Paul Tudor Jones II is a very rich guy. And he’s also very smart. That’s a formidable combination.Jones owns the 25,000-acre Blue Valley Ranch which straddles the Summit and Grand County line.Mr. Jones wants to add to that acreage through a land swap with the federal Bureau of Land Management. In a nutshell he gets to lock up land he doesn’t already own along the river and the BLM gets several thousand acres of what is now private land.I’m reminded of a guy I met in Alabama years ago. He was in the lumber business and it would be accurate to call him a timber baron. He once told me, “I don’t want to own all the timberland in Alabama, just what’s next to mine.”Perhaps it’s unfair of me to paint Mr. Jones that way. I honestly don’t know his motivation, but it’s hard not to surmise the motivation could be to prevent anglers from floating through his property on the Blue River.If the swap goes through it becomes difficult if not impossible for someone to float the river and have time to fish. And it eliminates being able to stop along the way without trespassing.I need to admit my bias. I don’t like the deal that’s been proposed because I’m a fisherman. We may be getting some fine hunting land, but we’re losing fishing land. And you can’t fish where there isn’t water.To be fair, some of my friends who don’t fish think it’s not so bad a deal. After all, there’s a net gain of more than 250 acres, and as I said, it’s good hunting land.
To them hunting land is more valuable than fishing land. That, of course, is their bias.Some influential folks like Summit County Commissioner Tom Long and Open Space and Trails chief Todd Robertson are already on record in support of the swap (992 of the acres affected are in Summit County).Long says the positives outweigh the negatives. Robertson likes it because it would enable the county to stretch open space funds.There’s talk the deal will be done before the end of the year.Look at a map of Summit County. For that matter, look at a map of all of Colorado. There is a reason that property with water access typically has a much, much higher value – there’s damned little of it.There’s a lot of hunting land, but not very much fishing land. It’s the law of supply and demand. Mr. Jones, I suspect, understands that better than most. It was his brains that led him to his wealth. He has made an ungodly amount of money on Wall Street managing investment funds. Read stories and interviews about him and you can’t help but come away with the notion that this guy understands the verities of investing and markets at a level most mortals cannot comprehend.I don’t begrudge him his success.
And I can’t really rag on the guy as one of those pillage-and-plunder types. The fact is, he’s actually got a superlative environmental record.He’s given big money to worthy environmental causes. My Ducks Unlimited friends back in Maryland say he’s a supporter of wetlands restoration in a big way and on top of that, “a pretty good guy.” He’s won awards for his contributions to and actions on behalf of environmental causes, in particular in the Everglades in Florida, another of my favorite places to cast a fly line.OK. The guy’s not an ogre. But I can’t help but begrudge him that this deal will close off access to one of the state’s finest trout streams.It’s not a done deal. The BLM still has to go through the public comment phase and prepare an assessment, which thankfully takes into consideration social, economic and environmental issues. Officials promise to weigh hunting interests against fishing interests.Unfortunately, fishermen don’t make up much of a political constituency. And Lord knows most of us don’t have much money. So here we are bucking a proposal involving very rich, very smart, very well-connected folks. The odds don’t look good.In thinking about this column, I did some research on Mr. Jones and came across an interview he gave several years ago. In it was this exchange:
Question: What do you think you’ll be most remembered for? Paul Tudor Jones: I don’t think anybody will remember me. Question: What do you hope you’ll be remembered for? Paul Tudor Jones: I think Teddy Roosevelt’s greatest legacy is the national parks system, so on a micro level anything that I could do to protect natural resources, I think, would be the best legacy that I could leave my kids.My hope is that he’ll be remembered not as the guy who closed the Blue River to anglers but as the guy who kept it open.Publisher Jim Morgan writes a Tuesday column. He can be reached at (970) 668-3998, ext. 240, or [email protected].
