Toiling away to keep soil in its proper place/ Specialist leads fight

If you boil it down, John Valentine's job description is simply this: don't let El Paso County blow away. Or wash away, for that matter.

It's a big task for a guy with a yawn of a title - resource conservationist - the federal government's way of saying he's trying to hold down the soil.

For the most part, Valentine toils in obscurity, assisting hundreds of private landowners in problems ranging from how to graze horses without damaging the dirt to planting trees for windbreaks on the blustery plains.

Behind the scenes, Valentine has become a major player in the battles over how to slow the dramatic erosion along Fountain Creek - an issue that's pitted Colorado Springs against downstream landowners, and developers against those demanding better drainage controls.

Since the big spring rains, Valentine has been the point man for distributing $11 million in federal aid to repair irrigation gates and canals and to shore up stream banks near roads, trails and utilities in southeastern Colorado.

He heads a district office for an agency called the Natural Resources Conservation Service, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In that role, he's been working in El Paso, Teller and Park counties for 10 years.

So, it's safe to say he knows the dirt on the region - all 3 million private acres that fall under his jurisdiction.

Though he has an office on East Platte Avenue, he does most of his work from a government-issued pickup truck, which he drives tirelessly around the county's eastern plains - "the country," he says - and loves every day of it.

"I get excited when I see this," Valentine said on a recent day, driving north of Ellicott and surrounded on either side by a scene not unlike that witnessed long ago by American Indians and pioneers.

"Very few houses here - just land."

It's out there where much of Valentine's work gets done, largely unnoticed within bustling Colorado Springs.

Along Black Squirrel Creek, for example, he's helping bring willows and cottonwoods back to an 11-acre area that's been denuded by heavy cattle grazing.

At Valentine's urging, a rancher has fenced out cattle. Workers and volunteers have planted rows of trees. With no grazing, grasses are returning. In the coming years, the area could be a bona fide creekside landscape again.

In a time when society seems driven by the fast-paced changes of high-technology, it might be easy to dismiss Valentine's work as little more than a quaint, agrarian sideshow.

But viewed more fundamentally, Valentine's work is critical. Think the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Think world history, he says.

"Historically, nations that have collapsed from within, have collapsed because they haven't taken care of their resources," he said.

In other words, lose your topsoil, lose your food.

Witness Fountain Creek, where rising creek flows driven by man- made changes to the land, are gobbling acre after acre of valuable farm and ranch land south of Colorado Springs.

This is Valentine's biggest battle, and he's losing - at least for now.

The problem is twofold: As the Colorado Springs area grows, more pavement, roofs and driveways mean more rainwater is flowing straight off the land and into the local creek system instead of soaking into the ground.

On top of that, Colorado Springs is pumping an increasing volume of water from the Western Slope. All that water eventually ends up in Fountain Creek.

Together, it means rising flows in what historically has been a fairly tame stream. Those rising flows are chewing up stream banks, gnawing on things like roads, trails and pipelines, and feasting on farmland.

Valentine has long tried to bring affected parties together. He won grants to create the Fountain Creek Watershed Project, which has now evolved into a group called the Fountain Creek Watershed Forum.

But participants in those groups - builders, local governments, farmers, ranchers and utilities - have conflicting viewpoints. Mainly, downstreamers wonder why they have to suffer the floodlike flows generated by all the growth upstream.

Valentine, as one might expect, sympathizes with the farmers. Soil is his business, after all. But knowing that warfare solves little, he takes the diplomatic approach when it's time to sit down at the table.

"He has walked an incredible tightrope," said Tom Johnson, former coordinator for the Fountain Creek Watershed Project who, by his own admission, didn't walk the same tightrope and ended up the casualty of political clashes over the creek.

"He is acutely aware of political realities and he knows that by burning bridges, the resource doesn't stand a chance," he said.

"He's the one person in the midst of all these (creek) controversies that people have difficulty speaking poorly about."

Valentine tries to be optimistic about the creek's erosion problems. Slowly but surely, he says, policy makers are beginning to understand the issue and realizing it needs to be addressed.

Still, he says, "We'll all have grandchildren before this thing is fixed."

Meanwhile, Valentine will keep on trying to hold the ground together - and keep enjoying it.

"They give you a truck and some gas and say 'Go out and work with the farmers and ranchers,'" he said. "What more could you ask?"

- Todd Hartman covers the environment and may be reached at 636- 0285 or [email protected]

- Story editor Jim Borden

Headline by Jim Wilson

@CUTLINE: Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette - Federal soil- conservation specialist John Valentine examines work on Monument Creek in September. The erosion of the creek, made worse in part by Colorado Springs development, is his biggest concern.

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