NEWS ROUNDUP

Land sells at $1 mil per acre A small piece of land in north Phoenix's popular Desert Ridge development sold for a record $1 million an acre Thursday at an Arizona state land auction. Apartment builder Gray Development paid $33.45 million for the 32-acre site near the Loop 101 and 56th Street. It plans to build more than 800 high-end apartments and condominiums on the pricey land. It was the first of five residential parcels in Desert Ridge that the Land Department plans to auction off this year. "There's still tremendous demand for land," State Land Commissioner Mark Winkleman said....
Firefighter charged with arson in Nevada A firefighter was indicted Thursday on federal arson charges for three wildfires that burned hundreds of acres of national forest in central Nevada this summer. Mark E. Morgan, 34, was working temporarily as a member of a U.S. Bureau of Land Management crew. He's accused of setting the fires in August in Lander County about 170 miles east of Reno, agency officials said. Morgan, of Reno, faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of three counts if convicted, U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden said. A federal grand jury returned the indictment Wednesday, but prosecutors did not make it public until late Thursday....
GJ: No drilling on mesa The Grand Junction City Council will fight a plan that could open the city’s watershed on Grand Mesa to oil and gas development, saying it wants to take every precaution to safeguard the city’s drinking water. Council members voted 5-2 Wednesday night to oppose a federal lease sale offering more than 13,000 acres on the mesa for drilling. The city will send a formal letter of protest to the Bureau of Land Management and letters to the Western Slope’s congressional delegation asking for legislators’ help in removing Grand Junction’s parcels from the sale. Raul Morales, the associate field office manager for the BLM in Grand Junction, said Thursday the BLM takes the issues raised by the city just as seriously as the city does. The BLM is planning to auction oil and gas leases on 22,000 acres in Mesa County on Feb. 9. About 12,000 acres are in Palisade’s watershed, and 600 acres are in Grand Junction’s watershed, according to the BLM. Those watersheds provide drinking water to the municipalities. Grand Junction is following the lead of Palisade town trustees, who voted unanimously last week to battle the lease sale. Palisade officials said they not only want to protect the town’s watershed, but also a $6 million investment in a new water treatment facility the town board approved last year....
2 Oregon activists accused of arson Investigators of sabotage by radical environmental groups have named two more suspects, both from Southern Oregon, in criminal complaints filed in federal court in Eugene. Widely known activist Jonathan Mark Christopher Paul, 39, is accused of a July 21, 1997, arson that destroyed the Cavel West horse meat packing plant in Redmond. Damage was estimated at $1.4 million. He is scheduled to appear in federal court later this week. Suzanne Nicole Savoie, 29, is accused of the Jan. 2, 2001, arson of Superior Lumber Co., now known as Swanson Group, in Glendale. Savoie, who lives in the Applegate area, had not yet been arrested Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Portland said. If convicted, each faces at least five years and as long as 20 years in prison. A grand jury is expected to return formal charges against the two within 30 days....
Forest Service must release papers A judge has ordered the U.S. Forest Service to come clean about accusations that attorneys for the controversial Village at Wolf Creek served as ghostwriters for federal policy. In a ruling Tuesday, Magistrate Judge David L. West of the U.S. District Court in Durango gave the Forest Service three weeks to turn over any documents detailing communication between village developers and Forest Service officials. In particular, he called on the agency to release documents that might shed light on a charge that an attorney for billionaire village developer Billie Joe "Red" McCombs drafted a letter later signed by lawyers for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA oversees the Forest Service. The letter became a crucial component of the village's final building plans. Mineral County endorsed the plans in October 2004, but a district judge in Creede revoked the approval a year later....
Red tape prompts sawmill closure Timber entrepreneur Steve Seley has closed his sawmill on Gravina Island near Ketchikan, one of the few mills left in the giant Southeast rainforest. Seley said Tuesday he's fed up with dealing with the U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency that manages Alaska's 17 million-acre Tongass National Forest, the country's largest. The owner of Pacific Log & Lumber said he's beyond the point of frustration with trying to buy timber from the agency. "The issue is: Can the federal government perform or not?" Seley said. "The industry is out of capital, out of logs and almost out of desire."....
Judge lifts restraining order on logging while bears hibernate A federal judge has cleared the way for salvage logging in grizzly bear habitat in the Flathead National Forest while the bears are hibernating. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy had banned logging in the roadless areas that fall within areas burned by wildfires during the summer of 2003. The temporary restraining order was issued in response to a lawsuit that challenges post-fire management projects in the Swan Mountain Range west of Hungry Horse Reservoir and in the North Fork Flathead Basin. The Flathead National Forest filed a motion in November asking that the logging ban be lifted during winter months, and Molloy did so in a Jan. 13 ruling. Joe Krueger, the Flathead forest's environmental coordinator, said the initial order had the potential to set a precedent for banning all management activities year-round in core grizzly bear habitat. But the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service argued that scheduled helicopter logging in those areas would not adversely affect grizzly bears when they are denned during the winter months....
Tanks, tortoises fuel ongoing debate The U.S. Army, moving closer to the long-sought expansion of its tank training center near Barstow into desert tortoise habitat, released its final report Thursday on how it will minimize harm from its large-scale maneuvers on the federally protected reptile. The report, however, noted that a key finding in 2004 by federal wildlife officials that approved the 150,000-acre expansion of the National Training Center at Fort Irwin may have been invalidated by a later court ruling in another case. In that case, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must consider the recovery of an endangered species and not just its survival when approving an action in what is called critical habitat, such as the case with the tank training center....
Feds May Protect Plant In Oil Shale, Gas Fields The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday that it is considering whether to protect a plant that environmentalists warn could be wiped out by oil shale and natural gas development. Fish and Wildlife has proposed listing the Graham's beardtongue as a threatened species as part of the settlement of a lawsuit by five environmental groups. The plant is found in eastern Utah and northwestern Colorado, home to intense gas drilling and vast oil shale reserves that the federal government is eager to develop. The Bureau of Land Management is developing a programmatic environmental review of oil shale development on federal lands in the area, meaning that it will be an overview of various issues rather than a study of a specific project at a specific site. More than 70 percent of the plants are on public lands overseen by Bureau of Land Management....
Study: Government not protecting sage grouse from energy boom The federal government needs to impose new restrictions on oil and gas development in the West because current policies are failing to protect sage grouse, according to conservationists citing a new study of the birds in western Wyoming. With all the oil and gas development going on now and planned in the future, "care really must be taken if we're going to have these wide open ecosystems in the future," Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist with the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance in Laramie, said Thursday. Sage grouse inhabit large areas of the western United States, including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Montana, where energy development is booming. The study cited Thursday was conducted by University of Wyoming doctoral student Matthew Holloran for his dissertation. It was paid for by the Bureau of Land Management, the state Game and Fish Department and oil and gas companies....
Feds won’t add coho to threatened species list Crediting strong efforts by the state of Oregon to limit fishing, reform hatchery production and improve freshwater habitat, NOAA Fisheries said Tuesday it’s shelving its proposal to return Oregon coastal coho to the threatened species list. “I applaud the hard work of local agriculture, forestry, state, tribal and other federal partners to develop a solid plan for recovery,” Bob Lohn, the NOAA Fisheries Northwest regional administrator, said in a statement. “This is an encouraging example of the diverse interests that can come together to improve conditions for salmon in the Pacific Northwest.” With no federal protection, there will be fewer regulations on logging, agriculture, land development and restoration work from Astoria to Port Orford. Douglas Timber Operators Executive Director Bob Ragon said the decision won’t likely increase logging in the region, but will ultimately mean less threat of lawsuits and restrictive bureaucratic red tape in the future....
Lawmakers: Why would proposed mine spend $18 million on grizzlies After hearing that a proposed mine beneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness in Montana would help the survival of grizzly bears in the region, the leader of an Idaho legislative panel on Wednesday asked why mining officials were taking steps to conserve grizzly habitat in the first place. ‘‘What’s bears got to do with the mine?’’ Sen. Hal Bunderson, R-Meridian, asked officials with Revett Minerals Inc., a Spokane Valley, Wash., company seeking government approval for a copper and silver mine at Rock Creek, Mont., about 25 miles across the Idaho border from Lake Pend Oreille. ‘‘I understand the need to do water quality mitigation, but when it comes to bear mitigation, that’s just piling on and it’s wrong,’’ said Bunderson, co-chairman of the Joint Legislative Environmental Common Sense Committee. Revett officials are hoping their plans to spend $18 million to increase grizzly protection around the Rock Creek Mine will improve chances that government regulators and courts will approve the necessary permits that have been sought by developers since 1987. Legal challenges have overturned two previous ‘‘biological opinions’’ in favor of the project by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency is now at work on a third....
McCloskey takes challenge to run against Pombo Former Peninsula Congressman Paul "Pete" McCloskey Jr., best remembered for his Vietnam War opposition and his speech calling for the impeachment of President Nixon, will announce his candidacy Monday in Lodi as a Republican challenger to Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy. The feisty 78-year-old beat the bushes for months in his quest to find a Republican willing to run against the seven-term incumbent with whom he has major political differences. But when no one volunteered, McCloskey asked, "Why not me?" McCloskey, who served eight terms in Congress from 1967 to 1983, wrote the 1974 Endangered Species Act that Pombo has worked to alter for the past 13 years. Pombo finally passed a bill out of the House last year that would fundamentally change the way the country protects threatened plants and animals, although the bill faces an uncertain fate in the Senate. "It's time to take Pombo out," McCloskey told the Times' editorial board Wednesday....
Land trade expands desert wilderness sites A land swap nine years in the making will boost wilderness areas, wildlife refuges and other federally designated lands in the desert by 29,500 acres. The land was old railroad property in wilderness areas in the Newberry and Rodman mountains and the Trilobite Wilderness in San Bernardino County and in Gilmore's Camp and two national wildlife refuges in Imperial County. Those parcels now will be in public hands under an agreement with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. In exchange, the bureau will give up 2,000 acres of public land, mostly agricultural leases, in eastern Riverside County in and around the Palo Verde Valley, a farming hub next to the Colorado River....
Environmentalists, others rip BLM oil-shale plan Environmentalists and other Coloradans with long memories criticized a government effort to revive oil-shale production on the Western Slope during a meeting in the Denver area Thursday, as industry representatives generally stayed quiet. "There's no indication today that oil shale is any more economically viable than it was on Sunday, May 2, 1982," when Exxon closed its oil-shale project near Parachute, laying off 2,200 workers, said Kevin Markey, who lives near Lyons. Markey and others warned that the oil-shale industry took a heavy toll on Colorado's environment and economy, and said they see little reason to believe a new round of exploration will be different....
Perry Declares Statewide Drought Disaster Gov. Rick Perry declared a disaster in all 254 Texas counties Thursday and asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide disaster relief assistance for Texas farmers and ranchers who have suffered losses because of the dry conditions. Perry earlier requested drought relief assistance for 113 counties and to date the USDA has approved 54 of the requests. “Our farmers and ranchers have been suffering from extremely dry conditions, as well as devastating wildfires,” Perry said....