DENVER - Colorado's wild country helps drive the state economy and makes it easier to lure employers, Mayor John Hickenlooper told a task force Friday as it considered the future of 4.4 million acres of roadless national forest land in the state.

"The $200 million-a-year outdoor gear industry - and that's just in Colorado - is a remarkable testimony to the value of these open places," he said.

The Colorado roadless areas are part of 58.5 million acres nationwide put off-limits to development under the Clinton administration, but potentially opened to logging, road-building and other activities by the Bush administration.

About 34 million acres nationwide, and about 2.2 million acres in Colorado, could be opened to road-building under existing forest management plans.

The administration's move followed a 2003 ruling by a federal judge in Wyoming that the Clinton-era ban was illegal. Governors have until Nov. 13 to petition the agriculture secretary, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, to protect some or all of the roadless sites.

Washington, Oregon, California and New Mexico are suing to prevent development on the land.

In Colorado, a task force created by the Legislature and Gov. Bill Owens is holding a series of meetings and taking comments to determine what Coloradans want to do with the roadless areas and make recommendations to Owens.

Hickenlooper told the task force that businesses considering a move to Colorado want to know about schools and traffic, "and they almost always ask about the mountains and rural Colorado and how is it holding up and is it still what they think about or how they imagined," he said.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife gave the task force a report Feb. 10 that said the agency's biologists and wildlife officers think the land should be managed to protect wildlife and its habitat.

The overwhelming majority of the 749 written and verbal comments between the start of the meetings in September and Feb. 3 favor continued protection for roadless areas, according to an analysis by Colorado's Forest Legacy, a coalition of environmental and outdoors groups.

Adriana Raudzens of the Sierra Club said the responses so far are similar to those by Coloradans during previous comment periods on roadless areas. She said Coloradans submitted about 96,000 comments in favor of preserving undeveloped areas when the Clinton administration was considering the road-building ban.

Hunters and anglers have teamed up with environmentalists to urge protection for the land, saying it provides important habitat and many times contains pristine waterways. They said hunting and fishing is a multi-million-dollar industry.

Off-road vehicle users argue the public lands should be open to everybody. A spokesman for an advocacy group told the task force in a Dec. 9 meeting in Durango that off-road vehicle recreation is seeing double-digit growth.

The Colorado Farm Bureau, which opposed the previous road-building ban, has said management decisions should be left to the individual forests, with input from local residents.