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Author: Greg Walcher

Walcher: We built it, and they still won’t come
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Walcher: We built it, and they still won’t come

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com Building a new subdivision is complicated. Almost every city and county in America have master plans dictating “conforming uses” of land. Most specify lot and home sizes, rules for vehicle access, water supply, sewage disposal, flood control, affordable housing, and park space. Those are addressed in lengthy application processes and public hearings, all preceding building the infrastructure, and then the homes. The National Association of Home Builders says government regulations account for 24 percent of the final price of new homes. Sixty percent of that comes during planning and development, only 40 percent during actual construction. Those costs are many times higher when building businesses or industries. So, how much cheape...
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Walcher: Squirrels Killed by the Forest Service, or the Courts?
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Walcher: Squirrels Killed by the Forest Service, or the Courts?

By Greg Walcher | Guest Commentary, GregWalcher.com In 2017 the Arizona Game and Fish Department estimated that there were only 252 Mount Graham red squirrels left. They only inhabited a few hundred acres in the 10,000-foot Pinaleño Mountains, not equipped to survive the heat of the surrounding deserts. Then, a lightning strike started a 48,000-acre fire in that section of the Coronado National Forest, incinerating all but 35 of the Mount Graham squirrels in existence. Federal and state wildlife officials thought the species faced likely extinction. It is a more common story than you might think. The Journal Science published a study in 2020 called “Fire and biodiversity in the Anthropocene,” analyzing the danger of wildfires to threatened and endangered species. Across nine taxonomi...
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Walcher: Zombies That Can Never Be Killed
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Walcher: Zombies That Can Never Be Killed

By Greg Walcher | GregWalcher.com In Haitian folklore a zombie is a dead body reanimated through Vodou magic. The modern concept of zombies as flesh-eating creatures from the cemetery evolved more recently, from the 1968 comedy/horror film, “Night of the Living Dead,” and sequels like “Dawn of the Dead,” “Day of the Dead,” and “Return of the Living Dead.” Some call them cult classics now, staples of the horror genre. Such films all have one thing in common: no matter how many times the bad guys are killed, they keep coming back. The same is true in politics, where the term “zombie” is often used to describe federal agencies and programs whose legal authority has expired but nevertheless continue to operate as if nothing changed. Coloradans are justifiably proud that their...
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Walcher: Paying for what ought to be free
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Walcher: Paying for what ought to be free

By Greg Walcher | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice If I offered you a thousand dollars not to steal my car, would you be any less likely to steal it? What if I offered you a million? If you’re like most people, you would answer that you weren’t planning to steal it anyway. You’re not a thief so the discussion is pointless. Although if I were serious, you might take the money anyway. That isn’t much different than some of the revelations of government grants we are learning about through recent DOGE discoveries, controversial though they are. I’m just looking at grants related to natural resources and the environment, but can’t help wondering why the government has been paying so much to so many organizations and companies – to do what they were doing anyway. For example, sho...
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Walcher: How many border guards do we need?
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Walcher: How many border guards do we need?

By Greg Walcher | Guest Commentary, GregWalcher.com Police have an unflattering nickname, “Permit Patty,” for someone who calls police over frivolous complaints. It originated when a woman called the police on a little girl selling lemonade at a streetside stand – as generations of kids have done – without a permit. It illustrates a commonsense truth, namely that not everything in life should require a permit, and not every infraction is a matter for the police. Most of us instinctively understand that, but the federal government never has. Virtually all government agencies operate from a top-down, command-and-control model that emphasizes enforcement over incentives. And most of them have a law enforcement division to make sure everyone complies with their edicts and rules. The fede...
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Walcher: Let’s use what we already have
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Walcher: Let’s use what we already have

By Greg Walcher | Guest Commentary, GregWalcher.com In planning the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, Congress made one of its dumbest-ever boondoggle decisions. Recognizing the near death of railroad passenger service since the 1950’s, Congress decided to spend millions turning the aging and crumbling Union Station into the National Visitor Center. But they missed the obvious red flag – the millions of visitors to the nation’s capital during 1976 would not be coming by train. The ugly-carpeted National Visitor Center sat mostly empty that year, after which the old depot was boarded up, its roof caving in by 1981. Still ignoring reality, Congress spent millions more on several studies of what to do with the building. Each study concluded that the highest and best use would be a...
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Walcher: Throw off climate suffocation and ‘shovel, baby, shovel’
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Walcher: Throw off climate suffocation and ‘shovel, baby, shovel’

By Greg Walcher | Guest Columnist, Rocky Mountain Voice, via GregWalcher.com My friend Amos Eno, one of the country’s leading conservation experts, spent a decade running the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and more recently the Land Conservation Assistance Network. His writing appears in all the right publications, and he is a popular speaker at conferences everywhere.  Writing about the old/new President’s endorsement of the almost-cliché adage, “Drill, baby, drill,” he added another related, but separate, concept: “Shovel, baby, shovel.” It is an apt way to describe what he calls an urgent need “to resurrect our mining of strategic and critical minerals and coal, throwing off the wet blanket of climate suffocation policies.” There is considerable attention and deb...
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Walcher: Is government going to the DOGE?
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Walcher: Is government going to the DOGE?

By Greg Walcher | Commentary, GregWalcher.com A lot of jokes about Elon Musk are making the rounds, in light of his new role in identifying government waste, fraud and abuse. One says after he puts a car into orbit, outer space will be full of germs and diseases, no longer auto-immune. Another asks what he has in common with Thomas Edison. Answer: they both got rich off Tesla. The mission of the new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that he will co-chair with Vivek Ramaswamy, is not a joke, though. In fact, the idea of reducing wasteful spending has already achieved some level of bipartisan support in Congress. Leaders on both sides are saying no one should oppose efficiency, which is easy to say before anyone has had to vote on any specific program cut. Every govern...
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Walcher: The unproud Western legacy of Jimmy Carter
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Walcher: The unproud Western legacy of Jimmy Carter

By Greg Walcher | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice Alaska comprises nearly 20 percent of the entire U.S. at more than 665,000 square-miles, and is the richest state in natural resources. Yet it remains the most sparsely populated state, partly because of its isolation and weather, but largely because the federal government owns most of it: 406,000 square-miles. The U.S. purchased Alaska in 1867 specifically because of its vast resources, especially energy, which benefited the state and country for decades. But in the late 1970s, just after completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act was passed, with the goal of preventing further development of those resources. It set aside 245,312.5 square-miles (157 million acres) for specia...
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Walcher: Federal agencies should look in the mirror
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Walcher: Federal agencies should look in the mirror

By Greg Walcher | Guest Commentary, GregWalcher.com In the 1950 movie version of Grimm’s Fairy Tale, the cruel stepmother scolds Cinderella, “You clumsy little fool – clean that up!” But, of course, it was the stepmother, not Cinderella, who made the mess. Sometimes it seems like the world is full of people who expect others to clean up their messes. It is a recurring theme among critics of federal agencies, which often regulate and even fine others for environmental damage, but rarely admit the role they themselves played in creating the problem. A lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), filed by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), has again focused attention on an agency blaming everyone but itself. Th...
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