This weekend, the Albuquerque Journal published two letters to the editor regarding the Valles Caldera National Preserve — one in favor of continuing the current Trust management experiment at the Preserve, and one in favor of the National Park Service assuming management of the Caldera as a National Park Service Preserve. Click here to read these two letters [non-subscribers to the Journal should click “trial premium pass” in the lower left of the screen to read the letters].
Jose Cisneros of Santa Fe writes in a letter headlined “Don’t Abolish The Preserve’s Act Yet,” that the Trust should be allowed the entire 15 years originally specified in the Valles Caldera Preservation Act to attempt to achieve self-sustainability on the Preserve. Cisneros maintains that any movement to alter the management structure at the Preserve should wait until 2015:
With due respect to my colleagues in the preservation community, let me remind everyone that it is premature to abolish the Valles Caldera Preservation Act because of the act’s “controversial” mandate for financial self-sufficiency — a deadline still five years away….
Financial self-sufficiency is a novel mandate for any federal entity and is worthy of exploration given the financial crisis in the federal government. It is worth waiting to see whether the Valles Caldera Preserve trustees can achieve it in the remaining five years. In the meantime, the preserve will continue to receive its congressional appropriation.
Upon reading this letter, it is important to realize that the Valles Caldera Trust itself has explicitly given up on the hope of ever achieving financial self-sustainability under the current legislative structure governing the Preserve. For example, in a Oct. 9, 2009 letter by Valles Caldera Trust Chairman Stephen Henry to the Government Accountability Office that was printed in last month’s GAO Audit of the Trust, Henry says:
Simply stated, the Valles Caldera Trust can never achieve financial independence under this legal regime.
Henry also expressed this belief on Oct. 19, 2009, in a letter written to New Mexico’s U.S. Senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall:
[The Valles Caldera Preservation Act] is defective…the requirement that the Trust be financially self-sustaining is impossible to achieve.
Therefore, all sides in this debate — those who wish the National Park Service to administer the Caldera, as well as those who would like the Trust experiment to continue — agree that financial self-sustainability at the Preserve is not attainable.
Meanwhile, Caldera Action‘s Tom Ribe wrote a letter to the Journal in response to an article published on Nov. 6 by Phil Parker that was entitled “Caldera May Become Park.” Ribe points out that the National Park Service is studying, at the request of Senators Bingaman and Udall, the feasibility of the NPS managing the Caldera as a National Park Service Preserve, not as a National Park, as Parker’s article states:
It’s critical that people understand that nobody is proposing that the Valles Caldera become a national park, as your article stated. Our long campaign envisions that it remain a national preserve, but under new management….
The Valles Caldera is perhaps worthy of national park status but the need to provide elk management including hunting regulated by the state of New Mexico requires that the National Park Service maintain its preserve status.
For more information about how the Valles Caldera National Preserve might be operated under NPS management, click here to read a detailed examination of the 19 other national preserves managed by the National Park Service.
