Growth puts BLM in ‘critical situation’

Benjamin Grove

Sunday, Jan. 16, 2000 | 9:41 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- A population surge in the American West is trampling the Bureau of Land Management's ability to tend public lands, officials say.

And Nevada is the prime example of how growth is driving up demands on BLM land as the bureau's staff is declining and its budget is remaining flat.

"We want to tell the people of Nevada that they should adjust their expectations of what the BLM can deliver," said Celia Boddington, BLM spokeswoman in Washington. "We've done our best to maximize taxpayer dollars, but the BLM is in a critical situation."

The BLM manages 264 million acres nationwide, mostly in 12 Western states.

The agency oversees 48 million acres in Nevada, which is 68 percent of the fastest-growing state in the nation. Nevada's population of 1.8 million is up 51 percent since 1990.

The growth is stretching the BLM thin as the agency scrambles to provide its traditional services: managing conservation and preservation areas, mining and grazing areas and recreation sites.

BLM officials must increasingly juggle a mixed bag of other challenges: tending 1.6 million Nevada acres burned this year by fire; a troublesome wild horse and burro population; 50,000 dangerous abandoned mines; all-terrain vehicle drivers; trash dumpers; squatters; vandals and lost hikers.

At the same time the agency faces a longer and longer line of drooling developers and local governments that want BLM land.

"Whereas before we were the agency that can -- more frequently, we cannot," Boddington said.

Much of the BLM's land is in the Interior West -- Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming -- the fastest-growing region of the nation.

Urban areas like Las Vegas are exploding in the Interior West, once considered an unexplored outback.

"The BLM is the back yard of the West," Boddington said. "These are the lands that you go to on the weekends. People used to think we were the middle of nowhere. Now subdivisions are right next to the public land."

Flat budget

Statistics tell part of the BLM story. The bureau's budget remained flat between 1994 and 1998, with small increases in the last two years.

"Before we got an increase this year we lost ground," said Rem Hawes, another BLM spokesman in Washington. "Our spending power actually declined because we could not keep pace with inflation."

The bureau has trimmed full-time employees from 9,581 in 1994 to 8,758. The BLM Nevada staff is down 80 people to 540 in the past five years.

But demands on the BLM are increasing. Nationwide, 75 million people visited BLM lands last year, up 25 million in four years. The BLM recently identified 1,200 "deferred maintenance sites" such as roads, buildings, restrooms or signs that desperately need repair. BLM staffers fret that some are safety hazards.

"The BLM's ability to ensure a safe experience is in question," Boddington said.

Even caring for wildlife is more difficult: the BLM now must monitor 296 listed endangered species, up from 76 in 1982.

"Our staff has to run faster, run harder and get it right the first time," said Phil Guerrero, BLM spokesman in Las Vegas. "We answer our phone calls. We answer our letters. But sometimes it's plain, flat-out overwhelming."

In Southern Nevada, BLM officials mop up urban Las Vegas as it seeps into the public land around it.

Nine BLM rangers hop from call to call. They respond when drivers tear around restricted areas on off-road vehicles. Recently they dispersed 15 squatters who had planted mobile homes longer than a 14-day limit on BLM land at Sunrise Mountain.

"They're living on public land for free, basically, said Ranger Richard Smith. "They tend to acquire more dogs than they can take care of. They also tend to have a lot of trash."

Smith's patrol area spans about 2 million acres between Las Vegas and Mesquite. He spends some of his time busting off-road drivers and gun-wielding drunks on restricted BLM land.

"They drink the beer, then they shoot the bottles," Smith said.

He also finds about six abandoned vehicles a month, often stolen.

"They go for joyrides, take the car out on public lands in the desert, then torch them or abandon them, strip them," Smith said. "A lot of it is just for the thrill of it."

Officials say dumping is as "common as coyotes" on public land. People trash almost anything in the desert: old clothes, refrigerators and junked cars. This time of year they dump dead Christmas trees.

"It's kind of ridiculous because the sanitation company will take those away for you," said Fred Delcamp, chief BLM ranger for the Las Vegas district.

In one of the state's largest clean-up efforts, the BLM and prison work crews last fall hauled 323 tons of trash dating to the 1960s out of an illegal dump in Taylor Canyon northwest of Elko.

But the BLM's nine Las Vegas district rangers mostly focus on Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, one of the nation's most popular BLM attractions with 1 million visitors. Visitors come to camp, hike, climb, and increasingly, to cause trouble.

Incidents of vandalism are up. So is underage drinking. In November, a stray .50-caliber bullet struck a camper's car from a nearby firing range.

Posted signs warn people to watch their valuables. BLM officials say credit card thieves have preyed on parked cars in recent days, carefully plucking the cards but leaving other valuables and the vehicles untouched. Motorists don't notice their cards are missing for days. The thieves then get cash advances on the cards in casinos.

"It's pretty devious," Guerrero said. "No one wants to admit it, but Red Rock is an urban park. We've got urban issues that we face every day of the week."

The BLM came under some fire last month when a 15-year-old died at Red Rock. The teen, descending a steep ledge with no gear, fell in a remote area near Calico Basin.

"How can we keep track of everything that goes on on that land?" Guerrero said. "We can't watch everybody all the time when we have just a spattering of rangers and 3.5 million acres of land."

The Las Vegas BLM field office is among the busiest in the nation in part because the office is swamped with realty cases. Thirteen BLM staffers are digging through a pile of land auctions 703 case files high.

"We have more cases coming in than we can process in a timely manner," said Rex Wells, BLM's Las Vegas district land manager. "As fast as they go out, they come in."

Land sales

The BLM is responsible for arranging the sale of 27,000 acres of public land in the coming years. Congress mandated the sales in 1998.

In addition the BLM conveys land to fast-growing Clark County to be used for schools, parks, fire stations, libraries and other public uses. Federal agencies such as the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Geological Survey also use BLM land.

And utility companies need BLM permits for power, telephone, water and sewer lines. Nevada Power was making so many requests every month that the company sent its own right-of-way agent to work in the BLM office four days a week. Nevada Power's Becky Tippet said it is more efficient for her to work face-to-face with BLM permit processors. She is preparing and prioritizing about 80 pending cases.

Nevada's seven other field offices are busy, too.

The Ely office, 220 miles north of Las Vegas, oversees the largest expanse of BLM land in the state, 11.5 million acres. The office's one BLM ranger keeps an eye peeled for methamphetamine labs and marijuana crops, among a wide variety of other duties. He recently tracked down a man who had dumped a trailer full of documents on BLM land during a move to Colorado.

"We do the best we can with what we have," said special projects manager Curtis Tucker in the BLM's Ely office. "My suspicion is that there are things going on out there that we don't know about."

Case in point: On Christmas Eve 1998, a Union Pacific train derailed near Caliente and 16 cars dumped coal on BLM land and in a creek. Several months passed before anyone told the BLM. Since then, Union Pacific has promised to immediately notify BLM of future accidents and agreed to pay to revegetate the area.

In the Tonopah field office, an 18-member BLM staff keep tabs on five large-scale mining operations and roughly 2,500 unpatented mining claims, mostly small unworked plots. The office also issues permits for four or five road races in which thousands of cars roar across the desert.

Tonopah office manager Craig MacKinnon said computers have made his far-flung office more efficient, but also less vigilant.

"I need more people out in the truck in the field," MacKinnon said. "Our specialists don't have the luxury of getting out of the office as much. The demands are impressive. Each of our resources is being pinched. We need more people."

The Tonopah office grapples with a common problem in Nevada: wild horses and burros. Statewide, the landscape can support about 15,000 to 16,000 animals. But Nevada has about 22,500.

BLM officials each year remove wild horses and burros. Some are adopted; others are shipped out-of-state.

BLM officials figure they need to round up about 6,000 horses and burros every year for seven years to reach safe levels by 2005. Last year, they had funding to remove 3,500.

MacKinnon said nine burros have been invading Beatty, population 1,600, to feed on the greenery around a new apartment complex for seniors.

"We get people-burro problems all the time," MacKinnon said. "They're kind of cute, but they can get nasty."

Some horses have to be removed because summer wildfires burned the landscape.

Massive reseeding efforts of nearly 340,000 acres are under way after fire scarred about 1.6 million Nevada acres.

BLM officials would like to launch an even larger landscape plan in an effort to battle cheatgrass, a fast-spreading, quick-drying non-native plant. Cheatgrass is choking out native species, they say. But that plan is still a question mark.

"We'd like to treat the whole landscape, but we're just not sure if the funding for that is going to happen," BLM Nevada spokeswoman Jo Simpson said.

BLM Nevada State Director Bob Abbey added, "BLM is funded for adequacy, not excellence."

BLM officials pledge to look for more partnership programs with other agencies in order to trim budgets. The bureau also is experimenting with setting new fees. Red Rock visitors paid about $2 million during the first two years of a new fee collection program in 1998 and 1999.

It's not clear how much money Congress might approve for the BLM in the 2001 fiscal year.

In the meantime, bureau officials will evaluate which budgets to trim and which projects to delay.

One project on hold is the Nevada ghost town of Rhyolite, roughly 110 miles northwest of Las Vegas. About 70,000 tourists visit Rhyolite every year, yet it has no BLM guide, no interpretive signs and no restrooms. "What services are we not going to provide in the future?" asked Hawes. "These are questions we are trying to answer."

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