SANTA FE: GOPHERS GOTTA GO
Contract would pay company $28 a head to dispose of burrowing beasts in parks
Santa Fe gophers, consider this your eviction notice. The burrowing critters have had their way with city parks for more than two years, tearing up grassy fields and pockmarking them with clandestine holes in the earth, treacherous footing for any young athlete or carefree parkgoer.
These halcyon gopher-hole days appear to be through.
A proposed city contract with a company called Gopher Grabbers amounts to a Book of Revelation for the fuzzy brown pests. The end is near. Gopher Grabbers, based in Albuquerque, will “trap” its foes underground using mechanical appliances, according to the contract. But the trap is more of a oneway ticket.
“‘Cervical dislocation’ is how Mr. Victor Lucero used
to describe it,” said parks Director Richard Thompson, referring to the city’s former pest manager. “It’s a snap trap.”
The company will earn $28 per pocket gopher, up to $75,000.
The city Finance Committee this week approved the new gopher-be-gone contract as part of the consent agenda, meaning without discussion. The full eight-member City Council and Mayor Alan Webber still must consider the proposed contract.
An animal-minded Santa Fean might reasonably wonder: Why only gophers? What about prairie dogs?
Since 2001, prairie dogs have been protected under a city ordinance. It is illegal, in fact, to “intentionally destroy or otherwise harm” a prairie dog within Santa Fe city limits in any form of development, with only a few exemptions allowed, according to city code.
So prairie dogs are relocated instead of decapitated when they are in the way. There are no such travel accommodations for pocket gophers — or ordinance protection of any kind.
Prairie dog relocation costs $84 per animal, Thompson said, as compared to the $28-per-head quote for gopher destruction — three times more expensive.
The new gopher-eradication initiative comes after a lengthy hiatus. Thompson said city crews haven’t used their old gopher-maintenance mechanism since 2016.
“It was pretty primitive,” Thompson said, describing a carbon monoxide generator that would discharge poisonous fumes through hoses into gopher burrows.
City staff would collapse the burrows afterward, burying the asphyxiated gophers right on-site.
“It was unsanitary and unclear as to how humane it was,” he said.
With the city Parks and Recreation Department under new management, staff “just decided to get serious,” Thompson said, and issued a bid for contractor services earlier this year.
Only Gopher Grabbers responded, according to a city memo.
The Parks and Recreation Department cites the safety and well-being of park users in the contract memo; a fix was needed, staff wrote, because the “high population and subsequent damage by gophers to the turf, irrigation lines, electrical lines and landscape trees and shrubs, in addition to causing trip and fall hazards to constituents using the playing fields.”
Thompson said large grassy areas at popular parks — such as Ragle Park, Franklin E. Miles Park and Fort Marcy Park — are particularly high-traffic areas for gophers.
“We have kids running around. ‘Keep your eye on the ball’ is the admonition,” Thompson said. “And with that, [gopher holes are] an extreme danger to sports participants on our irrigated turf. Could break a leg.”