Leaked DOI maps suggest big management changes

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vision for reorganizing the Interior Department includes dividing management of millions of federal acres into 13 multistate regions along boundaries of watersheds and basins, according to maps obtained by E&E News. The maps provide the most detail to date on the still-mysterious Interior Department reorganization plan that has been in the works since the opening weeks of the Trump administration, but that Zinke has discussed publicly only in broad terms. Today he met about the proposal with roughly 150 Interior senior executives gathered in Washington. Zinke, a former Navy SEAL, has in recent months disclosed general details of the plan to senior-level employees, including the concept of establishing a dozen or more joint management areas, or JMAs, an idea based on the military’s joint command structure. The maps obtained by E&E News do not mention JMAs. But they outline a plan to divide the management of onshore lands and offshore resources into at least a dozen regions, with names like the North Atlantic-Appalachian, Colorado Basin and Northern Pacific Mountains regions, each covering hundreds of thousands of square miles extending into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the coast of Alaska. The regions, in many cases, split states like Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming into multiple sections...the change could be significant for BLM — the federal government’s largest landowner, managing nearly 245 million acres — which divides management of federal lands in its jurisdiction, with few exceptions, along state lines. Mountain West News