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Bill Heicher, a district wildlife manager for the state Division of Wildlife for 32 years, says he's had his share of run-ins with bureaucrats in Denver. In retirement, he says, he may be "more obnoxious" because he no longer has to fear for his job.
For Eagle's Bill Heicher, 55, the line between personal opinion and professional opinion over wildlife has always been a fine one.
One of the area's most unapologetic wildlife advocates, he's retiring after 32 years with the state Division of Wildlife as a district wildlife manager.
In the nearly one-third of a century he's held the position and lived in Eagle, Heicher's been at the forefront of many development battles in the name of wildlife. He was there before Interstate 70 was punched through Eagle County, even before Beaver Creek was built. He even was there as development decisions were made that led to a doubling the population of Eagle County
Now that he's out of the bureaucratic fray, Heicher's candid about the fact those battles earned him a lot of friends and a fair share of enemies - even within the ranks of his state agency, of which he now can be publicly critical.
"I have some strong personal and professional philosphies about wildlife," he says. "I believe there's ways to make things better for wildlife in the long run. I've tried to pursue them and it has caused some turmoil."
At one point in his career, Heicher's views and recommendations on land-use decisions were unpopular enough with those higher-up he had to hire a lawyer to protect his job. A state legislator once took exception to what Heicher was saying and told the division's director to either terminate or transfer him.
"I was talked to continuously," he says.
The situation was resolved when someone else was brought in to handle the issue.
Politically incorrect
"He gets in the middle of everything," says lifelong Eagle resident and friend Bill Johnson. "Politically, Heicher's never been very politically correct."
Dave Hoart, who recently retired from the Division of Wildlife, too, acknowledges Heicher was assertive in land-use issues.
"He really is notable for his land-use recommendations," Hoart says. "You had a situation where an interstate was coming through and land use was changing daily. He had the ability to cut through all the BS and get right to the point. People (then) were inserting wildlife in county planning in an aggressive way. Later, when politics changed, we got our tallies whacked. we all had to take a step back. The threat was that we would lose our job if we made somebody angry."
Some developers, like Jen Wright, acknowledge Heicher wasn't unreasonable, however.
"In my experience, he was always a very fair person. He represented the wildlife department and did fine job," Wright says. "He was demanding and he had his opinions. Seldom did I find he was pretty much right-on and was a good guy to work with. I like him a lot. Some guys you couldn't say that about. Today, smart developers develop green."
"Spectaculation and greedheads'
Heicher is one of those individuals that discovered early on what made him happy.
"I knew what I wanted to be when I was in seventh grade," he says.
After graduating from high school in Littleton, he attended CSU and graduated with a wildlife management degree. After training for a year with other Division of Wildlife officers in other parts of the state, Heicher was assigned his own territory in the Eagle area.
Eagle then was more bucolic than bustling. It had a population of less than 1,000 and "more cows than people," he said.
Not long after he arrived he heard rumors of a new Beaver Creek-sized ski area being proposed by a St. Louis developer 18 miles south of Eagle on Adam and Eve Mountain. That became the start of his public advocacy for wildlife, as well as how he discovered what really drives state and regional policy.
To Heicher, the development made no sense, and he said so bluntly.
"It would have been devastating to wildlife," he says. "By that time we had some grasp of impacts to wildlife by ski areas. It wasn't just winter downhill skiing, it was secondary development impacts and taking a
area that was in the middle of nowhere and they were going to plop down a community of about 4,000 to 5,000 people with peak (population) levels of 20,000 to 50,000 and all the developments around it. It was spectaculation and greedheads."
So he got involved.
"I got fairly active trying to voice some of the concerns we should have for wildlife," he says.
In that process, Heicher discovered a universal truth about public policy decisions.
"That was my introduction to how politics run this state. I had gone to school and was taught and trained how to base things on science, and I started to realize for the most part, decisions aren't made using science as the determining factor. Decisions are made on politics, which comes right back to the dollar. I was awfully naive.
"It doesn't matter what administration - Republican or Democrat - it doesn't matter," he adds. "Politics is big business."
His naivety - "I was continually shocked," he says -brought him face to face with a state bureaucracy that prefers calm water to wet sailing.
"I thought I was hired to be a wildlife advocate," he says. "In reality what they want us to do is good things that get good press and don't make any waves."
Making waves
But over the decades, the job demands and descriptions changed dramatically, as did the political philosophy of each different administration that guided the department.
"It really isn't about wildlife anymore," Heicher says, noting that he isn't bitter, just frustrated. "It's people management. It used to be the job consisted of a lot of hands-on work with wildlife - collaring elk, banding, following, measuring and all that kind of stuff. You worked out in the field. In last eight or nine years, you don't do that. Everything is contracted out."
"The enjoyment of this type of career is fading," he adds. "I can remember riding across Flat Tops with another officer and he said "I can't believe they're paying us to do this.'"
Worse yet, Heicher says, the division's ability to function in the current administration under Gov. Bill Owens administration has been severely compromised by a highly centralized and partisan approach to decision-making.
"Field people don't have any decision-making ability any more. All our decisions are made in Denver," he says. "At DNS (the Department of Natural Resource), Greg Walcher has to OK what happens right down to who gets what job. If it is not a politically correct promotion or transfer, much less letter to the county, it doesn't happen."
The centralized command-and-control scenario has bureaucratically hamstrung the people in the field, Heicher adds.
"At one time the game wardens, now district wildlife managers, they made almost every decision concerning wildlife," he says. "Who got tickets, who got game damage (compensation), what kind of (hunting) seasons, bag limits - all those decisions are now made up higher. Just recently, any written comments dealing with land use, with the Forest Service, or county or towns - and even school districts - has to be approved by Walcher."
Heicher maintains he's not suffering a "sour grapes" syndrome; he's just frustrated.
"It's amazing the paranoia that's in this (division)," he says. "There are some major issues. ... Politics push (bureaucrats) into those issues and politics will push "em out."
Growth central
It's ironic someone who had so staunchly defended wildlife found himself in the 1990s in the middle of the then fourth-fastest growing county in the country. It meant vacant land was being gobbled up at a prodigious rate.
There seemed to be no stopping the impacts to wildlife. But Heicher and colleague Bill Andree developed an innovative program to address the impacts - a wildlife trust. If impacts of development on wildlife could not be mitigated on-site, developers have the ability to pay into a fund that will help mitigate the impacts elsewhere.
To date, that fund, which started in the early "90s, has nearly $800,000 in it. Each year, only the interest is used to pay for projects that will help wildlife. One such project will be a treating 600 acres if critical big-game winter habitat with fertilizer in and around the Wolcott area.
Even this innovative approach has been pretty controversial.
"It hasn't been all roses," Heicher says. "Some politicians and developers who don't like it see this as extortion. All we're doing is making a recommendation. Wildlife is an amenity. Most smart developers market around it. Wildlife is important to people."
Land-use decisions impact wildlife forever, he adds.
"People don't have long-term vision," Heicher says. "When I came here, I-70 wasn't here. It caused major changes and has allowed more growth. It really bisected this valley and lot of the critical wildlife habitat.
"What people fail to realize is if you don't have habitat, you're never going to have the animals," he says, adding that the number of deer countywide is just 40 percent of what it was, mainly due to loss of habitat. "They don't just move over the hill. That doesn't happen. Those deer don't go over the next hill. Once you lose habitat, they're gone. You can pretty well wipe out a species."
He's also been on another side of the development equation, serving eight years on the Eagle Town Board.
"The biggest thing was that we had a lot of decision-makers who were afraid to say "no' and speak their minds," he says. "There's nothing wrong with saying "no.' A project can be good, but if it's really not going to benefit community or area there's no reason to do it."
Not everything Heicher dealt with was taken as seriously. Occasionally, though, Heicher was able to make his point with humor.
"I'd get (regular) calls from a lady in one of the resort areas complaining about a bear in her yard. She wanted it gone," he says. "She didn't care if it was killed or trapped or run off. She wanted it out of there.
I said, "It's funny. I just got a call a couple of moments ago from a bear that said there was a house in his yard and he wanted it out of there.' She didn't think that was funny."
And then came Bigfoot
In the spring of 1999, Heicher got a call that to this day he hasn't been able to explain. Fisherman in Gypsum and Eagle reported huge footprints in the sand along the Eagle River.
A skeptical Heicher went out to investigate. Sure enough, he saw three 18- inch-long, nine-inch-wide tracks in the gravel. They tracks sunk into the gravel nearly an inch.
"I couldn't sink in at all and I'm a big boy," he says. "Whatever did this had a considerable amount of weight. I could see the outline of a foot, similar to a human foot and heel, ball and arch of the foot. The five toes went straight across."
Heicher says he doesn't know to this day what it was, but he does know it wasn't a bear or anything else and doesn't believe they were a hoax.
While his three-week-old retirement is still sinking in, Heicher says he's going to look at what options are available to him but hasn't made any decisions. If anything, he says, he'll probably be "more obnoxious" because he no longer has to fear for his job.
Andree says it's pretty much a foregone conclusion Heicher will continue to to what he been doing.
"He's going to continue to be an advocate for wildlife even though he's no longer with the division," Andree says.
Cliff Thompson can be reached at 970-949-0555 x450 or cthompson@vaildaily.com
One of the area's most unapologetic wildlife advocates, he's retiring after 32 years with the state Division of Wildlife as a district wildlife manager.
In the nearly one-third of a century he's held the position and lived in Eagle, Heicher's been at the forefront of many development battles in the name of wildlife. He was there before Interstate 70 was punched through Eagle County, even before Beaver Creek was built. He even was there as development decisions were made that led to a doubling the population of Eagle County
Now that he's out of the bureaucratic fray, Heicher's candid about the fact those battles earned him a lot of friends and a fair share of enemies - even within the ranks of his state agency, of which he now can be publicly critical.
"I have some strong personal and professional philosphies about wildlife," he says. "I believe there's ways to make things better for wildlife in the long run. I've tried to pursue them and it has caused some turmoil."
At one point in his career, Heicher's views and recommendations on land-use decisions were unpopular enough with those higher-up he had to hire a lawyer to protect his job. A state legislator once took exception to what Heicher was saying and told the division's director to either terminate or transfer him.
"I was talked to continuously," he says.
The situation was resolved when someone else was brought in to handle the issue.
Politically incorrect
"He gets in the middle of everything," says lifelong Eagle resident and friend Bill Johnson. "Politically, Heicher's never been very politically correct."
Dave Hoart, who recently retired from the Division of Wildlife, too, acknowledges Heicher was assertive in land-use issues.
"He really is notable for his land-use recommendations," Hoart says. "You had a situation where an interstate was coming through and land use was changing daily. He had the ability to cut through all the BS and get right to the point. People (then) were inserting wildlife in county planning in an aggressive way. Later, when politics changed, we got our tallies whacked. we all had to take a step back. The threat was that we would lose our job if we made somebody angry."
Some developers, like Jen Wright, acknowledge Heicher wasn't unreasonable, however.
"In my experience, he was always a very fair person. He represented the wildlife department and did fine job," Wright says. "He was demanding and he had his opinions. Seldom did I find he was pretty much right-on and was a good guy to work with. I like him a lot. Some guys you couldn't say that about. Today, smart developers develop green."
"Spectaculation and greedheads'
Heicher is one of those individuals that discovered early on what made him happy.
"I knew what I wanted to be when I was in seventh grade," he says.
After graduating from high school in Littleton, he attended CSU and graduated with a wildlife management degree. After training for a year with other Division of Wildlife officers in other parts of the state, Heicher was assigned his own territory in the Eagle area.
Eagle then was more bucolic than bustling. It had a population of less than 1,000 and "more cows than people," he said.
Not long after he arrived he heard rumors of a new Beaver Creek-sized ski area being proposed by a St. Louis developer 18 miles south of Eagle on Adam and Eve Mountain. That became the start of his public advocacy for wildlife, as well as how he discovered what really drives state and regional policy.
To Heicher, the development made no sense, and he said so bluntly.
"It would have been devastating to wildlife," he says. "By that time we had some grasp of impacts to wildlife by ski areas. It wasn't just winter downhill skiing, it was secondary development impacts and taking a
area that was in the middle of nowhere and they were going to plop down a community of about 4,000 to 5,000 people with peak (population) levels of 20,000 to 50,000 and all the developments around it. It was spectaculation and greedheads."
So he got involved.
"I got fairly active trying to voice some of the concerns we should have for wildlife," he says.
In that process, Heicher discovered a universal truth about public policy decisions.
"That was my introduction to how politics run this state. I had gone to school and was taught and trained how to base things on science, and I started to realize for the most part, decisions aren't made using science as the determining factor. Decisions are made on politics, which comes right back to the dollar. I was awfully naive.
"It doesn't matter what administration - Republican or Democrat - it doesn't matter," he adds. "Politics is big business."
His naivety - "I was continually shocked," he says -brought him face to face with a state bureaucracy that prefers calm water to wet sailing.
"I thought I was hired to be a wildlife advocate," he says. "In reality what they want us to do is good things that get good press and don't make any waves."
Making waves
But over the decades, the job demands and descriptions changed dramatically, as did the political philosophy of each different administration that guided the department.
"It really isn't about wildlife anymore," Heicher says, noting that he isn't bitter, just frustrated. "It's people management. It used to be the job consisted of a lot of hands-on work with wildlife - collaring elk, banding, following, measuring and all that kind of stuff. You worked out in the field. In last eight or nine years, you don't do that. Everything is contracted out."
"The enjoyment of this type of career is fading," he adds. "I can remember riding across Flat Tops with another officer and he said "I can't believe they're paying us to do this.'"
Worse yet, Heicher says, the division's ability to function in the current administration under Gov. Bill Owens administration has been severely compromised by a highly centralized and partisan approach to decision-making.
"Field people don't have any decision-making ability any more. All our decisions are made in Denver," he says. "At DNS (the Department of Natural Resource), Greg Walcher has to OK what happens right down to who gets what job. If it is not a politically correct promotion or transfer, much less letter to the county, it doesn't happen."
The centralized command-and-control scenario has bureaucratically hamstrung the people in the field, Heicher adds.
"At one time the game wardens, now district wildlife managers, they made almost every decision concerning wildlife," he says. "Who got tickets, who got game damage (compensation), what kind of (hunting) seasons, bag limits - all those decisions are now made up higher. Just recently, any written comments dealing with land use, with the Forest Service, or county or towns - and even school districts - has to be approved by Walcher."
Heicher maintains he's not suffering a "sour grapes" syndrome; he's just frustrated.
"It's amazing the paranoia that's in this (division)," he says. "There are some major issues. ... Politics push (bureaucrats) into those issues and politics will push "em out."
Growth central
It's ironic someone who had so staunchly defended wildlife found himself in the 1990s in the middle of the then fourth-fastest growing county in the country. It meant vacant land was being gobbled up at a prodigious rate.
There seemed to be no stopping the impacts to wildlife. But Heicher and colleague Bill Andree developed an innovative program to address the impacts - a wildlife trust. If impacts of development on wildlife could not be mitigated on-site, developers have the ability to pay into a fund that will help mitigate the impacts elsewhere.
To date, that fund, which started in the early "90s, has nearly $800,000 in it. Each year, only the interest is used to pay for projects that will help wildlife. One such project will be a treating 600 acres if critical big-game winter habitat with fertilizer in and around the Wolcott area.
Even this innovative approach has been pretty controversial.
"It hasn't been all roses," Heicher says. "Some politicians and developers who don't like it see this as extortion. All we're doing is making a recommendation. Wildlife is an amenity. Most smart developers market around it. Wildlife is important to people."
Land-use decisions impact wildlife forever, he adds.
"People don't have long-term vision," Heicher says. "When I came here, I-70 wasn't here. It caused major changes and has allowed more growth. It really bisected this valley and lot of the critical wildlife habitat.
"What people fail to realize is if you don't have habitat, you're never going to have the animals," he says, adding that the number of deer countywide is just 40 percent of what it was, mainly due to loss of habitat. "They don't just move over the hill. That doesn't happen. Those deer don't go over the next hill. Once you lose habitat, they're gone. You can pretty well wipe out a species."
He's also been on another side of the development equation, serving eight years on the Eagle Town Board.
"The biggest thing was that we had a lot of decision-makers who were afraid to say "no' and speak their minds," he says. "There's nothing wrong with saying "no.' A project can be good, but if it's really not going to benefit community or area there's no reason to do it."
Not everything Heicher dealt with was taken as seriously. Occasionally, though, Heicher was able to make his point with humor.
"I'd get (regular) calls from a lady in one of the resort areas complaining about a bear in her yard. She wanted it gone," he says. "She didn't care if it was killed or trapped or run off. She wanted it out of there.
I said, "It's funny. I just got a call a couple of moments ago from a bear that said there was a house in his yard and he wanted it out of there.' She didn't think that was funny."
And then came Bigfoot
In the spring of 1999, Heicher got a call that to this day he hasn't been able to explain. Fisherman in Gypsum and Eagle reported huge footprints in the sand along the Eagle River.
A skeptical Heicher went out to investigate. Sure enough, he saw three 18- inch-long, nine-inch-wide tracks in the gravel. They tracks sunk into the gravel nearly an inch.
"I couldn't sink in at all and I'm a big boy," he says. "Whatever did this had a considerable amount of weight. I could see the outline of a foot, similar to a human foot and heel, ball and arch of the foot. The five toes went straight across."
Heicher says he doesn't know to this day what it was, but he does know it wasn't a bear or anything else and doesn't believe they were a hoax.
While his three-week-old retirement is still sinking in, Heicher says he's going to look at what options are available to him but hasn't made any decisions. If anything, he says, he'll probably be "more obnoxious" because he no longer has to fear for his job.
Andree says it's pretty much a foregone conclusion Heicher will continue to to what he been doing.
"He's going to continue to be an advocate for wildlife even though he's no longer with the division," Andree says.
Cliff Thompson can be reached at 970-949-0555 x450 or cthompson@vaildaily.com
