BLM scraps Southern Nevada land-use plan after decade of work

The Bureau of Land Management is scrapping a long-delayed revision of its overall land-use blueprint for Southern Nevada after working on the massive document off and on for the past decade. Agency officials decided to “terminate” the process rather than release a draft of the document this fall as planned, according to an email obtained by the Review-Journal. James Lee Kirk, the BLM’s acting manager for Gold Butte National Monument, said in the email that the decision was made “at the local level,” not handed down by the bureau’s deputy director or the Department of Interior. But at least one local environmentalist thinks the Las Vegas BLM office may have been forced to abandon the revision because of new Trump administration rules aimed at streamlining planning documents and environmental reviews. Last year, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke issued an order limiting environmental impact statements to no more than 300 pages and requiring them to be completed within one year. A follow-up directive from Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in April required BLM planners in Las Vegas to finish their revision of the Southern Nevada District Resource Management Plan by April 27, 2019, roughly two years sooner than originally forecast. The directive from Washington also would have forced local BLM officials to cut roughly 1,900 pages from the document...MORE