Congressman who stalled Tule Springs monument bill gets tour

Rob Bishop

Less than a month after he stalled efforts to create a new national monument in the fossil-rich hills north of Las Vegas, Rep. Rob Bishop took a short hike through Tule Springs and held bits of mammoth bone in his fingers. “This is cool,” said the Republican congressman from Utah. “We’re going to have to work this out.” Bishop visited the proposed monument site Monday as part of a whirlwind, three-hour tour that also offered him a quick look at other public land set to be transferred or otherwise impacted by the legislation. He was accompanied on the tour by some high-powered advocates for the bill, including its sponsor, Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, former Congressman turned lobbyist Jon Porter, and Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce President Kristin McMillan. As they stood at the edge of a trench left over from an early-1960s scientific expedition known as the “Big Dig,” Horsford praised Bishop for his willingness to research the issue in person. “Once you get out here and touch it and see it, you can see why we’re working so hard to transfer this land,” Horsford said. The bill would create Nevada’s only national monument on 22,650 acres prized for its wealth of fossils from a vast cross-section of time, which allows researchers to study climate change and its impact on camels, horses, mammoths and other animals that died off about 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. The measure also would grant 660 acres of federal land to Las Vegas and 645 acres to North Las Vegas to be auctioned off as “job creation zones.” Other parts of the bill would add land to the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, improve management of the Spring Mountains National Recreation Area, free up property for campus expansion by the Nevada System of Higher Education, and convey land to Clark County for an off-road vehicle recreation park at Nellis Dunes. It is the most sweeping public lands legislation for Southern Nevada in a decade, and every member of Nevada’s delegation supports it — or at least they did. The measure was headed for a Feb. 27 hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee when Bishop, a leader on the committee, sponsored a last-minute change that would direct profits from land auctions in the bill into the U.S. Treasury rather than allowing the money to remain in the state...more