House OKs Palm Springs-Area National Preserve

In a rare collaboration, environmentalists and developers have joined forces on legislation to designate 272,000 acres in the mountains near Palm Springs as a national preserve.

The Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument Act was passed by unanimous voice vote in the House on Tuesday, and a companion measure is expected to be approved in the Senate before the end of this congressional session.

The bill provides for the Bureau of Land Management rather than the National Park Service to oversee the monument--the first time such an arrangement has been made, according to the Department of the Interior.

Nearly a fifth of the total acreage affected by the legislation is privately owned. On the House floor, the bill’s author, Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs), said that the measure protects private property rights “with strong buffer zone language.”

“The bottom line is that this was a totally locally driven process,” said Bono’s spokesman, Rusty Payne. “The locals came to us and said they wanted to do this.”

For the last 18 months, Payne said, Bono has been working to come up with a proposal that would be acceptable to the Department of the Interior, which oversees all national parkland and often recommends territory for the president to designate for federal protection under the 1906 Antiquities Act.

While President Clinton in recent months has exercised his executive authority to create national monuments, Payne said that Bono won the administration’s approval--specifically, the backing of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt--before proceeding with her legislative campaign to designate the land.

Lawmakers said that they expect Clinton to sign the bill if the Senate passes a suitable companion measure.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced the Senate version in late June. Howard Gantman, a spokesman for Feinstein, said that he expects the forests and public land management subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to consider the bill in early September.

“There is a time crunch,” Gantman said, “but we’re hopeful it can be done . . . We believe our measure will come out similar to the House version.”

Elden Hughes, chairman of the Sierra Club’s California/Nevada Desert Committee, expressed elation at news of the bill’s passage. Hughes said that the Sierra Club had long advocated the national monument designation and worked with Bono on the legislation.

“We were concerned with boundaries and . . . bad language that will undermine wilderness or protection,” he said. “But, as near as I can tell, the bad language is out of” the latest draft.

Ed Kibbey, executive director of the desert chapter of the Southern California Building Industry Assn., said that Bono also enlisted the construction industry’s aid in drafting the bill. He said that his group represents about 90% of construction companies in the Coachella Valley. Given the apparent inevitability of a national monument in the region, Kibbey said, builders were pleased to be able to contribute their ideas to the legislative process.

“I was told personally by the secretary of the Interior that the president was going to make the land a national monument but wanted the designation to occur through legislation instead” of by executive act, Kibbey said.

Clinton “all along has believed the congressional route was a better route to go than the executive order, and I believe he wanted to see it done this way,” Bono said in an interview.

Payne said that legislative rather than executive action in Southern California would prevent a “horror” scenario like ones that occurred recently in Utah and Arizona, where Clinton made the designation without informing the governor or lawmakers in advance.

“There are a lot of things an executive order wouldn’t have included that would have made the bill harder to swallow” for locals, he said.

As an example, Payne raised the flyover provision of the House bill, which guarantees that air traffic would not be affected by the designation. Tourism is the second-largest industry in the Palm Springs area, he said, and Palm Springs International Airport lies relatively close to the monument site.

Hughes said that the environmental community realized it had to accept such a compromise for the bill to succeed. “In the real world, you have to allow these flights to happen,” he said.

Molly McUsic, counselor to the Interior secretary, said that the president would “likely” sign the legislation. Babbitt, she said, has long been “supportive of the idea and is pleased that it’s moving forward.”

“The Palm Springs area is growing, so this is a great idea, and I think people recognize it,” McUsic said.