QUC General Reasons why Chaffee County Roads are unsuitable for OHV use
(The reasons below apply to all routes)
1) State law (CRS 33-14.5-108) states that these county roads are closed to unlicensed OHVs as the pre-existing baseline condition. These roads should remain closed to OHVs unless there are enough specific, significant and rational fact based reasons that might warrant changing this, and the majority of county residents agree.
2) Most of the 64 counties in Colorado have not chosen to allow OHVs on County Roads. Less than 10 Counties have allowed OHVs on some of their roads. Why does Chaffee County think it is so different from the vast majority Colorado Counties so as to even consider this?
3) Of the Colorado counties that have modified state law to allow OHV use on county roads, Chaffee County has the largest population and is the closest county to the major metropolitan areas on the Front Range to have done so. Most of the counties that have done this are very rural, remote and isolated counties on the western slope. These are quiet backwoods type counties out in the boondocks. The population of Chaffee County is ~ 3 times the population of the average county that has allowed any OHV use on its roads. Chaffee County roads get more traffic than roads in these other counties.
Does Chaffee County want to label and portray itself as a progressive, populated, growing, safe, well visited and quiet place that is easily accessible as the Crossroads of the Rockies; or as a remote, rough and wild place where you need a specialized off road machine just to travel on the county roads?
4) Chaffee County has not been able to properly educate OHV users about existing regulations that prohibit OHV use on most county roads, and/or enforce regulations that apply to the roads that are open. (i.e. From Chaffee County Ordinance 2005-01 such as riding single file on the right of the road, using county roads for any other purpose other than going to, or coming from adjacent public land, obeying all other motor vehicle speed limits and signage, being 16 years old and having a valid driver’s license and keeping off public or private property without express consent of the owner, obeying traffic signs especially No OHV signs and possessing insurance). Most OHV operators on the existing county roads opened to OHV use know nothing about the above regulations. To see ample evidence of illegal Chaffee County road use by OHVs click here.
5) Chaffee County does not have the funding or manpower to properly educate OHV users about any future regulations that may allow or prohibit OHV use on and newly opened county roads, and will not be able to enforce regulations that apply to any new roads that are opened. The county should not create additional problems and concerns when it does not have the resources to properly deal with existing problems and concerns.
Other Colorado counties (San Juan, San Miguel, Hinsdale) that have opened their roads to OHV use have had to spend their own money to hire OHV specific law enforcement people ("Alpine Rangers"), along with purchasing OHV specific law enforcement vehicles, in order to properly manage OHV use on their county roads.
This was costing these counties over $20,000 per year 4 years ago.
Don Reimer stated in a public input meeting that there are no additional Chaffee County funds for additional OHV education or enforcement.
6) The above mentioned County OHV regulations are significantly different from what is allowed on Forest Service and BLM roads, many of which transition directly onto Chaffee County roads. OHV riders on public lands can be as young as 10 years old, have no training or driver’s license, lack insurance, and can generally perform all sorts of acts (such as doing ‘donuts’, popping wheelies, weaving, riding back and forth, etc.) consistent with recreational use of an OHV. (OHVs by state law are defined as being used primarily for recreation, not transportation). It is unrealistic to expect OHV riders to know that different rules apply on county roads, and automatically change from a recreation based mindset to a transportation based mindset when they transition onto County roads.
OHV riders can and will use county roads as recreational corridors, and this will create unsafe mixed use conditions.
7) The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the ATV Safety Institute, and almost all ATV manufacturer owner’s manuals have warnings against operating ATVs on public roads in mixed use conditions. ATVs are not safe on public roads and their tire design and high center of gravity prohibits full control when used at higher speeds, when turning/cornering and on the improved road surfaces of county roads (especially pavement). No paved county roads should allow ATV use. Allowing ATVs on county roads unnecessarily places regular existing road users at greater risk from having to mix with vehicles not designed to be safely operated on those roads.
8) Who will bear the increased financial burden placed on the county that will result from allowing OHVs on County roads? The voters sent a clear message to the County in the elections last fall that we need to err on the side of fiscal responsibility. Properly managing OHV use on county roads will result in increased costs for education (signs and public contacts will be needed), enforcement (to contact, educate and cite violators), and merely considering this proposal is occupying the time of paid county staff.
Opening county roads to OHVs will place additional burdens on adjacent private land owners, land management agencies, cities/towns and county that want to exclude OHV use.
9) Does the county wish to unnecessarily jeopardize its insurance and place itself at unneeded risk, from potential lawsuits that will result when OHVs collide with regular passenger vehicles? Who will bear the costs of trying to defend the decision that opened these roads to OHV use?
10) This proposal has the potential to displace the hundreds of thousands of visiting quiet non-motorized recreationists (hikers, climbers, campers, boaters, fishermen, wildlife watchers, etc.) that make up the vast majority of tourists that come to Chaffee County. Tourism is the primary component of Chaffee County’s economy, and these active outdoor recreationists are the basis for that economy. These recreationists come to Chaffee County to escape noise, pollution and unsafe conditions in the cities.
Conflict between these existing users and OHV users can and does occur. OHV recreation is generally incompatible with many other forms of recreation, and when OHV recreation reaches a certain level, other forms of recreation is displaced. Opening more roads to OHV use has the potential to drive these existing tourists away and hurt the local economy.
11) Does the county wish to encourage use of dangerous recreational vehicles on its roads? The incidence of accidents, injuries and deaths resulting from ATV use is greater in areas where these vehicles have been allowed on public roads than in areas where such use is prohibited.
12) OHVs are significantly noisier than regular cars and trucks. OHVs are allowed by Colorado law (SB 63-08) to emit up to 96 d (B)A in noise, whereas the average car or truck emits significantly less than this (<70 d(B)A). On the logarithmic scale used to measure sound/noise, OHVs emit many times more noise than regular licensed vehicles. 96d(B)A is like a loud gas powered lawn mower. This noise level exceeds the limits set for allowed motor vehicle noise according to Salida and Buena Vista city codes. OHV noise is irritating and damaging at these high levels, and noise is a form of pollution. Noise emitted by trail and motor bikes has been shown to be the most annoying to people camping. OHV noise can travel long distances from roads and negatively impact humans and wildlife alike. Irritating noise like OHV noise increases stress levels in humans and animals.
13) ATVs and dirt motorcycles pollute more than highway licensed vehicles. OHVs are not required to meet the same stringent EPA emissions standards as regular highway licensed passenger vehicles. These OHVs can emit up to 8 times more pollutants than regular passenger vehicles. Studies have shown that regular auto emissions have decreased 56% over the last 20 years, but OHV emissions have increased 42% over the same period. It is irresponsible to encourage use of these polluting machines, especially when one considers that this use is for non-essential recreational purposes. ( see http://www.epa.gov/otaq/regs/nonroad/2002/f02033.pdf ).
14) OHVs repeatedly are illegally driven off designated routes onto public lands, negatively impacting natural resources. There are over 100 miles of unauthorized motorized routes on public land in Chaffee County that see regular illegal use by OHVs. These illegal routes are negatively impacting wildlife, water quality, vegetation, increasing the risk of wildfire, contributing to erosion, etc. The USFS and BLM make efforts to educate and enforce rules and regulations that limit OHV use to designated routes, but users drive around, vandalize and/or ignore educational signage and barriers. A study of Colorado OHV users (read it here) showed that the vast majority of OHV users think it is ok to ride off designated routes, and over 66% actually do this occasionally, and 15-20% of OHV users frequently break the rules and often ride off routes. Many county roads proposed for opening pass through public lands, and many of these roads already have unauthorized motorized routes leading off them. Opening these roads to OHV use will only further contribute to this illegal off road use problem.
Public land managers and private property owners with undeveloped lands through which these county roads pass will have to bear the burden of being vigilant and working to exclude and prevent any unauthorized OHV use on anything that looks like a route available to OHV use. It only takes one or a few riders to lay down new tracks, and others will soon follow.
15) There is no specific training or testing required to operate an ATV or unlicensed dirt motorcycle in Colorado. ATVs are significantly different than regular passenger cars and motorcycles. The braking, steering, and handling of an OHV is not at all similar to that of a licensed car or truck. Obtaining a license to safely operate a car or motorcycle does not fully prepare and qualify an individual with all the skills required to safely operate an ATV. Why would the county want to risk mixing untrained, unskilled ATV riders with other trained operators on any county roads?
16) This proposal will negatively impact free ranging wildlife and big game throughout the county. It will increase road hunting pressure and further fragment habitat by increasing recreational OHV use on county roads through wildlife habitat. Wildlife is impacted by road noise, and increased OHV noise will drive animals further away from these roads, impacting hunters and wildlife watchers. Studies indicate far more people hunt and/or watch wildlife in Chaffee County than ride OHVs.
17) The cumulative direct and indirect impacts of opening roads must be considered. Opening roads in one area may increase use and impacts on other routes and landscapes in other areas. Opening roads may lead to negative effects from high impact motorized dispersed camping, increases in noise, pollution, unauthorized use, displacement of other users, changes in visitor perception, changes in property values, social impacts, etc. These county roads do not exist in an isolated vacuum and opening them to OHV use will have impacts far beyond the road itself. These must be considered.
18) These OHVs lack visible identification. They have no license plate or easily seen identification number. It is impossible to report and later identify riders that are violating rules and traffic regulations. Some riders do not feel they need to be accountable for their actions because they know they cannot be identified and later caught.
Although all OHVs must be registered with the state, the registration sticker is about the size of half a playing card. The registration number on the sticker is small with ~<1/4 inch high numbers and letters that are not visible unless the OHV is stopped and you are within 3 feet of it.
19) OHVs are also significantly different than regular highway licensed vehicles in other ways. OHVs can be large and heavy (up to 800 lbs.) and are powerful and fast (top speeds over 60 miles per hour). Thus OHVs can be dangerous and can cause significant damage if they collide with anything else. But OHVs often do not have important safety equipment found on regular passenger vehicles as they may lack headlights w/high and low beams, front and rear turn signals, speedometers (how can a driver obey the posted county road speed limit w/o a speedometer?), horns, a reverse gear, mufflers as quiet as cars and fuel efficiency standards – ATVs average only 15-20MPG.
20) It has been said that other states allow OHV use on county roads so we should do this here.
This is an erroneous assumption in that Chaffee County is in Colorado, not Utah, Arizona or the very few other states that may allow OHV use on public roads. The vast majority of States do not allow OHV use on their county roads. The few states that do allow OHV use on their roads require OHVs to be licensed with visible identification plates and they must be insured, and have additional regulations that must apply to these vehicles in order for them to be on County roads. Many of these other states offer and require specific OHV training courses for riders to be able to operate an OHV on a county road. Colorado has not required or offered any OHV operator courses. Thus, OHV use on county roads in other States is be very different in terms of enforceability, identification, penalties, operator training and regulations than OHV use on Chaffee County roads.
21) Allowing increased OHV use on Chaffee County Roads has the potential to shift the existing recreational balance of visitors and recreationists in the county. National Forest Visitor Use Monitoring data (attached) from 2006 indicates that only about 7% of forest users participate in OHV recreation, and only 2% choose OHV riding as their primary recreational activity. With Forest Land composing 70% of the area of Chaffee County, visitors and tourists on this land comprise a very significant component of the local recreation based economy.
Conflicts between non-motorized and motorized recreationists are common. Since OHV users form a small percentage of local public land users, it is not worth the risk of increasing use for this group and possibly displacing the much larger existing hikers, campers, fishermen, hunters, wildlife watchers, etc. . that already comes here.
22) The proposal to open these roads is ambiguous and incomplete. In some cases we do not know if the entire road is proposed for opening or only a segment of it. There are roads named in one part of the proposal as suggested for opening but not in others. The jurisdiction of certain roads being considered is still questionable.
23) Why were only proponents of opening roads to OHVs contacted, and asked for suggestions on which roads they wished to open? Why wasn’t the public contacted and asked to submit suggestions regarding which roads should remain closed to OHVs? Is there actually a written proposal that is requesting these roads to be opened to OHVs, with reasons why the county to consider this and why is the public not allowed to see this?
24) OHV riders erroneously claim they were able to use the roads in the Fourmile area before the plan, and that the Fourmile Travel Management Plan (TMP) stated they could still use the roads. They claim they left the meetings at the end of the Fourmile plan with an understanding that they could use all the roads in there.
The County retains jurisdiction of roads that cross private property unless the Forest Service has an existing easement for those segments of roads. The Forest Service transferred jurisdiction of many roads in the Fourmile area to the county using formal FRTA agreements. The Forest Service normally does this when over 50% of the use of that road is for non-forest related activities (like commercial use to businesses, residents going to and from their homes, etc.) and the county accepts this jurisdiction when it realizes the road is serving as a crucial link to those businesses and homes. The county accepts maintenance responsibility for FRTA roads and operates them as public county roads, with all traffic restrictions and regulations applying. CR 307, CR 187, CR 371 are county roads under FRTA easements with some of these agreements dating back to 1997.
The Forest Service publicly stated in a Chaffee County Commissioner work session in 2011 that the Fourmile TMP, which was finalized in 2002, had no jurisdiction over county roads. The county has stated that they were not involved in the Fourmile TMP.
The final Environmental Assessment for the Fourmile TMP stated at II-2 that there are “58 miles of routes on private land” within the planning area. “Opening, closing, or modifying these routes are outside the scope of this plan”.
Thus, county roads were not impacted by the Fourmile TMP.
Forest Service maps produced in association with the plan, and Forest Service and Friends of Fourmile maps produced afterward, erroneously did not distinguish between county roads and forest service roads in this area. This added to the confusion. The Forest Service has confirmed that the maps are not correct and is in the process of updating them.
25) It has been erroneously claimed that opening additional areas to OHVs will reduce impact on heavily used areas.
This is similar to an earlier flawed approach to dealing with environmental pollution described as “the solution to pollution is dilution,” which has long been discredited. If there were no additional inputs (i.e. no increase in OHVs coming to the county overall) then spreading existing use would reduce crowding and impacts. But the basic assumption about no additional increase is not correct: increases in OHV use will continue, probably driven even higher by the recognition that more county roads would be open. There will be no way to limit or regulate the amount of OHV use on Chaffee County roads once they are opened to this use.
It should be noted that in unmanaged recreation and specifically unmanaged OHV recreation, was identified as one of the four major threats to the health of our nation’s Forests. OHV recreation also contributes directly and indirectly to the other 3 threats: wildfire, loss of open space, and spread of invasive species. The Forest Service responded to this by issuing the national Travel Management Rule in 2005, which will help them better manage, limit and improve OHV recreational opportunities.
The end result of opening more roads to OHVs over time is that original heavily used areas will return to and even surpass initial use densities but the new areas of expansion will eventually reach their own unsustainable levels of use. So the expansion argument is really a short sighted view that misses the fundamental point: that demand for increased use (by any type of recreational user) should not drive decisions to increase availability but rather those decisions should directly relate to reasonably limiting resource damage and avoiding displacement of others.
There is a counter argument and well used management strategy that concentrating use in small areas makes management of high impact activities like OHV use easier. Managers can “harden” campsites and routes, focus limited enforcement resources in smaller areas and even, if justified, effectively limit entry of users. Carnage Canyon in Fourmile and the Big Bend OHV area are examples of this approach. Concentrating campers in a designated campground, and even people in cities are similar examples.
Opening more county roads to OHV use will only spread the problems associated with that use to larger and larger areas and make it harder to manage and regulate.
26) OHV recreationists do not spend any more than other recreationists, and in fact
When you consider the relative numbers of forest visitors among various user groups, along with the average amount spent per day, you see that OHV recreation is contributing a relatively small percentage of the total amount spent by all visitors.
27) Active non-motorized outdoor recreation in Colorado provides significant economic benefits. These activities include: bicycling, camping, fishing, hunting, paddling, snow sports, hiking, climbing and wildlife viewing. The top five visitor participation activities in Chaffee County, according to the 2006 Chaffee County Visitor Bureau Survey, are Walking, Photography, Hiking, Bird Watching, and Fishing
Active Outdoor recreation activity in Colorado:
-Contributes over $10 billion annually to Colorado’s economy
-Supports 107,000 jobs.
-Generates nearly $500 million in annual state tax revenues.
-Produces $7.6 billion in retail sales and services across Colorado.
(source http://www.outdoorfoundation.org/research.recreation.state.html )
The economic potential for tapping into this huge user group is much greater than the limited potential for tapping into the much smaller and limited OHV user group.
28) All of these county roads proposed for OHV use receive regular use by other non-motorized recreationists. Hikers, walkers, runners, bicyclists and horseback riders use all of these roads. All of these uses are allowed on county roads by state law. All of these users can generally hear and are very aware of normal licensed vehicle use traffic approaching on these roads, and they know that they will lose in any collision, so these other users generally get off the road or move to the side to avoid accidents.
These other allowed county road users are much more impacted by OHV noise, pollution, and unsafe use than licensed vehicle drivers are. The impacts to these other road users that will result from allowing OHV use on these county roads must be considered.
OHV use is very different than these other users. OHV users are generally prohibited from using county roads by state law. OHV users cannot hear approaching traffic, as their machine motors are very loud. OHV riders often wear helmets that cover their ears, further restricting hearing. OHV riders travel at much higher rates of speed than these other users.
OHV use on county roads is much more dangerous on county roads that other non-motorized use on those roads because of the power and speed of OHV use, and the inability of OHV users to hear other users.
29) OHV use is non-standard use and will increase maintenance costs on county roads.
OHV use is defined by law as recreational use, and some of the recreational fun activities OHV users do (spinning “donuts”, doing power slides, accelerating quickly, etc.) wears and impacts the maintained tread surface of county roads much differently than use by regular highway licensed vehicles. OHVs have the power and weight to chew up the maintained gravel surface of these county roads by doing these activities.
Even riding along slowly on the edge of county roads by OHVs is non-standard use that will cause different road wear patterns and maintenance concerns.
30) Safety is a concern with OHV use. The ATV safety institute states that 92% of all accidents involve behavior that is strongly and publicly warned against, like riding on a public road (http://www.atvsafety.org/ ).
West Virginia data indicates that 33-47% of the over 200 deaths from ATV accidents over the last 20 years occurred on public roads.
There have been numerous OHV deaths from accidents in the county, with the most recent one in Chubb Park on 9/25/2011. Over 150 people have died in ATV accidents in Colorado in recent years.
This does not imply that ATV use should be banned, or that it should not be allowed anywhere because it results in deaths. The fact is that ATV use can be dangerous and does result in serious enough accidents that result in the death of the rider. These accidents can and do endanger other users of public county roads when they occur on those roads.
31) The Salida City Council and the Buena Vista Board of Trustees have passed resolutions opposing the opening of roads to OHV use. View these here and here.
Note that the Salida resolution was passed based on proposals to only open up 16 roads to OHV use.
32) The vast majority of citizens and groups represented at the February public input meetings in Chaffee County opposed opening any more roads to OHV use, as do a number of local businesses. Of those who commented, 72-82% were opposed to opening any roads to OHV use.
That number: 72-82% opposed, would represent an overwhelming majority landslide margin (a mandate) if it was the result of any general election.
33) Irregular OHV tire use on county roads will increase wear and tear on county roads, and the Chaffee County Road and Bridge Department has stated that OHV use on county roads will cost the county more in materials, maintenance time and staffing.
The Salida Ranger District has stated that they have examples of a road that was made inaccessible to passenger cars because of OHV use.