Colorado Sportsmen, bend over...(update)

[Oak]

...your good Governor Owens and his lackey Greg Walcher are about to give it to you without any lube.

"An initiative, called Core Mission Project, largely has been pursued by the administration under a veil of secrecy until recent news accounts spilled details of its potential for dizzying costs and for usurping the traditional role of the largest of these nine agencies, the Division of Wildlife.

"Despite concerted efforts to keep details from being made public, information has emerged about a sweeping plan that threatens to strip DOW of its effectiveness as a defender of wildlife values, with a corresponding potential to tap heavily into the agency's cash reserve to pay for it all."

Full Story Here

Oak

<FONT COLOR="#800080" SIZE="1">[ 12-04-2003 10:47: Message edited by: Colorado Oak ]</font>

 

[Ithaca 37]

Colorado sportsmen better get organized and fight this!

 

[cjcj]

Yes it is clear that Alta has a conflict of interest, looks like a scam to me why all of the secrecy? if it was on the up&up it would be out in the open wouldn`t it? as i`ve said before WE hunters/sportsman have to stick together [even high fence guys] there is strength in numbers, i have some engineering buddies that work for lockhead/martin in denver i will give them a call.

 

[Oak]

People are starting to take note of how bad this plan was.

Link to story below

...I might have offered the current situation involving Greg Walcher, executive director of Colorado's Department of Natural Resources and his pet project, a fiscal nightmare he named Core Mission Project.

As touted by Walcher, who supervises nine agencies that control various aspects of the state's wildlife, outdoor recreation and commercial natural resources, the scheme was aimed at saving the taxpayers millions of dollars through improved efficiency.

The plan also included certain elements of revenue enhancement, particularly a hike in fees for fishing and resident big-game hunting.

Those antennae started to rise when a Utah-based company, Alta Ventures, was hired as consultant on the project even though it soon became apparent this contract would cost taxpayers - particularly outdoors enthusiasts - far more than anyone imagined.

Suspicion swelled with the revelation that someone in DNR, presumably Walcher, amended Alta's bid to award it 4 percent of any savings or revenue when the Utah firm only bid for 2 percent in the first place.

Then someone did the math to figure that Alta stood to gain $400,000 just from the boost in license sales - even though just such a proposal had been floated every year for the past half decade. The company line became that the license hike needed to be connected to the Core Mission Project to carry it through, that it couldn't get legislative approval on its own.

Next came the revelation that state employees, under browbeating by Walcher and his lieutenants, spent 30,000 hours - the equivalent of $1 million in lost productivity - to deliver, gift wrapped, many hundreds of ideas to Alta Ventures.

DNR administrators then spent countless additional high-pay hours winnowing the list to what, in the case of the Division of Wildlife, came to 58 final recommendations, many still not worth the paper they're printed on.

However cockamamie these suggestions - multiplied across all nine agencies - might seem, they collectively allowed Alta to claim credit, all at a tidy 4 percent override, with a minimum of effort. The savings, projected over two years, needn't even be real. Upon Walcher's approval, the alleged savings become a matter of record and Alta leaves the state with a pile of Colorado money at a time when Gov. Bill Owens, Walcher's boss and benefactor, is crying the budget blues.

Nobody has pegged some cozy connection between Walcher and the Utah firm that would warrant such largesse, at least not yet. But there goes that suspicion thing again.

Finally, an underlying motive for all this foolishness arrived with Walcher's announcement that he's leaving his DNR post to run for the vacant U.S. House of Representatives seat from the 3rd Congressional District.

Considering the timing, this is the part where nasty old journalists really get distrustful. Walcher began the Core initiative in June, with a completion date for October or November - right on time for his political announcement.

A skeptic might conclude that the DNR chief planned on riding triumphantly into the congressional arena on a white horse spangled with his fresh reputation for fiscal genius.

Trouble is, this house of cards came tumbling down amid the stupidity of the Alta deal and widespread revelations from inside Walcher's own agency about the economic quicksand that had been Core's foundation all along. The deeper critics dug, the worse the smell.

In a Nov. 21 editorial, The Denver Post detailed the legislative Joint Budget Committee's discovery of how Walcher squandered hundreds of thousands more dollars to prop up the ruse.

Confronted with this folly and supported by only a handful of lackeys in his own department, Walcher chose to brazen it out, claiming an even more inflated benefit from Core, always unsubstantiated. He now claims the license proposal has been removed from the plan - a particular irony considering DOW won't get the money it otherwise might have had through normal means.

We may never fully know the cost of Walcher's folly, but JBC is scheduled to hold another hearing on the matter today. The legislature's fiscal watchdogs might suggest that Walcher pay Alta's bill with money from his campaign chest and see how much he really thinks the advice is worth.

But there we go being suspicious again.

Contracts savings plummet

...The state Department of Natural Resources estimates an efficiency study will save the agency only $6.5 million in the first year of the plan - $18 million less than predicted a month ago.

In a new forecast of the Core Efficiency Study's impact presented to the legislature's Joint Budget Committee on Tuesday, department director Greg Walcher said that the savings the nine divisions would realize is 73 percent less than officials estimated in late October.

Walcher has come under fire from the budget committee for entering into a contract with Utah-based Alta Ventures LLC that pays the consultant a $100,000 flat fee plus 4 percent of savings identified by the study, up to a cap of $800,000.

Legislators were also troubled by a clause in the contract that allows Alta Ventures to be paid based on estimated savings.

...If actual savings fall short, Walcher said, department agencies would have to enact further cuts to justify payments to the consultant.

"That was the way the contract was designed to work," he said.

Rep. Brad Young, R-Lamar, warned Walcher that the committee would frown on attempts by Alta to claim payment for ideas that the legislature had reviewed in the past, several of which appeared on the Department of Natural Resources' list of proposed actions.

The savings on which Alta's payment is calculated, he said, should be lowered by the estimated 30,000 hours of staff time that department employees put into developing the recommendations at the core of the study.

"But I don't know that we have control over that right now," Young said. "The horse may be out of the barn. It might be up to the executive branch to decide."

While the tone of the hearing was less tense than previous ones, Rep. Tom Plant, D-Nederland, was far from conciliatory.

"What has Alta done?" he asked. "DNR employees came up with the ideas. They estimated the savings. They're going to be the ones to implement them. What are we paying this company for?"