Colorado’s senior U.S. senator remembers a time when Congress would pass a broad public lands conservation package with bipartisan support at the end of each year. 

But those days are becoming rarer, said Michael Bennet, a Democrat who has served in the Senate since 2009. 

Public lands legislation has largely stalled in Washington over the last several years. Bills with Democratic and Republican support have been reintroduced multiple times, with some even passing the House only to languish in the Senate. 

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Republicans in Congress are also advancing a sprawling domestic policy package, which President Donald Trump has called his “big, beautiful bill.” The package aims to fulfill many of the president’s core campaign promises, including opening more federal lands to oil and gas leasing to boost energy production. 

Yet Bennet said he has reason to be optimistic for the future of public lands in Colorado. He secured a much-needed bipartisan boost for his latest conservation bill after Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, who represents much of western Colorado, introduced companion legislation in the House.

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The Gunnison Outdoor Resource Protection, or GORP Act, would safeguard 730,000 acres of land in and around Gunnison County, touching on areas in neighboring Saguache, Ouray, Hinsdale, Delta and Pitkin counties. The bill enhances protections for undeveloped and wildlife areas, recreation use and research, shields land from oil and gas development, and secures more support for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. 

The bill, co-sponsored by Sen. John Hickenlooper, was first introduced last fall in the Senate but never advanced. Bennet said Hurd’s support will be “enormously helpful in moving the legislation forward,” adding that the GORP Act enjoys endorsements from a wide variety of community groups after 10 years of stakeholding. 

“It was written on the banks of the rivers of Colorado and the living rooms of people in Colorado, not in Washington, D.C.,” Bennet said. 

Whether the GORP Act will usher in a new era for bipartisan public lands initiatives, however, remains to be seen. 

While Bennet believes there are still places to find common ground, he and other Democrats are uniformly opposed to the energy and environmental policies included in Republicans’ domestic policy bill, which passed the House by a one-vote margin early Thursday. Republicans hold narrow majorities in both the House and Senate. 

“I do think (the GORP Act) is coming at a moment when there are people in Congress who are threatening to sell off the public lands of the United States of America,” he said, “and Colorado will never support that, we will fight that every step along the way.” 

In a 2024 Colorado College survey of 436 Coloradans, 69% said they prefer that leaders place more emphasis on protecting water, air, wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities over maximizing the amount of land available for drilling and mining. 

The poll also found 84% were in favor of creating new national parks, national monuments, national wildlife refuges, and tribal protected areas.

Hurd: ‘You can’t pigeonhole me’ on public lands 

During his 2024 campaign for Congress, Hurd, a Grand Junction attorney, said his message on public lands was to “make sure that we have federal lands management decisions that have the buy-in of the people that are affected by them.” 

He feels his support for the GORP Act is consistent with that pledge, even as some of its provisions may seem at odds with Republicans’ national agenda around energy and public lands. 

The measure, for instance, removes 74,000 acres of land in Delta County’s North Fork Valley from oil and gas development. While Hurd supports that provision as part of the GORP Act, he also voted for House Republicans’ domestic policy bill, which could open up over 200 million acres of public land nationally to oil and gas leasing.

In Colorado, the bill would mandate quarterly lease sales for oil and gas on federal land. Democrats and conservationist groups have lambasted the bill, calling the proposals some of the most anti-public lands policies in the country’s history. 

Hurd said the bill is “about finding balance” and approaching public lands “pragmatically.” 

Among his chief priorities is overturning several resource management plans approved under former President Joe Biden, which he and other Republicans argue went against the Bureau of Land Management’s multiple-use mandate. The mandate is used to designate federal land for various simultaneous activities, including recreation, drilling, logging and conservation. 

The plans, which undergo a public engagement process, typically take around three years to develop and are intended to guide land policy decisions for decades to come. 

Hurd supported provisions in Republicans’ domestic policy bill that would have struck down two resource management plans for the Bureau of Land Management’s Colorado River Valley and Grand Junction field offices, though those efforts didn’t make it into the final package that passed on Thursday. 

The management plans, approved under the Biden administration, closed “low and medium potential” areas to new leases for oil and gas companies, while keeping around 85% of lands that have “high potential” open to future leasing. The plans also extended wilderness protections and conservation areas. 

The Colorado Department of Natural Resources, in a previous statement, said it had deep concern about efforts to undo the two Colorado plans, which it said “drew near consensus support” when finalized.

Hurd earlier this year introduced separate legislation, dubbed the Productive Public Lands Act, to repeal those and several other Biden-era management plans. He said conservation and energy production aren’t mutually exclusive. 

“Energy is such a core part of our economy — a support for families in western and southern Colorado,” Hurd said. “I don’t think that we should restrict the multiple-use mandate in the way that those resource management plans would’ve done. Doing so would only hurt Colorado families.” 

Still, he said there are “certain circumstances where we are going to draw that line in different places,” adding, “you can’t pigeonhole me” when it comes to his decisions on public lands. 

He was the lone Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee to vote against an amendment to the domestic policy bill that sought to allow the sale of around half a million acres of public lands in Nevada and Utah. 

Democrats worried the measure, which was later stripped out of the final package, could’ve opened up parts of the country to additional land sales. 

Hurd said the proposal failed to show it had enough community input, unlike something like the GORP Act, which has endorsements from multiple county and town governments, recreation groups and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

Mixed results for past outdoors legislation 

Will Roush, executive director for the Carbondale-based conservation group Wilderness Workshop, both praised Hurd’s support for the GORP Act and criticized Republicans’ broader efforts on public lands in the domestic policy bill. 

“They’re very different pieces of legislation, and for folks who care about public lands and who care about people who use public lands, it’s really clear which one is the one to support,” Roush said. 

While he sees Republicans’ domestic policy bill as “D.C. politics” that does little to reflect public desires around public lands, he called the GORP Act a prime example of community-driven legislation. 

“People love our public land, they want to see them protected, and this bipartisan introduction is just an excellent example of that that I hope bears fruit real soon,” he said. 

“We hear a lot of rhetoric from both parties about the value of local communities, of Washington D.C. listening to the people on the ground, especially in the realm of public lands,” he continued, “and so I would hope that Congress really takes that to heart.” 

Roush remains hopeful that GORP and other public lands bills can make it over the finish line, adding that he’s encouraged by some recent legislative wins for the outdoor community. 

That includes the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experiences, or EXPLORE Act, which was signed into law by Biden late last year. Prior to EXPLORE, the last major public lands initiative to become law — a sprawling conservation package named after former Michigan Rep. John Dingle — passed in 2019, under the first Trump administration. 

Still, several high-priority public lands bills for Colorado Democrats remain in limbo. Efforts like the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy (CORE) Act and the Ski Hill Resources for Economic Development (SHRED) Act, for example, have passed the House but never made it out of the upper chamber. Both bills were reintroduced this year and are led by Bennet and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat representing parts of the Front Range and the central and northern mountains. 

Hurd said there “is a path to legislative results in a divided Congress” and signaled he could be open to supporting other Democratic-sponsored public lands legislation. He said the SHRED Act, which seeks to keep the revenue generated from ski resorts’ operating permits in the hands of local communities, is “something that I am looking at very closely.”

The fate of public lands legislation, however, remains largely in the hands of the Senate, which has proven to be the main roadblock for past measures.

Bennet believes there are more than the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to pass public lands packages but blames a small faction of Republican “ideologues” who’ve used procedural Senate rules to block those bills from advancing. He specifically called out Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican who currently chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. 

“There are a handful of people here who have a deep, deep commitment to the ideology that the U.S. should sell off our public lands,” Bennet said. “(But) I think most of my colleagues think it’s ridiculous that we haven’t passed public lands bills.” 

He is also bracing for the public lands fight to come to the Senate, where Democrats will need to find bipartisan support if they are to change, or outright reject, any of the House’s provisions. 

“We have to be very, very vigilant about fighting back on those that want to sell off our public lands while at the same time doing everything we can to push these public lands initiatives forward,” he said. 

Reporter Ali Longwell contributed to this story.