A bill making state land off- limits to the U.S. Army’s proposed expansion of the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site in southeast Colorado scrambled party lines Tuesday, as Democrats and Republicans joined together both for and against the bill in a head-spinning rhetorical free-for-all.
At the end of the debate, the House passed House Bill 1317 on an unrecorded voice vote, in which the side that shouts the loudest wins and the true support for the measure often remains muddy. The bill must still pass on a recorded vote before heading to the Senate.
“To me, this bill is ultimately about the authority of the military in this country,” said Rep. Kathleen Curry, D-Gunnison. “. . . The military in this situation is violating the trust of the state. And we as a state need to maintain our autonomy and our values and take a stand whether the military should be able to expand on our lands.”
Bill sponsor Rep. Sal Pace, D-Pueblo, said state lands pepper the area around the Piñon Canyon site and taking them off the table would hamstring the proposed expansion. The Army argues that it needs to expand to overcome a shortage of adequate training land.
Rep. Joe Rice, a Littleton Democrat and a colonel in the Army Reserve, said the current Piñon Canyon site isn’t big enough to train soldiers for the distances they would have to cover and exhaustion they would face in combat.
“This is about what the military needs to train for the wars and conflicts that we expect them to take part in,” said Rice, who read the names of several soldiers killed in Iraq after a navigational error the military determined was caused by fatigue. “. . . We want to prepare them and give them every chance to fight, win and survive.”
Bill proponents, though, said the expansion would come at the expense of ranchers whose families have worked on the targeted land for generations.
“We aren’t simply taking a house; we aren’t taking a sliver of land to put a highway through,” said Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez. “We are taking livelihoods.”
But bill opponents shot back that, by trying to block the expansion, the state would send an unwanted message to the Army that it is not welcome. That, in turn, could cause the Army to look elsewhere in future base-realignment decisions, hurting the state’s economy and the livelihoods of those here who depend on the military.
