Cemetery raises new Elko fight with federal officials

Scott Sonner

Friday, June 18, 1999 | 10:23 a.m.

RENO -- For nearly a century the people of the remote mining town of Jarbidge have buried their dead in a 2-acre parcel of land inside a national forest in the northeast corner of Nevada.

Now local county officials want to take title to the historic cemetery. But the Forest Service says if they want it, they'll have to pay for it.

"The Forest Service should hang their heads," said Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., who is pressing the federal government to give the cemetery to Elko County.

"It is ludicrous to pay for the graves of Nevada's parents and grandparents," he said.

Deputy Forest Service Chief Ron Stewart told a House panel in Washington on Thursday the Clinton administration is willing to sell the cemetery to Elko County or trade it for like land. But the agency currently opposes the bill offered by Gibbons to simply give the land to the county.

"The taxpayers of the United States should receive fair market value for the sale, exchange or use of their national forest lands," Stewart told the House Resources subcommittee on forests and forest health.

The county continues to have the option of obtaining 10- to 20-year special use permits for free use of the cemetery, as it has done since 1915, he said.

The earliest tombstones in the cemetery near the Idaho border date to the early 1900s.

Many of those buried there are miners and their families, "the very founders of the small Elko County community" surrounded by the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, Gibbons said.

"Given the hundreds of thousands of acres administered by the Forest Service in this region and their oversight of the Jarbidge Wilderness, conveyance of two acres - not 200 acres nor even 20 acres - for the purpose of allowing these residents to privately own the resting place of their relatives, seems both rational and fair," he said.

Stewart said the administration believes the legislation is unnecessary.

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, who oversees the Forest Service, already has the authority to sell as much as 640 acres or to exchange lands with states, counties or municipal governments, he said.

But the laws require him to obtain fair market value for the lands, Stewart said.

"The administration objects to reversing this policy by opening the door to less than fair market value consideration for the disposition of national forest lands," he said.

Stewart said the agency remained open to discussing other alternatives with members of the subcommittee chaired by Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho.

Elko County commissioners have bumped heads with the agency on a number of fronts over the years, most recently in a dispute over the reconstruction of a Forest Service road washed out in a flood at Jarbidge. County officials say the road is needed to resume access to a popular campground but agency wildlife biologists say it would harm the threatened bull trout.