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Protests mount against West Mojave Plan
By Mark Wheeler / Hi-Desert Star
MORONGO BASIN - The hills are alive with the sound of protest over a document the Bureau of Land Management has crafted and intends to use for governing 9.3 million acres of public lands in the southern California desert.
Called the West Mojave Plan (WEMO), and originally conceived as an instrument for implementing the 1994 Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan, the document has been scorned by some among the opponents as "a giveaway to industry that would harm the desert's quality of life."
Policy-watch and research group the Center for Biological Diversity is perhaps one of the WEMO plan's most vocal and powerful opponents. Its spokesperson Daniel Patterson says his organization, along with others, has filed legal protest with the Department of Interior challenging the plan on legal and scientific terms.
Denouncing the plan's provision for allowing developers on private lands within the designated area to pay a fee instead of mitigating endangered species impacts, Patterson accuses the plan of bias in favor of industry and of ignoring conservation responsibilities which are written into state and federal environmental and land-use laws.
Desert ecologist and retired BLM wildlife biologist Tom Egan enumerates four primary faults he finds with the plan:
€ It contains no operations provision for effectively managing off-highway vehicle activity on sensitive public lands;
€ It lacks internal plans for managing desert riparian areas;
€ It fails to provide for habitat recovery according to the 1994 Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan; and
€ It contains no operational plan for protecting endangered species.
Byron Kahr, speaking for the California Wilderness Coalition and the Alliance for Responsible Recreation, says his groups have focused primarily on the plan's route designations for OHV travel. Upon studying the decision-making process used for classifying those routes, conservationists decided the decisions in many cases were arbitrary and not supported by data.
Furthermore, the procedures for the decision-making process itself, which are specified by BLM's own policy, were not followed according to law.
According to Kahr, the decision process requires public input, and it especially insists on qualified environmental analysis for choices made in the sequence of all choices used to arrive at a final decision. These requirements were not upheld, Kahr claims, adding his claims can be demonstrated on evidence.
Even more central to the protests from Kahr's groups is what they claim was failure on part of the route planners to observe requirements that every planning decision must demonstrate its results will have a minimum impact on the environment.
Probably most unflattering to the BLM of all protests is the one brought by Friends of Juniper Flats. This group claims a biological report was modified without consent of its author in order, allegedly, to include a sensitive area in the designated route plan. Should this accusation prove valid, it could hold the BLM responsible for tampering with evidence, a grave crime for any public land management agency.
None of the protest groups expect the Department of Interior or the BLM will modify the plan to satisfy the accusations. Filing formal protest is merely a prerequisite for filing a legal suit at a later date. The terms of engagement for a matter such as this one commonly mean the plan's ultimate fate will be decided in a courtroom.
The Morongo Basin is included in the WEMO plan's area of influence. Land-use planning decisions here may, therefore, be affected by the plan's final approval or rejection.
Linda Hansen, the BLM area manager who is named as the contact person for this matter, could not be reached.
Called the West Mojave Plan (WEMO), and originally conceived as an instrument for implementing the 1994 Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan, the document has been scorned by some among the opponents as "a giveaway to industry that would harm the desert's quality of life."
Policy-watch and research group the Center for Biological Diversity is perhaps one of the WEMO plan's most vocal and powerful opponents. Its spokesperson Daniel Patterson says his organization, along with others, has filed legal protest with the Department of Interior challenging the plan on legal and scientific terms.
Denouncing the plan's provision for allowing developers on private lands within the designated area to pay a fee instead of mitigating endangered species impacts, Patterson accuses the plan of bias in favor of industry and of ignoring conservation responsibilities which are written into state and federal environmental and land-use laws.
Desert ecologist and retired BLM wildlife biologist Tom Egan enumerates four primary faults he finds with the plan:
€ It contains no operations provision for effectively managing off-highway vehicle activity on sensitive public lands;
€ It lacks internal plans for managing desert riparian areas;
€ It fails to provide for habitat recovery according to the 1994 Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan; and
€ It contains no operational plan for protecting endangered species.
Byron Kahr, speaking for the California Wilderness Coalition and the Alliance for Responsible Recreation, says his groups have focused primarily on the plan's route designations for OHV travel. Upon studying the decision-making process used for classifying those routes, conservationists decided the decisions in many cases were arbitrary and not supported by data.
Furthermore, the procedures for the decision-making process itself, which are specified by BLM's own policy, were not followed according to law.
According to Kahr, the decision process requires public input, and it especially insists on qualified environmental analysis for choices made in the sequence of all choices used to arrive at a final decision. These requirements were not upheld, Kahr claims, adding his claims can be demonstrated on evidence.
Even more central to the protests from Kahr's groups is what they claim was failure on part of the route planners to observe requirements that every planning decision must demonstrate its results will have a minimum impact on the environment.
Probably most unflattering to the BLM of all protests is the one brought by Friends of Juniper Flats. This group claims a biological report was modified without consent of its author in order, allegedly, to include a sensitive area in the designated route plan. Should this accusation prove valid, it could hold the BLM responsible for tampering with evidence, a grave crime for any public land management agency.
None of the protest groups expect the Department of Interior or the BLM will modify the plan to satisfy the accusations. Filing formal protest is merely a prerequisite for filing a legal suit at a later date. The terms of engagement for a matter such as this one commonly mean the plan's ultimate fate will be decided in a courtroom.
The Morongo Basin is included in the WEMO plan's area of influence. Land-use planning decisions here may, therefore, be affected by the plan's final approval or rejection.
Linda Hansen, the BLM area manager who is named as the contact person for this matter, could not be reached.
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