Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Hello and welcome, everyone. It is Tuesday, October 6th, 2026 at 10 a.m. My name is Elizabeth Philbrick. I am a La Plata County Commissioner and I will be chairing the special business agenda meeting today. This is our call to order. Can we please go ahead and introduce ourselves?

All right. Marcia Porter Norton, La Plata County Commissioner. And we'll start over here.

Thank you very much. We will now rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Now we will move to today's agenda. There are two main sections of the agenda. One is the consent agenda and then the decision agenda. The consent agenda is designed to approve projects in a single motion that, while important, do not require board or staff discussion. Do any of the commissioners wish to remove anything from the consent agenda?

I have nothing to remove from the consent agenda. Thank you.

Hearing no changes, may I have a motion to approve today's agenda?

Commissioner Philbrick, I move that we approve today's special business meeting agenda for the Board of County Commissioners on October 2nd at 10.05. 10.01, excuse me.

Aye. Motion passes and the agenda is approved as presented. Now we move on to the identification of potential or perceived conflicts of interest. Do any of the commissioners need to make or disclose a disclosure regarding potential or perceived conflicts of interest?

Nothing to disclose, Madam Chair. Thank you.

All right. And nothing from me as well. We do not have any minutes to approve today, so we will move past the approval of minutes component of our day. And we will move on to public comment and input. I would like to open up public comment portion of this meeting.

Is there anyone in the room wishing to make a comment? At this point in time, the room is predominantly staff. I don't see anyone interested. So we will go ahead and close the public comment portion of the meeting and move on to the consent agenda. The consent agenda is designed to approve projects in a single motion that, while important, do not require the board or staff discussion. However, any board member or staff may request to remove an item from the consent agenda and place it on the decision agenda. With that, does anyone request the removal of any item from the consent agenda?

Madam chair I have nothing to remove and I Would move that we approve today's consent agenda with the three items all those in favor aye aye Motion passes and the consent agenda is approved as presented Now we will move on to the decision agenda We'll begin hearing the decision agenda with item number one

the consideration of a comment letter to the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and Bureau of Land Management on scoping and programmatic EIS for the Mancos Shale development. Staff report, please.

Any questions? I don't, just for, I think you said this, I apologize, but we have known this is coming, you came to board discussion time and we've been, the county attorney's office has been soliciting our feedback, so I read the letter and all my feedback is in there. The 108,000 surface area acres, that is in La Plata county, correct? Because my understanding is the makeshale also goes down into new Mexico? The field?

All right, and it is on my contingent on voting yes on this. And then do you know the timeline? So when, and again, you could get back to me later, but once this, I know there was a short comment period, and then they will, what's the next step from the BLM perspective?

Great. Thank you. I am under the impression that one of the main reasons for this EIS is because at this point in time, a lot of the wells that are already will be used in future capacity. But they've all been approved at different times, and so they all have different standards to meet. And this will help them create a blanket statement of understanding of what is and is not allowable on each platform. Is that true?

Thank you for that. And just for the listening public, would you be able to provide us with when this comment period ends? Because we as the county have an incredible amount of resources, as you had said, multiple different departments with a lot of expertise, but comments are available from anyone who wants to write comments, correct?

Thank you for that. And I appreciate all of the work that staff has put into thinking through how this will affect them and their expertise in that. We should note that Commissioner Sulka is with our governor at this point in time. He's with Governor Polis. And there is, so he is not here to agree for this particular letter on this particular decision item. So we would like to make sure that we offer some flexibility for him to be able to sign that. Can you put on record exactly how we go forth and do that?

So while that might be difficult to repeat word for word, do we have any more questions or comments?

Are there any more questions or comments from the public? Oh, I don't have any more. We'll open this agenda item to public comment. Anyone wishing to address this issue, please limit your comments to three minutes. The board will take your comment into consideration, but this will not respond to each comment. Please state your name for the record before you begin your comments. Not seeing anyone in the room, let's go ahead and open it up to our online community.

If there are more comments or questions, I'll entertain a motion.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I want to make a comment that, first of all, thank you for all the work, Ashley and county attorney, and all the staff that put work into this. This is a very big deal for our community and for the tribe. And I just want to say we have an excellent relationship With the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the commissioners and the tribal counselors meet quarterly. Our attorneys talk all the time. And we look forward to collaboratively working with them as they develop their energy resources that they have done quite successfully in the past. And at the same time, it's not a

All right. I will amend my recommended action to say with discretion to the vice chair to change the signature blocks should Commissioner Salka not be available today. As we said, he is meeting with the governor today on the enterprise gas bill.

All right, we're going to move on to some reports now. Commissioner Porter-Norton, do you have anything to report?

No, I was gone last week. And for the listening public to know, if you wonder why commissioners take time off at the same time, it's because we... Some of us take time off in the fifth week, which is kind of rare on the on the annual calendar when we don't have a meeting so Both Commissioner Salka and I were gone Last week we are in budget season as we know anybody can listen in on those online we're meeting with all of the departments and And in terms of any common items, I will be on a CCAT Interim Issues and Policy Committee on Thursday. Everything else is budget meetings. And that's it for

Wonderful. And so speaking of budget, remember that this evening at 5 PM in this room in the CAP board, you have the capacity as the public to be able to come in and speak. Make comments about our existing budget. It is available for you online. We are working through each individual department by department and discussing budgets. We take very seriously our role as the fiscal managers of the community, and we really take seriously the role of all of our department heads and their input when we talk about budget season. If anyone would like to come in, we will be here at 5 p.m. today taking pu

Wonderful. I see no one else in the room. We can go ahead and adjourn.