WASHINGTON, June 29, 2016 - The lack of guidance to accompany
sage-grouse management plans in 10 Western states is creating uncertainty among
ranchers, energy companies and other resource users, Republican senators said
at a hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday.
The criticism was led by
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, chairman of the subcommittee on public lands,
forests and mining.
Since the Interior
Department announced last September that it was not listing
the greater sage-grouse under the Endangered Species Act, “no instructional
memoranda have been finalized, no final field guides have been made public, and
agency staff on the ground are no closer to implementing the federal plans than
they were last September,” Barrasso said.
“In Wyoming, and many of my
colleagues’ home states, their ranchers, energy and mineral producers, and
construction workers depend on production based on federal lands,” Barrasso
said. The grouse, in turn, “depends on the people who depend on the land.”
Barrasso and other GOP
senators from Western states – namely, Jim Risch of Idaho, Mike Lee of Utah and
Steve Daines of Montana – also criticized the federal government in general,
and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in particular, for adopting a
“one-size-fits-all” approach to land management planning and for failing to
properly take into account views of stakeholders such as ranchers.
Sage-grouse habitat exists on about 165 million acres in 11 Western
states. The conservation strategy covers about 67 million acres in 10 of those
states, about half of which is managed by BLM.
The featured government witness was Jim Lyons, Interior’s deputy
assistant secretary for lands and minerals. He said that guidance has been
delayed because BLM wanted to do more outreach and gain more feedback from
affected land owners. Lyons also insisted that far from being uniform, the
sage-grouse conservation plans are tailored as much as possible to local
conditions.
After the hearing, he said he
expected the implementation guidance to be issued within a month.
The subcommittee also heard from
Brenda Richards, a rancher from Owyhee County, Idaho, and the president of the
Public Lands Council, who said the conservation plans have a “misplaced focus on reduced grazing
footprint rather than proper application of grazing as a tool, and (a)
disregard for ongoing local management.”
Lyons, however, said the
government is trying to work with ranchers across the bird’s habitat. In his
testimony, he noted that through the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s
Sage Grouse Initiative, about 1,100 ranches are conserving 4.4 million acres of
sage-grouse habitat.
Asked by Risch whether
there would be a requirement that all stubble in sage-grouse leks – the areas
where the birds perform their spring mating rituals – be at least seven inches
high, Lyons said no.
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