A new approach to constraining the Garfield County Library District took the stage during the first Garfield County Board of Commissioners (BOCC) meeting of 2025. Rifle resident Trish O’Grady Zoomed in to direct the BOCC’s attention to the library district’s budget, opining about how the library spends its money, based on information she said she found on the Library Research Service (LRS) website. LRS is an office of the Colorado State Library.
O’Grady also told her version of library executive director Jamie LaRue’s 2025 salary raise: “And here we have an executive director of the library being proposed to make $180,000 a year. When I brought this up to the library, and they did make some discussion about this, they compromised and his salary now for this coming year is now only going to be $166,000. They did give him a merit increase of 2% and a COLA [cost-of-living] increase of 3%, but I still question whether that $166,000 is even a fair amount based on the type of responsibilities he has.”
LaRue told The Sopris Sun in a Jan. 7 email that O’Grady is mistaken and that she had nothing to do with the amount of his pay raise. He said his salary for 2024 was $155,316, which increased to $180,115 on Jan. 1, 2025. “My current contract says that I receive the same adjustments the staff receives. So if that’s a cost of living increase of 3% for them, I get it too,” he explained. “But, in 2024, we did a wage and compensation study, paying a third party to compare our job descriptions and wages [to the Colorado market].”
He added that his raise is not based on performance. “It’s based on the wage and compensation study, which affected everyone’s pay and explicitly mine as covered by my existing employment contract,” he said. “The study is done every three to five years.”
O’Grady went on to ask the BOCC how they could take control of approving the library district’s budget. “If there’s any way you can dissolve their special district to take back, not just the advisory portion of the library budget, but to actually approve the budget.”
Commission Chair John Martin reiterated that the BOCC does not approve the library budget. “We only receive the budget and acknowledge that we have [it],” he explained. “The library board sets their budget and approves that budget.” He added that the BOCC can review her concerns and discuss them with the library board but they can’t control the library budget.
Martin and Garfield County Attorney Heather Beattie reminded O’Grady that the special district was approved by voters. “The only way that you could dissolve the district is also [by] a vote of the citizenry,” he said.
You can listen to O’Grady’s testimony on the meeting recording at the Garfield County website.
In other news, commissioners approved the consent agenda, including the new workers compensation insurance contract with Glenwood Insurance Agency and a contract with Waste Management Inc for trash and recycling services, a contract change order for the county landfill, a development plan for Vantage Aviation’s new fuel farm at the Rifle Garfield County Airport and Vantage’s concept plan for parcel A-7, also at the airport. An amendment to Holy Cross Energy’s land lease and operating agreement for the solar array at the airport was also approved as was the 2024 Highway Users Tax Fund county road inventory.
Robert Weidner, the county’s public land, environment and natural resources lobbyist in Washington D.C., phoned in from the nation’s capitol to update the BOCC on his work during the 2024 fourth quarter. “The 118th Congress was probably the least effective in my lifetime,” said Weidner. “I’m glad to be in a new Congress with a new opportunity to move forward on the agenda items that you’ve asked me to work on.” He offered an update on the nation’s $3.6 trillion dollar debt and appropriation bills on hold. “The budget system of the Congress is completely broken,” he said, adding that he would like to see Congress pass one appropriations bill at a time.
Weidner said that U.S. Senators Michael Bennett and John Hickenlooper have been supportive in some areas but not concerning access to federal land for extractive uses. “When he was the governor of our state, Hickenlooper was, I would say, somewhat sympathetic to our cause in oil and gas exploration,” said Commissioner Mike Samson. “He’s changed since he’s gone back to Washington, D.C.”
Samson hopes to meet with the senators on his trip to D.C. in March “to try to impress upon them the importance of the oil and gas industry [to constituents in Western Colorado],” he said. Samson added, “We were making such great strides [during] the first Trump administration. I’m really looking forward with hope and faith that the doors will be opened up again and that we can get things rolling again and help our economy here in Western Colorado.”
Weidner also talked about historic rights of way and Utah’s case before the U.S. Supreme Court about whether states can take jurisdictional control over federal land ownership, which Commissioner Tom Jankovsky is against. “In Colorado, that would just allow the state more places to release wolves,” he said. The county pays Weidner $7,500 per quarter.