Reid speaks of challenges under new lands bill

Friday, Dec. 20, 2002 | 10:13 a.m.

A bill passed last month does not provide all the protection for federal lands that Sen. Harry Reid wanted, but it goes a long way toward preserving some of the most important pieces of land near Las Vegas, Reid said.

Reid, speaking to federal Bureau of Land Management staff at the agency's Las Vegas field office, said the real challenge is beginning. The BLM staff and other federal employees will take the lead in protecting such areas as the new Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area, an environmental and cultural treasure trove encompassing 48,000 acres 15 miles south of Las Vegas.

Reid, Democratic minority whip, and Sen. John Ensign, his Republican counterpart, teamed up to pass the Clark County Public Lands and Natural Resources Act of 2002.

The implementation of the act is expected to take three years, but the act provides for 444,000 acres of protected wilderness, off limits to motorized vehicles.

The act also expands the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, and releases 233,000 acres for other public uses, including potential development.

"This bill isn't everything I wanted," Reid said. "The bill is a compromise."

Reid said he would have liked to have more land set aside as wilderness. But he also defended opening up thousands of acres for other uses, a critical component of a lands bill in an area where the population continues to grow by about 80,000 people a year.

"There's going to be land made available to put houses on and to build shopping centers," he said.

BLM staff members on Thursday invited Reid to the formal dedication of the Sloan conservation area, set for February.

The area includes American Indian pictographs and petroglyphs and habitat for rare plant and animal species, including bighorn sheep.

Reid promised the federal staff that he will work to provide the staffing needed to protect designated wilderness -- despite threats to staffing nationally from Bush administration budget cuts.

Phil Guerrero, spokesman for the Las Vegas BLM field office, said his agency now has fewer than 150 workers locally. Additional responsibilities -- planning and coordinating the set-asides for wilderness, but mainly preparing 22,000 acres for sale to the public -- will take anywhere from 25 to 75 more people, he said.

"We can't do the work without people," Guerrero said. "This new act, as sweeping and as landmark as it is, is a great thing for Nevada, but it potentially doubles the workload."

BLM Las Vegas Field Manager Mark Morse said some of the work to implement the act will be funded with $450,000 in seed money. More money for implementation could come from the sale of 500 acres of land near Henderson.

Guerrero said the price tag for that land is around $50 million.

"It's a good start," Morse said. "That is the engine that will fund the management of the (Sloan) national conservation area."

Stanton Rolf, BLM district archeologist, said his agency is working to document the condition of the conservation area's cultural and ecological resources.

"The physical condition is excellent right now," he said. "It's pristine. It's like a time machine out there."

Alan O'Neill, executive director of Outside Las Vegas, a nonprofit conservation group, presented the senator with a T-shirt with a Red Rock Canyon logo.

O'Neill said government staffing is important, but more significant is getting people to cherish the area's wild places. He said Outside Las Vegas is looking to recruit and train volunteers to be stewards of areas such as the Sloan conservation area.

"It gives us an incredible opportunity to look at a different way of staffing, if people take some ownership and responsibility," O'Neill said. "Not only of Sloan, but all of the resources that surround us.

"The community needs to take that responsibility. We can't continue to turn that over to government. Government can't do it alone."