Valdez himself crafted early Costilla County land use codes and zoning regulations in the 1990s amidst an extensive career as a land planner, administrator, and architect, with a graduate degree from the Harvard University School of Design.
He implored the county to issue code and permitting citations for the fence project, and to conduct an analysis of how the large-scale fence installation could affect the watershed and wildlife migration.
“[The county] seems to be reluctant, maybe, to get involved in anything that's going to be controversial,” Valdez said. "I think they're also afraid, probably, of what the legal implications would be versus a multimillionaire, a billionaire. You know?” He said. “As a county, we just don't have the resources.”
At the end of the day, the priority is watershed protection, Valdez said. He believes the county has more authority than it exercises when it comes to protecting the land from erosion and sedimentation, and has urged protections and a deeper look into the effects of construction on below water and land systems.
On June 6, 2022, a field technician from the Costilla County Planning and Zoning Department issued a series of land use code infractions against Cielo Vista Ranch, citing “no approved permits and or special use reviews for the construction being done.”
Violations included not obtaining a mining permit for excavating and filling for road construction; not obtaining a watershed overlay permit for activity potentially affecting the watershed; and not obtaining a permit for road grading.
The county called for a cease in fence building activity and gave Cielo Vista Ranch ten days to comply before instating legal action.
Law firm Spencer Fane for Cielo Vista Ranch responded on June 17, 2022, denying any violations had occurred. “CVR views this latest letter as a continuation of a long series of interference with CVR’s constitutional property rights,” the response states.
Cielo Vista Ranch’s representation stated they would seek compensatory damages including a monetary award and attorney's fees, and additional fees, stating alteration of the fence would cost $75,000 per mile, and that a lapse in project activity would incur as much as $7,000 per day.
The parties then entered private negotiations. The settlement agreement was presented to the public on Tuesday, Oct. 25 during a special commissioners’ meeting that was spent mostly in executive session.
Emerging from executive session, one commissioner suggested wryly he and fellow commissioners may want to “bring a bulletproof vest” to the next meeting.
The widely circulated comment put locals on high alert and characterizes a larger paradigm of relationship between the community, Costilla County, and what is now Cielo Vista Ranch.
[Related: Attorneys anticipate judge's historic ruling in 41-year-old land rights case]
Commissioners published the settlement proposal in the print version of the Costilla County Free Press on Thursday, Oct. 27. Details of the agreement were also posted on the county’s website on Oct. 26.
During a regular meeting Tuesday, Nov. 1, commissioners voted to accept the agreement.
“Nobody saw [the agreement] until a few days before it was approved,” Valdez said. “It was never released to the public. I wanted to comment on it because I think there were several things wrong.”
In reference to the Morada, “there was just a brief mention,” Valdez said. “They basically said that the impact and the development of the fence had not impacted the Morada.”
Valdez believes an additional study of the fence’s effects on the watershed, wildlife, and cultural practices is necessary.
He said the county’s response to issues pertaining to the fence “sets a bad precedence, because now any developer can go out there and do what they want. And then if they get caught, it’s, ‘Oh, well,’” Valdez said. “They'll just pay the fee, with no evaluation of the impacts.”
“Still, I do appreciate that they brought it to light,” Valdez acknowledged.
Representatives for the county declined to comment.
Settlement upon settlement
Even inadvertently, a new kind of fence brings up old wounds.
What is now Cielo Vista Ranch was once a portion of the Mexican-backed Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. The land was privatized into the hands of its sponsor, Charles Beaubien, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
Beginning in 1864, the land grant was deeded to a series of surveyors and prospectors, among them, Colorado’s first governor, William Gilpin.
Yet the area’s meadow and timber lands remained in use by the original settlers and their descendants, more or less uninterrupted — though continually contested in and out of the courts — until 1961, when a lumber operation purchased the property from the county for back taxes, fencing it off.
The 1961 fence became a signal of a changed way of life. Closing access to the mountain’s common lands ended over a century of grazing, hunting, fishing, and firewood and timber collection that baselined the local subsistence lifestyle.
“There’s been a lot of tension ever since the fencing off in 1961,” Valdez said.
Decades of abuses ensued between mountain owners and the community, including direct actions to stop logging, bloodshed, and assassination attempts — hence the commissioner’s comment about a bulletproof vest — pinnacled in an unheard-of development. In an outstanding anomaly, the Colorado Supreme Court reinstated locals’ rights to graze animals and harvest tree resources on private property in 2002. They acknowledged some settlers’ rights as prescribed on behalf of the former Mexican government — opening a now two-decades-long conversation about how communal rights are to be defined, established and monitored.
[Related: Court appoints special master in Costilla County land rights case]
The Cielo Vista Ranch property adjacent to the Morada is a parcel referred to as “Cielo Vista II,” and is not part of the Colorado Supreme Court-issued allowance to the originally deeded common lands.