National Monument Dealt Setback

The Bush administration has delayed indefinitely the release of a management plan for the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southern Oregon--a move that could have consequences for more than 3 million acres of wild lands set aside for such protection nationwide.

The Bureau of Land Management this week ruled that the plan for the monument near the California border--an ecological melting pot whose safeguarding was an environmental cornerstone of the Clinton administration--should be subject to additional scrutiny.

Community leaders fear that delaying the draft management plan, the first to come up for review under Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, could lead to scaling back the size of the monument and to building in guarantees for timber harvests and cattle grazing within the protected area.

“This is our first look at how Norton is treating the national monuments . . . , and what it’s looking like is the secretary wants to preserve options--including allowing the boundaries to be shrunk,” said Dave Willis, a local activist who pushed for designation of the monument.

But Larry Finfer, the BLM’s assistant director for communications, said the decision to delay release of the plan comes after Norton’s announcement in March that she would seek input from property owners, elected officials and others affected by former President Clinton’s designation of 19 new national monuments across the country.

“The department decided it would be kind of a rush to judgment to go out with a draft management plan before there had been an opportunity to see how the public reacted to the secretary’s inquiry,” Finfer said. “Ultimately a plan will come out, but they want to hear from the public first.”

The delay does not affect the monument designation itself, which already has taken effect. Rather, it postpones release of the draft management plan and environmental impact statement, which determine the monument’s scope and the nature of operations permitted there.

Under the monument designation process, Clinton was able to create environmental protections for millions of acres of federal land in the last months of his presidency without having to face near-certain opposition in Congress.

Many of the monuments have faced opposition because of effects on grazing and timber--as well as on the oil and gas industry, which says that at least half a dozen of the designated areas contain significant energy resources.

The Cascade-Siskiyou region southeast of Ashland, Ore., is an important biological crossroads between the Cascade, Klamath and Siskiyou ecosystems--a meeting point of the conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest, the dry oak and pine forests of the Klamath River basin and the Great Basin to the east.

It is one of the top three regions in the country for butterflies, with more than 120 species. And it is the only high-elevation land bridge between the Cascade and the Siskiyou mountains--a connection scientists say is crucial to providing a gene pool diverse enough to allow species to survive.

“It is an area of nearly unprecedented ecological diversity. To approach the number and kinds of species there anywhere else, you’d probably have to be in the tropics,” said Don Ferguson, spokesman for the BLM’s district office in Medford, Ore.

Monument proponents have collected endorsements from more than 2,700 local residents. Nancy Ames Cole, who has initiated a habitat restoration project on 1,421 acres she owns within the monument, said the delay “is an absolutely inexcusable usurpation of the majority will.”

“There’s been a long, thoughtful, extensive process that led to establishing this national monument, with hundreds of hours of citizen input, scientific input, user input. And basically, this seems to me just a way to subvert that process.”

But several local officials--along with much of southern Oregon’s timber and ranching communities--applauded the delay, saying the existing monument designation ignores local landowners.

“We had no input into this process,” complained Ric Holt, a Jackson County commissioner. “None of the private landowners up there were notified of this process. Some of them didn’t even find out about it until they read it in the paper. They ramrodded this thing through, and as far as a public process was concerned, that’s bull crud.”

A key concern is that, while the monument designation covers 52,947 acres of federal lands, there are an additional 27,000 acres to 40,000 acres of private lands that either are encircled by it or immediately adjacent. These include 6,400 acres of private timberlands held by Boise Cascade Corp., as well as large tracts of cattle grazing lands.

Many landowners fear access to grazing and timber harvests could be foreclosed, as could entry by off-road recreational vehicles.

“We have felt all along that it’s certainly possible to redefine the boundaries to exclude private property and still protect significant features that were advocated as reasons for the national monument to be named in the first place,” said Dave Hill, vice president of the Southern Oregon Timber Industry Assn.

Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, along with Oregon’s four Democratic congressmen and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, have urged Norton to proceed with the monument designation.

“In light of the public process that has already taken place, any effort to reduce the size of the monument is unwarranted,” the governor said in a letter to Norton.

Ferguson, of the BLM’s district office in Medford, explained that Norton just “wants to preserve her options.”

Finfer said that, of 15 monuments on BLM land designated during the Clinton administration, only the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah completed its management plan before the new administration took over.

While the Cascade-Siskiyou monument was one of the last to be named by Clinton, it has proceeded more quickly to the draft management plan stage because of extensive usage reviews that were underway, Finfer said.

Bruce Sargent, operator of a private resort surrounded by the monument, said he has gathered signatures from 320 people living within a mile of the monument who support it.

“What it all boils down to is there’s a serious move to shrink the national monument. Putting the plan on hold will give them a chance to figure out how to do it,” Sargent said.