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BLM monument planning process worries environmentalists
By FAITH BREMNER
Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON ? Conservation groups are worried that resource-management plans being developed for 14 new national monuments don't do enough to protect the assets the monuments were created to protect.
The monuments, most designated by President Bill Clinton during his final year in office, were created to protect a variety of natural and archeological treasures.

The Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in Montana has stretches that remain largely unchanged since Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traversed the area in 1805. The Agua Fria National Monument in Arizona has a large collection of prehistoric sites, including stone-masonry pueblos and petroglyphs. The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southern Oregon has a large variety of rare and beautiful species of plants and animals.
The Bureau of Land Management has completed management plans for five of the Clinton national monuments. The nine others are being developed.
For the next 10 to 20 years, these plans will dictate where visitors can drive their vehicles, where and when ranchers can graze livestock, how and where oil and gas companies can drill wells and when and where motorized boats can be used.
The proclamations Clinton signed establishing the national monuments allow most of those traditional activities to continue, so long as they don't harm the monuments' treasures.

It's a difficult balancing act, said Jeff Jarvis, division chief for BLM's National Landscape Conservation System.
"We're not directed to eliminate grazing in the national monuments, we're trying to balance that use," he said. "The question is how much and where."
A common problem in the draft plans is that they would allow too many roads ? many of which are just dirt tracks across the landscape ? to remain open to vehicle use, said Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society. Too many roads can harm wildlife and provide easy access to vandals and poachers, Culver said.

In the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, the BLM is proposing to close 200 miles of the monument's 580 miles of roads. Conservation groups say no more than 103 miles should be left open, which would leave 27 percent of the monument within half a mile of a road and 46 percent within a mile.

"The BLM lands are all multiple-use lands and certainly the national monuments retain many, many uses," Culver said. "But instead of saying we're going to make an accommodation for as many uses as we can possibly fit into this situation, the monuments are supposed to be managed first to protect the (resources) then to accommodate other uses. That's a different approach."
On the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, some history buffs like to experience the river just as it was in 1805 without hearing motors.

But one man who makes his living on the river said his business and the public would suffer if the BLM were to ban motorized boats on the 57-mile section of the Missouri River during the summer months.
Missouri River guide Terry Selph, owner of Hole-In-The-Wall Adventures in Lewistown said he needs to be able to use motor boats to ferry equipment to campsites and take people out on the river on day trips. Some elderly and handicapped people can't go on overnight canoe trips, he said.
Very few motor boats use that 57-mile section of the river anyway, Selph added.
"I don't want to see it change," he said. "I want it left the way it is.
"I certainly see where (the preservationists) are coming from," Selph said. "For the most part, they would be pretty much guaranteed that experience if they went down the river, especially if they go during the week. There's just not that many people on the lower end of the river."
For the record, motorized use on the river is allowed in the preferred alternative of the draft plan issued by the BLM in October 2005. But seasonal limitations would be put in place on upstream travel.
The draft's preferred alternative also calls for a seasonal no-wake speed restriction in the Wild and Scenic Missouri River segment. In addition, a stretch of that segment, from Holmes Council Island to Fred Robinson Bridge, would be restricted to nonmotorized watercraft from June 5 to Sept. 15.
Additionally, some conservationists say grazing is a problem in the new national monuments. Cattle deposit cow pies in archeological sites in the Agua Fria National Monument and trample stream banks in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, according to environmentalists. The Cascade-Siskiyou proclamation orders the Interior Department to study livestock grazing impacts and retire the monument's grazing allotments if grazing is found to be harming the area's biological assets.
But David Willis, chairman of the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council in Ashland, Ore., said he fears the BLM will just "fool around forever with this (grazing) modification; study and modify."

Management of oil and gas operations also would be more restrictive under the preferred alternative.
A final plan is expected to be released this fall.
Contact Faith Bremner at fbremner@gns.gannett.com