After a year of protests, meetings and threats of lawsuits, the Bureau of Land Management released its controversial plan to manage 3.6 million acres of federal land in southwest Wyoming, and Cowboy State officials are already crying foul.
The hefty plan was released Thursday and is billed by the BLM as a compromise merging of various alternatives, including the agency’s and Biden administration’s preferred Alternative B, which favored conservation above other considerations.
Wyoming U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, along with Gov. Mark Gordon, all slammed the plan, saying promises to kill mineral and economic development.
“The Biden-Harris administration is pushing Wyoming off an economic cliff with nothing more than a tattered parachute,” Barrasso said in a joint statement with Lummis released early Thursday.
Lummis was equally unkind to the BLM.
“In brazenly bypassing over a decade’s worth of knowledge from local experts and stakeholders, this administration not only punishes the state of Wyoming but jeopardizes America’s energy independence and our national security,” she stated.
Gordon also expressed disappointment in a statement early Thursday.
“Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the FEIS (final environmental impact statement) for the proposed Rock Springs RMP does not meet Wyoming’s expectations of durable, multiple use of public lands,” Gordon said.
More locally, Sweetwater County Commissioner Taylor Jones told Cowboy State Daily that he agrees with Gordon and that his county could be devastated economically if the plan is enacted.
The county has worked to make the Red Desert and adjacent land one of Wyoming’s premier outdoor recreation destinations, he said.
Now there’s concern that the BLM’s Washington, D.C., office will cut off public access and hurt Sweetwater County’s energy-based economy, Jones said.
“We are doing an excellent job of taking care of our public land though this BLM field office, while having multiple use of the land,” Jones said.
A Gigantic Document
The BLM’s Rock Springs Resource Management Plan has long been controversial. Late last year, Gordon put together a task force to address Wyoming’s concerns over the plan.
The Rock Springs BLM field office oversees roughly 3.6 million acres in Wyoming, much of it in Sweetwater County. The BLM’s preferred alternative of the draft RMP, Alternative B, designates 1.8 million acres of that as “areas of critical environmental concern” (ACES).
In its final plan released Thursday, those areas have been reduced to just less than 1 million acres.
The ACES remain the key point of concern, Jones said, because that’s were such things as energy development might be shut down.
But it’s still not clear how that might play out, because the BLMs document is huge and will take a long time to comb through, he added.
The plan is 438 pages with another 1,152 pages of supporting documents for a total of 1,590 pages.
Jones noted one bright spot, from his perspective. Any reference to “travel management” that was mentioned in earlier drafts appears to be gone, he said.
Travel management could have led to road closures throughout the area, Jones said.
The document is set to be officially published to the Federal Register on Friday, which begins a 30-day protest period and the concurrent 60-day Governor’s Consistency Review will start.
Gordon plans to protest.
“I will examine the FEIS closely, but make no mistake, the state of Wyoming will be filing protests where our comments were disregarded,” he said. “I will continue to identify any management decisions that are inconsistent with Wyoming law and policy in my upcoming consistency review.”
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
