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The state should “acquire” 10,000 acres of an 83,000-acre San Luis Valley ranch long fought over by the ranch owner and the heirs of a land grant signed before Colorado was a state, a new report ordered by Gov. Jared Polis says.
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The governor appointed former U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, a native of the valley in southern Colorado, as a “special envoy” to help come up with a solution to one of the state’s longest-running land battles. In the past month, Salazar and consultant Berrick Abramson have met with the landowner, walked the ranchland, and talked with land-grant heirs at the governor’s mansion.
The two even asked William Harrison, the son of an oil baron who purchased the Cielo Vista Ranch in 2017 for $105 million, if the state could buy the whole property, according to the report released Wednesday. The answer was a definitive no.
“He declined that approach and said he had no interest in it,” wrote Abramson, with consulting firm Confluence PSG. “He repeated that position in multiple subsequent discussions.”
Harrison countered with another offer. He would give land-grant heirs full access, with the additional rights of fishing, hunting and medicinal herb collection, to about 10,000 acres — in exchange for the heirs surrendering their rights to the other 70,000 acres.
“I carried this proposal to the second round of community meetings,” Abramson wrote. “It was rejected quickly and decisively by those who attended the meetings.
“The single clearest and most consistent finding across this engagement is that proposals trading surrendered rights on most of the property for expanded rights or acreage elsewhere do not have community support.”
The fight dates back to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico. Settlers in the valley, and their heirs, were given access to hunt, graze livestock and gather timber on the land — rights that have mostly remained even as the ranch has been owned by private landowners over the decades.
The report recommends that the state acquire about 10,000 acres of the ranch, land that the land-grant heirs and the rest of the public could use for recreation. The descendants of the people granted use of the land in 1844 would keep the rights they already have on those 10,000 acres and beyond, which are to collect firewood, harvest timber and graze livestock, Salazar and Abramson said.
The 10,000 acres includes lower-elevation land “dominated by sagebrush,” as well as alpine prairie and mountain terrain, the report says.
“No rights are surrendered” under the proposal, it says. “The expanded rights on the 10,000 acres would be in addition to existing rights.” Harrison, the report says, is open to enhancing the 10,000 acres by spreading grass seed and improving existing roads.
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The report recommends a 45-day plan in which all sides explore “the terms of a state acquisition” of a parcel of the ranch. At the same time, the parties should create a strategy regarding the “working relationship” going forward between Harrison and the community.
“Reaching these outcomes will require the property owner and the community to move beyond long-held positions, and the work ahead is to finalize terms that both can accept,” the report states.
Polis said the proposed solution creates an opportunity for the community to enjoy part of the land, with no change in heirs’ rights.
“The state cannot compel anyone involved to act to resolve this conflict; resolution can only be done through good faith engagement and cooperation, which is what we have seen from all parties during this process,” the governor said in a news release. “I am grateful for all who are working for a better outcome than the conflicts of yesterday.”
Salazar, who is also a former secretary of the interior, Colorado attorney general and ambassador to Mexico, and Abramson met with more than 100 land-grant heirs and community members. A smaller group of heirs were invited to the governor’s mansion before Polis announced an executive order appointing Salazar as special envoy.
The work is a “rare opportunity to secure lasting recreational access and a fundamentally different working relationship between the parties. If this opportunity is lost, the record suggests it may not present itself again for a generation or more,” the report says.
This isn’t the first time a Colorado governor has stepped into the land dispute.
In 1993, then-Gov. Roy Romer, at the urging of Salazar, who was director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, created a commission to pursue a state purchase of the ranch. The commission recommended that Colorado acquire the land, with a nonprofit land trust holding a conservation easement, “protecting the community’s historic use rights in perpetuity.” But no funding was secured and the plan never materialized.
“That history is a reason for urgency,” the new report says. “It is also a caution: the 1993 effort was led by credible people with real institutional support, and it still stalled.”
The fight between Harrison and the land-grant heirs has multiple fronts.
One ongoing legal battle involves at 8-foot tall fence that Harrison started to build around his ranch in 2020. The battle over the fence has dragged on for several years. Construction, including a bulldozed path through piñon trees and sagebrush, was halted in 2023, after about 20 miles of fence line was erected, when Costilla County commissioners won a temporary injunction.
In a different court battle, heirs of the land grant won the right to keep grazing sheep and cattle on the land, which they call La Sierra. But the ruling in May ended their right to collect firewood in a 233-acre buffer zone around Harrison’s new 7,000-square-foot house on the ranch.
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