Recreation: Colorado's Parks and Open Spaces

Whether fly fishing gold medal waters along the Upper Colorado River, hiking in famed mountains or enjoying city parks, Coloradans and visitors to Colorado love the state’s green spaces. These wild playgrounds are essential to Colorado’s economy and way of life. For the past 50 years, a relatively unknown but beloved federal program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), has developed community parks, preserved cultural heritage sites, secured boating and angling access.

But this critical conservation program could go unfunded, leaving many Colorado landscapes--in both the city and wild--without the support they desperately need.

The future of the Land and Water Conservation Fund for Colorado’s wild places is uncertain. Congress has never fully funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund to the extent promised when the program was created in 1964, consistently robbing the program of its full potential. Not just that, but Congress fails to permanently reauthorize the fund, leaving it in constant uncertainty.

With Colorado’s economy reliant on outdoor recreation, it’s vital that we support this most important conservation program. We want to keep green space in local communities while also safeguarding wildlands like Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and Rocky Mountain National Park.

A bipartisan majority of Colorado’s Congressional delegation supports the fund, and we will continue to push for the full funding of this program for the sake of preserving green spaces for future generations.