Jessica Presso is one of the proponents of the recently filed initiative, Wildlife and Ecosystem Conservation Commission, that required 19 pages of memo from the legislative services team to critique. That’s impressive for a title that should be a single-subject title voters can understand and cast a vote on either as a yes or no. She is, according to her online biography, a speaker at the World Conference on Ecological Restoration, an environmental data scientist, a restoration and rewilding strategist and an expert in environmental policy and ballot initiatives. She graduated with a Masters from Colorado School of Mines in May 2025.

Her upcoming talk at the World Conference on Ecological Restoration focuses on stakeholder collaboration. I do enjoy irony.

The proposal itself reads like a wish list for removing landowners and ranchers from the landscape, and perhaps it’s an attempt to garner feedback from the Legislative Council staff to sharpen skills prior to rolling out a more focused effort in the coming months or years. At this point, it’s so broad and so far outside the statutorily required parameters, I’m hesitant to spill too much ink.

However, here we are.

The better question, though, is where are the reasonable voices in these ballot proposals? The ballot proposal process in Colorado gives far-flung efforts from the ends of the rational spectrum a way to bypass stakeholders and debate between elected officials. Perhaps I’ve mentioned by disdain before.

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I wrote about this dumpster fire in my column on March 24, and it hasn’t changed significantly. One of my main concerns with the Wildlife and Ecosystem Conservation Commission is the complete omission and restriction of involvement from ranchers. A close second is the goal of seeking to override state and federal agencies with a group of unaccountable activists.

The initiative seeks to establish the conservation commission and specify who they deem acceptable to hold membership. It seeks to authorize the commission to designate “state-specific endangered species and keystone species,” establishing a statewide network of wildlife corridors, approving or disapproving public and private infrastructure projects and land-use practices, imposing and collecting fines and fees, seeking and expending grants from public and private sources, and adopting rules; establishes property tax reductions to incentivize landowners to participate in a statewide network of wildlife corridors; enacts new requirements and prohibitions for public and private infrastructure projects and land use practices; and establishes revenue sources to fund the commission.

This initiative attempts to create this commission as an entity of state government with all the statutory powers and duties that entails, despite the framework for those agencies of the executive department defined in the Colorado Constitution. This initiative attempts to circumvent the Department of Natural Resources and Colorado Parks and Wildlife entirely, both agencies held accountable to all stakeholders, not just the ones proponents of this initiative agree with.

Perhaps my favorite item in the 19-page memo from legislative services in section 4, subsection (2)(b) states the following: “In the event that CPW or another relevant agency is legally disbanded, defunded, or judicially determined to be nonfunctional, the WECC shall assume all statutory wildlife conservation functions previously assigned to such agency until a lawful successor is designated.” The memo asks, “Which government agencies in Colorado do the proponents consider to be ‘relevant’ agencies for the purposes of this provision? Alternatively, what characteristics does a government agency need to have in order to be considered ‘relevant’ for the purposes of this provision? Does this provision apply only to ‘relevant agencies’ of the state government? Or can a local government agency also be a ‘relevant agency’?”

It’s difficult to know where to begin here, but this portion of the initiative is the picture of overreach and an arrogance borne out of a blatant disrespect of landowners, stakeholders, voters and local control.

The initiative seeks to trample upon the Endangered Species Act by designating their own state-listed endangered species, I suppose based upon their own expertise, though it’s unclear what that might be.

The cherry on top of the overreach sundae is the initiative’s proponents seeking to target private landowners who aren’t using or developing their private property in such a way that the WECC deems acceptable and grants the commission the power to investigate, issue subpoenas, inspect private property and refer cases for prosecution.

And all this only covers half the initiative.

This initiative is so wildly out of line with reason it shouldn’t garner another drop of ink. It does, however, illustrate the arrogance of extremists who believe they know better than experts, stakeholders, landowners, state and federal agencies, voters and anyone exercising good sense and rational thought.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state’s oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state’s 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children’s books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.