While many tourism-based businesses may be seeing dollar signs because of the newly announced Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, farmers and ranchers are trying to gather evidence that the federal designation and all its protectionist restrictions will negatively impact the county’s traditional economic base — agriculture.

Members of the Southwest Landowners Association asked the county commission Monday for its assistance in gathering that data, specifically on how much agriculture within the fledgling monument’s boundaries contributes to the local economy. The landowners’ idea is to research potential impacts of the monument so that they can be presented convincingly during the public participation portion of the management-plan process.

"We need to come up with a system to determine the value of agriculture within those lands, including the inholdings," said Rick Keck, a member of the landowners group. "And we need to do this right away."

The basis of the monument’s final management plan, which could take up to four years to implement, must be derived from what the commission called "vague and troublesome" language established in a proclamation announcing the monument, effective June 9. How much public input will ultimately be considered in the final plan is yet to be determined, a question causing considerable anxiety among local residents.

"There is a lot we do not know yet," said Mike Preston, federal lands coordinator for Montezuma County. "It’s important to generate credible information to put into the process and fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. The BLM team that will be drafting the new plan will not know those specifics, so it is up to us."

The monument was designated at the recommendation of U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as a way to further provide protection for the region, which is filled with mostly buried Ancestral Puebloan sites. But county commissioners, along with the landowners group, agreed that the proclamation is especially troubling for ranchers, who lease grazing allotments from the BLM, and for owners of private land within the monument.

"For private inholders and ranchers, they are making it so that we cannot sell it, farm it, use a post hole on it, drive on it, rebuild a cabin on it and so on," said Chester Tozer, president of the landowners group. "This thing is closing in on us."

"It just goes on and on. I do not want the next endangered species to be us," said audience member Glena Harris, in reference to wildlife habitat protected within the monument. Those protected habitats include the ones for the long-nosed leopard lizard and the Mesa Verde nightsnake.

Harris called for "community healing" to begin on the issue, and called on the commission to use its power to influence the public in a positive way regarding the management of federal lands within the county.

"If we turn this around, and legislate more cultural protection through the legislative process that has community support, then I’m sure it would pass in a New York minute," Keck agreed.

Some of the proclamation language is up to interpretation, Story said, and needs legal clarification. Specifically, the commission was concerned with a portion of the proclamation that states all federal lands and interests in those lands "are hereby withdrawn from all forms of entry, location, selection, sale, or other disposition," implying that grazing allotments could potentially be curtailed or totally eliminated within the monument.

The proclamation clearly bans off-road use by motorized vehicles within the monument, which constitutes a problem for ranchers that use roads historically driven on, but never officially mapped, in order to reach livestock or private inholdings. County planners are already contacting individual landowners to determine and then map out those access roads so they can be considered for protection under the final plan for the area.

For the agricultural economic analysis to work, the commissioners said that there needs to be cooperative outreach between the Farm Bureau, Cattleman’s Association and the Southwest Landowners group.

Concern was also raised on where exactly the boundary of the monument would be, and the fact that some maps erroneously include deeded or private lands. Once the management plan is put in place, the Bureau of Land Management will set the legal boundaries, and an electronic map that uses Global Positioning Satellite technology will be drawn.

In the spirit of cooperation, the commissioners agreed that the community needs to work together on gathering economic data, and pointed out that obtaining personal finance numbers could be difficult. They stopped short of signing on with the Southwest Landowner’s request to stop the monument on a legal basis, however, saying that more information was needed.

The group reiterated their intent to try to stop the monument either legislatively, through a provision in the Federal Land Management Policy Act that allows a majority of Congress to overturn a monument, or via a lawsuit challenging the legality of designating monuments.