VallesCaldera.com – The independent news source about the Valles Caldera

Dennis Trujillo, who has served as preserve manager of the Valles Caldera National Preserve since 2002, has been named interim executive director, according to the Valles Caldera National Preserve Board of Trustees. Mr. Trujillo will fill the vacancy created by Gary Bratcher, who recently resigned as executive director of the Preserve.

There was no word from the trustees as to whether Mr. Trujillo will enjoy the same $120,000 annual government salary that Mr. Bratcher had been paid since Dec. of 2008.

To put this salary in context, the median combined household income in New Mexico is $51,205, and in Jemez Springs, the median combined household income is $37,321, according to the Census Bureau.

We saw the following report on the “New Mexico Fan Page” on Facebook:

GOT TROUT? Here’s the latest from Valles Caldera – Largest caught last week: 20-inch brown on the San Antonio and a 13-inch rainbow on the East Fork. Best reports are on black beetles, black ants, red humpy, and hoppers. Fishing costs for San Antonio Creek or East Fork Jemez are $35/adult and $25/youth. Weekends are filling up fast, so book your spot today! Text “TROUT” to 67664 for the latest availabilities.

Exciting reports of large fish caught on New Mexico’s supervolcano would no doubt ordinarily bring happiness to the New Mexico angler. However, the reported access fees for the public to fish the Caldera largely price out most working New Mexicans. If a family of two adults and two children wanted to spend the day fishing the broad, montane-grassland valles of the Caldera, it would set the family back $120.

Compare this to the average price of a major league baseball ticket, which this season has been identified by Team Marketing Group as $26.91. If the same family wanted to buy four tickets to a major league ballgame, it would spend an average of $107.64, which is more than $12 less than the price of accessing the Jemez Mountains’ taxpayer-owned national preserve.

Access fees that price out the average New Mexican family at the Valles Caldera National Preserve and are more steep even than our corporate-controlled national pastime are one reason why the local public, pueblos, newspapers, elected officials, and other organizations — as well as the Valles Caldera National Preserve Board of Trustees itself — have overwhelmingly endorsed ditching the Trust “experiment in land management” at the Caldera and replacing it with National Park Service leadership.

In response to the above fishing report on Facebook, an apt comment was left behind by Paul McCarty, who wrote:

Pricing out the locals?

Followed by Lawrence Wade, who stated:

They were pricing out the locals long time ago. Only thing I don’t miss about home: [as] soon as something gets popular, the mystical “they” price gouge until they kill the golden goose. I deeply care about my home state. If I [didn't] I wouldn’t try to change things for the better.

Thor Sigstedt, a Santa Fe County artist and landscape photographer, wrote the following op-ed in today’s Santa Fe New Mexican, in which he advocates for an end to the Valles Caldera Trust land-management experiment:

I read today about Valles Caldera and thought I would put in my 2 cents worth, as I have thought about this place for a long time — since the late 1960s when I first went up there to gather vigas on Dome Lookout. I was just 17 or 18 years old and had just moved back to New Mexico after graduating from high school in Colorado. Although my family lived here, and I had also, off and on, I was not yet entrenched in this bioregion as I am now.

I remember vividly seeing the Valle Grande back then and passing by or cross-country skiing on the overlooking hills or just driving by and stopping to gape. That place is so amazing and so comprehensive the way it just lies there like a beautiful Southwestern-style oil painting; an enchanted and perfect valley ringed by forested hills. I thought then that it should be set aside as a state park or a national park, no doubt about it.

I subsequently went up the creek and fished there, near the lower end and camped out a night or two on what was then private land. I was in love with that place. Then a few years ago, I caught wind of the possibility that it might become part of the national park system.

“Oh, great, finally,” I thought and was very excited. And William de Buys was involved, so even better. But then the ironies began to set in. Pete Domenici was involved, beloved to many, but not me, and he was riding that wave of privatization that was spearheaded by the same people who gave us the bankrupt “trickle-down” stuff and the deregulation that has nearly ruined this country, the guys who basically privatized the Army, the prisons, the forest thinning, the firefighting, health care and the list goes on and on. Everything “for profit” is their motto.

So, I watched this with some skepticism and saw that people would have to pay through the nose to even see it, except for the one time they opened it up to the public for free and the lines went all the way back to the top of the hill and they couldn’t manage it. I could not get in, so I turned back, along with hundreds of other disappointed cars of people.

I love to fish, but the costs were too high. I hunt, but that was prohibitive and now the place was no longer a querencia, but a orchid-like resort for the ricos; not for the people. Everything was just too precious for the peasants to be a part of, like the old days of Europe where the dukes had the land and the poor were just potential poachers.

Then I read that the director was being paid $120,000 a year to manage the place. Gee whiz, what are they thinking? I know plenty of other people who felt the same, and yet nothing was done until now when the seed money is used up and the grabbers are jumping ship. It was a bad idea from the get-go; sounded interesting but no rancher can operate a ranch with a base salary of such big bucks for the foreman. And no one who had a lick of sense would hire an agribusiness honcho from a large corporation. It doesn’t work in the real world of New Mexico.

So, in my life time, we have the chance to get it right again and I might get in there finally. I feel like my neighbor who rides a beautiful old red classic Harley “panhead”; a prize-winner that he has ridden all these years, but when he went down to the Harley gathering down in Albuquerque, they wanted big bucks to enter the arena with all those weekend Harleys. He did what any real vaquero would do — he snuck in!

So maybe it won’t come to that now. Let the kids in, and their kids, and teach them not to wreck it and promote a “land ethic,” Aldo Leopold style. And, by the way, everybody knows the place is called Valle Grande, so why don’t you call it that again? I am thankful that it was bought and is now possessed by the people. Maybe we can get in there again sometime soon and hug some trees like weary travelers who kiss the Earth upon their return home.

Raymond Loretto, the chairman of the Valles Caldera Board of Trustees, announced today that Gary Bratcher will be leaving his post as executive director of the Valles Caldera National Preserve on May 31. Bratcher has served as the executive director of the Preserve since Dec. of 2008, for which he has been paid an annual salary of $120,000.

Bratcher’s departure comes in the wake of the Valles Caldera National Preserve Board of Trustees’ endorsement of legislation to transfer management of the Preserve to the National Park Service. Bratcher publicly criticized this move in the media on Friday, despite the fact that he serves at the pleasure of the Board.

Staci Matlock of the Santa Fe New Mexican reported on this story today. Read the entire story by clicking here. According to Matlock:

[Bratcher's] departure is more than a nail in the coffin of an experiment championed by former Sen. Pete Domenici, who envisioned a preserve where private revenue would reduce the need for federal funds to manage public land. Conservationists called the experiment a “failed one” a few years ago, and New Mexico’s congressional delegation joined the chorus last year.
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The trust has had a tough road managing the Valles Caldera from day one, with conflicting congressional mandates and a lot of public interest in the how the property would be managed. Environmental groups didn’t like cows as part of the preserve’s working-ranch mandate because of the potential impact on natural resources. Local livestock owners felt left out of the working-ranch picture. Recreational interests wanted to see a lot more attention put toward opening the preserve to the public, but lack of infrastructure, lack of a management plan and the expense of conducting events limited public activities. One of the preserve’s best hopes of making money with the least impact — auctioning off elk-hunting tags — was nixed by people who thought it would leave local hunters at a disadvantage.
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[Bratcher] and the trust staff increased visitation by 59 percent and revenue by more than 15 percent, according to last year’s report to Congress. Aside from science-program grants, the preserve’s highest source of revenue, with the least cost, came from hunting, which brought in $276,944 last year. Summer recreation activities brought in $52,801, but cost the preserve more than $220,000.

“He really did a lot to bring in people, help establish a temporary visitor center, a lot of things that really opened up the preserve,” Loretto said.

In a press conference Monday from Capitol Hill, U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman discussed the Valles Caldera National Preserve Management Act — legislation that would transfer management of the VCNP to the National Park Service. Click here to hear his remarks about this bill, which last week was endorsed by the Valles Caldera Board of Trustees. Bingaman’s remarks can also be read below:

Let me just start off and mention one bill that we had a hearing on last week that I hope we can move forward with in this Congress — that’s the legislation that I introduced along with Sen. Udall to transfer management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service. This is legislation that the two of us introduced in the last Congress, and were not able to get it passed — we weren’t able to pass any public land bills through the Senate in the last Congress. But we hope we can in this Congress. We had the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera Trust testifying, Dr. Raymond Loretto, testified in favor of the bill this year, and that was favorable to us, and helps our chances, I believe.

In a YouTube video to his constituents in which he reported on the legislative activities with which he was involved over the past week, U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) conveyed his appreciation to the Valles Caldera National Preserve Board of Trustees for issuing a public endorsement Wednesday of the legislation that Bingaman introduced that would replace the Valles Caldera Trust with National Park Service management. Click on the video above to watch it. Bingaman’s remarks are transcribed below:

We also had a hearing on public land issues this week, and one of the bills we considered was the Valles Caldera — the legislation that I’ve introduced along with Sen. Udall to transfer management of the Valles Caldera to the National Park Service. I was glad to see the board of the Preserve — Trust Board — which is now operating — has endorsed that idea and recognized that that will improve the ability to properly manage the property and get the resources that they need in order to see that that’s done.

Seemingly biting the hand that feeds him, the executive director of the Valles Caldera National Preserve, Gary Bratcher, was quoted in the Santa Fe New Mexican on Friday publicly criticizing the Valles Caldera Board of Trustees’ newly announced support for legislation currently in the U.S. Senate that would transfer control of the Preserve to the National Park Service. The members of the Board of Trustees serve as Bratcher’s supervisors.

According to an article entitled “Valles Caldera board supports Park Service takeover,” by Staci Matlock of the New Mexican, “Bratcher said he serves at the will of the board, but as a former executive in the private sector, he believes the Valles Caldera Trust model is still worth a try, especially in an era of shrinking federal budgets. He said last year the board proposed changes to the legislation that would have made it easier to meet the mandates. ‘I had really hoped during this amount of time we would get changes in the original act and get a good recovery in the cost for the public,’ he said. ‘Even the way the legislation is written, we were making inroads. We were improving public access and reducing the amount of public taxpayer funds needed. If this bill passes, the whole model remains unproven.’”

Bratcher also publicly called out the Board for not informing him in advance that Chairman Raymond Loretto was going to endorse a Park Service takeover in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks last week.

According to the New Mexican, “Bratcher, the trust’s executive director, said he didn’t know the board was going to support the legislation. ‘I was not advised by anyone on the board,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think that anyone on the staff was advised that this was going to be their testimony.’”

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees responded to the criticism by his employee in the New Mexican: “Loretto said that a majority of the four presidential appointees currently on the board decided to support S. 564, but didn’t vote on it until after the last public meeting held April 19. ‘We only found out we were to testify before the committee last week,’ said Loretto, a former governor of Jemez Pueblo. ‘We had to make a decision.’ Loretto said the trust staff has done a great job, but with the trust destined to dissolve in 2015 without further congressional action, ‘we need to start transitioning, regardless of which agency it goes to. It comes down to an emotional decision we had to make.’”

Closer examination of Bratcher’s assertion that the Board of Trustees had proposed changes to the Valles Caldera Preservation Act of 2000 that would have “made it easier to meet the mandates,” is appropriate. In a letter to Congress from Oct. of 2009, Bratcher, asserting that “the requirement that the Trust be financially self-sustaining is impossible to achieve,” insisted that this legislative requirement be “removed and/or modified.” In other words, instead of proposing substantive changes to the original legislation to ensure that he could help achieve the mandate of financial self-sufficiency, he simply proposed that this goal be taken away so that it wouldn’t have to be achieved at all.

Bratcher has a record of making blatantly false and misleading statements in the media during his tenure as the Preserve’s executive director. In March of 2010, he was quoted in an article in the Albuquerque Journal as stating about the Preserve, “What will you cut out if you (a federal agency) take over?” [Executive Director Gary Bratcher] asks, then answers: “Everything but hiking and camping. That’ll be it.”

Of course, this is a whopper of a lie to the taxpaying public — the legislation before Congress specifically calls for hunting, fishing, and grazing, as well as a science and education program. The editors of the Albuquerque Journal publicly lambasted Bratcher for his obviously misleading statements the next day, including his false declaration that there would be no science program if the Park Service took over the Caldera, calling them “less than convincing,” “hard to believe,” and “laughable.” According to the Journal editorial from last year:

But the preserve managers’ argument that unique educational and scientific programs will not be available if the Park Service (or the U.S. Forest Service) takes over is less than convincing.

Showing off the preserve’s new educational and scientific center in Jemez Springs recently, executive director Gary Bratcher said stargazing with big telescopes, for example, might not be allowed under some other agency’s jurisdiction. Nor, Bratcher said, might class-loads of students, which the new center can host for overnight or even weeklong stays, be able to learn science hands-on by collecting data on the preserve and analyzing it in the center’s state-of-the-art lab.

That’s hard to believe — we recall Chaco Canyon National Historic Park, as just one example, hosting a bevy of state astronomy fanatics who treated park visitors to just such a night of stargazing.
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Bratcher characterized the trust’s programs as “special,” apparently because the trust maintains strict control over access to the Valles Caldera. Agencies like the Park Service can’t do that, says Bratcher, so their programs aren’t going to be as special. Somebody should remind Bratcher that lack of public access has been the No. 1 complaint about the trust’s management of the preserve.
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Bratcher also characterized the trust management as light on its feet and flexible. That’s laughable. The trust wasn’t even flexible enough to recognize the good financial deal offered recently by a national environmental group, which would have paid many times the going rate to lease the preserve’s grazing rights for the opportunity not to run cows.

The trust certainly hasn’t been flexible enough to figure out ways to increase opportunities for public access to the hiking, skiing, camping and sightseeing crowd, either. And that’s the main reason for the public sentiment that’s fueling the crusade to turn preserve management over to someone else.

Bratcher’s misleading assertions don’t stop with his misstatements to the press. In the Preserve’s most recent annual report to Congress, Bratcher falsely proclaimed in his “Executive Director Perspective” letter that there exists “strong public support” for management of the Preserve under his direction. However, as he is well aware, evidence shows the exact opposite to be true: