Category Archives: Zenke

Column Thomas Mitchell: Neighbors hope Little Ash Springs remains closed

There are two sides to every story.

Four years ago the Bureau of Land Management locked the gate to Little Ash Springs north of Alamo for what was described as a couple of weeks due to a crumbling wall on a manmade pool. It remains closed.

Recently, the Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke told the Las Vegas newspaper, “This is exactly why the federal government needs to clean up our act. I’m not in the business of locking the public out.”

He added, “We need to work with local communities and be better neighbors …”

Speaking of neighbors, Joe and Andrea Barker own the 13-acre tract adjacent to and downstream from the 1-acre BLM-controlled Little Ash Springs. Their property is known as Big Ash Springs and has 50 springs feeding 94-degree water into meandering shallow rivulets that are home to two endangered species — the White River springfish and the Pahranagat roundtail chub found only in the Ash Springs system.

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3% Stand With Snake River Ranchers

The 71-year-old rancher has become the focus of a legal effort by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Spokane, which is asking a federal judge to sanction Riley for “trespass, encroachment, damages” and make him pay the legal costs incurred by forcing Riley to abide by the rules on ground purchased by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers some 53 years ago.

“The government just has too many employees and too much money,” said Riley’s nephew, Chad Lindgren, who works Riley’s River Ranch. “They are not going to back down. They are not going to give in unless we make them give in.”

And, he noted, the yearslong dispute is being funded by taxpayers: “We are basically paying those people to be a pain in our ass.”

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Newspaper column: Move the headquarters of federal land agencies West : Feb 16 by Thomas Mitchell

Head ’em up, move ’em out.

There has been a lot of talk since the Trump administration has taken over about where to locate the national headquarters of some of the nation’s federal land agencies. One land agency, the Bureau of Land Management, controls 11 percent of the nation’s lands, but 99 percent of that land is in the West.

Fully 85 percent of the land in Nevada is controlled by those federal land agencies, the highest percentage of any state, with 66 percent of the state lying under the purview of the BLM, while the rest of the public land is controlled by agencies such as the Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Defense and the Bureau of Reclamation.

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Interior secretary recommends shrinking Gold Butte

Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke on Tuesday recommended shrinking the boundaries of Gold Butte National Monument in a move that distressed conservationists, who have fought for years to protect the land near Mesquite. Zinke’s report came one day after the president slashed the size of two national monuments in Utah, a move that has already sparked a lawsuit.
Compared to the wholesale changes the president approved in Utah, any adjustments to Gold Butte are expected to be minor. But Zinke’s recommendations, although similar to a leaked draft in September, carry a symbolic weight for the area. They signal a major reversal of public lands policy that comes almost exactly one year after President Obama designated the nearly 300,000 acres that start about 10 miles from the site of the 2014 Bundy standoff.

“We will fight it in court,” Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity wrote in an email. “And we will win.”

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Federal Agency Promoted Ranger Five Months After His Gun Was Stolen and Used in Steinle Killing

Five months after Kathryn Steinle was slain on San Francisco’s waterfront, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management promoted the law enforcement ranger whose unsecured stolen gun was used to kill her, according to an internal BLM email obtained by KQED.

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an undocumented Mexican national, is expected to go on trial in San Francisco next week on a charge of murder in Steinle’s killing. Conservative lawmakers have seized on Garcia Zarate’s history of deportations and illegal re-entry into the U.S. — plus San Francisco’s policy that ignored a detention request from immigration authorities — to fuel a political assault on so-called sanctuary cities.

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BLM experiments with ‘flexible’ grazing permits

The Bureau of Land Management is taking applications from Western states to test outcome-based grazing, which enables ranchers to manage according to current conditions rather than rigid permit requirements. BOISE — Mike Courtney may finally get the chance to implement a more common-sense grazing approach to controlling weeds and minimizing the wildfire risk in the Berger Resource Conservation Area.

Courtney, manager for the Bureau of Land Management’s Twin Falls District, will apply to include the grazing area south of Buhl in a BLM pilot project, testing a new approach intended to increase flexibility in grazing permits.

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Thomas Mitchell Newspaper column: Bill would limit power to create national monuments

The House Committee on Natural Resources this past week approved a bill sponsored by Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop to rein in the powers granted by the Antiquities Act of 1906 that allow a president to unilaterally create huge national monuments.

The bill advanced on a party line vote of 27-13, with Democrats in opposition.

The bill, H.R. 3990, the National Monument Creation and Protection Act, amends the Antiquities Act to limit the size of future monuments and specifically grants the sitting president the power to reduce the size of existing monuments — a power Democrats have argued President Trump does not have under current law.

During his administration President Obama created 26 national monuments totaling more than 500 million acres — including the 700,000-acre Basin and Range National Monument on the border of Lincoln and Nye counties and the 300,000-acre Gold Butte National Monument in Clark County.

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More than a third of National Park Service employees harassed at work; Zinke calls for accountability, transparency

ST. GEORGE — Federal officials on Friday released the results of a survey in which 39 percent of National Park Service employees said they had experienced harassment or discrimination on the job, then vowed to take immediate action to deal with the problem.

“From day one, I made it clear that I have zero tolerance for harassment in the workplace, and I directed leadership in the National Park Service to move rapidly to improve accountability and transparency,” Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke said. “All employees have the right to work in an environment that is safe and harassment-free.

“I’ve removed a number of people who were abusive or acted improperly that other administrations were too afraid to or just turned a blind eye to. Under my leadership, we’re going to hold people accountable. We are also fixing the problem of victims being afraid of retaliation or inaction by codifying the right for victims to report abuse to any manager in any location across the service, and by bringing on an independent, investigative partner.”

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Antiquities Act weakens rural communities by robbing them of lands

GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said Wednesday that the Antiquities Act of 1906 represents the kind of collusion among special interests, bureaucrats and the executive that he was elected to fight.

“[The Antiquities Act] is an attack on our republican form of government that weakens rural communities by robbing them of agency and opportunity on the surrounding lands,” Lee said in a speech at a joint Heritage Foundation and Sutherland Institute event Wednesday on abuses of the Antiquities Act. “What is needed is wholesale reform of the Antiquities Act, to return its monumental power back to where it belongs: To the people who reside closest to the proposed monuments.”

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Congress works to expand public lands access for hunting, fishing, outdoor shooting

Part of the effort to expand access to public lands is reforming the Equal Access to Justice Act, which is addressed in the current legislation. The Equal Access to Justice Act has been widely abused in recent years by radical special interest groups aiming to bury federal and state wildlife and land agencies in anti-lands management lawsuits, and get rich on taxpayer dollars while doing so.

Hunting in its various forms, fishing, and outdoor shooting are not just iconic American pastimes, they are essential to families who depend on the economic benefits these activities yield. Countless rural families depend on big game and fish as affordable sources of protein. And in the West, game and fish quarries are taken primarily from public lands. But it’s not just meat and fish harvested by anglers and game hunters that benefit families and foster self-reliance, it’s the commerce of outfitting and selling hunting leases that keep many ranchers, farmers and property owners afloat in a sea of fickle agricultural and real estate markets.

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Navajo tribe says ready to sue Trump over changes to Utah monument

The Navajo Nation will sue the Trump administration if it tries to reduce the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, its top lawyer told Reuters on Thursday, ahead of the release of a broad government review of such sites across the country.

President Donald Trump had ordered the Interior Department to examine whether 27 national monuments designated by past presidents could be reduced or rescinded to make way for oil and gas drilling and other economic development.

The results have not been announced, but a leak of the review obtained by the Washington Post shows the Interior Department will recommend shrinking some sites, including Bears Ears, a 1.35-million-acre wilderness that the Navajo and other tribes consider sacred.

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Secretary Zinke Announces $94.3 Million to States for Parks and Outdoor Recreation through Land and Water Conservation Fund

WASHINGTON – U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke today announced that $94.3 million will be distributed for outdoor recreation and conservation projects to the 50 states, U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which is funded through offshore oil and gas leasing. These funds are awarded through federal matching grants that leverage public and private investment in America’s state and local public parks.

“The Land and Water Conservation Fund state grant program has been a resounding success that makes physical investments in our communities,” Secretary Zinke said. “From Detroit, Michigan, to Lake Tahoe, California, the program benefits citizens across the nation by helping state and local governments make infrastructure investments in urban, suburban, and rural parks. By advancing the Administration’s offshore energy goals, we will be able to generate more revenue for the fund to improve conservation and recreation opportunities for generations to come.”

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Secretary Zinke signs Secretarial Order to Support Sportsmen & Enhance Wildlife Conservation

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke signed Secretarial Order 3356, which will support and expand hunting and fishing, enhance conservation stewardship, improve wildlife management, and increase outdoor recreation opportunities for all Americans. Secretarial Order 3356 is an extension of Secretarial Order 3347, issued on Zinke’s first day, March 2, 2017. That order identified a slate of actions for the restoration of the American sportsmen conservation ethic, which was established by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The new order comes days after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a survey that found there are 2.2 million fewer hunters in America now than in 2011. The order seeks to improve wildlife management and conservation, increase access to public lands for hunting, shooting, and fishing, and puts a new and a greater emphasis on recruiting and retaining new sportsmen conservationists, with a focus on engaging youths, veterans, minorities, and other communities that traditionally have low participation in outdoor recreation activities.

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