forested lands, they reduce risk rather than create new harms. This evening's testimony has shown that no one's disputing how important and vital home hardening is for protecting our communities and how critical it is for this funding to happen. But nobody that's been opposed has pointed to where this funding can come from in these tight budget years, and particularly for this pillar that has been largely neglected for state investment. With record low snowpack and high temperatures across the state, it's really urgent for us to be ensuring that we're investing in home hardening because it is proven to actually protect our communities and make them safe. So a lot of what I was going to cover has been covered, so I'm not going to repeat or belabor the points. But I would like to emphasize that, as we pointed out in our written testimony, the science is very clear that it is critical that we prioritize home pardoning. This is a core challenge. We have to protect people where they live. And we're going to be having fires, so we have to figure out how we're protecting from structure loss. and that's not from fire on the landscape. That is predominantly for how do we protect our communities. Colorado is a low burn but high loss fire characterized area and that means that our fire is largely driven by human caused ignitions that are near homes and this is a pattern that has been tragically exemplified by the Marshall Fire. I really hope that the committee is going to listen to the peer-reviewed science and ensure that we have funding that is going towards home hardening and for an area of important wildfire mitigation that we are not properly funding at the state level Thank you Thank you for your testimony Next is Alec Markovich Yes hello Can you hear me We can Am I allowed to show an image by sharing something from my screen? I'm sorry, but you're not. So just go ahead and give us your testimony. Okay, okay. Then I'll describe the image I wanted to show. It's an image of Paradise, California after the fire of 2018. It shows an area that used to be several blocks of homes in Paradise, California. Every single visible housing lot, there's about 75 or so visible in the picture, is just charred remains of houses down to ground level. I mean, gray ash on the ground. Yet the whole area is surrounded by a forest of green living trees that did not burn. And one can see that this forest extends from the edge of the lots out to the foreseeable distance. There's even many trees on the actual home lots interspersed with the ashes that are still green. You know, images from many other towns that are unfortunately catastrophically burned recently show the same thing. You look from above like a drone picture and you see all these burned lots and you see plenty of green trees, right? Further, the various towns that burned catastrophically in the last few years had what so-called fuel reductions projects done on the wildlands surrounding them, typically multiple times before the catastrophic fires destroyed the towns. So the bottom line is houses are much more flammable than the trees. So while some landscape work, particularly within 100 feet of a structure, can be both effective and ecologically sound, we need to address the actual problem of flammable houses instead of wasting money on broad, ecologically unsound logging projects that damage our forests. Particularly projects that go beyond just ladder fuel reduction in specifically lower montane Ponderosa pine forests, where I do agree that ladder fuel reduction can be useful. Unfortunately, too many current so-called fuels reduction projects go beyond such targeted goals to ecologically unsound removal of mature trees in ecosystems within both Ponderosa forests and particularly within higher elevation forests that are not out of their historical range of density variability because they are characteristically at higher elevations, not high-frequency fire forests. Thank you. And I'll have you wrap up, if you would, please. Yeah, very good. So basically, I urge the committee to vote in favor of the bill to emphasize the funding towards hold hard. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And next, Scott Hatfield. Hi. Appreciate the opportunity to testify in favor of this bill. I think it's really important. It needs to be done to protect homes, to protect property, and actually do what is often purported as the purpose and need for so much fuels reduction work. I'd like to bring up the research of USFS Jack Cohen again, as some other folks have. Thank you. And he pretty authoritative in the research world He shown that a flame front from 100 feet away or more cannot ignite an ignitable surface It shows that fuel reduction will not affect homes. It doesn't help the insurance companies either. Only home hardening and defensible space is going to actually protect these structures. The fuel reduction is not about small diameter trees. There's a lot of clear cuts going on. Jefferson County, for example, has large clear cuts that are purported to promote forest health. They're taking old growth far from structures or far from the actual wildland urban interface. and that's just a giveaway to the timber companies. There's a priority that they have to open up the canopy. This brings in wind and sun, dries everything up, creates a bit of a tinderbox, which is a worse tinderbox, I should say. It makes the situation worse and more prone to fire. But if you're one of these big proponents, generally you're coming from an industrial logging type of perspective and you want to be set up for your next logging project or salvage sale. And these things do not improve forest health. It's treating natural forests as a threat. I'm over. Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. And we'll go to Mike Rollick next. Hi, thank you, committee, for hearing my words on this. I hope you guys can support this bill. Just ironically, heavy timbers is recognized in the WUI building code as inherently resistant to ignition, and the vertical timbers would be six by six inches. However, CoSwap, when we looked at the Alderfer Three Sisters grant, it allowed taking up to 22-inch diameter trees to be taken and sold on the open market. This project was $488,000 of CFS money, that's state money, awarded to Jetco for 279 acres. Evergreen, 7,074 acres. Only 3.9% of Evergreen was treated, logged. And that means there's a 1 in 25 chance if a fire is ignited in a park that you're actually going to get any benefit. And that doesn't account for wind and other issues that you might have. So one in twenty five chance, if you just treat that area, has nothing to do with ignition along the side of a road or anything like that. Additionally, burn piles are allowed to stay for two years under these grants. So that's an interesting issue. That four hundred eighty eight thousand dollars. While I overall don't like taxpayer money being used for much of anything, except we're going back to the taxpayers. If it was used for the homes in the Walmart elementary school system, you could have saved or hardened 49 to up to 244 homes, depending on the cost, 2 to 15 K by the headwaters economics. So what did this $488,000 achieve? Reports of increased wind. When we talk to folks out there, you lose the boundary layer. Anything to do with aerodynamics, once you lose your boundary layer, your friction near the surface, the winds will accelerate. So we didn't see any wind studies. We didn't see any erosion studies. We didn't see any drainage studies. We talk about erosion issues, but there are no erosion studies done on this particular slope. And the contractor is allowed to sell the tree logs on the open market and not share the profit. So that is a tax issue as well. So we are paying about three thousand two hundred dollars per acre in Jeffco for this treatment. And then to the to the spoils you know go the victor so to speak Right You allowed now to sell it on the open market for history We talk about historic benchmarks 1933 is the Secretary of Agriculture wrote to the president saying we needed to reforest 50 million acres. So when we look back 100 years and say that's a healthy forest, it's not. I'll have you wrap up. Okay, great. Thanks. Next up is Carol Walker. Good evening, Madam Chair and members of the committee. I'm Carol Walker. I'm the Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Association. And on behalf of our member insurance companies that comprise about 85 percent of the Colorado homeowners insurance market, I'm testifying in support of House Bill 1310 with the Strike Below Amendment to prioritize the home hardening grants based on the science-based property mitigation actions. First, thank you to Representative Story for appreciating the critical need for financial assistance that supports wildfire mitigation efforts at an infrastructure, community, and personal level. Of all of these risk reduction goals are needed to work in tandem to make sure our state communities and homeowners are safer and ultimately more insurable. On almost a daily basis, I'm asked, what do insurance companies need in terms of meaningful wildfire mitigation? What will make a long-term impact on insurance availability in our wildfire-prone areas? The short answer is insurers recognize and invested in science-based mitigation based on the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety's wildfire-prepared home certification standard. We must focus on getting wildfire-prepared home properties that are measurable and scalable at a neighborhood level. That's why last summer the Colorado Fire Commission unanimously adopted a series of resolutions that included recognizing wildfire-prepared home as the uniform standard we must work together to achieve to bring down risk and increase insurability. As amended, House Bill 1310 would prioritize co-swap grant money for property-specific mitigation based on IBHS or equivalent science-based mitigation designation. This will support homeowners and communities' abilities to get certified with the Colorado Spring launch of IBHS's Wildfire Prepared Home program. Some insurers will also be basing wildfire mitigation discounts on wildfire prepared home designations. Thank you for your time this evening and consideration. We respectfully ask for your yes vote on House Bill 1310 and the strike below amendment. Thank you very much. Thank you for your testimony. Committee, any questions for this panel of witnesses? All right. Thank you again for showing up and staying with us today. We appreciate that. I did last call for witnesses, and seeing no further folks that want to testify, that ends the witness phase of our hearing. And we will move on to the amendment phase. Representative Story, I know you have an amendment.

Second. Seconded by Representative Morrow.

so this is a strike below I've talked to everybody here on the committee um

to better balance how the funds are used became very complex, especially when we got the fiscal note.

And so we continued our discussions with stakeholders and worked on this amendment and also included a legislative declaration, which is at the beginning, to better explain the purpose and the reason that we were moving in this direction And then also, instead of the way we had planned the structure of the funding, we changed it and just settled on a specific amount for two years, one starting July 1st of 27. So the 27-28 fiscal year, $600,000. And then the second year, starting on July 1st of 28, $2 million in order to get this home hardening piece off the ground. And so that's basically the amendment and how it's different from the original bill.

I move House Bill 1310 as amended to the Committee of Appropriations.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Representative Stewart, for highlighting this important conversation. I can say I've learned a lot over the past few days in conversations with you and really appreciate the goal here. Uh, I, I've heard a lot from my district over the last, you know, few weeks and fire mitigation is such an important part, not just for our homes, but I learned over this last summer, um, you know, I, I represent the, um, the district where the gold King mine spill happened and you compare all of, you know, the millions of gallons coming out of this, you know, old mine down the Animas River to what happens to the watershed because of wildfire. And I learned that the mine spill was nothing compared to what wildfires do to our watersheds. And so I'm taking a holistic view of this. I think there's so much important work that CoSwap does that we've heard today, not just for homeowners, but for our watersheds in general. but I'm very glad that you brought this to our attention and I hope that we can continue to have this conversation of how we can support homeowners in a very highly volatile wildfire environment. But for today, I'll be respectful now, but I do appreciate your work. Thank you.

Thank you, and thank you, Representative Story, for bringing this forward. I know we've talked about home hardening and how critical it is. And as I think you said, or maybe one of the witnesses, it needs to be done in a cluster. So I'm lucky in that we actually have taxed ourselves to have the fire department do assessments, foundation assessments, and then there is feedback for the work. honest, the hardest thing is .

There's no guarantee. This particular grant program that individual house I got four counties and I look at the swap map and three out of the four have projects and mountains, and I would imagine that they want to make sure that they're getting funding. And finally, I'm just going to say that I'm on the Colorado Workforce Development Commission, And I really like the course development and what's going on with my mic. But the youth core, in fact, I've seen ads on the market. Yes, they're shooting and training and also directions. So I think that's really important. So not programs well. but tonight I'm going to be no but need to continue to figure out how we can

representative story for bringing this bill and starting this conversation and I'm so grateful that you have explained how critical home hardening is and I wish so badly that we were able to have funding and more funding in all these programs as you said uh i very much appreciate the uh explanation and understanding of how the colorado strategic wildfire action program is utilized i have heard from my constituents that they uh and i know i had constituents supporting and opposing um this bill um and so i but i have heard that the the funding that is going into co-swap for my district is just too critical at this moment to divert that funding so I will also be respectful now.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Rep. Story, for bringing this important topic to light. I really appreciate learning about the importance of this and having I live not too far from where the Marshall Fire had its impact. We in critical financial times We all know that And I just at this time feel that it just not fair to for lack of a better term Rob Peter to pay Paul But we do need to continue these conversations, and hopefully down the road we can, before it's not too late, to invest in home hardening.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Rep Story, for bringing this bill. I have watched you over the last few sessions on this issue, and I really respect the attention that you give it, and especially coming from your particular community. And I agree with all these things, the concerns about the budget. I think I agree with you that we have to have a multifaceted approach because there are, number one, there's all these things that we need to be tackling, but also they work in tandem of, you know, hopefully preventing some of these things. And so I too wish we had more money, but I think we also have to figure out what to do with the money we do have and how to allocate that and be creative and how we do these things, because I think every little bit helps. And I think that we really need to be throwing everything we've got at this problem because it will continue. And so with that, I'm a happy yes on your bill tonight, and thank you for your continued work on this.

I think you've heard from me. My concern is not all of the good points that were brought forward, and I actually, reading your legislative declaration, I wrote up to the side, I agree with all of this. It's all very true. We do need new dollars in the system, which is, you know, as I was writing you this weekend, wanted to just think about how do we get new dollars in the system to direct towards tools like this that can help individual homeowners while we save the money in the system that protects whole communities. And so looking at potentially having your county or any county that has kind of this major issue with home hardening dollars to pass a local ballot initiative to say okay people in this particular community are we willing to tax ourselves to create our own grant program for people in that community to subscribe to so i'm in the same boat as far as i don't want to take money from a program that is working that is oversubscribed to put it into another program when I feel like the economy of scale of the dollars that we have will do the most good for communities and structures. And so I too will be a no today. But I do appreciate all the work that you've done and the advocacy that you bring forward from your community. It is an important piece of the conversation.

Representatives Garcia-Sander.

Goldstein.

Johnson.

Lindsay.

Lukens.

Martinez.

Smith.

Stewart.

Story.

Zucla.

Winter.

Morrow.

Adam Chair.

Okay.