A new plan that’s been three years in the making would add new protections to 394,000 acres along the Rocky Mountain Front and help protect the embattled wilderness from additional road building and oil and gas development, a grassroots coalition says. Members of the Coalition to Protect the Rocky Mountain Front unveiled the proposed legislation yesterday and are seeking a congressional sponsor for it. The Coalition’s main goal is to use a new designation—Conservation Management Area—for 307,000 acres of public lands along the Front. The CMA, the coalition says, would follow regulations set down by the U.S. Forest Service in 2007. According to the Coalition (and taken verbatim from its website), the 2007 plan is “an extremely popular Forest Service decision developed over many years of public participation. By using this planning document as the basis for travel management decisions we protect access to our public lands as it exists now for hikers, stock users, mountain bikers, and motorized users.” Under the CMA, the Forest Service could choose to decrease motorized use but could not expand it; it could authorize new road construction only for safety or emergency measures; and it would allow logging and wood cutting, among other things. The new designation would ensure that the Front is protected far into the future, the group says...NewWest
You can read their draft legislation here.
A Dona Ana County coalition has also proposed a new designation, Rangeland Preservation Area, that would protect the land from disposal by sale or lease, mining, mineral leasing and would limit off-road vehicle travel. You can read their proposed legislation here.
Clearly it's time for a new land use designation for areas where a wilderness designation just doesn't work. Best of luck to the Rocky Mtn. Front group and let's hope their Senators are more forward looking than our Senator Bingaman who refuses to consider anything other than the same old and out of date designations.
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