House Panel OKs California Desert Preservation Bill

In a long-awaited step toward preserving the California desert, a House subcommittee passed legislation Tuesday that would set aside 4 million acres in the state’s southeast corner as specially designated wilderness areas.

The bill’s sponsors, Reps. Richard Lehman (D-Sanger) and Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), hailed the vote--taken after five years of public hearings--as historic.

“Five years is long enough for this bill to incubate,” Lehman said before the 4-1 vote of the House Interior subcommittee on general oversight and California desert lands. “This will serve to protect a spectacular part of the American West.”

The vote was expected to set the stage for an intense battle over how many of the 25 million acres of California desert should be included in the legislation.

The legislation is similar to a measure introduced in the Senate by Alan Cranston (D-California) that would create a 1.5-million-acre East Mojave National Park and protect the desert from off-road vehicles, mining and other uses. The arid, sparsely inhabited land is home to giant sand dunes and 750 species of wildlife, including the endangered desert tortoise and big horn sheep.

“We’re ecstatic,” said Elden Hughes, head of the Sierra Club’s California Desert Committee. “. . . There is damage that is happening right now and this can put the desert on the road to healing.”

It is anticipated, however, that the bill, in its current form, would be vetoed by President Bush, who proposed in July that Congress extend wilderness designation to only 2.1 million acres.

The measure is likely to sail through the House, where it enjoys strong support from House Interior Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Martinez). It faces a tougher test in the Senate, where Cranston and John Seymour (R-California) remain at odds over how much of the desert needs protection.

The House bill would designate 77 wilderness areas covering 4.4 million acres. It provides 250,000 more acres for mining, utilities and off-road vehicle use than was set aside in an earlier version.

“It is still a long, long ways away from what you would consider to be a reasonable compromise,” said Seymour spokesman H.D. Palmer.

Although Seymour has not provided his own figure yet, he is holding out for a compromise to benefit desert users that include cattle ranchers, the U.S. Defense Department, rock hounds and others. The desert supports the Army’s national tank training center at Ft. Irwin, the homesteads of about 30 ranchers and active mines.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), who represents much of the affected desert area and opposes the bill, called the legislation unacceptable. He said the bill could have been drafted a decade ago by “an elite group from the Sierra Club” without the government bothering to conduct studies and public hearings at an estimated cost of $6 million.

“We wasted a lot of time and money if this is the way we are going to proceed,” Lewis said. “This is a compromise that totally ignored the elected representatives of the desert.”

Lewis said that the measure would wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in potential mineral resources as well as the livelihood of ranchers.

The legislation marks one of the largest public land measures considered by Congress. It would also set aside 3.3 million acres to establish Death Valley National Park and provide 800,000 acres to create Joshua Tree National Park, which contains the world’s largest Joshua tree forest.

Dropped from the bill were a pair of potentially troubling issues--the cost of the federal government acquiring desert land from willing sellers and the impact on military flight operations over areas of protected desert.

In both cases, subcommittee members decided to take up the issues later through amendments or separate bills rather than risk losing jurisdiction over the measure to other committees.

“These are tough issues and they have not been adequately resolved at this point,” Levine said.