From mesas and river valleys they came, from ranches and Telluride Victorians, cramming into a stuffy county meeting room, their minds alit with imagined power towers and gas lines slashing across the center of San Miguel County.

Since 2005, the federal government has been working to designate 6,055 miles of land as energy corridors — wide boulevards of public land that would be designated as prime sites for carrying power and natural gas across the West. It’s part of a massive effort to update the country’s threadbare electrical grid to accommodate soaring demand, especially across the growing West.

Part of those corridors would run north to south through San Miguel, skirting the edges of scenic Naturita Canyon or the saddle of Lone Cone Peak. And yesterday, for the first time, locals got a chance to convey their questions and concerns to federal officials running the project.

They wondered: How would the 3,500-foot-wide corridors affect scenic vistas and Gunnison sage grouse habitats? What footprint will they leave? Who gets to build utilities on these designated corridors? Will utilities be able to steamroll property rights? Did the Department of Energy consider renewable resources as it mapped these corridors? Would this new network simply encourage more coal plants and consumption? They wondered all these things.

“We’re rushing into something that is entrenching an ideology — oil and gas pipelines,” said Ben Williams, a Norwoodian.

“I’m very leery of the whole thing,” said Grace Herndon, who lives in Norwood. “I hope this thing gets slowed up and has some alternate thinking come into play.”

“This is talking about centralized distribution, big and old fashioned,” said Edwin Schlapfer. “More capacity, more consumption when we need to be pushing conservation. These are not energy solutions.”

Officials from the Department of Energy, including project manager Laverne Kyriss, answered questions and tried to explain how they’d chosen routes for the energy corridor in San Miguel County and across the West.

“I can’t promise you what we will or won’t do, but we have to respond to every comment and lay out our justifications,” Kyriss said. “You’re not the only place where we’re working through things we need to consider.”

San Miguel County’s portion of the project is a small part of a larger energy corridor that originates near the Four Corners and runs north to Wyoming. In all, the federal government hopes to designate 3 million acres of these corridors on federal lands, a web that stretches from the Front Range to California.

As it’s proposed, the energy corridor would cut a straight line through San Miguel County, running just west of Norwood. The route is farther west than originally drawn two years ago, but county officials want to see the line pushed even more westward, to the Slickrock area.

The current route raised concerns about property rights, and whether the corridor plan would one day pit homeowners against utility projects.

The Deparment of Energy has only designated energy corridors on federal lands, such as those owned by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. But often, and in San Miguel County, those federal lands are mere islands in a sea of private property. And to connect two islands requires swimming through lots of private land.

The way it’s now mapped, the energy corridor snakes through a piece of federal Forest Service land in northern San Miguel County. To build power or gas networks through the proposed path, utilities would likely have to condemn acres upon acres of private land that lies to the south.

Pushing it farther west could follow the path of an existing 115 kilovolt power line and flow the energy corridor through existing Bureau of Land Management property, county officials said.

But that path poses problems, too. Sage grouse fly through that route, and it would bisect the Dolores River.

What locals and commissioners wanted, more than anything, was a greater voice in the process. More meetings, more chances to comment, before the feds draw up their final plans.

“Trying to get an infrastructure network established is a good thing,” Goodtimes said. “I think we can all agree that we need to do this. I think we need to step back a little bit.”