BLM Acting Director Defends Agency's Controversial Move To Colorado

...At 6'5", Pendley is wearing a crisp white western shirt and black bolo tie. And he seems tired of the symbolic criticism. The General Services Administration, not him or the BLM, found this space to lease anyway, he says. "Let's be real," Pendley says. "The oil patch can always afford to fly to Washington and sit down with somebody, the people who can't do it are farmers and ranchers and people from small communities and county commissioners." The Bureau of Land Management decides who gets to do what on some 250 million acres of public land in the country, or to put it another way roughly one-tenth of all the land in the U.S. Relocating its headquarters to the West, where most of its actual land is, has been floated for years. But now the Trump administration is actually making it happen. For Pendley the move is part of a broader push by the controversial president to decentralize the federal government. "I think the more important story is we're out here, we're in the local community, and locals can come and see us," he says. "We're just a short day's drive away from a lot of people who would never think of flying to D.C. to sit down with the director." The 74-year-old attorney served in President Reagan's Department of Interior under controversial Secretary James Watt. But he spent most of his career at the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation in Colorado. There, he frequently challenged the BLM in cases representing miners, ranchers and recently Utah counties who fought Bears Ears National Monument. Some westerners, Pendley included, have long complained that the agency's leaders in Washington are disconnected with rural, resource-dependent communities. Here in Grand Junction, Mesa County Commissioner Rose Pugliese pushed hard for the relocation. "We have had great relationships with our local field offices," Pugliese says. "But ultimately we have learned that the decisions are made in Washington, D.C., where they don't really even know where Mesa County is or the impacts of their decisions on our economy." Pugliese is a Republican. But there has been some bipartisan support in Colorado anyway for the relocation. In part because the government is moving higher paying leadership jobs out here...MORE