U.S. Seeks to Reopen Area to Off-Roaders

The federal government wants to overturn key parts of a Clinton-era decision that helped preserve a large patch of desert dunes in southeastern California, a move that would reopen thousands of acres to off-road vehicles, officials said Wednesday.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management declined to discuss the new plan in detail. But several officials said it would allow at least limited off-road vehicle access to thousands of acres in the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area where off-road vehicles are currently banned.

The proposal will be announced today or Friday, officials said.

Roy Denner, a Lakeside resident who sits on two citizen panels that advise the BLM on use of the desert, said the proposal would reopen 15,000 acres to off-road vehicle use with no limitations. Another chunk of land, he said, as many as 35,000 acres, could be opened with strict limits on the number of riders each day--probably about 500. The plan--a draft, subject to a 90-day public comment period once it is released--is expected to become official by the end of the year.

Word of the plan has enraged conservationists, who thought their campaign to control dust pollution and preserve sensitive plants and animals, many of which can survive only in the dunes, had been won.

The new plan would trump portions of a November 2000 legal agreement between the BLM and a group of environmentalists who filed a federal lawsuit largely to protect a rare plant they said was being decimated by off-road vehicles.

The settlement banned off-road vehicles on 49,000 acres of the recreation area. Those curbs were seen as temporary until the BLM enacted a permanent plan to manage the site. This new proposal is part of that plan, which conservationists say will render the legal settlement moot.

“They are basically reopening the dunes,” said Kristen Brengel, campaign manager for the Washington-based Natural Trails and Waters Coalition, a consortium of about 90 environmental organizations.

“It just amazes me,” she said. “This is one of the most precious places in Southern California.... We need to preserve it so it’s there for future generations to enjoy.”

Michael Harrison, press secretary for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine), a congressman who has been closely involved in the preparation of the proposal, said the federal government is merely taking “a common-sense approach to solving environmental concerns.”

Tony Staed, deputy director of communications for the Bureau of Land Management in Sacramento, said the BLM is fighting hard to please all sides in what has become a fierce battle over the public’s right to use public land as it sees fit.

“The bureau is trying to work out acceptable use of the desert to all parties concerned,” he said.

“I know that’s a wide-open statement. We are doing our best.... It’s trying to achieve that balance that is so critical. I think we can do that.”

Harrison and off-road enthusiasts made it clear Wednesday that they had hoped to eliminate portions of the 18-month-old settlement as soon as President Bush took office.

“The Clinton administration was very, very far to the extreme environmental position,” said Denner, who is president and chief executive of a trade association of companies that cater to off-road vehicle enthusiasts.

“I don’t think the new administration is swinging the pendulum all the way in the other direction,” he said. “The new administration has opened the door to reasonable and balanced land management practices. We do not want the right to run off-highway vehicles helter- skelter all over public lands. But neither do we want to be closed out. And that’s where the Clinton administration was heading.”

About 25 miles east of Brawley, the Imperial recreation area stretches nearly 40 miles from the Chocolate Mountains to the Mexican border, the largest dune formation in California. Some dunes rise more than 300 feet off the desert floor, making them a suitable home for hundreds of species of rare creatures and plants as well as a desirable site for riders of dune buggies, Baja Bugs, motorcycles, trucks and all-terrain vehicles.

Because the area is so big, so isolated and so arid--average rainfall is about 2 inches a year and summer temperatures routinely soar to 110 degrees--it is considered a unique habitat. Its many plants and animals include the silver-leafed Algodones Dunes sunflower and 12 species of beetle, ecologists say.

Some weekends, as many as 200,000 off-road enthusiasts swarm the dunes. Thanksgiving weekend, law enforcement officials reported a stabbing, a fatal shooting, an attack on a ranger who had pulled someone over for speeding, and dozens of crashes that caused 200 injuries and two deaths.

Much of the environmental concern centers on the Peirson’s milk vetch, an endangered plant that grows only in the Imperial Valley desert.

Off-road enthusiasts have hired their own biologists who they say have shown that the plant is surviving quite well.

And Harrison scoffed Wednesday at the environmentalists’ efforts--”all in purposes of saving a weed,” he said.

Brengel responded: “First of all, it isn’t a weed. Second of all, we need to treat our land with respect. To just call it a weed and just throw your hands up and say, ‘Who cares?’--that’s not the way land should be managed. And that’s not why Americans have laws in place to protect land and endangered species.”