03/02/2025
KSJD NEWS: Montezuma County is already feeling the impacts of sweeping cuts to the budgets of federal agencies. A rangeland management specialist with the local Bureau of Land Management Tres Rios Field Office has been terminated after fewer than 60 days on the job.
Ryan Schroeder is now speaking out about what he worries that this and other cuts will mean for the field office.
“It’s a real gut punch,” he said, “and it’s going to impact the ability of the office to do range management.”
Schroeder had been hired to replace longtime BLM employee Mike Jensen, who had retired. He was to help address a backlog of grazing permits and land health assessments on some 600,000 acres in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument and the Tres Rios Field Office.
Schroeder, who recently earned a Ph.D. in systems ecology from the University of Montana, moved to Mancos and started work on Dec. 29, 2024.
On Feb. 18, he was sent a letter notifying him of his termination, effective immediately.
“The Department [of Interior] has determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities and do not meet the Department’s current needs. . .,” reads the letter from Karen Kelleher, deputy director for state operations of the BLM.
“I had signed my performance plan seven days prior,” Schroeder, who was a probationary employee, told KSJD. “ I was not able to have had a performance review.”
Schroeder has worked as a graduate research assistant at two institutions and also worked as a rangeland technician in Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming before obtaining his doctorate.
“I’m a botanist, an ecologist, and a soil scientist,” he told KSJD.
At the county commissioners’ workshop on Feb. 24, Derek Padilla, field manager for the Tres Rios Field Office, told the board about Schroeder’s termination. He said it was concerning “because we have a pretty big backlog” of work.
Padilla said another person who had been hired by the Tres Rios office as a realty specialist to deal with matters such as rights-of-way and easements was also terminated.
“We’re waiting till the dust settles to figure out what our organization is going to look like once the entire federal-workforce restructuring is done,” Padilla told the commissioners.
The position of rangeland management specialist is difficult to fill, Schroeder told KSJD, because it requires a great deal of specialized training.
“They are hard to hire because of all the requirements written into the statutes,” he said. “For every four positions open, there is one person qualified to do it.”
He said he had also interviewed for a position with the Gunnison Field Office and had been offered that position too but chose Montezuma County instead. If he had taken the Gunnison position, it wouldn’t have mattered, he said, because he would also have been probationary there so would have been terminated.
Rangeland management specialists try to ensure that lands have adequate forage for cattle and for wildlife, enough plants in place to hold down the soil, and habitat diversity to support pollinators as well as birds.
Here, those birds include piñon jays, which are in decline, and Gunnison sage grouse, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
“One and a half hours before I got terminated,” Schroeder said, “I was having a good talk with two private ranchers on the Colorado-Utah border.”
They discussed topics such as re-seeding in order to get more grass growing, mitigating fire hazards from junipers in powerline rights-of-way, and getting the Yellow Jacket grazing allotment reopened, he said.
“They were really excited we were going to finally get moving. Then I told them I’d been terminated and they were like, ‘wait, what?’ It was deflating for them too.”
Rangeland technicians monitor whether permittees are following the terms of their leases. “We actively go out and monitor to make sure ranchers are operating under the terms of their permits,” Schroeder said.
For example, if someone has a winter grazing permit but is grazing clear into May, which is the prime growing season for desert vegetation, “that has negative ramifications for soil to stay in place, water to not collect in places, and plants to grow,” Schroeder said.
“We have monitoring plots where we collect individual plant species across grazing allotments to see what the vegetation forage capacity for a pasture is, whether it meets the need of the producer for the number of cattle.”
Under law, the BLM is obligated to renew grazing permits but it doesn’t make sense to reissue a permit without adjusting things if necessary, he said.
Many current permits were originally signed in the 1980s or 1990s, he said, “There was a lot more forage then. Now there are more junipers and there is less predictable water. The carrying capacity of a lot of these allotments has changed. We need to make modifications and to incorporate more up-to-date science.
“This is adaptive management with ranchers. We don’t tell them what to do. We need to work collaboratively with people in the stewardship of this landscape.
“Ranchers want to do the right thing by the land and their animals, but there’s a lot of different people who run (cattle) out here and not everybody does things the same way.”
Schroeder was one of three people working on a backlog of permit renewals and updates, land health assessments, and other projects requiring NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] analyses.
“We have lost 33 percent of the capacity we had and we had just got back to the minimum necessary,” he told KSJD.
“If there’s another wave of firings coming targeting new people, then the only option would be to rubber-stamp” permit renewals without any adjustments, he said.
His position does not entail only grazing issues, Schroeder said, but includes working with non-profits, local governments, and tribal nations on other issues such as wild-horse management.
“It’s not just grazing and it’s not data collection for data collection’s sake,” he said.
Public lands are used by hunters, anglers, backpackers, wild-horse advocates and more, he noted. “The BLM has a multiple-use mandate.”
Schroeder said he is considering joining class-action lawsuits that are being launched over the abrupt firings of federal employees.
“I wanted to serve my country and serve this resource, to be an expert on this resource, and I’m afraid for what’s to come if this position doesn’t get refilled.
“I wanted to do on-the-ground work, not be some Ph.D. in an ivory tower. I hate that. I got my Ph.D. to be able to have the skills to do this job.”
“I would really like my job back, but I worry about the Public Lands Office being able to do the right thing for the public and the community.”
Having moved here from nearly 800 miles away, Schroeder is now sorry he may have to look for work elsewhere.
“I was really excited to make Mancos and Montezuma County my home.”
(Schroeder is in the photo with his dog, Chispa.)
