Final Rock Springs plan seeks development, wildlife balance — Wyoming leaders still unhappy

A year after a conservation-heavy draft management plan for 3.6 million acres of public land in southwest Wyoming ignited intense opposition, the Bureau of Land Management has issued a finalized plan seeking more of a balance between landscape protection and development. 

The final environmental impact statement outlining BLM’s proposed Resource Management Plan for the Rock Springs Field Office was released Thursday. The plan blends all four previous “alternatives” in an apparent effort to placate the public and cooperating agencies that protested the plan a year ago — though Wyoming officials are already saying the plan does too much to protect the environment at the expense of the state’s economy.

The Rock Springs Resource Management Plan has not been updated since 1997, though there have been years of effort at completing a revision. The final plan deviates from the draft plan significantly. Some of the most notable changes include: 

• Areas of Critical Environmental Concern were reduced from 1.6 million acres to 935,000 acres. (Currently there are 226,000 acres of ACECs in the field office.)
• Closures to fluid mineral extraction have been roughly lopped in half. In draft plans, 2.19 million acres were proposed to be off-limits to drilling, but the final plans would close 1.08 million acres — leaving 70% available for development. 
• With mule deer and pronghorn migrations, the BLM went from complete protection of designated routes to management “in a manner consistent” with the state of Wyoming’s migration policy. Because of the state policy’s permissiveness for development, that means a significant reduction in protections for migrating wildlife. Oil and gas leasing would be allowed in corridors as long as there’s an “acceptable conservation plan.” 
• Curtailment of livestock grazing, currently permitted on 99.97% of the Rock Springs Field Office is smaller than in the initial proposal. The draft called for making 8,572 acres (0.2% of the field office) unavailable for grazing, but the final plan reduces that to 2,114 acres (0.005%). 

Opposition to BLM’s final plans materialized within minutes.

Gov. Mark Gordon issued a statement saying, “unfortunately, but not surprisingly” the final plan “does not meet Wyoming’s expectations of durable, multiple use of public lands.” 

“A cursory review makes it clear where the BLM considered local and cooperative input, and where the agency chose to force through national agendas,” the governor stated. “It is important to compare this document to the current status on the ground, and not by how much it has shifted away from the BLM’s worst-case scenario.”

Rhetoric flies

After a misinformation-fueled backlash mounted in response to the draft RMP, the governor assembled a taskforce to provide additional guidance to the federal agency. The task force, Gordon’s statement said, “helped claw” the BLM plan away from the “absolutely unworkable” proposal outlined in the draft.

Still, Gordon pledged to file a protest — the ordinary process BLM utilizes to create changes before it issues a record of decision. A 30-day protest period starts Friday, the day the notice of availability for the BLM’s final EIS publishes in the Federal Register. 

Wyoming’s congressional delegation issued statements rebuking the proposed RMP with more bombast. U.S. Sen. John Barrasso argued it “strangles responsible natural resource development,” while U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis called it a “land grab” that “will deliver a seismic blow to Wyoming’s economy.” 

Meantime, some environmental groups with a presence in Wyoming supported the final plan with more vigor than they did the draft a year ago. 

Josh Coursey, who leads the Muley Fanatic Foundation, was a member of the task force Gordon appointed to develop final recommendations for the BLM. He praised the final proposal.

“BLM’s proposed plan is not only critical for sustaining the long-term health of sensitive fish and wildlife habitat in southwestern Wyoming, it also honors the wishes of the Greater Little Mountain Coalition and Governor Gordon’s Rock Springs task force,” Coursey said in a statement. “The RMP brings much-needed updates to the current plan, which is sorely outdated, and is a critical step to ensuring that the right combination of multiple uses, including hunting and fishing, grazing, wildlife conservation and responsible energy development, are prioritized for years to come.”

Along with guiding grazing, wildlife management and energy development, the final plan will have a bearing on recreation throughout the enormous acreage, which includes the prized hunting grounds of the Greater Little Mountain Area, the badlands of Adobe Town and the popular play areas of Killpecker Dunes in the Red Desert. Land users hunt for rocks, snowmobile, camp and hike on the lands. Indigenous residents visit sacred sites.

Special designations 

The controversial conservation-heavy draft plan would have eliminated all existing special recreation management area designations, which provide specific recreation opportunities such as trailhead areas for hikers or off-road vehicle users. The areas would not have closed, but the agency would no longer prioritize developed recreation if the designations were discontinued. 

The final proposal reinstates five of those recreation areas, including a smaller version of the Wind River Front as well as the Continental Divide Scenic Trail, Continental Divide Snowmobile Trail, Killpecker Sand Dunes and Little Mountain areas. 

Another special designation in the draft plan that came under fire was Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, which are used to protect important historic, cultural and scenic values. Some 286,000 acres of the 3.5-million-acre region are now designated as ACECs, but in the draft EIS the proposal swelled to 1.6 million acres. That expansion outraged industry proponents.

The final proposal shaves the acreage down to 935,000. Its ACECs include 10 already existing ones like White Mountain Petroglyphs, Oregon Buttes and Steamboat Mountain, as well as two new ones: Pinnacles and Big Sandy Openings. 

That outcome appears unacceptable for critics like Gordon, who noted in his statement that “one quarter of the Field Office remains slated for area of critical environmental concern (ACEC) designation.”

In contrast, increased ACEC acres surviving in the final plan was a bright spot for The Wilderness Society. The proposed RMP “will help safeguard world-renowned wildlife habitats in the Northern Red Desert and Big Sandy Foothills, plus important cultural areas and hunting, fishing and OHV access,” Wyoming state director Julia Stuble said in a statement. 

The final RMP, however, does not include changes for wilderness study areas, which are places potentially eligible for Wilderness Act designation that are managed to preserve their wilderness qualities. There are currently 228,000 acres in 13 areas under that designation in the field office area. The final plan retains the status quo. 

Recreation 

The BLM’s final proposal retains outdoor recreation opportunities in the Rock Springs Field Office. They include: 

• Existing campgrounds would continue to be open and maintained.
• Dispersed camping would still be allowed.
• Recreational activities such as hunting, fishing and backpacking would still be allowed.
• Motorized vehicles would be allowed on established roads and trails including in the Killpecker Sand Dunes open play area.
• There are no restrictions to activities such as snowmobiling or hiking proposed for the Continental Divide Snowmobile Trail. Trail extensions like loops can be added to the snowmobile track.

The conservation-heavy draft plan, in contrast, would have prohibited recreation projects near Sweetwater Campgrounds, Boars Tusk, Leucite Hills and the Continental Divide Snowmobile Trail. Dirt bike and ATV rallies, cross-country races and other organized events also would have been banned. The final plan allows permits for those types of events on a case-by-case basis. 

The final Rock Springs RMP proposes half-mile protective buffers around Native American petroglyphs to protect cultural and historical values. Additionally, it closes all known human burial sites — Indigenous sites and otherwise — to surface-disturbing activities. The plans also mandate consultation with tribal leaders whenever an activity is proposed within 3 miles of a sacred or traditional cultural area. 

Energy 

Like Wyoming elected officials, energy industry representatives — particularly oil and gas — were especially critical of the draft proposal to close federal rights-of-way on nearly 2.5 million acres. In essence, the closures would have prevented industries from building roads, power lines and pipelines to service gas fields or mines, with the intention of “less development overall,” a BLM spokesman told WyoFile last year.

BLM’s final plan reduces the rights-of-way exclusion zone to 1.1 million acres — a 56% cut.

That’s “still excessive,” Western Energy Alliance President Kathleen Sgamma said in a prepared statement. “When we put our regional lens on, this plan — along with plans from other western states — we see the Biden/Harris administration using the BLM land-use planning process to all but enact a leasing and fracking ban by other means.”

Lander-based conservation group Wyoming Outdoor Council considered the BLM’s larger rights-of-way exclusion zone in last year’s draft proposal to be practical, suggesting the agency was simply removing “marginal” energy development areas, including for wind, solar and geothermal energy.

Outdoor Council Program Director Alec Underwood noted that much of the area removed from the draft exclusion zone is in the “checkerboard” area, where there’s already long-established rights-of-way along the Interstate 80 corridor.

“It seems appropriate, given the proximity to existing development,” Underwood told WyoFile. 

Maintaining that area for potential new rights-of-way was a consensus-based recommendation for compromise proposed by Gordon’s task force, he added.

“Our organization was mostly interested in seeing protections for rights-of-way exclusion in the northern part of the field office where it makes a lot of sense, and they matter given the areas of undeveloped lands and the significance of some of the wildlife habitat in those areas.”

Today, nearly half of the 3.6-million acres of federal land is already leased for energy development. Those legal rights to develop are not affected by the rights-of-way exclusion zone, which means they’re not put into jeopardy by BLM’s final resource management plan, whatever is chosen. 

Both conservation advocates and energy industry officials described the BLM’s preferred action plan as a compromise that takes into account multi-stakeholder input — although neither said they got all they wanted.

“This is what responsible planning looks like,” Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Rachael Hamby told WyoFile. “In any situation where the BLM or any management agency is trying to balance so many different uses and resources and values, no one’s going to get everything that they want.”

Wildlife migration 

As expected, the final Rock Springs RMP proposes fewer stout safeguards for ungulate migration. In June, BLM-Wyoming director Andrew Archuleta signaled that his agency was stepping back from outright preservation of corridors used by pronghorn and mule deer traveling to and from their seasonal ranges. 

BLM’s draft plans proposed an ACEC that would allow no surface disturbance whatsoever inside the migration corridor that mule deer traverse from the Red Desert to the Hoback River basin — and well beyond. 

In contrast, the final plan explicitly calls for allowing drilling in designated migration corridors as long as the BLM and drilling companies agree to an “acceptable conservation plan for avoidance, minimization, rectification and/or restoration.” 

The final Rock Springs RMP states BLM will consult with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department about those conservation plans, which are intended to ensure drilling activities don’t displace deer or diminish their populations. 

Advocacy groups had mixed reactions to the changes in migration policy. 

“While the plan could be improved — protections for the iconic big game migration corridors in the region, for example, fall short of the mark — we appreciate that the agency worked diligently to ensure that updated management direction will conserve some of our country’s best remaining wildlife habitat,” the Outdoor Council’s Underwood said in a statement. 

Stuble, with The Wilderness Society, took issue with several aspects of BLM’s proposed protections of migration corridors, which mirrors Wyoming’s permissive approach. She dislikes how the policy only applies to mule deer and pronghorn, leaving out elk, and how it allows for disturbance in crucial habitats like “stopover” areas, she said.

“Number two, [Wyoming’s] designation process is not only lengthy, but fairly politicized,” she told WyoFile. “There could be future big game migration corridors for mule deer or pronghorn that don’t reach designation, but still require decent management to maintain functionality. They would be excluded by this [final plan].” 

The Wyoming Wildlife Federation is taking a different stance. 

“We’re overall happy that BLM is following the state’s lead on migration corridor management in the RMP,” said Nat Patterson, the nonprofit’s policy coordinator. 

Employees of the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming office were unavailable for an interview Tuesday before this story published. The proposed RMP has been posted online at BLM’s National NEPA Register. It’s also available for review below.