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

High Country News, a Colorado-based bi-weekly newspaper that “reports on the West’s natural resources, public lands, and changing communities,” published an update on the controversy surrounding the Valles Caldera National Preserve in its most recent edition. Click here to read the entire article. A portion of the article is included below:

In 2000, when the federal government shelled out $101 million to buy what’s now the Valles Caldera National Preserve, it made one thing clear: The government wouldn’t be the preserve’s cash cow forever. But nine years later, the preserve isn’t close to weaning itself off federal funding, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.

Valles Caldera started as an experiment in public lands management. The 89,000-acre ranch was purchased for preservation, but would be managed as a working ranch by a for-profit government corporation called the Valles Caldera Trust. By 2015, the feds expected the trust to be able to support itself financially, a goal the GAO now says is out of reach…

As HCN reported in 2005, the public was feeling increasingly locked out of a management process that was once inclusive and transparent. Access to the land itself was no better: “[F]ive years after the preserve’s creation, the public has unrestricted access to just two short hiking and ski trails. Hunting is tightly restricted, and even fishing access is determined by a lottery held three times a year.” Now, reports Castinado, access isn’t only controlled, it’s expensive: “You have to pay to play in the preserve or be politically connected to get in.”

Click here to read the whole article in High Country News. You can also read a response to this story by Valles Caldera National Preserve Natural Resources Coordinator Marie Rodriguez immediately following the article.

The Associated Press yesterday issued a story covering the release of the Government Accountability Office audit of the Valles Caldera Trust. Among other newspapers, the story was covered in the Denver Post. Click here to read the article from the Post in full. The first portion of the article is included below in its entirety:

A federal report says the land management experiment on New Mexico’s Valles Caldera National Preserve is plagued by managerial problems, lack of planning and legal stumbling blocks, and it’s uncertain the operation could be self-supporting by a 2015 deadline.

The report by the Government Accountability Office provides more ammunition for critics who say the public-private experiment should be ended and the remote, 89,000-acre preserve turned over to a federal agency.

The preserve, a collapsed volcano that is now a series of huge, grassy bowls ringed by mountains, was bought by the federal government nine years ago and is run by a nine-member trust.

It’s supposed to be financially self-sustaining by the end of 2015, when federal funding would dry up.

But the GAO said the trust is at least five years behind schedule. It hasn’t developed a strategic plan or monitoring systems, and has weak financial management, according to the recently released report.

Stephen Henry, chairman of the trust’s board, acknowledged in a letter to the GAO that “there is no excuse for these plans and controls to be lacking.”

Once again, click here to read this article in its entirety.

Roger G. Kennedy, a former director of the National Park Service, revealed his support for that agency to assume control over the Valles Caldera National Preserve yesterday.

He announced this in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, in response to another opinion piece in that paper earlier this week that dealt with the concept of the national park, a topic that has been receiving a great deal of media coverage recently due to the airing of the Ken Burns PBS miniseries “National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

Kennedy lauds the concept of having protected land near cities, stating that “accessible places near urban areas are, as well, examples of good land use and as re-inspirators for everyday life. That is the joy of the accessible park lands around San Francisco, Denver, New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.”

And now we need another great national park. The Valles Caldera, near the growing metropolitan areas of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M., should be a national park.

Click here to read Kennedy’s op-ed in its entirety.

The Associated Press released an article yesterday written by Deborah Baker, entitled “Valles Caldera: Failed Federal Experiment?” Read this article in the Las Cruces Sun-News by clicking here.

UPDATE 9/28: The Journal North printed this article today on the top of its front page, with a headline asking: “Valles Caldera: System Failure?” Click here to read the story in the Journal (after clicking on the prior link, non-subscribers must click on the “trial premium pass” button on the bottom left of the screen to read the story).

An excerpt of the piece follows:

This collapsed volcano in the Jemez Mountains, which erupted more than a million years ago, is the site of a federal experiment in public lands management — a failed experiment, according to critics. Even its most ardent supporters acknowledge that it needs a fix.

The preserve isn’t run by a federal agency, although the former private cattle ranch was bought with tax dollars.

Instead, it’s governed by a nine-member board — with seven, by law, being appointed by the president of the United States. It has a mixed-message mandate: protect the land and cultural resources, provide recreation, run cattle, all while making the preserve financially self-sustaining by 2015.

“It’s basically an unworkable system,” said Tom Ribe, president of Caldera Action, a watchdog group.

Valles Caldera National Preserve Executive Director Gary Bratcher also stated in the article the need for a modification of the law that governs the Valles Caldera National Preserve, asserting that “something has to change.”

Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal, as well as this month’s edition of Paonia, Colorado-based High Country News, featured an op-ed by Albuquerque resident Mike Castinado, entitled “Whose Valles Caldera Is It?”

Castinado begins his piece by referring to the Valles Caldera by its oft-repeated moniker, the Yellowstone of the Southwest:

But unlike Yellowstone, which is managed by the National Park Service, the [Valles Caldera National Preserve] has a radically different management structure. It is not managed by any federal agency; instead, it is run by a federal corporation known as the Valles Caldera Trust and its board of politically appointed trustees. Congress passed the Valles Caldera Preservation Act [of 2000] to establish the preserve and trust, and also gave it the unusual mandate that it must be operated as a working ranch and become financially self-sustaining.

Anyone who read the Preservation Act couldn’t fail to see its conflicting goals: preservation of the land, the former Baca Ranch, along with exploitation of the land in order to make a profit and sustain the trust. Many New Mexico residents like myself wondered how both goals could be achieved, but we were jubilant when at last the formerly private land became a public resource.

Nine years later, we’re a lot less jubilant. Public access is severely limited and also expensive, with $40 van tours, $35 to go fishing, $10 to hike on designated trails, and off-putting rules like no hiking midweek and fees tacked on to other activities. You have to pay to play in the preserve or be politically connected to get in. What’s more, public board meetings seem more like a sham, with directors recounting what has already been decided somewhere else, far away from public scrutiny. Executive directors also come and go with disturbing frequency — four in the last nine years.

Most of the nine board members are businesspeople with no public-land management experience. Almost without exception, all have fulltime endeavors to attend to besides the preserve. At best, a part-time board runs this national treasure.

Read this article in the High Country News (tagline: “For people who care about the West”) or in the Journal (after clicking on the prior link, non-subscribers must click on the “trial premium pass” button on the bottom left of the screen to read the story).

On Monday, the Associated Press issued a story about this summer’s cattle grazing program on the Valles Caldera National Preserve that is being conducted by New Mexico State University and the New Mexico Beef Cattle Performance Association.  This piece was carried in dozens of newspapers nationwide, including the New York Times and the Albuquerque Journal.  Click here to read the article.

According to the article, 100 Angus and Hereford bulls grazing on the Preserve this summer are the subjects of research into how to prevent high-altitude disease, which is “essentially a bovine equivalent of hypertension.”  The disease stems from the relative lack of oxygen in the air at high altitudes, and can occur to any breed and gender of cow.  Each bull’s pulmonary artery is being monitored daily at the Preserve for high pressure, and the cattle are also being monitored for weight gain.  Bulls showing symptoms of high-altitude disease are sent to lower elevations, creating a disease-resistant herd of bulls that is left over.

A Colorado State University professor was quoted in the story as stating that this disease kills three to five percent of cattle per year, a $60 million annual loss to the nation’s beef industry.

This article focused on the 100 bulls taking part in the high-altitude disease study on the Preserve, but Dr. Bob Parmenter, chief scientist of the Preserve, told VallesCaldera.com that there is a total of approximately 550-575 head of cattle on the Preserve right now, and the high-altitude disease study is only one component of the entire grazing program (the grazing contract awarded in May called for 500-1,500 animal units to be grazed on the Preserve this summer).

Parmenter also mentioned that the Preserve has been careful to keep the cattle out of the rivers of the Caldera as much as possible this summer.  “We’re keeping them out of the riparian areas, except for the time periods where they go to and from the corrals,” he said.

He added that the Preserve expects to gross $26,000 this summer on cattle grazing, and to post a $15,000 profit on the activity.

This is less than half the revenue that would have been collected by the Valles Caldera Trust had it accepted a bid from last spring by conservation group WildEarth Guardians to graze just 3-5 head of cattle on the Preserve this summer for $50,000.  The WildEarth Guardians proposal would therefore have gone further than the current grazing contract in adhering to the financial self-sufficiency mandate of the Valles Caldera Preservation Act of 2000, while also complying with the component of the legislation requiring protection and preservation of the various aspects of the Preserve, including the scenic and wildlife components, since the Preserve would only have experienced the environmental damage of grazing 3-5 head of cattle as opposed to 550-575.  However, the current program does conform to the legislative requirement that management should benefit local communities, since the Pueblo of Jemez and other local ranchers are also involved with the current grazing program.

Three op-eds on the Valles Caldera National Preserve — its management, its future, and the Valles Caldera Preservation Act — have been recently published in separate publications: the Albuquerque Journal, the Los Alamos Monitor, and Forest Magazine.

On June 21, Dave Menicucci published an op-ed in the Albuquerque Journal, entitled “No Simple Solution for Preserve.”  In this piece, Menicucci, who has written a multitude of articles on the Valles Caldera and Jemez Mountains for different newspapers, examines the issue of cattle grazing on the Preserve.  Since the Valles Caldera Preservation Act of 2000 stipulates that the Preserve must be operated as a working ranch, many infer that this means that cattle grazing must be allowed on what had been a private ranch for 140 years.  However, exactly how to implement a grazing program that satisfies the various stakeholders of the Preserve is a challenge, he writes:

The Valles Caldera National Preserve continues to swirl in the vortex of controversy. Last month the preserve’s Board of Trustees selected a grazing proposal designed to provide multiple benefits to the preserve and the community. The project’s goal is to identify the best genetic makeup to maximize cattle performance in high elevations. It held promise for broad-based public acceptance because the project is led by New Mexico State University and includes the Jemez Pueblo and the New Mexico Beef Cattle Performance Association, a local industry group dedicated to enhancing grazing productivity.

Instead, the plan has engendered strong negative reactions from two significant, but dissimilar quarters — the Northern New Mexico ranching community and environmentalists.

Menicucci examines different ideas for how (and, indeed, if) to proceed with cattle grazing on the Preserve, and concludes by noting that the Preserve, “with its alluring grassy valleys and fish-laden streams, is juxtaposed against complex and sometimes conflicting legal objectives regarding grazing. It has become a political battleground with no easy resolution in sight.”

Tom Ribe of Caldera Action published “At the Center of Controversy,” an opinion piece in the Summer 2009 edition of Forest Magazine.   The piece serves as an introduction to readers around the country about the unique legislative structure that governs the Preserve, the inherent problems that stem from it, the Preserve’s inability to approach profitability, and Caldera Action’s initiative to solve these problems by integrating the Valles Caldera into the National Park Service:

With the failure of the financial self-sufficiency requirement all but certain, conservation groups and other organizations see an urgent need to safeguard this landscape. “The legislation says the preserve will become national forest land in 2015 if financial self-sufficiency is not achieved,” says Caldera Action’s Monique Schoustra. “This is a nightmare scenario, since the national forest lands surrounding the preserve are overrun with cattle, off-road vehicles, and have minimal law enforcement. The place is special, world-class even, and needs high quality management and protection for ever-increasing numbers who want to visit.”

Caldera Action is pressing legislation that would transfer the area to the National Park Service as a preserve where hunting and fishing would be allowed and education and scientific research would be a core mission. With no champions of the trust experiment left in the New Mexico congressional delegation, Caldera Action and its allied groups feel optimistic that the National Park Service arrowhead may soon grace signs in the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Ribe also wrote an opinion piece in the Los Alamos Monitor this month, touching on the results of having a Trust run the Valles Caldera National Preserve rather than a traditional government agency:

The “trust” concept apparently was intended to have the Valles Caldera run like a business instead of an agency, but accounting problems, and the fact that public lands have set costs for complying with laws and managing public values that have no monetary value has meant that the business idea is a poor match for a piece of wild country that the public wants protected and open to its owners.

The idea that the VCNP should achieve financial self-sufficiency or even come close to it cannot be achieved without commercial developments, corporate sponsorships and high fees collected from the public owners of the preserve.

Stating that the Valles Caldera Trust hires “private consulting companies for tens of thousands of dollars to do basic things that are done in the ranger offices of any public land agency at minimal expense,” Ribe asserts that “running the VCNP as a National Park Service Preserve will cost the taxpayer less than the Trust does and we will have a fully accountable and professional agency in charge.”