New Bill Puts Fewer Limits on Use of Desert

Four California congressmen introduced legislation Thursday that would designate 2.1 million acres of the Southern California desert as wilderness while preserving grazing rights and authorizing motor vehicle access in some areas.

The new move in the years-long battle over desert policy has the support of multiple-use advocates who are fiercely opposed to more restrictive legislation introduced earlier by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica).

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), chief sponsor of the latest bill, said it reflects “a strongly held public desire to preserve and protect one of the crown jewels of America’s public lands.”

Cranston and Levine, however, denounced it as a travesty and an attack on federal wilderness legislation.

Rather than providing protection, Levine said, the Lewis bill amounts to “a new kind of warfare on the wilderness unlike any before” and “turns the clock back to the original debate of the 1960s.”

The 2.1 million acres to be designated as permanent wilderness area would be in 51 tracts to be designated by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

In at least three of the wilderness areas, vehicle access would be permitted with the permission of the secretary of the interior. Livestock grazing would be allowed to continue in areas where it had begun before the wilderness designation became effective.

Eight back-country trail systems, accessible to the handicapped, would be developed on the fringe of wilderness. Authority to expand them would be conferred on the interior secretary.

Sponsors of the measure characterized it as the culmination of a process begun in 1976 when the Bureau of Land Management was directed by Congress to develop a master plan for federal land planning and management.

During five years of ensuing hearings and deliberations, more than 40,000 Californians wrote the Bureau of Land Management, testified at hearings or otherwise conveyed their views on desert lands policy. The four lawmakers who shaped the proposal said that it is an outgrowth of that interchange.

Besides Lewis, the bill’s principal sponsors are Reps. Duncan L. Hunter (R-Coronado), William M. Thomas (R-Bakersfield) and Al McCandless (R-Bermuda Dunes), whose districts represent most of the Southern California desert.

Suggesting that the bill introduced by Cranston and Levine and strongly supported by environmental groups is a product of outsiders, Lewis said his 34-page alternative “is the people’s bill.”

The more extensive Cranston and Levine proposal would create a 1.5 million-acre Mojave National Park east of Barstow, designate 4.4 million acres in 81 separate tracts as permanent wilderness, greatly expand the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments by making both national parks and add 20,500 acres to Red Rock Canyon State Park.

In addition, 3 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land would be transferred to the National Park Service, which conservationists believe would be more attentive to its management.

The Cranston-Levine bill has stirred bitter opposition from cattlemen, mining interests, recreational users and even the military.

The routes and numbers of military training flights would be frozen under the Cranston-Levine measure, while the Lewis bill would explicitly prohibit any restrictions on military overflights in the wilderness.

Environmentalists want to sharply limit vehicular access to the desert areas. But Hunter said that such access is central to the Lewis proposal, calling the desert “the playground of the working people of California.”

“In the desert,” he said, “access is everything, and that means motorized access.”

Cranston called the rival bill “totally unacceptable.” He said it is worse than the status quo because it would permit vehicles in some wilderness areas, prevent the government from determining the legitimacy of mining claims, weaken grazing restrictions and prohibit future designation of wilderness areas.

Both proposals will be aired in a new round of congressional field hearings.

Rep. Bruce F. Vento (D-Minn.), chairman of the national parks and public lands subcommittee of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, has scheduled an Oct. 28 hearing in Bishop and a Nov. 3 hearing in Barstow. A third hearing is expected to be scheduled in Los Angeles early next year.

BACKGROUND

The Bureau of Land Management was directed by Congress in 1976 to develop a master plan for federal land planning and management. During the next five years, more than 40,000 Californians wrote BLM, testified at hearings or otherwise conveyed their views on desert lands policy. Thursday’s plan would protect the interests of many ranchers and off-road vehicle users in the California desert, while a competing proposal sponsored by Sen. Alan Cranston and Rep. Mel Levine is favored by environmentalists.