In a long-awaited decision, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), on Dec. 6, announced the release of their final environmental impact statement and proposed amendments to greater sage-grouse management plans in seven Western states.
According to BLM officials, the amendments, which alter the management plans drafted for each state in 2015, seek to better align those plans with existing state plans, as well as strike a better regulatory balance.
“With today’s action, we have leaned forward to address the various states’ issues, while appropriately ensuring that we will continue to be focused on meaningfully addressing the threats to the greater sage-grouse, and making efforts to improve its habitat,” said Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernardt.
According to Public Land Council (PLC) Director Ethan Lane, despite concerted efforts prior to 2015 to construct each state’s management plan as a collaborative effort between stakeholders, the end result did not reflect those compromises.
“The 2015 plans were the result of a multi-year negotiation and compromise effort amongst all those stakeholders,” says Lane. “It did have that element of cooperation. But the final plan took a hard left turn in the 11th hour, and included a bunch of stuff that wasn’t part of the original deal.”
“You have all these added restrictions to land use,” he explains. “You have all these focal areas that were withdrawn, and then you have some language specific to grazing that was really ambiguous and confusing to field staff on the ground.”
Communication confusion
That ambiguous language, perhaps more than any other factor, led the grazing community to push back against the plans in the years following their implementation. In particular, the Habitat Objectives Table, which called for, among other things, a seven-inch grass stubble height requirement, drew the ire of ranchers who pointed out that the standards were not attainable, with or without grazing.
The BLM, for their part, agreed, at least at the highest levels, stating that the habitat objectives were goals rather than standards, and were not meant to be the basis of grazing restrictions across entire allotments. That, however, is not what was happening on the ground.
“The BLM staff that wrote the plans in D.C. kept insisting there was all this flexibility to apply these standards in a way that doesn’t arbitrarily restrict grazing,” says Lane. “Yet, whenever grazing decisions were made, they were doing exactly that.”
The problem, says Lane, turned out to be a lack of clarity for BLM managers on the ground.
“The flexibility outlined in the plans was only helpful if you had a manager on the ground who was willing to take advantage of it,” he says. “With a highly litigious environmental community waiting to sue on every decision, a lot of managers at the field office level felt bullied and responded accordingly.”
Correcting that miscommunication, says Lane, is potentially the most important change brought by the new amendments, at least for the grazing community.
“[BLM managers] need that clarity, so that when they make those grazing decisions, they don’t feel like they’re doing something that will subject them to court action,” says Lane. “They’ll still get sued, but those decisions will be a lot more defensible, because they have guidance on what they’re supposed to be doing with those objectives.”
State-level variety
Unlike many species of concern, the BLM did not create an overarching management plan for the sage-grouse at the federal level. Instead, it was handled on a state-by-state basis. This means a separate management plan, and a different set of amendments, for each affected state.
Much of the process that drove the amendments was the result of collaboration between Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and each state’s governor. Thus, while ranchers in each state are seeing improvement in their plans, not all are seeing it in equal measure. While most states saw similar reform to their habitat objective frameworks, some states are faring better than others when it comes to other portions of the amendments.
In Wyoming, for example, where the governor and other state agencies worked closely with stakeholders to develop a sage-grouse management plan, the federal amendments made significant strides in aligning the BLM with the state.
“[The amendment] gives far greater deference to the state’s sage-grouse plan,” explains Jim Magagna, executive director for the Wyoming Stockgrower’s Association. “There’s far more flexibility there than there was in the original plan.”
In addition to clarifying the habitat standard, the Wyoming amendment also reduces the mitigation requirement for impacted land and removes the contested “Sagebrush Focal Area” designation from more than 1.9 million acres of habitat.
That designation, which Lane describes as equivalent to a critical habitat designation under the Endangered Species Act, will instead be replaced by the “core habitat” and “non-core habitat” designations in use at the state level.
“The state has been flexible and has adapted those designations as new information has become available,” says Magagna. “The feds were unable to be responsive to that. “Under this amendment, they have granted themselves the flexibility to adopt the state’s core areas and make changes as the state does.”
“It’s not that it doesn’t impose some burdens on us, but we think they’re realistic ones,” he adds.
In contrast, Oregon’s governor and congressmen were openly against amending the federal plan at all. The result, says Oregon Cattlemen’s Association’s John O’Keefe, is an amendment that, while positive, may not go far enough.
“We might have made more progress if we could have been more unified with the governor’s office,” he says.
Special designations
Similar to Wyoming, portions of BLM land in Oregon carried special designation, called Research Natural Areas (RNAs). Unlike Wyoming, however, while the Oregon amendment does pledge to maintain grazing in those areas, at least for now, the designations will remain. Additionally, O’Keefe says that there are concerns with how the habitat framework was amended in that state.
“It’s become evident, with the most recent research, that fire is a much bigger threat to sage-grouse than grazing,” he says. “Grazing doesn’t really affect nest success, but it does affect the likelihood of fire, and the likelihood of a bunchgrass community rehabilitating after a fire.”
“You need herbaceous cover, but you also need to manage fine fuels,” says O’Keefe. “The way the framework is set up, it doesn’t really give you the flexibility to do that.”
“We’re trying to figure out if that’s an issue that can be addressed with memorandums, or whether we need to work through the protest process,” he adds. “That hasn’t been decided yet.”
According to Lane, stakeholders have until Jan. 7 to protest the amendments. In addition, the governor of each affected state has 60 days to review them. He indicates that he doesn’t expect any radical departures from the dialogue that has already occurred.
“At the end of the day, we weren’t asking for much,” says Lane.
“We don’t think that we are disadvantageous to creating good sage-grouse habitat. All we were looking for is the clarity in those plans to make sure that land managers on the ground had the flexibility and the backing to make good decisions, deploy grazing where it can be useful, and let us get ahead of some of these invasive weeds and the fire cycle, so we can protect the sage-grouse habitat that we have left.” — Jason Campbell, WLJ correspondent
