Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument has grown by 280 acres/NPS file

The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act continues to give to the National Park System. This week the National Park Service closed on a 280-acre parcel of land for Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado.

The Dingell Act, passed in 2019, contained more than 100 individual bills. The legislation, among other things, expanded the size of both Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks, created a national monument honoring civil rights icon Medgar Evers in Mississippi and a Mill Springs Battlefield National Monument in Kentucky, while changing the designations of some other park system units.

It also created a number of wilderness areas in the western half of the country, and added more than 620 miles of additions to the Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

On Monday, the Park Service was abled to add 280 acres to Florissant Fossil Beds. The addition creates more access to address wildfire mitigation on the western side of the monument and provides additional montane habitat. The donation was made possible through the generosity of the local landowner and by way of Congress through the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, passed in 2019. 

Florissant Fossil Beds, located about 35 miles west of Colorado Springs, is an interesting stop in the National Park System, and not just because of the rich fossil resources it protects. In the summer of 1969, the area that is now the national monument nearly became an A-frame housing subdivision. The monument was saved by a grassroots group called the Defenders of Florissant and a precedent-setting legal team. Together, they succeeded in convincing a federal court to file an injunction to stop the developers’ bulldozers long enough for a bill to be passed and the president to sign it.

According to information from the park about the anniversary, the legal effort to protect Florissant was a precedent-setting application of the “public trust doctrine,” which is a "foundation of environmental common law. That doctrine states that the public has a right to stop private development that threatens natural resources."