Editorial: Bill language should not allow water grab

A growing number of public and private entities are joining a concerted effort to make sure a bill pending before Congress does not inadvertently create a means for Clark County to tap rural groundwater, though Clark County officials protest that is not the intent of the proposal.

According to Great Basin Water Network (GBWN) — a coalition of conservationists, rural officials, tribes and agricultural interests — there are fears that the wording in the proposed Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, whether intentional or not, could skirt a federal judge’s ruling blocking a proposed 300-mile right-of-way for a network of water pipelines.

The bulk of the bill, not yet introduced in Congress, proposes freeing up more than 40,000 acres of public land in Clark County for economic development, but two sections at the end of the 21-page bill call for the Interior Department to give the Southern Nevada Water Authority rights-of-way for an electric power line that “shall be subject only to the terms, conditions and stipulations identified in the existing rights-of-way, and shall not be subject to further administrative or judicial review. The right-of-way shall be granted in perpetuity and shall not require the payment of rental fees.” Opponents fear that a right-of-way for a power line could just as easily be used for pipelines.

Two years ago a federal judge ruled that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) could grant the water agency right-of-way for its network of pipelines to take groundwater beneath White Pine, Lincoln and Nye counties, but first it had to come up with plans to mitigate the potential loss of wildlife habitat due to a draw down of the water table, as is required by the CleanWater Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

That might prove to be impossible, since federal studies show the interconnected aquifers are already at equilibrium — meaning water that is now being drawn from the aquifers is being replaced gallon for gallon annually with no leeway for additional withdrawal. The water agency proposes to withdraw 84,000 acre-feet of groundwater per year. The project is projected to cost more than $15 billion and could triple water rates in Clark County.

This past week more than a dozen entities joined in opposition to Congress approving the right-of-way proposal. These include several Nevada and Utah counties, three Indian tribes and a number of environmental groups.

“What Clark County is proposing is a pro-pipeline bill,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the GBWN. “Elected officials, attorneys, and non-profit organizations that span Nevada, Utah and the region all agree: The SNWA wants the congressional delegation to carry its water by surreptitiously advancing a project that has consistently lost in federal and state courts. The Nevada delegation deserves better than sneaky end-runs masked as technicalities. For now, the name of the bill should be the Great Basin Water Grab Act of 2019.”

A resolution passed by the Duckwater Shosone Tribe warned, “Science has shown that the pipeline would ultimately destroy Bashsahwahbee, killing off Swamp Cedars and drying up the Sacred Water Valley’s springs and aquifers that plant and wildlife currently depend upon.”

A spokesman for the water authority told the Las Vegas newspapers there is no intention to use the right-of-way for anything other than power lines. Though he thought the language was sufficiently clear, he said it has been modified recently. Another official offered that it might be further altered to allay concerns.

Clark County could use the economic development. Changing the language in the bill should satisfy the opposition.

A version of this editorial appeared this week in some of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel,  Sparks Tribune and the Lincoln County Record.

Nevada State Sen. Pete Goicoechea and Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, discuss efforts by Clark County to tap rural groundwater. (Pix by Roger Moellendorf)

 

Editorial: Wild horse overpopulation is dire

Wild horses at puddle. (BLM Nevada pix via E&E News)

We’ve known for years that the wild horse and burro population growth on public land in the West is not sustainable, but little is being done about it.

A recent article in the online E&E News, which touts itself as the essential news source for energy and environment professionals, by Scott Streater paints an eye-opening on-the-ground picture of just how dire the situation is, especially in Nevada.

With a dateline of Eureka County, the piece opens with a glimpse of 100 head of wild horses gathered about a tiny pool of water around which most of the forage has long since been consumed by the sweltering day in July when reporter was given a tour.

“This is just not sustainable,” Ruth Thompson, Bureau of Land Management’s Nevada Wild Horse and Burro Program manager, tells the reporter while looking down into the valley. She explains that the edible grasses have been eaten down to the root, allowing invasive species such as cheatgrass, which is edible only for a brief period in the spring, to takeover and crowd out the native species.

Currently Nevada, according to the BLM, has more than 47,000 wild horses and burros on the range, though it can sustain less than 13,000. Nationally, there are 88,000 wild horses and burros, though the range can sustain less than 27,000. In addition, the BLM warehouses nearly 50,000 wild horses and burros on private pastures and in corrals at a cost of $50 million a year, which consumes most of the $66.7 million budgeted for the management of the wild horses and burros.

Unchecked by roundups or contraceptive measures, the populations of the feral beasts can double in just four years.

As for the cheatgrass supplanting edible forage, the E&E article quotes Dean Bolstad, who retired this past year as division chief of BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, as saying, “And once you get there, you have lost the habitat for wildlife, and they probably can never be restored to a perennial grassland that provides diverse habitat for wildlife and all kinds of other multiple uses that BLM is responsible for.” That affects native wildlife such as mule deer, antelope and greater sage grouse.

Streater goes on to relate that in the past year BLM removed 11,472 horses from federal rangelands, 5,800 of those were rounded up in “emergency gathers” because of a lack of water or forage, but as many as 18,000 foals were born on the range in that year. A BLM official told the reporter that darting the mares with fertility drugs every year is simply not practical.

The number of wild horses and burros adopted each year has fallen to about 2,500 in recent years, though the BLM is now offering $1,000 incentive payments to those who adopt the animals and maintain certain conditions.

The situation on the range is dire for the horses and burros, as well as for native wildlife and cattle and sheep. Our representatives in Congress need to work toward a solution. And, yes, that solution might have to include what was called for in the original 1971 law protecting these animals: “The Secretary (of the Interior) shall cause additional excess wild free-roaming horses and burros for which an adoption demand by qualified individuals does not exist to be destroyed in the most humane and cost efficient manner possible,” though Congress has denied funding for euthanasia for years.

That would be better than having the animals starve and die of thirst after protracted suffering.

A version of this editorial appeared this week in some of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel,  Sparks Tribune and the Lincoln County Record.

Newspaper column: Water agency should not skirt law and courts

Clark County has sent to Congress a bill draft proposing that more than 50,000 acres of federal public land in the Las Vegas Valley be opened for private development, but dangling like a vestigial tail at the end of the 21-page proposal is an end-run around the courts and the law that could allow the currently stalled rural water grab by the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) to take place.

In 2017 a federal judge ruled that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) could grant the water agency right-of-way for a 300-mile network of pipelines to take groundwater beneath White Pine, Lincoln and Nye counties, but first it had to come up with plans to mitigate the potential loss of wildlife habitat due to a draw down of the water table, as is required by the CleanWater Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

That task may be impossible, because federal studies show the interconnected aquifers are already at equilibrium — water that is already being drawn from the aquifers is being replaced gallon for gallon annually with no leeway for additional withdrawal. The water agency proposes to withdraw 84,000 acre-feet of groundwater per year.

The lands bill Clark County sent to Congress calls for the Interior Department to give the water authority rights-of-way for an electric power line that “shall be subject only to the terms, conditions and stipulations identified in the existing rights-of-way, and shall not be subject to further administrative or judicial review. The right-of-way shall be granted in perpetuity and shall not require the payment of rental fees.”

A right-of-way for a power line could easily accommodate pipelines, too.

The Great Basin Water Network (GBWN) — a coalition of conservationists, rural officials, tribes and agricultural interests which was one of the parties that successfully sued to block the water grab — is crying foul over the decision to try to skirt the law and the federal judge’s ruling with legislation.

“What that decision tells us is that SNWA and federal land managers cannot figure out how to mitigate a project that would –– when fully built –– destroy 305 springs, 112 miles of streams, 8,000 acres of wetlands, and 191,000 acres of shrubland habitat on public lands, according to the BLM,” GBWN and others write in a letter to Nevada’s congressional delegation. “In the path of this destruction is Nevada’s first national park, Great Basin, which hosts the state’s only glacier, supports magnificent stands of ancient bristlecone pines, and dazzles visitors with a majestic network of limestone caves.”

In a press release announcing its opposition to the bill draft, Kyle Roerink, GBWN’s executive director, stated, “SNWA is trying to re-write the laws to allow their destructive pipeline and remove barriers that were enacted to protect Nevadans and their public resources. Members of the delegation should not do SNWA’s dirty work by gutting bedrock environmental protections to pave the way for a project that will kill endangered species, mine groundwater, and siphon away Eastern Nevada’s future in return for sprawl.”

Roerink also noted the opponents have been fighting the water grab for 30 years.

If it goes forward, it is estimated the groundwater project will take 40 years to complete at a cost of $15 billion — a cost that would require the tripling of water rates in Clark County. According to an SNWA resource plan the water is not needed until 2035.

“Its gargantuan $15 billion price tag (in 2011 dollars) highlights SNWA’s blatant disregard for its own ratepayers –– many of whom live on low or fixed incomes,” Roerink argues. “Those costs could mean water bills skyrocketing in Las Vegas while wildlife, landscapes, businesses, local governments and tribes suffer in Eastern Nevada.”

In his 2017 ruling federal Judge Andrew Gordon noted the importance of the controversy to both sides of the issue, writing, “I am sensitive to the strong feelings and weighty interests at stake in this contest over Nevada’s water — after all, in the West, ‘whisky’s for drinkin’ and water’s for fightin’ over.’ There can be no question that drawing this much water from these desert aquifers will harm the ecosystem and impact cultural sites that are important to our citizens. On the other hand, southern Nevada faces an intractable water shortage.”

Our congressional delegation should allow Clark County to develop land within its boundaries, but should not grant this proposed end-run around the courts and the law to slake its thirst.

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Newspaper column: How to save the West from devastating wildfires

As we enter another wildfire season — and each one seems to be more devastating than the previous one — the question lingers: Why?

According to The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Geographic it is unquestionably due to climate change.

Pay no heed to the fact that prior to 1980 less than 25,000 acres of wildfires occurred each year in Nevada. In each of the past two years, more than 1 million acres have burned. Coincidentally, since 1980 the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have made massive cuts in the number of cattle and sheep allowed to graze federal land. The number of sheep has fallen 80 percent and the number of cattle has been cut in half.

This past week’s issue of Executive Intelligence Review magazine asks the question: “What Is Causing Massive Wildfires In the U.S. West: The Environment — Or Environmentalism?”

The article focuses on the largest fire in Nevada history — the July 2018 Martin Fire, which burned nearly half a million acres in Northeast Nevada and devastated the Ninety-Six Ranch, which has been run by the Stock and Stewart families for 155 years. The article includes an extensive interview with rancher Kris Stewart, who has been lobbying the federal land agencies and the president to allow historic levels of grazing to prevent such wildfires.

Stewart told the magazine’s editor the vegetative fuel levels on the rangeland that burned in the Martin Fire had been allowed to reach 1,000 percent of normal by the BLM’s own estimates, and, despite this, she said the ranch was denied permission for additional grazing time.

In the 1960s, she reported, “the modern environmental movement began to inform range management studies and policy, and environmental lawsuits caused a shift in grazing policies. Once considered engaged partners, ranchers were viewed as the enemy …”

This was political, not scientific. Stewart noted that range biologists such as Allan Savory have concluded that livestock grazing disturbs the soil in a healthy manner, “allowing rain and snow water, seeds and fertilizer to be absorbed throughout the soil. They obviously also deposit some of those seeds as well as a completely natural and healthy fertilizer to the soil.”

In the 2015 summer edition of Range magazine, under the headline “Cows can save the world,” Savory stated, “Over millions of years such grasslands — soil life, plants, grazing animals and their predators — developed together in an amazing symbiotic relationship. The grasses needed animals grazing, trampling, dunging and urinating just as much as the animals needed plants.”

In fact, livestock have actually transformed Nevada from a barren desert into land habitable by wildlife such as elk, deer and sage grouse — all of which are decimated by massive wildfires.

The late Elko County Commissioner Grant Gerber often charged that federal agents are in thrall of the radical environmentalists, whose mantra is that the land should be returned to the pristine state before ranchers ruined it by trampling it with sheep and cattle.

Gerber was fond of quoting from the diary of fur trapper Peter Skene Ogden who crossed Nevada circa 1828: “There were times when we tasted no food, and we were unable to discover water for several days together; without wood, we keenly felt the cold; wanting grass, our horses were reduced to great weakness, so that many of them died, on whose emaciated carcases we were constrained to satisfy the intolerable cravings of our hunger, and as a last resource, to quench our thirst with their blood.”

Only after the sheep and cattle came and trampled the earth and fertilized it, as Savory explained, and ranchers improved access to water, the region blossomed.

Whether that can continue is in jeopardy. Stewart estimates the fire cost the ranch $160,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for such things as hay. And since reseeding efforts have been largely unsuccessful those expenses are likely to occur for at least two or three years, exhausting savings and retirement accounts.

After the ranchers appealed to the White House, Stewart says President Trump responded with an executive order in December titled “Promoting Active Management of America’s Forests, Rangelands, and Other Federal Lands To Improve Conditions and Reduce Wildfire Risk.”

“Whether our family operation will survive this battle is unclear,” Stewart said, “but if we have a part in saving U.S. cattle ranching and our way of life, it will have been worth the time, expense and trouble for the next generation.”

The fires are destroying the one thing that could prevent them.

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Federal agencies never let the facts get in the way of their paperwork juggernaut

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a deadline of Sept. 30 to decide whether to list greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act and put into effect conservation measures developed by the agency and the Bureau of Land Management. There is almost no chance Fish and Wildlife will not decide for listing, despite what the science and statistics say.

When it does so, about 10 million acres of land in 11 states — nearly 3 million in Nevada alone — will be off limits to economic development. Countless potential jobs will be lost to save a bird that does not need saving.

Sage grouse

According to analysis by the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, the number of male sage grouse across the bird’s range has increased 63 percent from 2013 to 2015, and that is just in the accessible leks that were counted by hand. That report said population trends in Nevada have been flat since the mid-1990s.

While this may be an indicator that the state’s and local governments and businesses have already succeeded in protecting grouse, it is unlikely to sway the paperwork juggernaut of the federal government.

Gov. Brian Sandoval displayed some of his frustration with the agencies’ lack of cooperation and deafness to reason in a 12-page letter to the acting head of the BLM two weeks ago.

“The process was intended to be collaborative, inclusive and proactive; an unprecedented undertaking to bring federal agencies and states together to craft plans to adequately conserve the Greater Sage-grouse and preclude a listing under the Endangered Species Act,” the governor wrote. “Western state and multiple agencies have participated in this effort in good faith. We have expended millions of dollars and thousands of hours to present a scientific, innovative and effective conservation plan.”

Instead, the states were stonewalled, says Sandoval. He noted that the final 3,500-page land use plan released in May left unresolved, dismissed or ignored issues raised by the state. There was insufficient public notice or opportunity for comment. Scientific methodologies were changed without justification or explanation.

Sandoval said the plan “contains many new elements that disregard best science, Nevada’s state and local plans, and federal law. It is disappointing that this process has changed from a collaborative, proactive approach, to a now heavy-handed, federal approach that uses status-quo approaches and relies primarily on information from federal officials in Washington, D.C., rather than expertise from state conservation and wildlife agencies, and local input.”

 

 

Newspaper column: BLM seeks dismissal of suit over handling of wild horses, saying it is caught in the middle

Wild horses in corrals in Carson City (R-J photo by John Locher)

The Bureau of Land Management this past week filed a motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought against it in Nevada federal court over its failure to properly manage wild horses, as required by law, and letting the mustang population explode far beyond what the range is capable of handling.

The suit from the Nevada Association of Counties, the Nevada Farm Bureau Federation and others asks the court to issue an injunction or writ requiring federal agencies to follow the wild horse and burro law, because its current failure to do so is starving the very animals the law was intended to protect, damaging range land used for cattle grazing and taking private water rights, as reported in this week’s newspaper column, available online at The Ely Times, the Elko Daily Free Press and the Mesquite Local News.

“Free-roaming horse and burro herds in Nevada are frequently observed to be in malnourished condition, with the ribs and skeletal features of individual animals woefully on view and other signs of ill-health readily observable,” the suit says.

The BLM argues the suit is “nonjusticiable” because it fails to identify a single “final action” by the agency that caused damage, but rather asks the court to micromanage the BLM’s thousands of daily decisions about the management of feral horses — actually an invasive species with no natural predators and insatiable appetites.

But perhaps the court needs to play the role of Solomon and split this baby, because, as the BLM motion notes, the law clearly requires the BLM to maintain the feral horse population and destroy unadoptable excess wild horses, but the congressional budget specifically denies any funding for doing so.

The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971 says, “The Secretary (of Interior) shall cause additional excess wild free roaming horses and burros for which an adoption demand by qualified individuals does not exist to be destroyed in the most humane and cost efficient manner possible.”

But this year’s budget, just as every budget since 2009, states, “Appropriations herein made shall not be available for the destruction of healthy, unadopted, wild horses and burros in the care of the Bureau or its contractors or for the sale of wild horses and burros that results in their destruction for processing into commercial products.”

The motion to dismiss suggests that the proper course for the plaintiffs is not through the courts “but through petitions to Congress and the Executive.” A fat lot of good it does to ask Harry Reid’s Congress to do anything. It is inert, inept and too often self-contradictory.

There are nearly 50,000 feral horses and burros on the open range in the West, nearly 50 percent more than the range can handle. About half those are in Nevada. Off the range, there are another 48,000 animals in either short-term corrals or long-term pastures, which the taxpayers are feeding for their average 25-year life span.

Oddly enough there are many news stories now about state and federal agencies battling an invasive species with no natural predators and insatiable appetites that is devastating businesses and recreational use of the Great Lakes. But there is no Wild and Free-Roaming Asian Carp Act.

Read the entire column at Ely, Elko or Mesquite.

BLM motion to dismiss

Wild Horse suit

Is Nevada AWOL in the latest Sagebrush Rebellion?

Both Investor’s Business Daily and I today point out that a week ago  Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed House Bill 148, the latest volley in the long-running skirmish known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. The bill demands the United States extinguish title to federally occupied lands — about two-thirds of the state — and transfer title to the state of Utah on or before Dec. 31, 2014.

IBD says, “Utah is out in front, but it is not alone. Lawmakers in the Arizona Senate have passed a bill similar to Utah’s while the legislatures in Colorado, Idaho, Montana and New Mexico are reportedly following Salt Lake City’s lead.”

Oddly enough, the roster does not include the state with the highest percent of landmass occupied by the federal bureaucracy — Nevada.

I point out in today’s Ely Times column what President Lincoln said in his proclamation declaring Nevada a state on Oct. 31, 1864:

“Now, therefore, be it known, that I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in accordance with the duty imposed upon me by the act of congress aforesaid, do hereby declare and proclaim that the said State of Nevada is admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original states.”

Anyone can see from the accompanying map that this statement is patently false. The Western states were in no way admitted on equal footing. They were extorted into granting to the federal government control of and financial benefits from vast land holdings inside the boundaries of these sovereign states — land never purchased nor legally acquired except as tribute to Washington for the privilege of statehood. Western states were required to “disclaim” unappropriated lands inside their boundaries.

An example of the financial burden is the royalty paid by oil and gas companies who lease federally occupied land. The 12.5 percent royalty is divided between the federal coffers and the states’, rather the state getting all such revenues.

Today’s rebellion through legislation might not fare much better than past efforts, IBD notes, since Washington will likely ignore it as it has in the past. Nevada passed a similar law in 1979 and in 1996 voters approved a constitutional amendment to remove the disclaimer clause.

The problem is that the federal bureaucrats are beholding to the representatives of 49 other states and not to the local populace who could benefit from the beneficial use of the land.

The Bureau of Land Management has spent seven years studying whether the Southern Nevada Water Authority can acquire rights-of-way on BLM land for water wells and pipelines. Mining permits can take a decade to be approved or denied. Oil and gas leases are being denied over sage-grouse habitat without any explanation as to specifically why. Wind and solar projects require years of expensive studies by legions of bureaucrats, and the final decision resides with federal bureaucrats not local land owners.

Where is Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto’s lawsuit demanding Congress address the state’s petition for redress of grievance? We’ve been waiting nearly 16 years since that election and 23 years since Gov. Bob List signed that law. And never mind that the voters of the state in 1956 approved taxing federal land should Congress ever allow it. That was a joke.