Naturita’s economy has been sketchy since the uranium boom of the 1950s burst, possibly leaving some in this far-western Colorado town with cancer but more assuredly others with thin hopes for economic prosperity.

The town lies in western Montrose County amid wavy folds of sediments deposited deep in Jurassic and other ancient geologic periods. As for the future, solar energy could play a role in the county’s economy, delivering a tax base to support schools and other public services. A 20-megawatt solar farm accompanied by a comparable amount of battery storage has been proposed for an abandoned industrial site near Naturita.

But that solar project and potentially others would almost certainly be precluded by regulations being now being considered by Montrose County. Earlier this year, the commissioners ordered creation of a far more restrictive code applicable to all new larger-scale solar developments. In doing so, they shunned the regulations developed since the first moratorium was imposed in October 2022.

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This project near Naturita would be located on a former evaporation pond for oil and gas operations and next to a Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association electrical substation. It would seem to be an ideal location for the 100-acre solar project proposed by Standard Solar in cooperation with San Miguel Power Association.

It also happens to lie within a half mile of State Highway 141, a designated historic and scenic byway. The site is not visible from the highway, but the regulations proposed by county commissioners would ban solar installations within two miles of such highways.

Montrose County’s new alternative would, among other provisions, also prohibit large-scale solar within mapped deer/elk migration corridors, require them to be within 1,000 feet of existing transmission lines, and cap the height of solar panels at 20 feet.

The Colorado Solar and Storage Association Institute warned in an Aug. 5 letter to the county commissioners that adoption of the proposed code would “likely amount to a near-ban on large-scale solar development in Montrose County.”

The county planning commission on Aug. 28 rejected the regulations proposed by the county commissioners. It’s not clear what will happen next. The chaos in county government has some observers wondering whether the two commissioners who constitute a majority on the three-member commission will replace the planning commissioners with ones more compliant to their wishes. That has been the way of President Donald Trump.

Many of Colorado’s 64 counties during the last several years have adopted regulations governing solar and other distributed renewable generation. They vary greatly. Some are so strict that they constitute near-bans on solar. Others impose modest guardrails on new solar.

In addition to Montrose, four others among Colorado’s 64 counties still have moratoria on solar (Kiowa, Montezuma, Grand and Washington). Washington and La Plata counties also have moratoria on battery energy storage systems.

Trump hatred of solar

These proposed alternative rules in Montrose County echo what the Economist magazine in July called “Donald Trump’s war on renewables.” The Guardian explained that Trump’s “bitter dislike of renewable energy first erupted” in 2011 when off-shore wind turbines became visible from his golf course in Scotland.

At that time, renewable energy deployments were rising rapidly as prices plunged and utilities found ways to integrate intermittent resources into their portfolios without imperiling reliability. In 2016, a Pew Research Center survey found 89 percent of national respondents favorable to more solar farms and 83 percent to more wind farms. Far, far behind was off-shore oil and gas drilling at 45 percent. Nuclear got 43 percent support.

Trump has tried to change the narrative and has at least partially succeeded. In July he signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law, upending federal tax credits for renewable energy. Soon after he called solar “very, very inefficient and very ugly too.” Wind and solar, he proclaimed last week on social media, are the “scam of the century.”

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The Trump administration has started blaming solar for taking prime agriculture land out of production and threatening food and fuel supplies. On Aug. 19, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced sharp curbs to federal support for the Rural Energy for America Program. “Our prime farmland should not be wasted and replaced with green new deal subsidized solar panels,” Rollins said in Nashville.

The announcement included a chorus of statements from Republican members whose refrain was that solar was part of the “green new scam,” a play on the “green new deal” that took root among Democratic members of Congress in 2019.

“Taxpayers should never be forced to bankroll green new deal scams that destroy our farmland and undermine our food security,” said U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming.

Speaking at a geothermal conference in Hayden on Aug. 20, U.S. Senator Michael Bennet described a “deep and abiding ideological hatred for wind and solar.” He seemed to describe the Republican agenda reflected in the bill passed by Congress in July when he said that “those (tax) credits just couldn’t survive that hatred.”

Solar has much going for it as an energy source. It can be installed at a rate that is five times faster than all other new electricity sources combined and remains the lowest cost solution even without subsidies, according to CoBank, the cooperative bank serving agriculture and rural areas. The cost of unsubsidized solar has fallen 84 percent since 2009, according to an annual analysis by Lazard, the financial advisory and asset management firm.

Something else has come into play, according to local observations in Montrose. People, when driving south toward Gallup, N.M. or northwest to Salt Lake City, have seen giant solar farms. They find the scale of solar now arriving unsettling.

CoBank found something similar in its new report issued Aug. 14. The report describes a “staggering number of headwinds,” including federal policy and supply chain constraints. Foremost is the local opposition. But rural communities who balance concerns can help diversify agriculture income and benefit local communities, the report says.

A sharp turn rightward

Montrose County has a population of 45,000, roughly half of it urban but with a rural identity. It trends strongly Republican. Trump won roughly two-thirds of the votes there in the last three presidential elections.

The solar story began in October 2022. This was soon after a solar farm that was intended to power a Bitcoin mine was placed in the processing yard of the former Louisiana-Pacific oriented-strand board mill near Olathe. The company said it needed no county review — and that was correct. Like many other counties, Montrose had no regulations governing larger-scale solar installations.

About the same time, Enel Group proposed a solar project  on more than 1,000 acres south of Olathe. County commissioners decided they needed a six-month moratorium on utility-scale solar installations.

That moratorium has now been extended going on three years. The Planning Commission reviewed the regulations in February 2023 and approved them, which resulted in them being presented to the county commissioners in March 2023. That version of the regs was ultimately denied towards the end of last year. The regulations then went back to the planning commission this year. The planning commissioners voted unanimously in March recommend that the Montrose Board of County Commissioners approve the solar regulations. The proposal would have allowed farmers and others to use their land for solar installations but with some restrictions.

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Those limits were not restrictive enough for two of the three county commissioners. The two commissioners, Scott Mijares and Sean Pond, had both arrived in their offices in early 2025. They said the broader public had not had an opportunity to weigh in with their thoughts.

Sue Hansen, the two-term incumbent commissioner, dissented. She proclaimed this move back to the drawing board “the most wishy-washy approach I’ve ever — I mean, we need to make a decision!”

All three of the county commissioners were Republicans until March, when Hansen quietly left the party to become an independent.

Mijares ran unopposed in November after winning 54 percent of votes in the Republican primary and took office in January. He grew up in New Jersey and Florida, later becoming a surfer in Hawaii. In 2019, he arrived in Colorado,according to the biographical sketch on the Montrose County website. In the Uncompahgre Valley he has had several businesses, currently including a whiskey and wine bar in Montrose.

Mijares also had a career stint as a broker in commodities and stocks. It did not end well. According to a story in the Tampa Bay Times in 1996, Mijares, who was identified as then living in Winter Park, Fla., was among three employees of the Atlantic Capital Corp. who were accused of fraud in promoting speculative stocks. The scheme netted $2.6 million in profits for the group.

A final consent judgment filed in 1998 in a U.S. District Court in Florida ordered Mijares to pay the $19,000 he had fraudulently earned plus interest of more than $9,000.

Sean Pond, the third commissioner, was appointed by the Republican Central Committee in March to fill a vacancy. By April, the county manager, the assistant county manager, and the county attorney had all resigned. At least two of them said they were asked to leave by the new commissioners, according to a local news report. In July, an interim county manager resigned, although she stayed with the county in a different capacity.

In November, voters will be asked whether to recall Mijares from office. A petition with a surplus of qualified signatures was affirmed by election officials on Aug. 20. Those calling for a recall accuse him of violating transparency, fiscal responsibility, and public trust.

Pond is not subject to recall because he did not gain his office until March, and under Colorado an individual must be in office for six months. That will be in September — too late for the November election.

If this recall reflected simply the disgruntlement of Democrats, it would surely fail. But in Montrose County, a sharp fracture has emerged within the Republican Party. The dispute about solar regulations is just one aspect.

“It is very dysfunctional in Montrose County right now,” said Dennis Anderson, publisher of the Montrose Daily Press who has made no secret of his dislike of the direction of the county since the arrival of Mijares and Pond. Anderson told Big Pivots that he voted for Lauren Boebert the first time she ran for Congress in 2020, although not in 2022.

As for the Republican Party committee that appointed Pond, Anderson says it has been described as “being like the KKK without masks and the cross.” Coram, the former legislator, says few Republicans are pure enough for the committee members. “If you talk to a Democrat, you are evil.”

Get along? it’s a trap!

The hard right-ward jerk of the party can be seen most prominently in statements by Pond, who is from the Naturita-Nucla area of western Montrose County.

On the county website, he proclaims himself a descendant of homesteaders in western Colorado in the 1880s and says he grew up in humble circumstances. In the U.S. Navy he found the discipline he needed for success. He served two deployments in the Persian Gulf. He later was in the oil and gas industry and has started various businesses, some of which have succeeded and others that have failed.

Pond crusades prolifically. He rejects any compromise. That includes with traditional Republicans.

In a May 26 essay posted at the Rocky Mountain Voice, which calls itself an “unabashedly right-of-center, pro-Colorado citizen news source,” Pond proclaimed himself a defender of the U.S. Constitution. “And this get-along-with-everybody mentality. That’s the problem. That’s the trap,” he wrote.

As for energy, he called for expanding coal mines and opening more coal-fired power plants. He seems to be talking about renewables when he describes “unstable alternatives that scar our land and provide little benefit to local economies. They’re killing jobs, gutting communities, and taxing working families into the ground.”

On Facebook, where he has a large following (614 shares of one three-minute video), Pond also calls for fewer regulations. It’s an ironic call given his push for greater regulations governing solar in Montrose County. And while resenting decisions from outside about federal lands, he does want federal intervention to prevent implementation of a new state law, SB25-003, which is to govern semiautomatic guns.

Pond repeatedly expresses warnings about “outsiders” and about change of any sort.

“They have launched an all-out attack to turn Colorado into a socialist state,” he wrote at one point. In an Aug. 25 posting, he warned a state delegation to Naturita would be talking about diversification and resilience. “That sounds good, but what it really means is forcing rural Colorado away from the industries that built our towns and fed our families.

“Ask them the hard questions. Ask them if their grants will support uranium mining, timber, oil and gas, critical minerals, and real industry. I bet you’ll find out they don’t. I bet you’ll find out they only support solar, tourism, and ‘clean renewable energy.’ That’s the trap.”

Tri-State operated a small coal-fired power plant near Naturita until 2018. The coal plant and mine employed 85 people. It provided 67 percent of the tax base for the local fire district and 55 percent of the tax base for the school district, said Makayla Gordon, executive director of the West End Economic Development Corp. The solar project, it happens, will employ up to 250 union workers during construction but will have only one or two full-time employees.

In an Aug. 18 posting, Pond addressed the schism within the Republican Party.

“The truth is finally out in the open. There are TWO Republican Parties in Montrose County. On one side are the True Conservatives, men and women who fight for the Constitution, liberty and the people. We don’t bend, we don’t sell out, and we don’t take marching orders from the establishment,” he wrote.

“And on the other side sits the group I call the Coram, Catlin, Hanson Camp. The same old moderates and liberal-leaning politicians who are more worried about politics and compromise than protecting your freedoms.”

Who are these liberal leaners?

The Catlin he mentioned is State Senator Marc Catlin, a Montrose native who had a career in water before entering politics. A Republican, he has sometimes co-sponsored legislation with Democrats.

The “Hanson” is his fellow commissioner, Sue Han Senator She is described by observers as a sturdy conservative of the old school. What this means regarding solar regulations was reflected in a statement she made at an Aug. 6 meeting in support of the original solar regulations developed since 2022.

“My belief is that we need to make it easy to do business — but not without guardrails. And I think we have sufficient guardrails” in the original proposal, Hansen said.

Don Coram is the third individual in Pond’s triumvirate of “liberal-leaning politicians.” He served as a state legislator from 2011 through 2022. He, too, had occasionally co-sponsored bills with Democrats, including some in the energy sector. He opposed mandates for decarbonization that was part of the Polis administration approach. Mandates produce unnecessary opposition, he says. He favors carrots over sticks.

During his business career in Montrose County, Coram has had various mining interests in the Naturita-Nucla area. His all-of-the-above approach to energy includes nuclear.

“We need to put every bit of energy on the line that we can, with the controls that are necessary to make it safe and reasonable,” he said at a June meeting when the commissioners extended the moratorium to provide time to develop a new, more restrictive alternative. More solar will be needed, he said, because of the demands of artificial intelligence data centers.

In the case of the proposed solar project near Naturita, he had been working for free for Standard Solar. “Because it’s something I believe in,” he explained. “It’s beneficial to the county, to the west end. It would provide another source of income.”

Standard estimates that the solar project would produce $4.34 million in property taxes during the 25-year life of the project.

San Miguel Power says that the proposed regulations would effectively kill the project. A federal grant of $9.8 million was awarded to the solar project through the Department of Agriculture Empowering Rural America (New ERA). This was a program created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. However, an extension of the county’s moratorium on solar projects would likely prevent the project from meeting the federal deadline for construction. The project must break ground by July 2026.

Mijares sees little value in solar. “I feel like solar energy is being pushed upon us through the state,” he said at the June meeting covered by Rocky Mountain Radio. “The fact is that solar energy panels only produce energy at a fraction of the time of a coal or a natural gas plant.”

Hansen responded that it was not the job of county commissioners to decide the mix of energy sources. Rather, it was to provide safeguards for community residents. “I think if we were talking about some other non-renewable (energy source), we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she added.

Mijares, in an e-mail response to a request for comment from Big Pivots, said the larger question was why the previous board did not pass the code being developed. “Are you comfortable with our county code being dictated by climate activists and solar energy industry?” he asked. The new board, he added, “has a responsibility to do its own research.”

The other two commissioners did not respond to e-mailed invitations for comments.

What the solar sector says

In early August came another public discussion. The commissioners got an earful of dissent, but the two majority commissioners stayed their pre-determined course. They sent their alternative regulations to the planning commission for review, as required by law. The planning commissioners on Aug. 28 rejected the code that the two commissioners want.

The Colorado Solar and Storage Association Institute, a nonprofit arm of the trade organization, sees these as the key components of regulations the county commissioners want:

• The scenic byway setbacks of two miles;
• A cap of no more than three permits for large-scale solar facilities within a five-year period;
• A prohibition of solar projects in areas identified as elk or deer migration corridors mapped by Colorado Parks and Wildlife;
• Requires any solar energy facility be within 1,000 feet of an existing transmission line;
• Caps height of solar panels at 20 feet and battery storage projects at 25 feet;
• Prohibition from general agriculture zones.

Most concerning, said the COSSA Institute in its letter, is the agriculture prohibition. While the first alternative had encouraged facilities located on prime farm ground to use agrivoltaics, the new version would prohibit solar where more than 30 percent of the land is disturbed.

“It contradicts the definition and intent of agrivoltaics and effectively bans development in many areas closest to infrastructure and most feasible for solar siting,” said the Institute. “Most counties allow solar as a special use in ag zones, with appropriate review.”

Jeremiah Garrick, the manager of community engagement for the COSSA Institute, told Big Pivots that the new regulations now being considered would be among the most restrictive in Colorado. The stacking of requirements coupled with restricted use of agriculture land would “make it very difficult to find any land that could host a solar facility and likely act as a de facto ban,” he said.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as the saying goes, and that is evident here. The most restrictive regulations can generally be found in the wealthiest and most liberal places but also in the poorer, more conservative. Garrick says the most restrictive codes are found in Boulder, Delta, Saguache and San Miguel counties.

Delta County commissioners wanted to kill an 80-megawatt solar project on Garnet Mesa east of Delta but relented when project developers produced a plan for allowing sheep to be grazed on the 383-acre site. This marriage of solar with agriculture is called agrivoltaics, and it is slowly gaining support in Colorado, although the specifics matter greatly. That Garnet Mesa project will be formally commissioned on Sept. 30.

San Miguel County, a neighbor to Montrose, whose courthouse lies in Telluride, would seem to be oddly aligned with Montrose. The two counties lie at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Trump won two-thirds of votes in Montrose. In San Miguel, three-quarters of votes have gone to Trump’s opponents.

Yet in this matter of regulating solar, Montrose seems to be following the lead of San Miguel — an irony noted by Hansen, the commissioner, in the Aug. 6 meeting. She did not mean it kindly. “I personally think it’s important for Montrose County not to get in the way of people doing what they want on their property, with some guardrails,” she added.

The commissioners at that same meeting heard from Ken Norris, a former utility executive and Montrose County manager, who warned of blackouts if more solar continues to be added to the electric grid. He professed faith in coal-fired power plants, where he spent the early part of his career working for Colorado Ute and then Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association.

Private property rights

From the other side of the fence came equally strong opinions.

David Harold — of the family business, Tuxedo Corn, which made Olathe synonymous with corn in Colorado — disputed the proposed regulations. “I’m extremely agitated. It’s hard for me to stay calm,” he said.

Harold and his father, John, manage 2,500 acres, of which 1,300 acres would be considered higher-intensity farmland to grow vegetables and some row crops. He argues that the right to have solar on ag lands is a matter of economic survival. He also has stressed private property rights.

“Having something like solar panels, (which) could be an income stream, pulled out from under me in the name of protecting agriculture is just infuriating,” Harold said. “I suggest that if you don’t want prime farmland to be turned into solar panels, the county raise some tax money and buy it. Good luck. Have fun.”

Jennifer Jones, a member of the Western Colorado Alliance, pointed out that the industry standard for a setback from a scenic byway was a quarter mile.

Coram, the former legislator, also spoke at the meeting in early August. (See video on Facebook).

In his comments to the commissioners — and later, in an interview with Big Pivots — Coram emphasized that he believed the Montrose County commissioners were likely violating state law in their process. That state law allows local government decisions to be challenged. That includes land use proposals that are arbitrary or constitute an abuse of discretion.

He said a project that was unduly delayed without reasonable justification was arguably such an abuse.

The actual opportunities he sees for solar in Montrose County are limited. But in places, they could greatly help farmers. An acre of land leased for $200 for agriculture might produce $1,000 to $1,500 an acre for solar.

The most colorful comments at that early August meeting were from Wayne Urbanos.

He said that as a child he had avoided frogs, believing they would give him warts. At length, he learned otherwise. “I accepted the truth and learned to love frogs.”

In Montrose County, he said, there was an unfounded belief that solar panels give people warts.

Jim Heneghan also spoke. A former engineer for Delta-Montrose Electric, he’s now a consultant who works primarily with electrical cooperatives. It does look like solar is being targeted, he said. He said the combination of two criteria in particular— those governing acreage sizes on ag lands and distance from transmission — would “pretty much kill any project from happening.”

Heneghan, in an interview with Big Pivots, said he sees this as “bizarre politicization of renewable resources, which has been going on around the country for some time now.”

Coram, in an interview, focused on the process. “They are just using this as a stall tactic,” he said, likening it to a football team that “takes the knee” to run out the clock. He said he believes this violates a state law adopted in the 2024 session.

Do the county commissioners really care about visual intrusions? Coram points out that the commissioners in March approved erection of a cell tower near Naturita. Unlike the solar farm, it is visible from the scenic byway.

As for the two county commissioners who dislike solar, he points out that neither was a registered Republican until relatively recently. They are, he says, “two opportunists who jumped on the Trump way of life.”

For prior coverage of this topic, including a brief mention of Montrose County, please see this story from Sept. 6, 2024: “Leaving everybody just a little bit unhappy” in BigPivots.That story was focused on regulations adopted in Mesa County but skipped around Colorado.