WildEarth Guardians

Thursday, January 17, 2008
N.M. Game & Fish concerned with BLM handling of wildlife protections

N.M. Game & Fish joins WildEarth Guardians in concern over BLM waivers
Contact: Santa Fe New Mexican

ALBUQUERQUE - The director of the New Mexico Game and Fish Department is asking the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to take another look at how it handles seasonal closures and restrictions designed to protect wildlife from being disturbed by oil and gas drilling.

The BLM has come under fire in recent months for approving hundreds of waivers to the protective restrictions in the Farmington and Carlsbad areas. Critics contend BLM field offices are approving the waivers without due consideration or public comment.

Now, Game and Fish Director Bruce Thompson wants his agency and the BLM to jointly review the criteria used to determine whether waivers should be granted. He also has asked the BLM to cooperate with Game and Fish when waiver requests are received.

"The Department of Game and Fish and state Game Commission are becoming increasingly concerned with recent assertions regarding the number and frequency of exceptions to wildlife protective restrictions that are being approved by the Farmington field office," Thompson wrote in a Jan. 10 letter to BLM State Director Linda Rundell.

Rundell said she received the letter Thursday and welcomes cooperation between the two agencies. She said she also hoped Game and Fish would be open to collaborating with BLM when developing criteria for state lands.

"Certainly, what happens on those state lands also impacts us," she said. "The land ownership pattern is very much intermixed and intertwined, and yet it seems to be a one-way street in so far as planning is concerned."

Rundell said she was disappointed in the letter because her agency offered two years ago to pay for a Game and Fish employee to be stationed at the BLM's Farmington and Carlsbad offices to collaborate on energy development and wildlife issues. She said Thursday the offer still stands. "We would dearly love for them to take us up on that," Rundell said.

A Game and Fish spokesman, Marty Frentzel, said Thursday that the agency had not received a formal response from the BLM regarding Thompson's letter.

The letter focused on BLM's handling of requests for waivers and its accounting of the process. Thompson wrote that the criteria used to make decisions on requests "may not be adequate" and that questions were being raised about whether the decisions were consistent with a resource management plan for the Farmington area.

Rundell said the criteria for making those decisions are based on guidelines developed by a working group that included Game and Fish officials, conservationists, sportsmen's groups and industry representatives. She added that requests for waivers aren't granted if they don't fall within those guidelines.

In December, WildEarth Guardians and individuals representing hunting, conservation and business interests asked BLM to enforce winter and spring closures.

WildEarth Guardians said BLM's Farmington and Carlsbad offices had adopted protective restrictions but allowed them to be systematically violated, making them meaningless.

"They basically have tried to sweep this under the rug, and we're hoping that the Game and Fish letter will prompt the BLM to seriously look at reforming how they're going about these seasonal drilling restrictions," Nicole Rosmarino, conservation director for WildEarth Guardians, said Thursday.

Rundell said every request is evaluated by the agency's local wildlife biologist. She said the criteria are clear about which requests can be approved, and the vast number of requests that are granted are only for a day or two.

In responding to the criticism last month, Rundell wrote that development on federal lands is "the most regulated, most analyzed and provides the most opportunity for public input of any activity in New Mexico."

But Rosmarino said research by her group shows a different picture. "New drilling is being approved, new well pads are being approved, pipelines are being approved. All of those are highly impacting activities, and the BLM cannot minimize the amount of disturbance that they're allowing by saying these are low impact activities," she said.

Copyright 2008 Santa Fe New Mexican - Reprinted with permission