Thank you for your support of La Boca Center for Sustainability (LBCS) this past year. With your help LBCS has accomplished its goals for 2009. With over 1000 visitors to the farm throughout the growing season, LBCS staff has worked hard to provide educational experiences to the public while bringing awareness to the importance of nurturing a strong local food system.
In 2009 LBCS effectively implemented a CSA program for 20 families, provided high quality produce to Zia Taqueria, Cocina Linda, Cyprus Café, Seasons, Bread, Kennebec Café, Nature’s Oasis, Durango Natural Foods Co-op, Roots Natural Foods, Southern Ute Indian Schools, as well as the Durango and Ignacio Farmer’s Markets. Educational partnerships with Durango Nature Studies, Open Sky Wilderness Therapy, Fort Lewis College, Master Gardeners, and many more have provided hundreds of people direct experience with our land stewardship methods.
In spite of these successes, the future of LBCS is in grave doubt.
LBCS was created by the vision of Roy Craig, who placed the ranch and other assets in trust, mandating a 15-year lease to LBCS to prove its viability. At the end of the15 years, LBCS could inherit the ranch and other assets. Unfortunately, the trustees of the Roy Craig trust have terminated our lease and may disperse the trust assets, including La Boca Ranch, to the trust beneficiaries. The situation is complex, but to secure a future for LBCS, we now must argue in court that dissolution of the trust is unwarranted. For further information, see (link here)
The Board of Directors and staff believe that LBCS is a vital agricultural resource for this community but we need your help to continue our mission. Please consider supporting LBCS with a generous donation. Our legal defense is relying on these donations-we don’t have enough money to fight for what’s right without your help. Acting through our fiscal sponsor, the San Juan RC&D allows your donation to be tax deductible. Attached is a donation form for your convenience. Please make your check payable to “San Juan RC&D” (be sure to write La Boca donation in the memo). Your generosity and continued support is greatly appreciated.
To meet our immediate need, contributions should be received by December 18, 2009.
Respectfully yours,
LBCS Staff and Board of Directors
Background and History of the La Boca Center for Sustainability
La Boca
The town of La Boca was founded in the late 1800s and was a railroad stop for the Denver and Rio Grande Narrow Gauge Railroad. In the early 1900s an adobe schoolhouse and an adobe post-office, general store and residence were constructed; the buildings remain in use today. The railroad ran until 1968 and remaining relics from the railroad era are the base for the water tower, a railroad bridge across the Pine River, the old pump-house, and a number of other miscellaneous buildings, including the cowboy apartments and blacksmith shop. During the railroad years a series of owners operated the ranch. Roy Craig bought the ranch out of bankruptcy in 1977 after it had seen a number of tumultuous years in the hands of speculators.
Dr. Craig grew up on a large homesteaded ranch on Florida Mesa near Durango, Colorado. He knew first-hand the struggle and work involved in the keeping and maintaining a ranch, especially since his dad died of an accident when Roy was only 5 years old. He often talked about the time he put into milking cows from a very young age. Roy had two brothers and two sisters.
Roy attended Fort Lewis College when it was located near Hesperus. After military service in World War II, he completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado. He bragged about always being excused from having to take finals because he always had A’s going into final’s week. Subsequently, he completed a Master of Science at the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. at Iowa State University in Physical Chemistry. He became involved in nuclear weapons development at Los Alamos and at Rocky Flats. Roy left the nuclear business after attending a presentation by an Army General where he talked about the strategic use of nuclear bombs. Roy was a scientist that truly believed that no one would conceive of the use of nuclear weapons and that they would be the end of all wars.
He joined the natural science faculty at the University of Colorado and there he became the Chief Field Investigator in the official government search for verifiable scientific evidence for UFOs. His 1995 book, UFOs: An Insider’s View of the Official Quest for Evidence, describes his experiences.
Taking early retirement, he moved back to his homestead and lived in a singlewide trailer, not working and thus paying taxes for over three years as a protest to the Vietnam War. Soon after, he began an environmental consulting firm that dealt in solar energy, the impact of pollution from the Four Corners’ coal fired power plants, and monitoring radiation spills during the cleanup of the Uravan tailings and processing site, as well as a number of other issues. He was also an ardent opponent of land-use planning and a supporter of private property rights. While living in Boulder, Colorado, he had seen the economic impacts of land-use planning to low income people and he did not see the benefits of the strict land-use codes.
With his sister Caroline and her husband, Roy acquired La Boca Ranch in 1977. Over the years he pieced back together the better pieces of the ranch, which had been subdivided into 35 acre parcels. In 1977 Roy acquired his first llama – Tina. Tina came from a ranch near Telluride where she was a lone 13-year-old llama living with an elderly lady and her 13 rescued dogs. The woman felt sorry for the llama and thus gave it to Roy. From that point Roy built up his herd to a peak of 65 animals, selling them, showing them and participating in local parades where they pulled a cart that he and his dogs rode on. For more on Dr. Roy Craig see the article by Dr. Hal Mansfield:
http://www.halmansfield.com/Home/Friends/RoyCraig.htm.
Dr. Mansfield’s article mentions that for 20 years Roy Craig played chess with Chet Anderson. Chet’s son Chester came to know Roy and the ranch through this association, spending time on the ranch and additional time camping, fishing, and hiking with Roy. Having completed his education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, earned a masters degree in entomology at Cornell University, and worked at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, Chester returned to La Plata County in 1995 with his wife Shannon Carman (now Shannon Iris). In 1997, they took up residence on the La Boca Ranch, where they helped Roy Craig manage the property.
In 2003, shortly after Roy was diagnosed with cancer, he expressed concern over the fate of La Boca and over the fact, as he saw it, that no one took a real interest in the ranch. Given Chester’s long association with the land and Chester and Shannon’s dream of creating a place where people could reconnect with the natural world, this led to conversations about possibly combining their dream, Chester’s connection to the ranch, and Roy’s concern into a beautiful opportunity. Roy liked the idea. He was excited by it.
Shannon drafted a preliminary proposal and they had many conversations exploring options that Roy might fully support. He knew the value of an intact, working ranch and farm. He was also a trumpeter of private property rights and he struggled to reconcile these values.
In the end, he formed a Trust that included the La Boca Ranch, providing an opportunity for the “La Boca Institute” (newly chartered by Chester and Shannon and subsequently renamed the “La Boca Center for Sustainability” [LBCS]) lease the ranch and to operate for up to 15 years to prove its viability. Days before he died, he further finalized a conservation easement that protects the land from development in perpetuity.
Roy welcomed Chester and Shannon to La Boca Ranch and generously created a community, first with Chester and Shannon and their family, and through his bequest created an opportunity for LBCS to become a vibrant community committed to education and research, fulfilling his intent that the land should benefit the public.
From 2004 until 2009, as mandated by Roy Craig’s trust, Chester Anderson served as manager of the La Boca Ranch. During most of that time, he also served as Executive Director of LBCS. Shannon Iris served briefly as Executive Director, but continued as a member of the LBCS Board of Directors until 2009.
The Board of Directors initial comprised mostly friends of Chester and Shannon. Over the last five years, however, the composition has broadened to include individuals from the community with a wider range of expertise, but with equal commitment to fulfillment Roy Craig’s vision of a center for education and research as it has evolved in the operation of LBCS and the La Boca Ranch.
Galen (Gabe) Eggers was among the earliest volunteers at LBCS. A recent graduate of Fort Lewis College with a self-designed major in cultural ecology, he had become engaged in several ways with the local food system, including participation Local Food Assessment, which was completed in 2007 with LBCS as a partner. In 2006, Gabe completed the apprenticeship program of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California at Santa Cruz. This program has since served as a template for development of a similar program based at LBCS, to provide analogous training, but including range management and food production in a four-season environment. Gabe volunteered in the LBCS garden in 2007 and in 2008, besides co-managing the garden, he became Assistant Director of LBCS.
In June 2009, Chester Anderson resigned as LBCS Executive Director. As their young children grew, Chester and Shannon had moved their residence from the ranch to provide a richer social environment for the children. Further, loss of the partner in his water quality consulting firm demanded greater attention to that business and he finally placed commitment to his family over his commitment to La Boca. Gabe Eggers had already begun to assume greater responsibility and was appointed by the Board of Directors to succeed Chester. Gabe and the current Board remain firmly committed to fulfilling Roy Craig’s intent of using the La Boca Ranch for public benefit, as articulated in the LBCS mission statement: “developing, demonstrating, and teaching of sustainable agricultural practices.”
Termination of Chester’s connection with the ranch became the occasion for termination of the lease between the trust and LBCS. Initially, at their meeting on July 23, the trustees and the LBCS trustee relations committee viewed this as an opportunity to renegotiate the lease. Instead, it has created the current impasse over alleged lease violations that could trigger dissolution of the Trust and distribution of the assets among Roy’s natural heirs, thus threatening to remove LBCS from its position as primary beneficiary.
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