Monday, November 28, 2016

Future of Denver’s South Park watershed up in air, BLM planners need another 5 years

The wide open nature of South Park, Denver’s watershed and a relatively safe space for wildlife, remains up in the air – all the more so with president-elect Donald Trump’s transition team favoring oil and gas drillers. Conservation groups have urged faster work by President Obama’s Bureau of Land Management to lock in protection across hundreds of thousands of acres. But BLM officials say their master planning requires another five years. “South Park is really a world-class fishing destination – one of those special places worth protecting,” Trout Unlimited chief executive Chris Wood said. “We understand that it takes time to bring parties together and conduct landscape-scale evaluations, but we’d like to see a greater sense of urgency from the BLM in getting master-leasing plans complete. The slow pace has been frustrating at times for stakeholders,” Wood said. For more than two years, BLM officials who manage much of South Park have been developing a plan to balance conservation with economic activities including oil and gas drilling that can degrade the environment. The work begun in 2014 was aimed at setting out where companies could drill, where wildlife would prevail, and where houses could be built to maximize protection of delicate ecosystems across South Park, an inter-mountain valley southwest of Denver. No plan will be done for years, well into a Trump presidency, BLM spokesman Steven Hall said...more

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that the same place where all the mine dumps are?

Anonymous said...

5 years.... there could be another administration with hope for the eco-nuts that are embedded in ABC agencies. .........property owners and tax payers deadlines are measured in days-weeks and expire on the hour.
Not so for dictator bureaucrats.