BLM plan for land released to public

MARY LOCHNER

November 21, 2008 at 2:47PM AKST

The Bureau of Land Management made public its record of decision for finalizing land conveyances and managing retained federal lands in the Goodnews Bay and Bristol Bay areas as promised last Friday.

The plan has drawn criticism from environmental, fishing, subsistence and other groups for creating a framework that allows industrial activity on lands that had previously been closed to development. Many of them are primarily concerned about potential mining activities on land that provides spawning areas for salmon, but habitat for plants and other animals are also at issue.

But BLM district manager for the Anchorage district office Gary Reimer cautions that just because a record of decision has been entered doesn’t mean that people can start staking mining claims immediately.

“The plan isn’t self-implementing,” Reimer said.

It would take a public land order issued by Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior, to actually implement the plan, Reimer said. He called it very likely to happen, but declined to speculate as to exactly when.

Meanwhile, activist groups opposed to the decision have said they will fight to keep the plan from going into action.

A news release from the Alaska Wilderness League, Trout Unlimited and Sportsman’s Alliance for Alaska sent out Nov. 14 warned that, if more lands are opened to mining and other development in Bristol Bay and Goodnews Bay, “The salmon that drive the region’s and state’s economies and cultures will disappear.”

That has been the main cry of resistance in recent years to industrial development in the region in general, from people whose very lives revolve around commercial, subsistence or sport-fishing for salmon. The BLM Bay plan, if implemented, would open nearly 2 million acres to potential development, with many of the most mineral-rich lands being conveyed to the state of Alaska, and approximately 1.16 million acres being retained and managed by the federal government.

Just because a plan has been finalized doesn’t mean that’s the end of public partnership in managing BLM lands in Goodnews Bay and Bristol Bay, BLM spokeswoman Teresa McPherson said.

“We want to reassure people we’re not going to be this manager from afar,” McPherson said. “We’ll continue to engage residents in the long term. That’s something we want to emphasize. This wasn’t a one-time shot of getting public input.”

The BLM Bay plan and federally-mandated environmental impact statement have been in the works since 2004, Reimer said. The draft plan and environmental impact statement, released Sept. 29, 2006, came after a series of scoping meetings in which the public could air concerns. The release of the draft plan was followed by a public comment period that was ultimately extended to 130 days after its release. And, once the proposed plan was released in early December 2007, members of the public who participated in the plan had a 30-day window of time to submit letters of protest, which Reimer said are handled by the BLM’s director, James Caswell, in Washington, D.C.

Millen points to what he sees as flaws in the BLM’s public-input gathering process. The 30-day protest period came in the midst of the holiday season, he said, and at any time of year would have been an insufficient timeframe for the public to pore through the hundreds of pages of information contained in the proposed plan and environmental impact statement.

Reimer said questions about the timing of the protest period were taken up with BLM’s Resource Advisory Council, which he said is a group of citizens and representatives appointed by the secretary of the Department of the Interior to advise BLM, but ultimately that didn’t result in any change in the protest period.

Native inclusion questioned
Terry Hoefferle, director of a nonprofit called Nunamta Aulukestai that represents the interests of several village corporations in the region, said BLM’s system for dismissing public input categorized as “unsubstantive” is biased against inclusion of traditional Native knowledge. He said it tends to favor language that relates to Western ways of knowing, but discounts language that is often used to describe traditional Native knowledge.

Reimer said he’s been very conscious of the need to incorporate Native people’s traditional knowledge about the land and historical patterns of animal behavior and human use.

In the final analysis, the public input BLM was required by the National Environmental Policy Act to collect before drafting a land-use plan is one of many sources consulted in shaping the final plan and environmental impact statement. Other sources include scientific data, researchers and governmental and community organizations.

“NEPA is not a vote,” Reimer said.