Groups call for better protection of BLM lands

Friday, June 3, 2005 | 9:43 a.m.

A national historic preservation group has teamed up with conservation groups to call for better protection of lands held by the Bureau of Land Management, including land in Clark County.

The National Trust for Historic Places, a nonprofit group that works to preserve places and buildings of historic interest, included the National Landscape Conservation System in its annual list of 11 "most endangered historic places." The goal of the listing is to focus attention and potentially financial resources on the threatened places.

The BLM-managed system includes hundreds of properties throughout the West, including the Black Rock-High Rock Emigrant Trail National Conservation Area in Northern Nevada and two places in Clark County: the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area and the new Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area.

Red Rock Canyon is one of the most popular destinations within the National Landscape Conservation System, attracting more than 1.25 million visitors annually to 197,000 acres west of Las Vegas. BLM officials are now drawing up a management plan for Sloan Canyon, which was formally designated a conservation area last year.

Representatives of the national trust group said the inclusion of the National Landscape Conservation System was unusual in that it included many different sites, but was warranted because of concern about BLM properties.

"Preservation encompasses all types of historic places," said Jeannie McPherson, a national trust spokeswoman. "This is a broad initiative to try to preserve the important cultural heritage of those places ... We're just getting started."

Barb Pahl, the group's director for much of the West, said the problem with BLM stewardship of the landscape conservation system comes down to a lack of funding.

"The problem is that the BLM is severely underfunded," she said. The landscape conservation system includes 26 million acres, and the BLM has about $56 million to take care of the system, Pahl said.

BLM officials said the budget numbers were roughly on the mark.

Pahl pointed out that comes to about $2.15 per acre, down from $2.85 per acre two years ago and woefully short of the $16 per acre that she said the National Park Service averages.

"It's understaffed, unfunded and uninventoried," she said, referring to the cultural and environmental resources in the conservation areas. "We don't know the status of resources on these lands."

In much of the West, the BLM only gets a partial inventory of what resources are within an area when a proposal for development, such as new water wells or oil development, requires a federal environmental study, she said.

Pahl said the BLM needs to launch a "comprehensive, culturally driven" assessment of what it has on its conservation lands, some of which are or could be as significant as federal parks.

"We need more data, better data, so when the BLM is making decisions about what will happen on BLM land they have good reliable information about the resources," she said.

Conservationists with the national Wilderness Society and local Friends of Nevada Wilderness welcomed the inclusion of the National Landscape Conservation System in the historic trust's list of 11 endangered places.

They noted that efforts to preserve environmental and cultural resources in Clark County have had one funding advantage that other parts of the country have not. In the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, 85 percent of proceeds from BLM auctions of Clark County land go to environmental, conservation and recreation purposes in Nevada. Since the act was passed, the auctions have generated about $1.6 billion, and so far $1 billion has been earmarked for spending on projects statewide, with $445 million for local parks, trails and other projects in Clark County.

Jeremy Garncarz, associate director of the wilderness support center for the Wilderness Society, a national conservation group, said that funding has helped Southern Nevada's preservation efforts -- but the 1998 law is threatened by a proposal from the Bush administration to redirect 70 percent of land-sale proceeds to federal deficit reduction.

"People are going after it," Garncarz said of the funding. "We need to make sure the agency's getting the resources."

Susan Potts, Southern Nevada conservation director for the Friends of Nevada Wilderness, said another weakness of the 1998 act is that unless specified in other laws, proceeds from land sales cannot go to operations and maintenance, the "boots on the ground" that are important to protect the BLM's sensitive areas.

The one area that has been able to use funds for ongoing work has been Sloan Canyon outside of Henderson. The BLM is now drawing up a management plan for the 56,000-acre conservation area.

Even with the funding, Sloan Canyon "still has problems from overuse, abuse and vandalism," Potts said.

"The BLM is definitely underfunded," she said. "They manage so many acres and there are so many problems with vehicles going off of designated routes, with trash, vandalism of archeological sites and tearing up the environment generally. They don't have money for enforcement, education, maintenance and things like that."

Garncarz said the BLM in Southern Nevada also has greater challenges than the agency in other parts of Nevada and the West.

"The other thing that is unique to Southern Nevada is that it's directly adjacent to the fastest growing city in the country," he said. "The increased numbers of people are putting unprecedented pressure on these places. We need to make sure they (the BLM officials) have the tools to do their job."

BLM officials in Las Vegas and in Reno referred questions about BLM funding and the agency's stewardship of the National Landscape Conservation System to Washington.

"We certainly appreciate their interest in the National Landscape Conservation System," said Celia Bodington, BLM spokeswoman.

The BLM is committed to the system, and the budget has grown by about $15 million since 2001, she said. In that period the system has grown by about 1 million acres with federally designated wilderness, scenic trails and other elements, Bodington said.

The BLM stewardship of the elements of the system is in partnership with many other groups, she said.

"We work with probably thousands of partners to manage the land as best we can," Bodington said. "Clearly, the country is facing challenging times and our budgets reflect that.

The agency has a different mandate from other federal agencies that manage large amounts of land, such as the Park Service, because the BLM has to account for various uses, she said. Those include cattle grazing, energy development, recreation and conservation.

"We have a broader mandate than any other land management agency," she said. "I genuinely think it makes our work more exciting ... These are lands that people look to for their livelihood. Absolutely it's a challenge, but I think it gives tremendous vigor to the BLM."