NEWS ROUNDUP

Zoning power gets on the ballot The war in Iraq and homeland security are dominating the presidential campaign. But measures on ballots Tuesday across the USA show that Americans want to get a handle on issues in their own backyards: sprawl, big-box stores, traffic and the environment. In a number of communities from Florida to California, citizens groups and developers are using ballot referendums to try to wrest control of land-use decisions from local officials. A trend that began in California is picking up steam elsewhere, says Phyllis Myers, president of State Resource Strategies in Washington, D.C., a consulting firm that has tracked state and local ballot measures for more than 10 years. California has pioneered the use of ballot measures to restrict taxes, protect land and manage growth....
Ski village moves forward The Mineral County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday unanimously approved zoning plans for a highly controversial mountaintop village near the Wolf Creek Ski Area in southwestern Colorado. After listening to comments from roughly two dozen speakers at an all-day hearing, the panel voted 3-0 to approve a proposal by Texas billionaire B.J. "Red" McCombs to build what could be the state's largest resort village of its kind....
NPS Retirees: National Park Service Is Hiding Report Calling for More Scientific Approach to Park Management The 353-member Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees (CCNPSR) today publicly called on National Park Service (NPS) Director Fran Mainella to stop stonewalling the release of a major report that urges a more scientific approach to management of America's national parks. The report now being kept under wraps outlines steps for "reducing known shortcomings in past levels of NPS support for using science as a management tool" in order to "ensure the future of the nation's natural heritage that is reflected in the National Park System." According to CCNPSR, the report is being held hostage to the Bush Administration's campaign of ignoring science in order to clear the way for controversial steps -- such as opening up Yellowstone National Park to snowmobiles -- that violate the NPS mission of protecting the resources of the national park system....
LDS Church to pay to lease Martin's Cove The LDS Church will pay $16,000 a year to lease public land surrounding the Martin's Cove Historical Site in Wyoming under a 25-year agreement signed Tuesday with the Bureau of Land Management. Although critics of the lease say they still may file suit, the deal may close a six-year effort by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to acquire the property Mormon faithful consider sacred ground. Although no archaeological evidence has been found, Martin's Cove is believed to be the area where an 1856 blizzard took the lives of an estimated 200 European converts to Mormonism who were traveling to territorial Utah by pulling handcarts across the high plains....
Tribe wins key contract status A company created by the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation has landed a contract that makes it a preferred source for up to $100 million in federal projects. Under the Department of Labor's multi-year award, NWB Technology, a subsidiary of tribally-owned NWB Economic Development Corp., will offer information technology services, surveying and mapping, energy consulting, security and surveillance to various federal agencies. In all, the $100 million worth of contracts could generate hundreds of positions, among them internships and on-the-job training slots for the 450 members of the Northwestern Band....
Ancient lands restored to Acoma In the 1870s, federal land surveyors failed to include a portion of Acoma's tribal lands within the reservation's boundaries. The land was then deemed "public land" and patented to the old Atlantic and Pacific Railroad in 1908. Although surface rights were restored to the pueblo in 1936, it has taken the efforts of five Acoma administrations to realize the restoration of subsurface mineral rights on the lands....
Enviros, BLM spar over Roan Environmental groups attacked plans to drill on the Roan Plateau from a different angle Wednesday by contending that the Bureau of Land Management has grossly exaggerated the amount of natural gas available. A coalition led by the Wilderness Society claimed its analysis of government data shows 400 billion cubic feet of gas could be recovered using technology available today from under the Roan Plateau Planning Area. Earlier studies by the BLM contended that 15.4 trillion cubic feet is beneath the 127,000-acre area....
Dugway seeks to obtain more land Dugway Proving Ground, one of America's largest military bases, has been thinking about growing even larger. It's unclear whether the project is the revival of a 1988 Dugway effort to obtain a swath of public land 23 miles wide by 3 miles long, where chemical and conventional weapons contamination occurred. But what is certain is that two other projects besides the expansion show the military wants stronger action to protect the public from leftover ordinance. Officials of Dugway — the bigger-than-Rhode Island base sprawling across much of Utah's western desert — aren't saying how much they would like it to expand or even why....
Part-Time Paradise It’s the same story from Vail to Telluride, from Park City, Utah, to Sun Valley, Idaho. Growing chunks of the West’s mountains towns seem to go into deep hibernation for long stretches of the year. Similar clusters are cropping up in places from Bozeman, Mont., to Moab, Utah, and Sedona, Ariz. They are filled with second (and sometimes third or fourth) residences that are only used a few weeks or months out of the year by wealthy owners who really live in Hollywood, Dallas, Chicago or New York. Led by the baby-boom generation, affluent "equity exiles" have plunked down millions for their condos, townhomes and starter castles in paradise. Demographers, elected officials and planners now recognize a new phenomenon: "hollowed-out" communities, to use the phrase coined by Myles Rademan, Park City’s director of public affairs and communication....
Melting glaciers reveal treasures of past Sculptor Bill Ikler was hiking along the edge of a snowfield near the Continental Divide when a friend picked up a cracked, waterlogged, gray-brown chunk of what looked like driftwood. Ikler, who had once studied a bison skull while doing research for one of his sculptures, recognized the 8-inch-long object immediately: It was the bone core from a bison horn. "And then I looked down, and right near my hand was the other core, the other bison horn," he said, recalling the late-summer 2002 hike west of Nederland. "These had just melted out of the snowfield. They were literally pulled from the muck." Samples were sent to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for radiocarbon dating, and the results were surprising. The bison-horn cores were 2,090 years old, said University of Colorado archaeologist Craig Lee....
Bush Uses Market Incentives; Kerry Focuses on Rules Few issues divide President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry more starkly than the environment, where the two men have different approaches on matters ranging from curbing air pollution to promoting energy development on public lands. While Bush has focused on containing regulatory costs and has targeted selected issues, Kerry has advocated stricter federal rules on a wide array of fronts. "It's hard to imagine another case where we've seen a more vivid contrast between the candidates than we see between George Bush and John Kerry on the environment," said Greg Wetstone, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Action Fund, an advocacy and lobbying group....
Proposal Restricts Appeals on Dams The Bush administration has proposed giving dam owners the exclusive right to appeal Interior Department rulings about how dams should be licensed and operated on American rivers, through a little-noticed regulatory tweak that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the hydropower industry. The proposal would prevent states, Indian tribes and environmental groups from making their own appeals, while granting dam owners the opportunity to take their complaints -- and suggested solutions -- directly to senior political appointees in the Interior Department....
Column: Big river, big picture Although the notion of watershed thinking permeates the education of young scientists and natural resource managers, we have forgotten "to think like a watershed" in considering the environmental future of the Colorado River. Watershed thinking envisions all of the opportunities and constraints that exist in a drainage basin. Watershed decisions balance those opportunities and constraints. The need for watershed thinking has become apparent to me in the midst of pursuing a research program concerning management of dams and the restoration of regulated rivers throughout the Intermountain West. My colleagues and I conduct studies downstream from several dams and diversions in the Colorado River basin....
Water deal with Nez Perce Tribe dead in Senate An Idaho effort to resolve one of the West's largest water rights disputes is dead in the U.S. Senate for this year. Senators Larry Craig and Michael Crapo say an anonymous U-S senator has invoked a procedure single-handedly blocking a vote on their water agreement bill. The two say they don't know which of their colleagues is blocking it, and there's no way to find out....