NEWS ROUNDUP

Split estates law draws mixed reviews Rancher Steve Adami and oil and gas developer John Kennedy were the first to test Wyoming's new law for settling disputes between landowners who don't own minerals under the surface and the oil and gas developers who want to extract the resources. The experience left both with a bitter taste. Adami says the split-estate law didn't help him much; Kennedy says the law has done more to benefit lawyers than anyone else. Wyoming's split-estate law has been on the books for just over a year, and there are still conflicts between landowners and developers. However, the facts show those conflicts are few in number, and proponents of the law say it has done what it was originally intended to do _ encourage agreements between surface owners and developers. During the first 13 months after the law was enacted July 1, 2005, there were 31 cases where landowners and developers failed to reach agreement on how much compensation the surface owner received for damage to the land and loss of production in order to extract the minerals, according to Don Likwartz, supervisor of the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. And only three landowners ended up carrying the dispute to the commission for a hearing, Likwartz said. Considering that there were 6,922 coal-bed methane well permits approved over the same 13-month period, the law has been in effect, conflicts have been few, he said. Laurie Goodman, of the Landowners Association of Wyoming and one of those who lobbied for the law in 2005, said many oil and gas producers are working better with landowners....
Cattle still won't drink water Charbonneau Creek is precious, except that cattle won't drink from it. The creek was contaminated this winter, when Zenergy Inc. spilled nearly 1 million gallons of toxic salt water from a ruptured oil field pipeline across the land and into the creek. The pipeline carries water four times saltier than ocean water that comes up with oil production. The water down where the oil comes from is ancient, like the Dead Sea. The saltwater line that ruptured and leaked undetected for two weeks normally feeds into a reinjection well that buries it down deep again. Officially, the cleanup is well under way, and the creek has been OK'd for consumption by cattle by health and veterinarian officials. Zenergy, the Oklahoma-based company that owns the saltwater pipeline and is developing the field, will spend at least $2 million to pump up underground contaminated water and dredge up contaminated soils from the spill site up the creek. That's all well and good, except the cattle still won't drink it, ranchers say. They speculate that it may not be the salt alone, but an unpalatable combination of all the contaminants, the heavy metals, the salts and the ammonia that are below the toxic radar but still tainting the creek water. Zenergy is hauling replacement water to some ranches and may drill replacement wells for them....
Oil company wants fresh water to dilute salt The same oil company that's cleaning up the largest environmental disaster in North Dakota's oil history wants permits to drill 21 water wells west of Alexander. Some ranchers are worried about how all those wells will affect the water supply now and in years to come. They have asked for a public hearing to get it sorted out. The State Water Commission agreed it makes sense to review all 21 water wells together instead of one by one so people can get a handle on how much water is at stake. The request amounts to more than a billion gallons of water over the life of the wells. The commission, led by state engineer Dale Frink, will hold an informational hearing and take public comments starting at 1:30 p.m. Sept. 26 at the Watford City Civic Center. Zenergy Inc. is asking to drill new water wells and get permanent permits for existing water wells in the Foreman Butte oil field west of Alexander. It needs the fresh water supply because the 68-section oil field is in one of the saltiest zones in North Dakota. Oil wells produce about as much water as oil. Zenergy wants fresh well water to dilute the toxic saltwater that's coming up with the oil and fouling the pump shafts. The saturated saltwater cools as it rises, dropping out salt crystals that plug up equipment....
Private property, public projects Two years after resolving a long battle over how to handle split-estate disputes between surface owners and oil and gas developers, the two sides are now clashing over the law governing the seizure of private property for public projects. On Monday, the Legislature's Joint Agriculture, Public Lands and Water Resources Interim Committee will hear public comment and discuss possible changes to the state's eminent domain law. The panel will look over draft legislation that proposes a number of changes to the law. Committee Chairman Sen. Gerald Geis, R-Worland, said the issue was raised when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that municipalities could seize homes so a private developer could put up condominiums, a hotel and office buildings. Before the ruling, the eminent domain powers were limited to seizing property for public projects, such as highways. But in Wyoming, the initial concern about the eminent domain law being used to seize private property for private developments has evolved into a movement for seeking changes in how the law is used for public projects as well. Landowners contend the law now leaves them at a disadvantage when facing developers of oil and gas, power lines and pipelines wielding the threat of eminent domain. Developers counter that the current law is fair and necessary in obtaining rights of way and easements to deliver Wyoming's energy resources to consumers in the state and across the nation. Laurie Goodman, of the Landowners Association of Wyoming and one of those who pushed for changing the split-estates law, said she is concerned that some companies are trying to circumvent the split-estates law through use of the eminent domain law. For example, Goodman said, some companies are using eminent domain to discharge coal-bed methane water over the surface. "That causes some real problems for downstream property owners," she said....
Riparian recovery Whether they’re dropped, pushed or pulled, the placement of logs in streams has become a human endeavor until nature can reclaim the fish habitat building-block process. The tradeoff is temporary, but it may take a while. Riparian areas along creeks and streams have vastly recovered from logging’s rollicking heyday — especially the carefree days of the first half of the 20th century. But the growing trees are still decades away from their weight sending them lumbering into stream channels. In the meantime, fish, wildlife and habitat management officials will mimic nature by overseeing the placement of logs in streams. The practice, they said, may take nature 100 to 150 years to duplicate since getting hit hard by logging before environmental rules and regulations were put in place. Logs and other bulky obstacles — like boulders — dissipate stream energy. Rocks and pebbles settle in the slower moving water instead of being washed away. Eventually the collection spreads evenly as a potential bed of gravel for fish to spawn in. The logs also collect debris and form cover for juvenile fish to hide under from predators. At the same time, they shield sunlight from water and keep streams cool. Street said juvenile fish react to newly placed logs immediately. Within 10 minutes, smolt and fry clamor under the logs to take a break from the swift-moving current....
Grazing ban may not resolve bighorn debate Environmentalists are hailing a Forest Service decision to suspend livestock grazing in parts of the eastern Sierra to help protect endangered bighorn sheep as a prime example of how the Endangered Species Act can be used successfully to bring wildlife back from the brink of extinction. But a national ranching organization and other critics say the one-year ban has only postponed an inevitable showdown over whether federal land managers will side with wildlife or with the ranching families who have worked the high country range along the California-Nevada line for more than a century. The Forest Service reached an agreement last month with the largest ranching operation in the area, just northeast of Yosemite National Park, to halt domestic sheep grazing near Sierra Nevada bighorn habitat on one allotment in California's Mono County and limit the use of two others nearby. The restrictions are needed to guard against domestic sheep spreading disease to the bighorns, which were declared endangered in 1999, agency scientists said. The move won rare praise from conservationists who have been waging a legal battle to protect the bighorns for years in the Humboldt-Toiyabe and Inyo national forests....
BLM Plans to Allow Wilderness Airstrips When Lewis and Clark navigated flimsy boats beneath the towering sandstone cliffs of what is now Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, their journal entries described eroded bluffs, abundant wildlife and the Great Falls, which Meriwether Lewis reckoned were "truly magnificent and sublimely grand." Although the Missouri Breaks looks much as it did when the Corps of Discovery came through in 1805, this primitive landscape now contains something the explorers could not have foreseen 200 years ago — airstrips gouged out of sagebrush plateaus. After decades of ignoring unauthorized takeoffs and landings on the monument's 10 airstrips, the federal Bureau of Land Management is finalizing plans to close four of the airstrips and allow recreational pilots to land small planes on at least six other remote sites in the Breaks' uplands. The proposal has created a tempest at one of the BLM's most isolated and least-visited outposts. On one side, the Montana Pilots' Assn. hails the plan as a victory for recreational pilots and others who advocate increased access to public lands. Arrayed on the other side is a loose coalition of conservationists, hunters and anglers who say the planes will harass wildlife and could destroy the experience of solitude offered by the rugged landscape....
Rare wolf pays visit to Utah, dies in trap A second wolf has found its way into northern Utah. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday that an adult gray wolf was found dead in a leghold trap on private land in the hills north of Tremonton, in Box Elder County. The 3-year-old male was discovered Sunday by a trapper who was contracted to do predator control work for the property owner. The wolf's remains have since been shipped to Ashland, Ore., where they are undergoing genetic tests to determine the animal's lineage. "We think the little guy probably dispersed from the Yellowstone or central Idaho packs and wandered down," said Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Sharon Rose. "Once the [trapper] found the wolf, he called wildlife services. He was doing coyote management. He wasn't expecting to find a wolf." The discovery of the endangered Canis lupis comes nearly four years after another wolf was found alive in a leghold trap in the mountains north of Morgan. It marked the first confirmed sighting of a wolf in the Beehive State in more than 70 years and started environmentalists and biologists pondering how to welcome wolves back to the state. At the same time, the prospect alarmed ranchers and hunters. The debate led to a chain of events that culminated last year with creation of the state's first wolf management plan....
Feedground lawsuit could halt test-and-slaughter A lawsuit challenging elk feedgrounds on federal lands in western Wyoming could have dire consequences for a research project aimed at reducing brucellosis rates in elk, the state’s brucellosis task force was told this week. The lawsuit, filed in federal court this spring by attorneys representing a coalition of environmental interests, seeks to halt the five-year test-and-slaughter program for elk testing positive for brucellosis on the Muddy Creek elk feedground near Boulder. Brucellosis is a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes abortion and is found in elk and bison in the Yellowstone region. Elk from the Muddy Creek feedground are believed to have transmitted the disease to cattle in late 2003, resulting in the slaughter of an entire cattle herd to rid livestock of the disease and to reduce the potential for further transmission. The brucellosis outbreak led to Wyoming losing its brucellosis-free marketing status for its cattle herds in early 2004 and resulted in an intensive cattle-testing program. Wyoming’s cattle herds regained brucellosis-free status earlier this week. Plans for the elk feedground pilot project involve the test and removal of no more than 10 percent of the total elk herd population per year. During the first year of the project, 58 cow elk were sent to slaughter after testing positive for brucellosis exposure. The groups filing the lawsuit include the Wyoming Outdoor Council, Greater Yellowstone Coalition and the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance. The lawsuit asks the federal court to order the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to begin an environmental review of feedgrounds located on federal lands in western Wyoming. The review would study alternatives to the feeding program, such as a phase-out of the feedgrounds....
Dirt buffs kicking up dust off the paved path Environmentalists call it destructive, whether done legally or illegally. Government officials are concerned too, restricting off-roaders to a smaller slice of state and federal parks while cracking down on illegal riders on public land. Obscenely high gas prices are hitting off-roaders in the pocketbook. Safety advocates and law enforcement officials warn that the sport can be dangerous, particularly when youngsters ignore common-sense precautions. But all that hasn't stopped off-roaders from buying motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles and four-wheel-drive trucks at a national rate of 1,500 a day. Despite its rough-and-rowdy reputation, off-roading continues to be a recreational juggernaut, growing in the number of enthusiasts by 42 percent in the last four years. With nearly half a million enthusiasts in Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, Southern California is the hub of off-roading in the West. Yet there are only a handful of areas in the area where it is legal. In fact, environmental restrictions and the high cost of land have made it nearly impossible for state and federal officials to keep up with the demand for off-road parks. As a result, government agencies have located most of them in dried lakebeds, muddy reservoirs or hot desert scrubland, miles from urban centers....
Editorial - Clear ruling needed on rec-area user fees A federal magistrate has ruled that the Forest Service is acting illegally when it charges users a $5 fee for parking at trailheads, picnic areas and undeveloped campgrounds at some of the most popular outdoor recreational areas around Tucson. Magistrate Charles Pyle opened a Pandora's Box two weeks ago when he dismissed charges against a Tucson woman who had been given a $30 ticket twice for failure to pay the Forest Service fee for parking and hiking at Mount Lemmon trails. These fees have been controversial since they were first imposed in 1996. In dismissing the tickets for Christine Wallace, Pyle expressed an opinion frequently cited by foes of the Forest Service's recreational-user fees. A story in the Star by reporter Tony Davis said, "Pyle ruled that the Forest Service went beyond its congressional authorization when it charged fees for parking to use a trail, for roadside or trail-side picnicking, for camping outside developed campgrounds and for roadside parking in general." The Forest Service, not surprisingly, intends to appeal the ruling. The appeal is important because, aside from the fact that the user fees have been a valuable source of operating revenue for the Forest Service, the courts need to clarify once and for all whether those fees are legitimate....
Timber Poachers California's ancient redwood forests have survived fires, logging and disease. Now they face a growing threat from poachers who steal downed old-growth redwood trees in ever-larger numbers, scarring the land and robbing the forest of a vital part of its ecology for the sake of a few thousand dollars. In the past eight months, five men have been convicted of stealing old-growth logs -- those 750 years old or more -- from Redwood National and State Parks, established in 1968 to protect nearly half of the world's remaining old-growth redwoods. The convictions follow a concerted effort by park officials to crack down on thefts and preserve one of California's greatest natural treasures. Poaching is a problem in every national park. There is seemingly nothing poachers won't take, be it snakes from Mojave National Preserve, fossils from Badlands National Park in South Dakota, American ginseng from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia or frontier-era pistols from Fort Davis National Historic Site in Texas....
Column - Dooming woods and wildlife Environmental groups are unwittingly destroying forests and killing wildlife with lawsuits. Ironically, they do so while claiming to save them. Activists again file lawsuits to stop forest management, and the government pays them to do so. They craft settlements that pay them handsomely with taxpayer money so they can live well and file the next lawsuit. No wonder they are inflexible. The latest example uses the California spotted owl and Pacific fisher in arguments supporting a lawsuit to stop restoration thinning in the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service haven't listed either species as threatened or endangered. These activists claim spotted owls nest in dense forests, so no management should be allowed anywhere the owl might one day live. But, they neglect to mention owls also nest and thrive in managed forests. They ignore the fact owls have to eat, and their prey live mainly in young forests. Like the owl, Pacific fishers prefer patchy forests, where patches of young, middle-aged, and old forest spread across the landscape like squares on a checkerboard. In fact, science shows fishers prosper in managed forests that mimic this patchiness. Moreover, recent data from a University of California-Berkeley researcher indicate there probably are at least 896 fishers in the Sequoia National Monument, which, one study finds, is nearly threefold as dense as needed to maintain the population. Unfortunately, legal action has blocked common-sense thinning to restore forests to their natural diversity and resistance to catastrophic wildfire....
A bummer for bikers From the Fourth of July Lake trail, mountain bikers catch some of the widest views of the comb-like peaks of the Boulder-White Cloud mountains, but only if they can take their eyes off the wrist-twisting shale as the trail cuts across the picturesque alpine basin. Yet, to the dismay of fat-tire aficionados, bikes would be barred from Fourth of July and 85 miles of other nearby singletrack -- the narrow, challenging trails prized by hard-core riders -- under a bill gaining steam in Congress. The Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act, sponsored by Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, pegs 492 square miles near the famed Sun Valley Resort as federally designated wilderness. It's a vexing paradox for the International Mountain Bike Association, whose mission largely is to preserve trails in wild areas across the country. Since the 1980s, the legal definition of wilderness has prohibited mechanized transportation like snowmobiles, all terrain vehicles and -- inexplicably to some -- mountain bikes. So now, the association finds itself battling wilderness bills and tangling with conservationists in Idaho, California, Montana and the corridors of Congress....
Hungry bears encroaching on humans in S.E. Arizona At least four bears have been destroyed this summer after encroaching on humans in Southeastern Arizona. Biologists blame trash dumped by illegal entrants hiking through border mountains, because it acclimates the animals to people. Drought has caused shortages in acorns, juniper and manzanita berries that normally are dietary staples for black bears this time of year. Summer rains came too late to produce more of the foods that bears need as they prepare for hibernation, said Kurt Bahti, an Arizona Game and Fish field supervisor. As a result, bears in the Huachuca Mountains and elsewhere have had to rely heavily on human food, said Tom Skinner, Coronado National Forest wildlife program manager. Entrants crossing through the forest leave behind human-scented trash and leftovers, teaching the bears that people mean food, experts say. And both the number of crossers and the amount of trash are growing....
Conservation coalition opposes Nevada land swap bills Legislation that would create almost 550,000 acres of wilderness in the Nevada desert is facing opposition from a coalition of environmentalists who say the bill trades away other public land for private development "like currency." The coalition of 80 conservation groups object to a measure in the bill that would open up 45,000 acres in rural White Pine County to development in exchange for the wilderness protection. The bill, drafted by Nevada Sens. John Ensign and Harry Reid, is one of four pieces of legislation opposed by the groups. The others involve similar land-use exchanges in Idaho and Utah. "All of them have this quid pro quo strategy of giving away public land in one place for protection in another place," said Janine Blaeloch, director of the Western Lands Project. "If wilderness is going to be protected, it should not happen at the cost of losing the rest of our public lands." Other conservation groups disagree. "These bills are not perfect," said Jeremy Garncarz of The Wilderness Society. "No one is saying they are, but there are some good things here."....
On the Edge of Common Sense: 'Factory' farming a fact of modern life "We must stop the cruel confinement systems used in modern corporate factory health care!" "We must abolish the abusive practice of government-sponsored factory education systems where children are forced to sit still for hours a day!" "Evil corporate factory transportation companies that confine passengers in buses and airplanes in seats like crates which prevent turning around, lying down or completely extending their limbs must be regulated to reduce stress." Factory health care, factory education, factory transportation, i.e., hospitals, schools, airlines. All means of performing essential services that allow a more even distribution of benefits. Sure, there are people who can afford a private room, a personal physician, a tutor at home, a private jet, but not most of us. Factory farming is a buzzword invented by the ANTIs to denigrate methods used in agriculture today like feedlots, chicken houses, hog confinement facilities, dairies and veal barns. These methods of "factory" farming allow us to produce meat, milk and eggs in quantities large enough to meet the demands of a hungry nation....