The Mancos Conservation District is working to deal with the abrupt pullback of a $630,000 grant it had received from the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The president of the conservation district, Michael Nolan, told KSJD the money would have been used for education and outreach in the county as a whole, not just the Mancos watershed.
“We find that as important as hard infrastructure is – things like piping ditches, repairing diversions, doing forest management – we also value education and outreach,” Nolan said.
“It’s important to get more individuals to understand natural resources, to have a greater knowledge of water quality, water availability, forest health. That’s a positive for our cause as a conservation district. That’s what the outreach money was for.”
The Trump administration has been making sweeping cuts to spending by federal agencies. Trump advisor Elon Musk has said that without these dramatic slashes, America will go bankrupt.
On Feb. 14, the district received an email from the acting chief of the NRCS, Louis Aspey, terminating the funding agreement for the grant, whose purpose was to “reach underserved producers and provide a higher level of equity in access to conservation tech assistance, education, conservation planning services, and achieving sustainable conservation practices.”
The underserved community for which the money was intended included beginning farmers and ranchers, meaning those who had been doing the work for 10 years or less; limited-resource farmers and ranchers (those making less than $170,000 annually); and the Ute Mountain Ute tribal community.
The district has now laid off its education and outreach coordinator and reduced time across the board for other staff, Nolan said.
Emphasizing that he was speaking only for himself and not for the rest of the district’s board, Nolan said one of the grant’s focuses he was most disappointed to see unfunded was encouraging interest in natural resources and conservation among local youth.
“We would have worked with up to 30 students in the county that were interested in natural resources – agriculture, forestry – as a career,” Nolan said.
The money also would have paid for the district to offer dozens of different workshops on numerous aspects of agriculture, including rotational grazing, soil health practices, forest health, ranching, farming, and forestry.
“It would have been a multitude of classes and courses over a three-year period,” he said.
“We were starting to work toward those goals when this money got pulled.”
The district is now looking to see if it can complete some of those efforts anyway, but the board hasn’t decided what is viable, Nolan said.
He said much of the $630,000 would have circulated through the county as it was spent for food, supplies, and support for the various events.
The funding cutoff has been “an unintended kind of hurdle” to the district’s work, Nolan said.
“Everyone knows that with an administration change, funding opportunities are going to change and that’s just how it is,” he said, “but I was not expecting to have money we had already been spending and basically allocated taken away from us.”
Some other funding sources the district has been awarded are frozen, he said. “We’re working with those federal agencies and our state and federal representatives to get those unfrozen and soon as possible,” he said.
But the district remains intact.
“We’re taking a hit on this grant, but we’re still here, still doing good work,” Nolan said. “We’re providing advice and resources to landowners throughout the county.”
