‘All hell is going to break loose,’ under Dean Heller wilderness bill, aide says Republican Senator seeks to prevent future Nevada wilderness designations

Benjamin Spillman | Reno Gazette-Journal

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Republican Sen. Dean Heller is seeking to leverage one-party control of Congress and the White House with an idea for a bill that would block future wilderness designations in Nevada.

Heller, who is running for re-election and considered the most vulnerable Republican in the Senate, says he plans to introduce legislation "within weeks" that would strip protections from potentially dozens of designated wilderness study areas.

A wilderness advocate who has worked with Nevada's federal delegation on conservation legislation called Heller's idea a "radical departure" from prior, bipartisan public lands bills.

Heller chose the partisan approach because he's anticipating political blowback from conservationists and wants the legislation to move while Republicans have control of Congress and the White House, a Heller aide told the Lander County Commission during a Feb. 8 meeting.

"When Dean drops this bill, all hell is going to break loose," Heller aide Andrew Williams said, according to a transcript of the meeting.

Williams told the commission that Nye, Eureka and Elko counties were already on board and that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke pledged support and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, promised Heller a hearing.

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“That’s kind of what the push is here, is that I think Dean sees that right now we have a Republican majority in Congress. And we have an ally in the White House,” Williams said. “That if there’s any time to get this done, it’s going to be now.”

What’s a wilderness study area?

Wilderness study areas are a creation of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976.

The act ordered an inventory of Bureau of Land Management land to identify land that had "wilderness characteristics," meaning 5,000 acres or more of uninterrupted natural land with "outstanding opportunities for solitude or primitive and unconfined types of recreation."

The inventory identified about 100 areas covering more than 5 million acres in Nevada which became wilderness study areas. The law also called on the BLM to recommend whether the wilderness study areas were suitable to be designated permanent wilderness. A wilderness designation is considered the highest standard of public land protection because it prevents new roads, vehicles, structures, logging or mining.

Under federal law, only Congress has the power to convert a wilderness study area to full-fledged wilderness or "release" it back to a less-protected status that would allow mining and other disruptive uses.

In the meantime, the BLM is required to manage wilderness study areas to maintain their wilderness character.

Mineral and grazing leases that were in place prior to designation can remain in wilderness study areas and can be sold to new operators. But they’re not typically allowed to expand.

Recreation such as hiking, horseback riding, fishing, trapping, hunting and camping are generally allowed, so long as they don’t disrupt the wilderness characteristics.

Although motorized vehicle use is generally prohibited, many wilderness study areas are bounded by roads or have existing, cherry-stem roads. Those roads can remain accessible.

Since the BLM completed the wilderness inventory and made suitability recommendations in 1991, Congress has reduced the number of wilderness study areas in Nevada by about 40 percent, including the release of an estimated 450,000 acres to a less-protected status.

Much of that work has come through bipartisan public lands bills in which rural communities and conservationists negotiate boundaries with lawmakers from both parties to create legislation that converts study areas into permanent wilderness or releases it for development.

"Nevada actually has done the best job by far of any state in addressing its wilderness study areas, said Paul Spitler, director of wilderness policy for The Wilderness Society, who has worked with Democrats and Republicans in Nevada on six bipartisan lands bills. "Sen. Heller has been a part of many of those bills."

Heller describes his plan

During a phone interview, Heller said his not-yet-introduced bill would help rural Nevada communities increase economic development and public recreation access.

The bill would have two major components meant to reduce the amount of land in Nevada designated wilderness study area, which means the land meets the federal standards for wilderness but hasn't yet been designated as such by Congress.

"If it is wilderness that is fine," Heller said. "But if it is not wilderness than put it back to public use."

The first component would immediately strip the wilderness study area designation from areas the BLM in 1991 recommended be released from protected status based on a variety of reasons, including potential non-wilderness uses.

“If they are not wilderness, just make them public lands,” Heller said, which would make them available to mining and other wilderness-prohibited activity.

The second component would apply to wilderness study areas the BLM recommended as suitable for a wilderness designation.

Those areas, according to Heller, would be put on a five-year “shot clock.” If Congress doesn’t designate them as wilderness within five years, they would also be stripped of wilderness-level protection, he said.

“What I’m saying is get off the dime and make a decision,” Heller said. “That is the problem we have with BLM and these bureaucrats back there who can’t make a decision.”

The shot-clock approach, however, could result in wilderness opponents using delay tactics to strip protection from land that's already been designated as worthy of the wilderness label.

"The ramifications would be that many special places Nevadans love and are currently protected would lose that protection," Spitler said. "The existing protections from the areas would be stripped, they would just be stripped five years down the road."

Heller hasn't yet introduced the bill but it would likely cover BLM and U.S. Forest Service wilderness study areas in counties that wish to be included, although during the phone interview he referenced all 62 study areas in Nevada covering 2.5 million acres.

The letter of support from Lander County urged Heller to include not only the 2.5 million acres of wilderness study areas in Nevada, but all 12.6 million acres in the western U.S.

In addition to Lander; Elko, Mineral, Nye, Eureka and Humboldt counties issued letters or resolutions of support.

"We just don't have the full access for all the things we need," said Lander County Commissioner Patsy Waits. "Wilderness areas, they are fun to hike sometimes but we don't need that many of them."

Heller says wilderness ‘not there for public use’

While discussing the bill, Heller described it multiple times as something that would make wilderness study areas “public lands.”

Asked whether he considered designated wilderness areas public land, Heller acknowledged it’s public but added it’s not available for public use.

“Sure, it is public lands, but it is not there for public use,” Heller said before turning the question around.

“Do you know anything about wilderness,” he asked, adding, “Then you tell me, do you have use? In a wilderness area can you open up a mine?”

He also asked if people can drive vehicles, run cattle or conduct fire protection projects.

Heller also said wilderness designations prevent people over 60-years-old from accessing public land.

“What in essence it restricts is anybody over 60 years of age has no access to it, because they can’t walk into it,” he said. “So, what we’re trying to say is make it public use. Allow there to be the ability for somebody over the age of 60 to actually enjoy the property.”

Wilderness advocate says Heller ‘bizarrely misinformed’

Nevada’s wilderness advocates fired back at Heller’s descriptions of wilderness study areas and people who use them.

Shaaron Netherton, executive director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness, said several of Heller’s statements were misleading or just incorrect.

Netherton said it is incorrect to suggest wilderness precludes or applies severe restrictions to livestock grazing, for example.

“He is so bizarrely misinformed,” Netherton said. “The Wilderness Act specifically says ‘grazing shall continue,’ not ‘will’ but ‘shall,’ which is the strongest thing they ever put in legislation.”

Netherton also pointed out management decisions that support firefighting in wilderness and that when wilderness boundaries are negotiated they often drawn around existing roads.

She also said Heller was wrong when he said a wilderness designation prevents people over 60-years-old from accessing the land.

“I’m 62, I go in wilderness all the time, I don’t feel like it slows me down,” Netherton said. “People drive on roads. You get out, you walk a little bit and get back in your vehicle.”

While Netherton criticized Heller’s assessment of the facts, others took aim at the senator’s partisan approach to an issue Nevadans once handled through consensus.

Spitler said the plan Heller’s aide described in Lander County represented a “radical departure” from a system wilderness advocates and policymakers refer to as the “Nevada model” for public lands bills.

It’s an approach that developed in the decades since the early 1980s, as Nevada reduced the number of wilderness study areas from about 100 to about 62.

Congress designated some of the land wilderness and declared that other land should be available for development, mining or other activity prohibited in wilderness.

“Nevada actually has done the best job by far of any state in addressing its wilderness study areas,” Spitler said.

The key to the Nevada model, Spitler said, is an approach that builds consensus between local development interests and conservationists.

He said Heller’s latest effort defies the consensus approach.

“I think you could fairly call it a radical departure,” Spitler said. “It boggles the mind to understand why you would abandon a successful approach and adopt a failed approach.”

Spitler said it’s especially surprising considering Heller, a Congressman from 2007-11 before becoming a senator, supported consensus-based bills in the past.

When asked directly whether he agreed with his aide’s statement that the bill requires one-party control of Congress and the White House to gain approval, Heller gave an indirect answer.

“I don’t have an answer to that particular question,” Heller said. “But I would argue that I probably feel stronger about this and about this issue than my counterparts do on the other side. I feel strongly that rural Nevada has a right to use public land, that Nevadans have a right to their public lands for public use and extraordinary restrictions simply aren’t in the best interest of most Nevadans in rural Nevada.”