Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Army targeted 7 million acres in '04 In the long battle over the Army's plan to expand the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site, it's known as "The Big Map" because it shows the 238,000-acre training range northeast of Trinidad swelling by millions of acres until it engulfs the entire southeastern corner of Colorado. While Army officials have disowned or dismissed the map over the past two years whenever ranchers fighting the expansion have waved it as the Pentagon's true goal, opponents finally have unearthed the May 2004 study by Fort Carson planners that explains the big map. The study bluntly urges the Army to purchase 6 million acres of private land around Pinon Canyon, plus another 1 million acres of Forest Service land in a multi-phase process, creating the largest Army training reservation in the U.S. The plan puts the land acquisition costs at roughly $1 billion and says that 17,263 people in five counties would be "displaced." And the first step in that "big map" calls for the Army to purchase 80,000 acres directly south of the current Pinon Canyon site, which is almost exactly what Army officials announced they would settle for in July....

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