Slash in Funding Imperils Park Status for East Mojave

In a move that may effectively kill California’s newest national park, Republicans in Congress have slashed funding for the East Mojave National Preserve and ordered that it be run as a scenic area with fewer limits on mining, grazing and other activities.

Led by opponents of the preserve, a Senate-House conference committee voted late Tuesday to take away all funds for the National Park Service to operate Mojave. Control over the 1.4-million-acre preserve was returned to the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that administered the area before it was declared a park.

East Mojave, officially deemed a preserve because hunting is permitted, gained national park status last year along with the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments after a lengthy battle in Congress.

National Park Service officials argued Wednesday that although the operating budget had been stripped, Congress had not expressly taken away East Mojave’s status and that it could still be run as a park, although by a different agency.

But the language pushed by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) and added to a budget measure for the Interior Department states that the preserve is to be managed as it was when classified as a national scenic area and subject to less stringent environmental regulation.

“The intent is to return this area to what it used to be,” said Elizabeth Morra, a Republican spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee. A Democratic spokesman for the committee concurred with that interpretation.

Instead of the nearly $2 million sought by the National Park Service in next year’s budget to run a visitor center and begin operating the preserve as a park, the conference committee allocated $600,000 to the Bureau of Land Management to oversee use of the area.

Susan Kennedy, press secretary to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the leading sponsor of the law that created the desert parks, said “the senator is extremely disappointed. They’ve made it inoperable as a park.”

Referring to the East Mojave budget authorized by the committee, Kennedy said: “It’s not enough to operate campgrounds, to pay for basic search and rescue operations. It’s not enough for processing range improvements or mining permits.”

Although the Senate and House have one last opportunity to change the language, defenders of the park said Wednesday that the only hope to save the park is through a veto.

“It’s Clinton or nothing,” said Eldon Hughes, chairman of the Sierra Club’s California desert committee.

The action was a bitter blow to Hughes and other advocates who saw many years of work pay off in October when a Democrat-led Congress passed the Desert Protection Act. The act established the East Mojave preserve, expanded Death Valley and Joshua Tree and designated both as national parks, and bestowed wilderness status on 3.5 million acres of desert.

Only the status of East Mojave is affected by what Congress did this week.

The maneuver occurred during negotiations by House and Senate conferees on the 1996 budget for the Interior Department, which includes the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

Clinton has expressed displeasure with several aspects of the Republican-inspired budget, but the White House has not said anything about East Mojave.

The committee vote Tuesday caps a yearlong campaign by Lewis against park designation for East Mojave.

Lewis, who represents the area and owns land inside the preserve, for years has championed the cause of landowners, miners, ranchers, hunters and four-wheel driving enthusiasts. After the establishment of the park, many of those groups argued that their rights to use the land were being wrongly curtailed.

“Lewis’ point was that the East Mojave is not suitable as a national park, and I agreed with that,” said Dennis Casebier, a nearby resident and Mojave historian. “I think what has now happened is just great.”

Casebier said the BLM is better suited to administer the area than the Park Service, which he said is too “preservation oriented.”

“The BLM is user-oriented. There is cattle ranching, mining and a different style of recreation than what is normally found in a national park,” he said.

Like other opponents, Casebier said he regards the action this week as a first step. Next, he said, he would like to see removal of the new wilderness status throughout the desert area that restricts human activities.

Hughes and other environmentalists contend that termination of park status for the East Mojave and resumption of BLM control will mean a return to degradation of desert resources.

“The National Park Service mandate is to protect it for the future and within that protection let us enjoy it,” Hughes said. “The BLM mandate is to use it to the maximum, even if it means using it up.”

In another possible setback to the park system, Republicans managed to keep alive a plan to establish a commission to study whether to shut down or relinquish control over a variety of smaller national parks, urban recreation areas, historic monuments and cultural facilities.

The park closure commission was rejected in the House on Tuesday on 231-180 vote. Later, the defeated proposal was revived and attached to the budget measure funding the Interior Department and other government agencies in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

The move to slip the proposal into another piece of legislation--indeed one that would be more difficult to vote down--drew sharp complaints from the National Parks and Conservation Assn., a private nonprofit organization established in 1919 to preserve the national park system.

“This lack of respect for our legislative process is shameful. The leadership of the House should reject this blatant move which disregards the wishes of the majority,” said Paul C. Pritchard, association president.

Also in Washington, a plan advanced by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) and Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Resources Committee, to scale back protection of endangered species drew sharp criticism, and the threat of a presidential veto.

Assistant Interior Secretary George Frampton Jr. said “the Endangered Species Act embodies values important to all Americans and we do not believe that the American people will support the extreme measures taken in this bill that effectively repeal the act.”

Pressure to limit the scope of the 22-year-old law has been building since Republicans became the majority party in Congress this year, and since the Supreme Court ruled several months ago that protection of endangered species extends to their surrounding habitats.

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Washington contributed to this story.