With no public comments, no elected official reports and a short consent agenda, the Garfield Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) got to the heart of Monday’s meeting right out of the gate. They listened to updates from local nonprofits that receive county funding.
YouthZone (YZ) provides services to improve everyday life for youth who have found themselves on the other side of the law and to reduce youth involvement in the criminal justice system. To that end, YZ worked with 239 Garfield County clients from January through March, with more than 670 substance-use education sessions and 151 mental health sessions. The non-recidivism rate so far this year is at 85%. YZ also received a $700,000 grant through the state attorney general’s office, in partnership with the City of Rifle, to renovate its Rifle office.
Blythe Chapman of River Bridge Regional Center in Glenwood Springs mentioned that referrals decreased in 2025. “I hope that’s a hooray,” commented Commission Chair Tom Jankovsky. Chapman said she didn’t know and pointed to trends that might have influenced the change, including people leaving the area, the high cost of living and a decrease in child abuse reports.
But this has allowed River Bridge to focus on existing clients and provide more preventive and mental health services. The goal, she said, is to “work ourselves out of crisis response and focus on preventive work.” She added that River Bridge continues to search for another building and that two local nonprofits, Advocate Safehouse and Response, have stepped up to help maintain the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner or SANE program for adults. River Bridge continues to provide sexual assault exams for children.
A plethora of good news about Yampah Mountain High School’s Early Childhood Education and Teen Parent Program (TPP) came from Dr. Leigh McGown, director of the TPP, and April Moon, community liaison for the school. McGown said TPP has 22 students this year. “We have two fathers graduating this May and three moms,” she said, adding that TPP students are very engaged.
Moon agreed. “They don’t look forward to the breaks like we do,” she said. “They’re missing part of their family because we’ve become part of the integral workings in their life.” McGown added, “Our teen moms have become accustomed to having us in their life. It’s been a big honor to be able to be there for these kids.” Another big success, they said, is a workforce readiness program, offering credits in early childhood education from Denver’s Metro State University.
The biggest challenge, said McGown, is stable housing. “We have just under 80% of the teen parents who experience homelessness,” she said, adding that another trend is younger pregnancies.
The county’s Department of Human Service (DHS) update included federal assistance program disbursements for March, totaling $1,080,023. About 20% of county residents are on Medicaid; 4,000 are on food assistance. Sharon Longhurst-Pritt, DHS director, pointed out that people in the United States on refugee and asylum status no longer receive food assistance, which affects about 10 county residents.
The BOCC also approved items with long titles: an extension of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Colorado Department of Early Childhood and Garfield County DHS to administer the Colorado Childcare Assistance Program, a 2026 operational budget supplement for Colorado State University Extension Services and an easement agreement and permit for a GPS station at the county landfill.
The GPS station is owned and operated by EarthScope, which runs the Network of the Americas. It collects seismic and geodetic data throughout the U.S. and Central and South America. The station also has tools for weather and land surveying, as well as construction uses. Apparently, the station’s original permit from 2006, which expired in 2018, was not renewed.
In other meeting news, the BOCC signed a letter, discussed last week, opposing the confirmation of two Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) commissioners. County Manager Fred Jarman put the letter together, stating that he had help from John Swartout, lobbyist and retired executive director of Colorado Counties, Inc. Swartout has represented anti-wolf groups Colorado Advocates for Smart Wolf Policy and the United Wolf Coalition. He lobbied on behalf of the Colorado Outdoors Coalition and Garfield County last year, supporting Senate Bill 25B-005 that reallocated more than $264,000 from the State Department of Natural Resources’ wolf reintroduction funding to the state health insurance affordability enterprise cash fund.
The BOCC plans to send the letter to the Colorado State Senate in time for the CPW commissioner confirmation hearings in Denver this week and will ratify it at the next regular meeting in May.
At the end of Monday’s meeting, Jankovsky gave a shout out to The Sopris Sun’s illustrator Larry Day. “I just want to say thank you to The Sopris Sun and your cartoonist. I really appreciated the caricature that he painted last week [in the paper],” he said. “Sometimes he makes fun of us with his drawings. But the one that was last week, I really appreciated it. It was a good caricature of the three of us.”