Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2003 | 8:58 a.m.
Clark County's desert is home to a diverse range of flora and fauna, animals as large as the bighorn sheep and as tiny as the beetles that live in the mesquite scrub.
Increasingly, the desert also is home to old mattresses, tires, broken televisions, car parts, old furniture, piles of construction debris -- every type of trash that people can dump.
The Bureau of Land Management and seven local and state groups and agencies are teaming up to clean that up. Rebecca Watson, assistant secretary of the Interior for lands and minerals, joined about two dozen Clark County residents to kick off the program Monday at a dusty desert cleanup site a couple of miles south of the urban area, near Sloan.
The initiative is part of larger state and national conservation efforts backed by the White House. Interior and its lands agency, the BLM, will put $446,000 into conservation work in Clark County and $1.1 million statewide. The work will receive state and local funding matches, Watson said.
"These dump sites are very destructive to wildlife," she said. People "probably come out at night when no one is around and dump things."
The sites are particularly dangerous because just one pile of old scrap will lead others to dump at the same place, Watson said.
At Monday's cleanup, Linda Cardenas, Las Vegas BLM supervisor for renewable resources, said, "This is just one of 50 sites spread across Clark County. This one would be good to illustrate the problem because it's next to the Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area."
The site also is next to more than 1,900 acres southwest of Henderson that are slated to be sold for development at a Nov. 6 BLM auction.
Volunteers from several conservation organizations, who walked over the litter of shell casings from target shooters, said the cleanup is even more important because of the impending sale. Sloan Canyon won federal recognition as a 48,000-acre protected area last year, and its advocates said people who are living nearby or building or moving into the area need to know that an increasingly threatened desert ecosystem is close by.
"We hope to clean up the desert," said Kenny Anderson, president of the Friends of Sloan Canyon. Anderson said he hopes his volunteer group will be able to work with whoever buys the land for development, to encourage respect for the fragile habitat and to deter future dumping.
Bill James, the group's vice president, noted that within a few years people would probably be able to walk from their homes to the present dump site.
Watson, with the Interior Department, said groups such as Friends of Sloan Canyon and a group called Partners in Conservation in the rural Moapa Valley area of northeast Clark County are crucial for the success of the federal effort.
Other groups involved in the three conservation programs touted Monday include the Outside Las Vegas Foundation, the Boy Scouts, the Fraternity of Bighorn Sheep, Clark County and the Nevada Department of Wildlife.
The three projects are a $226,000 effort to clean up illegal dump sites scattered throughout Clark County's deserts, a $20,000 project to build or improve water tanks for wildlife for bighorn sheep, and a $200,000 effort to collect and conserve seeds from rare native plants in the region.
Ed O'Sullivan, BLM supervisor of volunteer programs, said the initiative is an extension of efforts already under way. Church groups, off-road vehicle enthusiasts and others help collect 250 tons of trash dumped throughout the region annually -- and they only catch part of what litters the area.
The site that Watson visited "is probably the worst site we have," but far from the only one, O'Sullivan said.
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