Firm Threatens to Mine, Build in Mojave Preserve

The largest private landowner in the new Mojave National Preserve has threatened to begin extensive mineral exploration and mapping of subdivisions after the collapse of a land swap that ran into conflict with the Clinton administration’s deal to save the Headwaters Forest.

Since passage of the controversial 1994 Desert Protection Act, the Department of the Interior has been attempting to acquire numerous private holdings within the newly created Mojave preserve and surrounding wilderness areas. Takeover of the private lands is believed crucial to protecting the desert national park from commercial intrusions.

By far the largest proposed purchase--285,000 acres owned by Catellus Development Corp.--was on the verge of closing when Catellus learned that $36 million it sought from the government was tied up in the negotiations for the Headwaters Forest, the embattled stand of ancient redwoods on the Northern California coast.

With Catellus preparing to dispatch geologists and land surveyors into the desert, federal officials insist that hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine desert are not being sacrificed to save the Headwaters’ 7,500 acres of old-growth trees.

“It will not come down to a choice between saving Headwaters and saving the Mojave,” said Deputy Secretary of the Interior John Garamendi, the Clinton administration’s principal negotiator for both places. He vowed that a new deal for the Mojave lands will be worked out. “We are moving forward with land swaps with Catellus,” Garamendi said.

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Still, the Headwaters agreement took money off the negotiating table that had been thought available for the Mojave, said Ed Hastey, California chief for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Hastey, who has been part of the negotiations with Catellus, said he has begun appealing to private conservation groups to help meet the shortfall.

The pending Headwaters deal, already under fire by critics who believe the government is paying too much for a small piece of forest, drew more criticism from environmental groups concerned about the fate of the Mojave.

“It doesn’t make much sense for the Interior Department to nix a 285,000-acre exchange in the desert to buy a tiny patch of redwoods,” said David Myers, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that buys and preserves environmentally sensitive land.

The two sides have returned to the bargaining table and report progress on a new package that, so far, involves the government acquiring only about 100,000 acres of Catellus land--none of it within the national park.

The talks took on new urgency after Catellus sent a letter last week notifying federal officials that it planned to begin mineral excavation, property surveys and water well drilling on its land inside the park and the adjacent wilderness areas that also were created by the 1994 act.

David Friedman, president of the company’s resources group, said the letter was an attempt to put the government on notice that if a deal could not be struck, Catellus was serious about developing its lands.

“We want to get out of wilderness areas and out of the park and consolidate our land holdings in more economically useful areas,” Friedman said.

“But if we can’t reach an agreement to trade out these lands, then we owe it to our stockholders to get the maximum value out of the desert property we presently own, even if it is in wilderness areas.”

In its original proposal, Catellus had offered to trade 285,860 acres--which it valued at $72 million--for $60 million in land and cash from the federal government. The company was willing to make such an exchange, Friedman said, in part to obtain urban and agricultural property that would be more suitable for development than remote desert land.

But the company placed a high value on the $36 million in cash, Friedman said. With the money no longer available, he added, “we are going to be more aggressive about our price and more picky about what we will take in return.”

Catellus, formerly the real estate arm of the Southern Pacific Railroad, controls more than 800,000 acres of desert land, an area almost the size of Rhode Island. Its holdings are interspersed in a checkerboard pattern with government land across many of the most fragile, remote and beautiful parts of the desert.

The company owns 88,000 acres within the 1.4-million-acre Mojave preserve, the nation’s newest national park.

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Pursuing mineral and real estate interests on those lands, say federal officials, would compromise the purpose of the Desert Protection Act, which sought to preserve several million acres of wilderness and parklands in the Mojave Desert.

“They own an awful lot of land out there, and they could do things there that would take away from the wilderness values that we are trying to uphold,” said the BLM’s Hastey.

Mary Martin, superintendent of the new park, said the Park Service would be powerless “to regulate or influence” any mining operations that occurred on private property inside the park. “They certainly could have a significant impact,” she said.

The Desert Protection Act culminated a decade-long fight by environmental groups to set aside wilderness in the Mojave. In the last Congress, Republicans opposing what they considered a lockup of crucial resources sought unsuccessfully to kill the budget for the new park.

The Catellus negotiations mark the fourth time this year that the Clinton administration has sought to protect nationally significant resources by offering to exchange federal assets for environmentally sensitive private property.

In the Headwaters agreement, the administration has offered to pay $380 million in cash and land for 7,500 acres of virgin redwood groves. Another proposed exchange ended the threat of a gold mine next to Yellowstone National Park. And in southern Utah’s red rock canyon country, federal officials are hoping that an exchange of mineral leases will persuade a mining company to drop its plans to mine for coal in a newly designated national monument.