If you go What: Boulder County is hosting a public tour of prairie dog habitat on open space land. The goal is to educate people about the management strategies that are now in place and to illustrate some of the challenges. When: 5:30 to 8 p.m. May 23. Check-in begins at 5:15 p.m. Where: The tour will depart from the Carolyn Holmberg Preserve, 2009 South 112th St. in Lafayette. Cost: Registration is required, and the charge is $5 per tour participant. To register, visit prairiedogtour.eventbrite.com. What: Open space staff members will present their proposed changes to the prairie dog management plan and take questions from the public. When: 6 p.m. May 29 Where: Barn A, Boulder County Fairgrounds, Longmont

Boulder County’s open space staff members are proposing changes to the way the department manages prairie dogs, including giving tenant farmers the ability to oust the animals when they venture into cropland.

The county’s Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee will consider the changes in July, but in the run-up to that discussion, the department is hosting a public meeting May 29 and a bus tour May 23 to educate interested residents and gather feedback.

The objective of the bus tour is to help people understand how the county now treats prairie dogs.

“We want people to know what our management looks like because it’s complicated by the fact that we have three different tiers of management,” said Jesse Rounds, resource planner for Parks and Open Space.

On lands designated as “habitat conservation areas,” the county basically leaves prairie dogs alone, only intervening if the colony begins to spread beyond the area’s boundaries. On lands designated as “mixed objective” areas, the county balances the needs of prairie dogs with other uses, such as trails.

But on agricultural lands — officially designated as “no prairie dog” zones — county staffers actively work to remove prairie dogs from the land, often trying to relocate the animals but sometimes killing them.

Last year, as Parks and Open Space created its new cropland policy, staffers heard from farmers who lease county land that they didn’t feel like rogue prairie dogs were dealt with in a timely manner when they invaded their properties.

In November, when the county’s Food and Agriculture Policy Council discussed the proposed cropland policy, farmer Dick Miller, who served on the council, said the prairie dog issue needed to be made a priority.

“I don’t like prairie dogs, and that may not be politically correct to say, but I look at it as an agricultural pest,” he said.

The land Miller farms borders open space where prairie dogs are allowed, and he said it’s been a challenge to keep neighboring prairie dogs from invading his croplands. Boulder County’s Rounds said other farmers have complained of prairie dogs eating young sugar beet and corn crops.

Famuer Rasmussen, who is also a farmer serving on the agriculture council, has said that one problem with prairie dogs is how quickly they multiply.

“You see one prairie dog hole, you’ve got five on the way,” said Rasmussen, who has had prairie dogs from open space move in and destroy multiple acres of his sugar beet crop.

“They just mowed them down to where there was nothing,” he said.

Rounds said part of the problem is that the county does not have enough staff — even including seasonal employees — to keep up with the demand from farmers to have the animals removed. The proposal to let tenants manage their own prairie dogs would allow the animals to be dealt with in a more timely manner.

Rounds said the proposed update to the prairie dog management plan would allow for tenant control of prairie dogs, but a separate set of guidelines would be written to govern how they would be dealt with, including when animals should be trapped versus killed. Open space staffers would also likely visit the property before the tenants eradicated the prairie dogs to OK the process. If farmers don’t follow the rules, there would be consequences, possibly including a revocation of their lease.

“We want to make it clear to the farmers that you can’t go out and remove prairie dogs whenever you want,” Rounds said.

The move to tenants managing prairie dogs is also likely to save the county some money, Rounds said.

The proposed update also suggests other changes, many of which are aimed at clarifying the management practices that are already in place. Now, many of the decisions are based on the experience of the current staff. The changes would lay out more explicitly how the animals should be managed in different circumstances.

The proposed plan also borrows a page from the city of Boulder’s practices for deciding when and where to relocate prairie dogs.

“In the past, we didn’t really have relocation criteria,” Rounds said. “We wanted to, as often as possible, relocate prairie dogs instead of controlling them lethally.”

The county is proposing to create criteria built on the city’s system of evaluating which open space properties can serve as “receiving sites” for prairie dogs that are being removed from places where they don’t belong.

Heather Swanson, wildlife ecologist for Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, said the city’s criteria take into account several factors when determining which properties can serve as receiving sites, including a survey of vegetation, the presence of an existing burrow structure and the proximity of areas that would not be appropriate for prairie dogs, such as city parks.

There is often more demand for places to move the prairie dogs than room at the receiving sites.

“That’s our biggest challenge,” Swanson said. “We are in a fragmented landscape intermixed with urban and suburban areas — it’s not just a huge continuous landscape. We have lots of neighbors and lots of other uses on the property.”

Contact Camera Staff Writer Laura Snider at 303-473-1327 or sniderl@dailycamera.com.