Monday, April 22, 2013

Public lands bills being held up by disagreements from delegates, BLM

Nevada lawmakers have anticipated that the chief challenge to getting many public lands bills through Congress this year is the willingness of a Republican-led House to pass legislation that balances federal land transfers with wilderness designations. But disagreements on the home front and between presumed allies threaten to hold up progress on critical public lands bills. Nevada delegates hinted that the week would start by unveiling a new set of Southern Nevada public lands bills, centered around an effort to designate Gold Butte as a national preservation area, but that's not how things happened. “We all don’t agree on how we should handle Gold Butte,” Sen. Harry Reid said flatly....This past week, Nevada Reps. Steven Horsford and Mark Amodei also assumed they’d have a smooth go of presenting the Lyon County public lands bill for its first legislative hearing. The bill lifts the federal yoke from over 10,000 acres of public lands destined for copper mine development near Yerington and designates almost five times as much land elsewhere in Lyon County as the Wovoka Wilderness Area — named after a Native American spiritual leader. But instead, they faced an unexpected bump in the road from the Bureau of Land Management, an agency they had assumed would be in Nevada’s corner. In written testimony, BLM Deputy Assistant Secretary Neil Farquhar raised flags about “challenges” and “potentially dangerous situation(s)” arising from language in the measure pertaining to mining claims and cleanup. But those items didn’t actually appear anywhere in the bill – leading both Horsford and Amodei to openly express frustration that the Yerington project was not even being judged on its merits...The designation of the 48,000 acres on Bald Mountain that would be converted to the Wovoka Wilderness Area in Horsford’s bill is lengthy, going into detail about the types of development that might be allowed in the wilderness area, such as the certain water resources intended to enhance the wilderness objectives and provide for long-term grazing, use of vehicles and access of hunters and trappers. In fact, some of those provisions caused a representative from the U.S. Forest Service who testified at the hearing to raise concerns that Horsford’s bill was too liberal when it came to its definitions of roads and hunting/fishing rights, and too restrictive in its definition of permissible water resource development projects. But on questions of mining, the legislation is pretty explicit: There is no wiggle room for any new mining claims once the land is declared federal land, not for mineral, geothermal, or any other type of materials that might otherwise be sited patented and leased...more

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