NEWS ROUNDUP


Ranchers vow fight over rural growth Setting the stage for a major land-use battle, a coalition of environmentalists plans to begin collecting signatures today for a ballot measure to set strict new development rules for hillsides, ranches and large farms across Santa Clara County. The Sierra Club, Greenbelt Alliance, Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society and other members of the coalition -- which already has $300,000 in the bank -- must collect 36,040 signatures from registered county voters to qualify for the November ballot, something they and their opponents expect will happen. The measure, which farmers and ranchers fear would drive down the value of their land, would affect nearly half of Santa Clara County's 839,000 acres. The complex proposal would essentially do two things. First, it would reduce the number of homes that could be built in unincorporated, rural areas along the east foothills of the Diablo Range from Milpitas to Gilroy, the Santa Cruz Mountains from Gilroy to Los Altos and east of Mount Hamilton. On lands zoned for ranching, for example, it would allow only one home per 160 acres, down from up to eight homes per 160 acres now. It also would set limits for new development in those areas: curbing the amount of square footage that could be built per parcel, reducing building on ridgelines and banning building unless adequate water is available. The measure would not affect land within city limits....
Predator Control Once Again Comes Within The Crosshairs Of Critics A few weeks ago, aerial marksmen working for the federed agency Wildlife Services climbed into a plane and cut a path across the Sonoran desert to kill coyotes in advance of the cattle calving season. It's a taxpayer-subsidized event that every spring is repeated across the West. It's been happening for decades. It's resulted in millions of dead coyotes over the years.It's been an annual short-term fix to cut livestock losses set against the backdrop of a long-term trend yielding more coyotes in America today than at any other time in recent history. Wildlife predators, like coyotes, wolves, bears, cougars, eagles etc., which by legal definition, belong to the public, kill livestock which belong to private operators. Depending upon your point of view, there are differing opinions about what should hold primacy, native wildlife or domestic livestock. It becomes more complicated when you consider that ranchers often own the vital winter range that big game species need in order to survive. he question of who should pay for predator eradication gets especially tricky when private operators are grazing their cattle and sheep on public land, such as on tracts administered by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management....
Environmental groups sue to stop elk slaughter Three environmental groups are suing the federal government to halt a controversial "test-and-slaughter" program aimed at brucellosis-exposed elk in Wyoming and force a hard look at the possibility of phasing out elk feedgrounds. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance and the Wyoming Outdoor Council filed the lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in Cheyenne, Wyo. Every winter, the state of Wyoming feeds 10,000 or more elk on hay lines scattered across 13 feedgrounds on U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management land. It has other feedgrounds on private land. A wide variety of scientists agree the practice fosters brucellosis by forcing the animals to gather much more closely than they would in the wild....
Timber cutting plan wins on a split decision A federal judge has issued a split decision over a challenge by a pair of environmental groups to the Ashley National Forest's land-use plan and a proposed timber sale. U.S. District Court Judge Tena Campbell upheld the contention of the Utah Environmental Congress and High Uintas Preservation Council that Ashley officials erred when they pared their list of "management indicator species" - used to help monitor overall forest health - from 12 species to two in their forest planning process. Campbell, however, upheld the proposed Trout Slope timber sale, ruling that the Forest Service's approval of the 2,000-acre project was "legally sufficient." Ashley National Forest officials Monday declined comment on the ruling. A call to the Utah Environmental Congress was not immediately returned....
Government Proposes Cuts to Counties with Public Lands Call him PILT-down man. Officials in southwest Colorado’s La Plata and San Juan counties are calling President Bush – or at least his proposed 2007 budget – worse things this week following the 16-percent reduction in PILT funds in the President’s budget submitted last week. Payments in Lieu of Taxes are federal funds distributed to compensate for property taxes in counties with large areas of public land. In southwest Colorado, these mean Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Park Service lands, which comprise some 70 percent of land ownership in western and southern Colorado. In 2005, Colorado received $16.8 million from the program. Statewide, the cuts are estimated at $2 million....
Land Management Professionals Take the Fight for Native Ecosystems to the Nation's Capitol Representatives from some of America's most beautiful public and private lands will congregate in Washington, D.C., for National Invasive Weed Awareness Week (NIWAW7), which will be hosted by the Invasive Weed Awareness Coalition (IWAC), February 26-March 3, 2006. NIWAW attendees come from varying backgrounds, but share a common goal: to manage invasive weeds in the United States and protect our native ecosystems. Now in its seventh year, NIWAW focuses on sharing invasive weed information with government officials and collaborating with experts to address what has become a national and global environmental concern. Non-native plant infestations continue to spread across the United States and weed experts will continue to work through IWAC to educate others on the impacts of these plant invasions. During the week, NIWAW participants will help members of Congress and congressional staff to understand the economic and environmental threat of invasive and noxious weeds to our nation. Participants will showcase successful control strategies and tactics in an effort to expand opportunities for success in new locations that face similar challenges. In 2004, President Bush signed the Noxious Weed Control and Eradication Act, which authorized noxious weed control programs....
Wildcat drilling plan draws concern An independent oil and gas producer is proposing a small exploratory drilling project in the Big Piney Ranger District of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, according to federal officials. Conservationists are objecting to the project and contend oil and gas development doesn't belong in the Wyoming Range. Officials with the Wilderness Society said the U.S. Forest Service should wait until a final forest plan revision is completed before issuing any permits to drill in the Bridger-Teton. District Ranger Greg Clark said in a "scoping" notice the Houston-based Plains Exploration and Production Co. is proposed to drill three exploratory oil and gas wells on leases located about seven miles southeast of Bondurant....
Oil, gas plan fuels protests Environmental groups are challenging proposed oil and gas lease sales on more than 100,000 acres near the Green River and San Rafael River, on the San Rafael desert of southern Utah, and near Dinosaur National Monument in the state's northeast. The leases are among those the Bureau of Land Management conditionally expects to offer on Feb. 21. However, about a week prior to the sale, agency experts will winnow their prospective list and may delete some of the areas. Altogether, BLM is considering offering leases on 172,095 acres on 109 parcels statewide, with the majority in the areas covered by the agency's Vernal and Price field offices, in a regular quarterly lease offering. The oil and gas industry had requested leases on another 188,689 acres on 127 parcels, but the BLM is deferring leases on those areas. The deferred areas could be offered in future sales, said Adrienne Babbitt, spokeswoman for the BLM. Some might be withheld at this time because of considerations such as new land-use plans not yet completed, she said. But many of the parcels not taken out of the lease sale, at least for now, are questioned by the conservationists....
Bald eagle closer to leaving endangered species nest The American bald eagle, after battling back from the threat of extinction because of habitat loss and DDT, took another step Monday toward coming off the endangered species list. The Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service issued a draft of voluntary guidelines spelling out how landowners, land managers and others should protect the bird once it no longer is safeguarded by the 1973 law. It also proposed prohibitions on "disturbing" the bald eagle, which could include anything that would disrupt its breeding, feeding or sheltering or cause injury, death or nest abandonment. The Clinton administration proposed removing the bald eagle from the endangered species list in 1999. But the delisting has taken far longer than the typical year, partly because updated counts are required from each of the states, and some of those have their own rules that add to red tape. Officials said Monday's action could lead to the bald eagle coming off the endangered species list within the next year or so....
Early California: A killing field When explorers and pioneers visited California in the 1700s and early 1800s, they were astonished by the abundance of birds, elk, deer, marine mammals, and other wildlife they encountered. Since then, people assumed such faunal wealth represented California's natural condition – a product of Native Americans' living in harmony with the wildlife and the land and used it as the baseline for measuring modern environmental damage. That assumption now is collapsing because University of Utah archaeologist Jack M. Broughton spent seven years – from 1997 to 2004 – painstakingly picking through 5,736 bird bones found in an ancient Native American garbage dump on the shores of San Francisco Bay. He determined the species of every bone, or, when that wasn't possible, at least the family, and used the bones to reconstruct a portrait of human bird-hunting behavior spanning 1,900 years. Broughton concluded that California wasn't always a lush Eden before settlers arrived. Instead, from 2,600 to at least 700 years ago, native people hunted some species to local extinction, and wildlife returned to "fabulous abundances" only after European diseases decimated Indian populations starting in the 1500s. Broughton's study of bird bones, published in Ornithological Monographs, mirrors earlier research in which he found that fish such as sturgeon, mammals such as elk, and other wildlife also sustained significant population declines at the hands of ancient Indian hunters....
Number of tricolored blackbirds decreasing The population of tricolored blackbirds has been plummeting for decades but the federal government has failed to list them as endangered, a group claimed in a lawsuit filed Monday. The Center for Biological Diversity initially filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2004, asking for the bird to be listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. The group claimed the agency's failure to act on their request for 16 months led to the federal lawsuit, which asks for emergency protection. It cited studies showing the tricolored blackbird population declined from the millions in the 1930s to about 162,000 in 2000. The population has continued to drop as birds deprived of their natural habitat by development and farming try to nest among crops, where their nests are plowed over during harvest....
Stream invaders may harm trout Every two months for the past six years, ecologist Dave Richards has scouted a 60-foot-long stretch of the Snake River near Twin Falls, Idaho. He collects cobbles from the river, carefully rinses them in a bucket of water, then counts what he's washed off the rocks: hordes of minuscule New Zealand mud snails. Richards estimates there are 100,000 to 500,000 New Zealand mud snails per square meter on the rocks along about 60 miles of the Snake. The snails graze on algae, and in such high densities, he says, that "they gobble up everything." That's a troubling image, because Richards' sampling area is the beachhead of a biological invasion - it's where New Zealand mud snails were first discovered in the United States, back in the mid-1980s. Since then, the invaders have spread to every Western state except New Mexico....
PFS gets desert N-dump license Private Fuel Storage received the first-ever license for commercial, off-site storage of nuclear waste from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday, but a series of obstacles remain before the proposed facility can open its gates in Utah. Specifically, the group of electric utilities seeking to store 44,000 tons of reactor fuel on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation still has to find an acceptable way to deliver the waste to the site 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and has to sell the storage space to enough reactor operators to make the economics add up. It also must prevail in a legal challenge filed by the state....
Hearing planned on OSU logging controversy U.S. Rep. Greg Walden announced Monday the details for a congressional field hearing later this month on managing forests damaged by catastrophic events, a hot topic since the release of a controversial Oregon State University study last month. The House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, which is chaired by the Oregon Republican, will review the findings of the OSU study Feb. 24 in Medford. The hearing begins at 1 p.m. in Medford City Hall. Walden, who has co-sponsored a bill to make salvage logging easier after large fires, said the meeting should allow the author of the study — and some of his critics — to weigh in. The three-year study by OSU graduate student Daniel Donato made headlines, and a federal agency suspended funding for study’s final year, further inflaming a debate over how to treat the millions of acres of national forest that burn each year....
Some Trans Texas Corridor details are being kept very quiet Among the Trans Texas Corridor's most fervent opponents are farmers and ranchers who are closely tied to family land. Many are like Susan Ridgeway Garry of Coupland, a small, rural community in the Austin area. "When you say the Trans Texas Corridor 'will be built on state land handed to investors,' you leave out an important step," she wrote. "It is not currently state land, it is Texas citizens' land, some of which has been in the same family for generations." The state intends to take at least 548,000 acres of land — most of it from private owners through eminent domain — in swaths as wide as three football fields laid end to end. On the 4,000 miles of new right of way, the plans call for four sets of vehicular lanes, two rail lanes, and easements, both above and underground, for utilities. The corridor will have no frontage roads, such as those along the interstate highway system that have fostered economic development in many communities. Instead, vehicular access to the tollways will be only from interstate, U.S. and some state highways that intersect it through expensive interchanges. Other intersecting roads — such as farm-to-market roads, county roads, local highways and two-lane state highways — will not provide access to the corridor....
The cost to condemn: going up? Condemnation actions for open space could become much more expensive in the near future, if a bill makes its way through the Colorado legislature. House Bill 1208 will increase the costs of condemnation by as little as 25 percent and as much as 100 percent by giving an extra lump of money to the landowner on top of the "fair market value." The bill's sponsor, Rep. Kevin Lundberg of Berthoud, is concerned with the rights of those whose property is being condemned. "What we should be doing is asking ourselves what the owner has lost," he said. The bill would apply only to condemnation actions that begin after the bill goes into effect. It's not retroactive, and so would not affect Telluride's condemnation case. At least two other bills are also working their way through the Colorado State legislature that look to restrict condemnation or make it more difficult for municipalities....
Foe of Endangered Species Act on Defensive Over Abramoff Growing up on the family ranch here, Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy) says, he learned that "you have to work till you're done. There's nobody else to pick up the slack." It's a lesson he carried from the fields of the northern San Joaquin Valley to the committee rooms of Congress, where for more than a decade he has doggedly labored to undo one of America's signature environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act. After finally getting a bill through the House last fall that would eliminate habitat protections on more than 150 million acres, Pombo has never been closer to reaching his goal. But as the Senate prepares to take up his measure this year, Pombo finds himself on the defensive, with his ideology increasingly viewed as extreme and his connections to industry and to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff under scrutiny. A seven-term Republican and chairman of the influential House Resources Committee, Pombo is a tax-cutting, anti-abortion, anti-gun-control conservative. But it is the 33-year-old species law that has been his political obsession....
Still rustling up business Cattle rustlers aren’t hanged anymore, but stealing so much as a single calf qualifies as a felony, with a rustling conviction capable of putting someone in prison for up to 10 years and bringing a fine of up to $10,000, or both. Wyoming Livestock Board Law Enforcement Administrator Jim Siler said livestock theft is not just a thing of the past. With four livestock investigators, his agency “ran over 400 cases last year,” Siler said, the majority of which involved theft, as well as others associated with animal health and welfare. “The truth of the matter is there is a lot of theft that goes on,” Siler said. At the moment, investigators are checking into a case involving 15 head of cows that are missing east of Cheyenne. With cows going for $1,400 to $1,700 a head, the illegal sale of just 10 head of cows could bring $17,000. When just one or two head of livestock are reported missing, Siler said brand inspectors will assist ranchers in combing their grazing ranges for lost animals or look for carcasses. But as a general rule, when it’s five or more animals, “your suspicions grow that it is a theft,” Siler said. When a horse is reported missing, “It’s very rare it’s just lost. It’s usually stolen.”....
It's All Trew: Pampa man's diary tells story of 1936 A diary dated 1936, acquired at an estate sale, recorded the thoughts of William Floyd Jr. of Pampa during this difficult period of our Panhandle history. It is a day-to-day story about drought, hard financial times and family. Yes, this is a “true” story. Between hard work, long hours and little spending money, there are many “average everyday life” descriptions among the pages. On Jan. 30 the family listened to wrestling on the radio. I’ll bet there aren’t many radio wrestling announcers around anymore. On Feb. 4, “wife & self “ saw “The Farmer Takes A Wife” at the local Pampa theater. The temperature was four above zero. He also noted a payment made on their newly purchased Bible and cleaned his .22-caliber rifle. Next day, it warmed up to 32 degrees and they bought $4.37 worth of merchandise from the Fuller Brush man....