A second Trump presidency could create big shifts in Colorado’s outdoor recreation economy

We do not know many specifics about how Colorado’s public lands and recreation economy are going to change under a second Trump administration, but there are signs. 

First, this week President-elect Donald Trump tapped North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to run the Interior department, which stewards 20% of the country’s lands, including 500 million acres of National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management lands, 700 million acres of underground minerals, and 1.7 billion offshore acres. North Dakota has about 4% of its lands under federal management and the 1 million barrels of oil it produces a day makes it the third largest oil producer in the U.S., behind Texas and New Mexico. 

“Running the Interior department requires someone who can find balance between recreation, conservation, hunting, ranching, mining, and—yes—oil drilling,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Jennifer Rokala in a statement on Thursday. “If Doug Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.”

If Trump follows recommendations in the 922-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” presidential transition proposal, there will be some big shifts. 

The lead author on the Project 2025 plan for the Interior Department was William Perry Pendley, a conservative Evergreen-based lawyer who briefly led the Bureau of Land Management under Trump in 2020. The public lands energy policy recommendations in the Project 2025 plan are credited to Kathleen Sgamma, the Denver-based president of the Western Energy Alliance.

Perhaps the most impactful proposal in Pendley’s plan is calling for a repeal of the Biden administration’s withdrawal of mineral and energy leases on 221,000 acres in the Thompson Divide.

The Project 2025 plan urges the Interior Department to amplify the multiple-use mandate on public lands and increase drilling and mining while scaling back conservation-guided protections for wildlife and habitat.

Rescinding the withdrawal of mineral leases in the Thompson Divide?

A president would not be able to nix the deal that has permanently removed molybdenum mining from Mount Emmons above Crested Butte, which everyone calls the Red Lady. Crested Butte residents and elected leaders spent 50 years working with High Country Conservation Advocates, the Crested Butte Land Trust, the Forest Service and the owner of a dormant mine on Red Lady to hammer out a complex land swap that permanently removed the possibility of mining on more than 1,200 mining claims above the town. 

Downsizing the Camp Hale national monument

And then there’s national monuments created with the Antiquities Act, which has been used by 18 of the country’s 21 presidents since 1906 to establish or enlarge 163 national monuments. 

While no president has eliminated national monuments created by a predecessor, those protected lands designated with the Antiquities Act have become political footballs.

President Trump in 2019 reduced the size of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by 45% and the Bears Ears National Monument by 85%, removing more than 2.2 million acres Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats, added when they created the national monuments in 1996 and 2016. President Joe Biden in 2021 restored the size of those Utah national monuments, a move targeted in a federal lawsuit filed by the state of Utah which is seeking more control over federal lands. (Utah in August filed a lawsuit supported by 12 other states asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn federal control of 18.5 million acres in the state managed by the Bureau of Land Management.)

Could Trump downsize the 53,804-acre Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument created in 2022 by Biden with the Antiquities Act? Pendley says yes.

“As has every Democratic president before him beginning with Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden has abused his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906,” Pendley wrote, pointing to Biden’s creation of the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in 2022 as an example of “the outrageous, unilateral withdrawals from public use of multiple-use federal land.”

Pendley warned that Biden will likely designate more Western monuments by the end of 2024. River and environmental advocates are urging Biden to use the Antiquities Act to protect more than 390,000 acres of land around the Dolores River as a national monument, which has stirred emotional opposition in rural parts of Mesa and Montrose counties.

The newly elected U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd — a Republican from Grand Junction who this month beat Democrat Adam Frisch to replace Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s sprawling 3rd Congressional District —  told The Sun in September that he opposed the creation of the Dolores River Canyon National Monument by presidential proclamation, saying additional protections for federal lands should be driven by local residents and Congress. 

“I think that would be a misuse of the president’s authority under the Antiquities Act,” Hurd said.

Supporters of the monument push — a coalition of Western Slope conservation groups and businesses — said they are committed to securing increased protections for the canyons surrounding the Dolores River in Mesa and Montrose counties. Colorado’s U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper have expressed support for added protections around the Dolores River the monument backers are “making sure all the momentum and support translate into a durable conservation designation, whether as a national monument or via legislation,” said Scott Braden with the Colorado Wildlands Project. 

“We’re worried about the threats facing this landscape, including new energy projects … as well as broader threats like the implications of Utah’s lawsuit before the Supreme Court that threaten all public lands,” Braden said. 

Moving the BLM headquarters back to Grand Junction?

Pendley played a role in the Trump administration’s relocation of the BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction from Washington, D.C., in 2020. His Project 2025 contribution also urges a reversal of the Biden administration’s shuffle of the headquarters back to the nation’s capital.

The outdoor recreation industry: tariffs, visas and a federal office

The outdoor recreation industry — a growing economic force in Colorado that generated $13.9 billion to the state in 2022, supporting nearly 130,000 workers who earned $6.9 billion — could see changes under a Trump administration. 

One of the biggest challenges for outdoor recreation businesses will come from Trump’s focus on tariffs as a tool for stimulating domestic manufacturing. Trump pledged to slap 60% tariffs on anything coming into the U.S. from China and a 10% to 20% tax on products coming from other countries. The outdoor recreation industry — which the Bureau of Economic Analysis says contributes $1.1 trillion in consumer spending— bemoaned Trump’s tariffs in 2019 and has lobbied aggressively for trade reform to reduce tariffs on goods imported from overseas factories. In 2019, the country’s outdoor businesses said they could pay an extra $1.5 billion a month on Trump’s plan for across-the-board 25% tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports. 

On other issues, the outdoor recreation industry is hopeful. Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020, which achieved a longtime industry goal of returning $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund as a way to support rural communities that rely on public lands and recreational access. Could that same rural economic development argument persuade Trump to achieve another outdoor recreation goal and establish a federal office of outdoor recreation? 

As a labor crisis chokes Colorado resort town economies — it’s hard to find workers when housing is so expensive in the high country — mountain town businesses have grown reliant on visa workers, especially students using J-1 visas. Resorts in 31 of the 38 states with ski lifts use J-1 workers and Trump’s ban on immigrant visas in 2020 challenged ski resorts and mountain businesses. 

Only 41% of the country’s ski areas reported they were fully staffed in 2022-23 ski season, according to the latest industry reports, which is a big improvement from the 19% of resorts that were fully staffed in the 2021-22 ski season.