MONTROSE – Lee County Conservation will now allow ATVs and side-by-sides in county parks on regular roadways
The LCC board voted Tuesday night to allow the recreational vehicles in county parks for one year starting Jan. 1, 2026. The move is more of an experiment to see how riders treat the parks with the expanded access.
The district will allow licensed drivers to operate ATVs, UTVs and side-by-sides on regular conservation-owned roadways, but not on trails or off road within any county-owned parks.
Board President Emily Benjamin said she understood the need for consistency, but said county park roads aren’t shortcuts to get anywhere so they shouldn’t be used for that.
“We’re not an access road or through-lane to get anywhere and I just want to voice a little bit of concern about our paying campers,” she said.
“They're the ones that are generating revenue by renting campsites and it just gives me a little bit of pause that we're going to be inviting additional traffic in when most people are probably in the campground to get away from the additional traffic and enjoy the ambiance of being disconnected a little bit.”
Board liaison Chuck Holmes asked what he thought the increased traffic would look like, but fellow supervisor Garry Seyb, said the one-year sunset gives the conservation board a chance to revisit the issue in a year.
He said the county board did the same thing, but it has been self-policed to a degree. He said the policy will create a little consistency for owners who use recreational vehicles regularly on county roads and going to and from fields and work sites.
“There was concern about kids out there driving, and by the way, kids can’t drive them, they still have to have a valid driver’s license. There were concerns about people hot-dogging or going down in ditches and those concerns and we didn’t see that. It didn’t materialize on a grand scale. You can point to ‘an’ incident, but it didn’t get out of control," Seyb said."
Parks Management Officer Clint Oldfield said there are a lot of opposing opinions out there.
“There’s always going to be people working against it an,d just like with other issues, just because the loudest voices speak louder doesn't make them right. And I know a lot of quiet voices out there oppose any ATV usage in the parks and they do speak to me on a regular basis and there are some that are very loud that are 100% for it.”
Oldfield said at times ATV usage is low and others, like during poker runs, can see 30 or 40 that would bring in other issues to the parks.
Director Heather Huebner emphasized that trails would be off limits and the district would want to review any concerns and data around the change in a year.
“This is only on roads vehicles regularly travel on and not on trails. We would want to revisit this in a year and wouldn’t start this until Jan. 1 to give us time to put up signs and get our ducks in a row,” she said.
Benjamin said the county’s park rangers wouldn’t have time for permitting for specific recreational vehicles, so the policy would have to be generalized.
“I can be on board with giving this a year chance. I wonder if there isn’t a little value of having our five to 10 miles of roads in our parks to not have any ATV traffic. To be fair, I haven’t camped in any of those campgrounds in a while so I don’t know if there is any real value in that, but I just wanted to bring it up,” she said.
Oldfield said, by design, those are off-road and 95-98% of operators are good, but he said it will be instinct to see trail heads and head that way. He said they have stopped vehicles in the past from hitting the trails.
The board passed the measure unanimously and will begin creating signage for the county parks and informing the public of the change effective Jan. 1.
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