BLM responds to residents’ anger

By Stephanie Tavares

Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The Bureau of Land Management is scrambling to accommodate angry Nevadans who were not allowed to speak directly to the people planning a controversial solar power plant for Amargosa Valley.

The agency hosted a meeting on that topic Aug. 17 in Beatty. Officials told audience members they had to either submit comments in writing or recite them to a court reporter on the premises. Agency personnel said that was to ensure concerns and suggestions were correctly recorded.

But many of the Amargosa Valley residents who attended the meeting wanted to look into the faces of BLM officials and representatives of the company that wants to build the plant along Amargosa Valley’s main drag.

They wanted to have a discussion. What they got was a bureaucratic process. Some rural residents had driven more than an hour to attend the meeting, and they had expected to be able to face off with the people calling the shots. Being instead told to speak to a court reporter was a huge letdown, and to some an insult.

“We wanted to talk and that was the time set up to do it,” Amargosa resident Jerry Nelson complained later. “I think it’s wrong for them to have done this. This is our home we’re talking about.”

Nelson said the BLM and the project developer came off as “callous.”

Maybe, but they were not in violation of state open meeting law. It requires government agencies to allow comment during public hearings — but the law doesn’t apply to federal agencies.

Nevertheless, the decision to not listen to oral comments at the meeting made it appear the BLM and the project developer had no sincere interest in public input, said Alan Lichtenstein, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.

“If you hold a meeting to get public comment, then not letting the public comment verbally sort of defeats the purpose,” Lichtenstein said. “Certainly the ability to speak at a public meeting would be a no-brainer and by not doing so they lose credibility as to whether they’re looking at true public input or whether it’s a sham. That’s unfortunate because this is an important issue that the public has a right to weigh in on and should be weighing in on.”

The BLM belatedly agrees. The agency announced last week that it will hold a follow-up meeting Sept. 22 in Beatty during which residents can express their concerns orally, just as was done in the other three “scoping meetings” on the project held at other sites.

Scoping meetings are required under the National Environmental Policy Act and are set up by federal agencies to collect public suggestions and feedback before an agency or a third party contractor begins the environmental impact studies for a proposed project. A scoping meeting is meant give reviewers the benefit of local expertise and to ensure the environmental impact statement prepared for a proposed project is thorough.

The meeting in Beatty was the first of four Southern Nevada scoping meetings for the Amargosa Valley solar thermal plant.

BLM’s renewable energy planning manager in Nevada, Gregory Helseth, acknowledged taking comments only in writing or through a court reporter at the Beatty meeting was a mistake.

“This approach did not work, and confused people as to how they could get their comments heard,” Helseth said in an e-mail.

Nelson says Helseth and his cohorts figured that out too late.

“I think they’ve screwed it up,” Nelson said.