Rural Communities Shift Away from Boom and Bust

By Julia Caulfield

Wild Gals Market in Nucla, Colorado (photo by Julia Caulfield)

Mining has been an economic driver in Southwest Colorado since the late 1800s. But when a local mine and power plant closed in 2017, a number of communities were forced to reimagine. KOTO’s Julia Caulfield has more on the region’s effort to create a new economic future.

Walk into Wild Gals Market in Nucla, Colorado and the store is bustling. Owner Galit Korngold is doing inventory on the order that just came in, when a member of the community busts through the door. She got her days mixed up and forgot people would be coming to her house for book club in a few short hours. She needs soup and bread.

Wild Gals is a success story for the West End Economic Development Corporation, or WEEDC, an organization supporting businesses like Wild Gals Market, and encouraging new industry and jobs in the area. Something crucial since the closure of local mines.

Nucla, and Wild Gals, sits in Colorado’s West End, a collection of communities on the west ends of Montrose and San Miguel Counties in the Southwest corner of the state, right on the Utah boarder.

If you ask Deana Sheriff, Executive Director of WEEDC, the region has always been boom and bust.

She says, “the people that came out here, if they were not the original homesteaders, they came out here as part of a mining operation, or a milling operation for uranium. And then when that fell out of favor, post-World War 2, we   saw a little bit of a bust then. Uranium came back a little bit in the early-80s, busted again in the 90s. It’s been very volatile since then.”

The last “bust” came when the New Horizon Mine and the Tri-State Power Generation facility closed in 2017.

“It’s been challenging when you have a community of less than 1,000 people, you’re talking about 10% of your population was impacted by this – and that’s just direct impact,” says Sheriff. “That doesn’t count the grocery stores and the gas stations, and the hair salons and everything that was also impacted.”

According to Sheriff about 60% of the mining workforce moved. Businesses on Main Street largely sat empty. But a group of locals in the West End did see the closure coming, and created WEEDC, with the aim of helping new businesses and the region weather the storm.

“That’s everything from how to set up your books, how to hire, do you need a personnel manual, where do you find employees. We really help them try and identify every piece of their business so they can be successful,” notes Sheriff.

Sheriff says WEEDC focuses on three areas of business growth: entrepreneurship, value added agriculture, and outdoor recreation and tourism. To date, WEEDC has worked with over 100 entrepreneurs in the area, with 36 of those turning into businesses.

Galit Korngold, over at Wild Gals, was one of those entrepreneurs, although she didn’t lose her job when the mine closed. Originally from Montreal, Canada, she and her husband moved to the area just before the pandemic, and bought an old mechanic shop.

“Once we moved here, I realized that there was no food that I really wanted to eat in this town. We had this great space at the front of the building, and I decided to open a food store,” says Korngold.

Wild Gals Market focuses on local, organic, and homemade goods from the region – with a selection of ingredients from the international market.

Korngold says WEEDC was “integral” to developing the plan for Wild Gals.

“I took accounting classes, and business mentoring from WEEDC,” she notes. “Because we don’t have a commercial kitchen of our own yet, and we make a lot of homemade food, we use the kitchen at WEEDC. That’s been just the greatest resource. We love that kitchen. We’re usually in there once a week, making stuff for the store.”

The West End is shifting. New businesses are opening, and broadband across the region makes remote work easy – drawing workers from across the state and country looking for a rural life. Korngold says it’s an exciting time to be in the area.

“I feel like we’re at the beginning of a renascence here, and it’s really cool to be a part of it,” says Korngold.

As that renascence continues, the future of the region is still to be determined. But for Sheriff, she hopes the days of boom and bust are over. For her, it’s all about steady, community building growth over the long term – and WEEDC plans to be there every step of the way.

Local Lawsuit Asks Oil and Gas to Help Pay for Climate Change

By Julia Caulfield

Colorado saw its two largest forest fires in state history in 2020. This fall, the U.S. Drought Monitor classified the entire state as in drought. Colorado’s average temperature has risen by 2 degrees Celsius in recent decades. Scientists say all of these effects are caused by climate change.

While these statistics have an impact from an environmental standpoint, according to San Miguel County Commissioner Hilary Cooper, they also affect the pocketbook of state and local governments.

“Our roads are deteriorating faster than they have in the past from extreme temperatures,” says Cooper, “and then of course the effects on our economy of extreme weather and especially drought conditions and the effects that that has on the ski area’s ability to operate and then also our farmers and ranchers.”

San Miguel County Commissioner Hilary Cooper (courtesy of Hilary Cooper)

Cooper says the changes in climate means the county needs to budget more money for climate mitigation, and she says they had a choice.

“Either going to our taxpayers and increasing their taxes or we can go to these companies who are making massive profits off of their sale of fossil fuels and make them accountable for at least a percentage of what it’s costing local governments,” says Cooper.

San Miguel County went to the companies.

In 2018, San Miguel County, along with Boulder County and the City of Boulder - representing both urban and rural parts of the state - filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy, to make them pay a portion of the price for climate mitigation on the local level. Exxon and Suncor are two of the largest fossil fuel companies working in Colorado - one of Suncor’s two U.S. offices is in the state.

The Colorado municipalities are not the first to file similar lawsuits, there have been cases in California, New York, and Hawaii – to name a few - though none of the cases have been decided in court yet. But the Colorado lawsuit is the first to be filed by governments in a non-coastal state. Marco Simons, General Council at EarthRights International, and part of the legal team in the lawsuit, says they wanted to tell the story of climate change from a different perspective.

“It’s not just about sea level rise, and it’s not just about coastal communities…It’s really affecting everyone across the United States,” says Simons, “and there’s a range of climate impacts that are visible to many folks in Colorado, whether that’s the changes in precipitation and snowpack, the damage to forests, heat waves, wildfires. All of these impacts which are happening throughout the Mountain West.”

Simons says the first aim for winning the lawsuit is to collect damages for San Miguel and Boulder. But there’s a secondary aim too, and it’s wrapped up in tort law.

“What tort law essentially does is it shifts the cost of dangerous or injurious activities onto the people who are engaging in those activities, rather than simply the victims,” says Simons.

In this case, Simons argues Exxon and Suncor are the agents, with residents and taxpayers in San Miguel and Boulder as the victims. His hope is, by shifting the cost, the lawsuits can also shift behavior.

Simons says, “whether that’s cutting back on the harmful activities, especially where the cost of those activities might exceed the benefits; and/or to raise the price of the products that are causing those harmful effects so that if they are continuing to sell fossil fuels, that the cost of the harms of those fossil fuels would ultimately get priced into them.”

The litigation process is long. Filed two years ago, the Colorado case still hasn’t been approved for a trial. But policy experts say lawsuits like the one in Colorado are having an impact already, noting as the lawsuits move further into the court process - and there’s discovery and hearings - oil and gas companies may lose their social license to operate, or acceptance from the general public.

Attorneys representing ExxonMobil and Suncor in the lawsuit did not respond for comment, neither did Suncor Energy. Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton commented in an email that lawsuits such as the one in Colorado “waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money and do nothing to advance meaningful actions that reduce the risks of climate change”.

But with the potential a loss of social license, oil and gas companies might be forced to change direction, or risk losing investment. That’s according to Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law and former lawyer with the Environmental Protection Agency. He says the banks that finance the oil and gas companies are looking at the rising number of lawsuits.

“And of course they’re looking at the science, and they’re beginning to get nervous. You can begin to see that the financial institutions are going to be disinvesting in oil and gas and reinvesting in renewables…so I think these cases could actually result in a major disinvestment in these companies that will push the energy transition that we’re seeing already even faster”, says Parenteau.

Time will tell if the tides are turning on the oil and gas industry. Until then, San Miguel and Boulder Counties, the City of Boulder, and all their residents will be stuck with the bill.