Rain has finally returned to northern New Mexico allowing trees, plants and wildlife to finally have lifesaving water. The Valles Caldera has been dry due to a winter with greatly diminished snowfall. Snowmelt is critical to replenishing groundwater which feeds springs and streams. Hopefully the monsoons will strengthen over the summer to make up for the water deficit. In the meantime, visit the Caldera as it is beautiful, mild and green. Ride a bike or hike or drive your car to the backcountry. This place is wonderful world-class scenery, and it is right in our back yard.
Cows, Fences and Political Pressure
As many readers know, Caldera Action has joined two West-wide organizations to bring legal challenges to the US Forest Service’s management of land bordering the Valles Caldera National Preserve. For more than 16 years, some cattle from national forest allotments have been trespassing into the VCNP and the National Park Service has gone to great lengths to protect wildlife and streams from cattle damage.
Caldera Action and our organizational partners are pressuring the US Forest Service to keep cattle out of the Preserve. We are concerned that cattle are damaging Caldera streams, polluting water and grazing down vegetation critical to endangered species. Our focus is keeping cattle on the Forest Service side of the fence where ranchers have the privilege of grazing on public lands.
The plot has thickened lately. Because of our litigation, the US Forest Service and the National Park Service entered negotiations about how to maintain the fence on the north side of the Preserve which has federal lands on both sides. The two agencies were close to finalizing a memorandum of understanding regarding fence maintenance when the Donald Trump administration intervened and threw the agreement into chaos.
We know from documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that the Trump administration set up a meeting between ranchers and the two agency officials in Los Alamos last March 16. At that meeting, which only ranchers and agency staff attended, and which had no public notice, the ranchers told the agencies how to rewrite their fence maintenance agreement to make it more friendly to the rancher’s concerns. It appears that the fence maintenance agreement may have been rewritten by the ranchers, which raises numerous legal issues. Local agency staff participated in this meeting with varying degrees of willingness due to political pressure from Washington to be kindly to the ranchers.
A woman named Karen Budd Falen who is a rancher from the northern Rockies and a leader in the anti-public lands movement, was appointed by Donald Trump as Associate Deputy Secretary of the Interior. In this job she has power over Interior Department actions, including those related to our national parks. She was contacted by a local rancher named Tom Patterson who is the president of New Mexico Cattle Growers Association and a retired Texas lawyer. He apparently expressed concern to Budd Falen on behalf of Jemez Mountain ranchers who may feel that keeping their cattle out of the Caldera is somehow damaging their business operations. In turn Budd Falen contacted National Park Service Regional Director Herbert C. Frost to ask him to get involved in the fence negotiations.
We know that local National Park Service officials have been under pressure to manage the trespass cattle and the fence in ways that the ranchers would prefer. Right now, the NPS at the Caldera is rounding up trespass cattle, penning them, and requiring the ranchers to retrieve them with truck and trailer, an expensive and time-consuming effort. The ranchers would like to be able to push the cattle on horseback across the northern fence as they did for years when there were hundreds of trespass cattle in the Caldera almost continuously all summer. They are asking for other accommodations to make grazing their cattle (illegally) in the Preserve easier.
The plot thickens further. As part of our litigation, we asked the Forest Service for copies of “biological opinions” regarding the status of endangered species on National Forest lands directly north of the Valles Caldera. These are documents that agencies prepare to address threatened and endangered species within their jurisdictions. The Forest Service never provided the biological opinions until we discovered newly written BiOps through our litigation work.
The biological opinions we found are newly written and are a study in denial and obfuscation. They ignore scientific monitoring of grazing impacts and basically announce that the Forest Service won’t be monitoring endangered species habitat going forward. This is all a dream come true for the ranchers, and it is consistent with the Trump administration’s emphasis on greatly increasing livestock grazing on public lands while gutting the endangered species act.
Note that we are talking about Forest Service land next to the Caldera. The National Park Service at the Caldera has its own program to monitor for endangered species and it has barred grazing from most of the Preserve to comply with the National Park Service Organic Act which emphasizes wildlife protection among other values.
To read our Press Release about the Forest Service problem, click here.
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