June 15, 2026 04:16 PM UTC

Trump Comes For The Roan Plateau

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• by: Colorado Pols

As veteran reporter Mark Jaffe reports for the Colorado Sun, another long struggle that conservationists thought was finally over with nature as the winner has been reignited by the Trump administration:

After nine years of protests and lawsuits, an agreement preserving the Roan Plateau in western Colorado from oil and gas development was reached in 2016. Now the Trump administration is poised to overturn that accord and open the plateau to drilling.

Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management proposed 114 parcels covering 126,744 acres on the Western Slope for drilling, including six parcels covering 5,000 acres on the plateau…

BLM first proposed issuing oil and gas leases atop the iconic plateau, which rises more than 3,000 feet above the Western Slope’s Colorado River Valley, in 2007, sparking protests by community and environmental groups and a lawsuit.

Longtime readers will remember the fight over drilling on the scenic Roan Plateau during former Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration, after George W. Bush’s BLM sold leases that a court later ruled were improper. After much further negotiation, most of the leases were cancelled and the Roan Plateau protected.

But then came Donald Trump and the “Big Beautiful Bill” that the Western Slope’s Rep. Jeff Hurd cast his deciding vote to pass:

The accelerated pace of sales is the result of changes made under H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July. The act mandates quarterly lease sales in nine Western states, including Colorado.

While Rep. Hurd at least makes excuses for his vote to slash Medicaid and food assistance funding, it’s worth noting that the “Drill Baby Drill” provisions of the 2025 Republican reconciliation budget bill were the parts that Hurd was most excited about–even justifying the bad parts by extolling the virtues of expanding energy production on the Western Slope.

The Roan Plateau, a place Coloradans had hoped the next generation might inherit intact, was what Hurd was talking about. Now the only hope is that the courts step in to save Roan Plateau again.