BOCC: Tons of Policies, Silver Cliff Gets Some Free Land, Round
Mountain Donation Confusion

by George Gramlich,
News and Commentary
The April 24, 2025 Custer County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) regular meeting was held at the All Aboard Westcliffe meeting room and started at 9 a.m. All three Commissioners were present: Chair Bill Canda and members Lucas Epp and Paul Vogelsong.
Not too much in Commissioner Items. Epp said the ARPA and LATCF yearly grant fund reports were done and submitted. Canda said the Commissioners had a “good” meeting with our local dems. (The local Polis, Biden, AOC, Pelosi loving Custer County democrat party asked our Commissioners to show up at a “round table” so they could question them about what is going to happen to Happy Valley when the fed and state grant money disappears, and the children will be starving.)
In New Business, Accounts Payable was up first. Epp gave the run down. (Epp does good with this. He reviews, during his presentation, all AP items over $5k. Very informative. Of note, interim County Attorney Dan Slater got a $6.8k check and they finally paid for the infamous Rolls Royce level chipper with a $98k check.) The total AP for the last two weeks was $372k.
Next was a proposal to approve a proclamation for Family Crisis Services to proclaim April Sexual Assault Awareness month. Family Crisis Services does a lot of good stuff including safe houses for abuse victims, therapy and counseling. Last year they served 274 clients. The proclamation was approved.
The Mayor of the Town of Silver Cliff, Buck Wenzel was next at the royal table. He said the County and Silver Cliff had an Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) regarding a piece of land the county owns but Silver Cliff uses and maintains. It has signs on it and it is a trail head. Buck wanted the BOCC to deed the piece over to Silver Cliff to make things simpler. This was approved.
Human Services was next with nine policies that the state requires and the County hadn’t adopted them. This was supposed to have been done in 2022 but it wasn’t. The Commissioners approved all the policies.
Next up was Human Resources Director, Bob Smith, with the newly revised Records Retention Policy for the County. Bob has sent it around to the various department heads for review and made some changes based on that input. The Commissioners approved it.
The final New Business Agenda Item was about setting up a procedure so people could donate money to help the Round Mountain Water and Sanitation District pay for the construction of their new waste treatment system. (Remember the County donated $40k recently.) Canda led the discussion. He wanted to set up an account item at the Treasurer’s Office to take the donations which would allow the donations to be tax deductible. It was asked why can’t Round Mountain do it and Canda said that under their statutory regulations, they were not allowed to do that. County Attorney Slater said that was wrong and Round Mountain, like a bunch of other local entities, by statute can accept donations and have them be tax deductible. This went on for a bit. Finally, Canda said he would go over and talk to Round Mountain to find out one way or the other.
No fireworks. Of note, however, Chair Canda is letting people, one person in particular, interrupt the Commissioners discussion of items instead of waiting for the Public Comment interlude at the end of each Commissioner discussion. Very disruptive and rude.