First, our thanks to Murphy Robinson for his service on the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission. The former Denver public safety chief has been a valued voice of reason on the governing board over our state’s wildlife management. Robinson, who announced last week he was stepping down to focu s on his commitments in the private sector, is the co-founder and CEO of SurePass, a tech start-up, and the founder and chairman of Seca Secure, a security systems company. Named to the commission in August 2024, Robinson was viewed as a steadfast advocate for hunters, anglers and agriculture producers. We hope his yet-unnamed successor will bring the same priorities to the panel. This is a good time for the powers that be and especially Gov. Jared Polis — who appoints commission members subject to legislative approval — to reassess the commission’s direction in the wake of other controversial appointments over the past few years. The 13-member commission, by design, is supposed to reflect diverse representation. Some of its seats are statutorily reserved to represent key stakeholders in wildlife management and conservation, including hunters and others engaged in outdoor recreation, as well as farmers and ranchers.  Robinson’s duties included representing hunters’ interests, and he acquitted himself well. But some of the governor’s other appointments have fallen well short of the mark. And it wasn’t just because they were poorly vetted, as sometimes happens. It was because of the Polis administration’s well-known relationship with the fringe of the animal-rights and environmental movements — no friends to hunting or other time-tested forms of wildlife management, or to Colorado agriculture. That fringe also includes advocates of Colorado’s divisive reintroduction of wolves, narrowly approved by voters in 2020 and now dropped into the laps of commissioners to implement over the objections of ranchers and outdoor enthusiasts. All of which explains why some of the administration’s appointments have defied the very premise of the commission itself. Last year, the governor appointed Jay Tuchton, a former attorney for environmental litigation machine WildEarth Guardians. The appointment was rejected in a bipartisan vote by the state Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee but later upheld by the full Democratic-controlled state Senate.  A year earlier, Polis appointed Jessica Beaulieu, a Denver animal-rights and environmental lawyer, to represent the state park system on the commission — despite her confession she didn’t have a state parks pass and could name only a few Front Range parks she had visited. Beaulieu, too, made it onto the commission only after a vote by the full Senate following her rejection by the agriculture committee. The same year, the governor appointed Gary Skiba, a wildlife biologist credited with authoring the state’s wolf-reintroduction plan. Skiba — who, believe it or not, was nominated to represent hunters and anglers on the commission — faced opposition from those very groups and later withdrew his nomination under fire. It was Skiba’s intended seat Robinson wound up filling. Controversy has followed Polis’ two latest appointments, earlier this year, as well. Both are closely associated with the environmental movement’s ringleader, the Sierra Club. Polis’ first step in atoning for that track record should be to pick a worthy successor to Robinson.  That means “real-world experience, common sense, and … unwavering commitment to science-based wildlife management…,” as Dan Gates, of the group Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management, put it to Colorado Politics last week in praising Robinson. “He stood up for the sportsmen and women who fund wildlife conservation in this state,” Gates said, “and he wasn’t afraid to ask the tough questions when politics threatened to override sound management practices.” That would be a good standard, in fact, for all the commission’s future appointments. ...read more read less