Visitors line the highway, most peering through binoculars, as they strain to get a better look at dozens of brown specks in the distance.

The specks — members of Valles Caldera National Preserve’s infamous elk herd — are munching in green pastures that stretch for miles. They are surrounded by mountain peaks blanketed with ponderosa pine, spruce and fir trees.

The expansive preserve is a sight to behold, but caretakers say Valles Caldera’s forests, grasslands and wetlands are not as healthy as they look. Nearly a decade of research has provided them with statistics to say so, and now they have developed a 10-year plan to get the preserve back into shape by using everything from prescribed fire and thinning to weed control and wetland restoration.

ORIGINAL POST: The Valles Caldera Trust has debuted a new section of its web site designed to educate the public regarding its “10-year strategy for the restoration and management of the forest, grassland, shrubland, and riparian ecosystems” on the Valles Caldera National Preserve, and to take public input regarding this plan.

Click here to visit the new section of the Trust’s official government web site.

While replete with information and supporting documents, the web site does lack some particulars. Namely, it does not mention how the proposed strategy would change if the Valles Caldera National Preserve Management Act, legislation that would transfer management of the Preserve to the National Park Service, is passed by Congress. This bill has been unanimously approved by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and is now up for consideration by the full Senate. In fact, the National Park Service is not mentioned at all on the site. The document also mentions enhancing objectives of surrounding National Forest lands, but fails to discuss how to enhance objectives of the forests of the National Park Service’s Bandelier National Monument, which shares a boundary with the Preserve.

The Associated Press ran a story about the new section of the Preserve’s web site:

The web page includes documents, maps and other links related to the proposed 10-year strategy for restoring and managing the forests, grasslands and riparian ecosystems on the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Trust officials say restoration and management of the preserve’s resources is at the heart of their stewardship responsibilities and will be 1 of the most important planning efforts undertaken by the trust.

The plan will guide decisions on forest thinning, prescribed fire, wetland restoration, travel management and noxious weed control, among other things.

Comments will be accepted through Sept. 29.

UPDATE: Sept. 3: Marie Rodriguez, the Natural Resources Coordinator of the Valles Caldera National Preserve, sent the following email to VallesCaldera.com today in response to the above post:

In your posting regarding the proposed Landscape Restoration & Management Plan you noted that we had provided no information about how the possible transfer of the Preserve to the National Park Service would affect this plan.

We simply cannot provide any official statement of certainty as to how a transfer would affect the proposed restoration.

However, the Bill that was actually voted on in committee (your link is to the Bill as introduced, not as voted on) states, “The Secretary shall undertake activities to improve the health of forest, grassland, and riparian areas within the Preserve, including any activities carried out in accordance with title IV of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of
2009 (16 U.S.C. 7301 et seq.)”

Further, it allows the Secretary to continue activities and programs developed by the Trust until planning is completed in compliance with Interior regulations.

One administrative issue is funding. The funding awarded under title IV can only be expended on National Forest System land. Should the transfer occur the current funding would no longer be availble for expenditure on the Preserve. However, we would be optimistic that the Secretary would support the collaboration and commitments made by all stakeholders.

In policies and documents such as the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and the New Mexico Restoration Principles, federal land managers recognize that the management of ecosystems including habitats and disturbance must be considered across administrative boundaries.

The goals and objectives of the proposed plan are completely consistent with the current and proposed legislation that guides (or would guide) the management of the Preserve.

Hope this helps!

Sincerely,

Marie Rodriguez
Valles Caldera Trust
Natural Resource Coordinator

Two important outdoor bills took major steps forward last week, raising the possibility they will be eligible for an omnibus lands bill this fall. Assuming of course an omnibus lands bill is assembled.
…
The Senate Energy Committee, which usually assembles the ingredients for an omnibus measure, has not yet begun to put together a new omnibus, but that doesn’t mean one will not be prepared. The ultimate call will be made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

Obvious candidates for the omnibus are a bill to transfer the Valles Caldera area in New Mexico to the Park Service, as well as measures to designate wilderness and trails in central Idaho, to extend a popular federal land sales bill, to designate a national park in Delaware (the state has none now), designate a handful of national heritage areas, and much more.

The Valles Caldera National Preserve Management Act was introduced in the Senate on May 27. Hearings on the bill in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee were held on June 30.

Mr. DeBuys, among whose books is Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico’s National Preserve, wrote this piece in response to this week’s editorial written by Courtney White that was titled “A Step Backward: the Valles Caldera National Park.”  Mr. White’s piece argues against the legislation and questions whether the late Stewart Udall, who served as Secretary of the Interior under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (and is the father of Sen. Tom Udall), would have supported the bill that his son co-sponsored.  Click here to read Mr. DeBuys’ piece.

Mr. DeBuys includes some compelling insight, revealing that he visited with Stewart Udall a month before his death in March, and according to Mr. DeBuys, Mr. Udall “expressed deep satisfaction that introduction of the bill was imminent.”

Below is a portion of the editorial, headlined “Valles Caldera: What Would Stewart Udall Think?”

Courtney White has my sympathy. He regrets that the land management “experiment” of the Valles Caldera Trust should be abandoned. I share his regret, but not his conclusion. It is time for all of us to face facts and not entangle the fate of a peerless natural landscape in dreamy notions about “new approaches.” The caldera has been the subject of a new approach for nearly a decade. It hasn’t worked.
…
Lamentably, the complex and conflicted mission with which the Trust was charged has produced paralysis, not synthesis, and the public is understandably frustrated by the conspicuous lack of both progress and access at the preserve.

The trust would have better served its fortunes in recent years by focusing its energies on building a broad public constituency; ultimately, its failure is not that it cannot be self-sufficient in dollars, but that the people it should be serving have failed to care sufficiently about it. As a result, the enormous reservoir of public goodwill with which the Trust started its journey has largely been consumed. Let’s move on.

Mr. White’s assertion that the “national park idea… is not well-suited for the onrushing, global challenges of the 21st century” is nonsense, and it is offensive that he should utter this foolishness in reference to Stewart Udall. If Stewart were still alive, he would be the first to say that the national park idea has proved adaptable and enduring, not least in lands beyond the borders of the United States where the defense of the natural world is led by citizens with sharper vision than Mr. White’s. The national park idea continues to represent one of the best strategies yet devised for protecting the environmental commons against the relentless push to privatize and exploit the earth’s goods.

Making the Valles Caldera National Preserve a unit of the National Park System will assure the protection and effective stewardship of an extraordinary place. New Mexico Senators Bingaman and Udall are demonstrating realism and leadership in championing the necessary legislation. Their bill would permit continued grazing and hunting on the preserve, and it also calls for continuation of the preserve’s science and education program, one of the signal achievements of the Trust’s early years. When I last saw Stewart Udall, about a month before he passed away, he expressed deep satisfaction that introduction of the bill was imminent.

The first, in favor of keeping the current management structure at the Preserve and entitled “A step back for Valles Caldera,” was written by Santa Fe resident and 2007 Caldera cattle grazer Courtney White. Mr. White is founder of the Quivira Coalition, whose goal is to “build bridges among ranchers, conservationists, scientists and public land managers around concepts of progressive cattle management, innovative stewardship and improved land health.”

The second, entitled “Valles Caldera Bill a Step Forward,” which favors the legislation, was penned by Roger G. Kennedy, who served as director of the National Park Service in the 1990s.

Mr. White’s piece, which you can read by clicking here, was published in the Santa Fe New Mexican, as well as on the New West website. The conclusion of his piece is quoted below:

I know that the implementation of the preserve’s mission has been a rocky road so far. I have first-hand knowledge because I was part of the team that grazed the preserve with livestock in 2007. The preserve is nowhere near financial self-sufficiency yet. But is the answer to these problems abandonment of the vision?

The bill introduced by Sens. Udall and Bingaman replaces the original act entirely and eliminates the trust. It also eliminates the vision. While it allows livestock grazing and hunting to continue on the preserve, the bill uses the words “may allow,” meaning they’ll take place at the discretion of the secretary of the interior. And because hunting and livestock grazing are generally inimical to the mission of the Park Service, “may allow” will likely become “won’t allow” eventually.

I believe the transference of the Valles Caldera to the National Park Service is a step backward. That’s because the national park idea, whose roots extend back to the 19th century, is not well-suited for the onrushing, global challenges of the 21st century. In contrast, the Valles Caldera National Preserve, under its current mandate, has the potential to keep testing an innovative model that addresses pressing problems. For this reason, I think the experiment should run for a while longer.

It is important to note that while Mr. White is correct that the legislation states that the Park Service “may allow” cattle grazing, it mandates that the NPS “shall permit” hunting, a much more forceful endorsement of the latter activity.

Former Park Service director Kennedy’s responding editorial, which was also published on the New West website, can be read by clicking here. Mr. Kennedy’s article concludes as such below:

Courtney White, who wrote in opposition to the bill last week on New West, may consider the Caldera Trust an “audacious and visionary experiment” – but it was a stopgap—the best we – including Stewart Udall—could get. Stewart’s enthusiasm for the park concept never wavered, maybe because he, unlike Mr. White, understood what is and isn’t “inimical” to the mission of the National Park Service”: ranching is done on National Park land, rarely and carefully, as it can be done in the Caldera. The national parks aren’t all big remote western places – its mission since the New Deal has also been to serve urban populations – and New Mexico is urbanizing fast.

Mr. White asserts that “the national park idea, whose roots extend back to the 19th century, is not well-suited the [sic] onrushing, global challenges of the 21st century.” Wrong. That idea is about protecting special places for learning – and since the 20th century about places as accessible to cities as possible. Northern New Mexico is becoming like Colorado, where in the Front Range megalopolis Rocky Mountain National Park is Central Park — as the Santa Monicas are to Los Angeles. Nostalgia for cattle ranches is not a substitute for recognition of the need for nature close at hand – or for places where we can learn about each other and about nature.

Mr. White asserts that “the reason public land existed in the first place [was] to protect it from the profit motive.” No –our federal public lands were assembled in 1789. The public realm preceded the private, not the other way around. As for the “national park idea” – it isn’t a 19th century invention. It too goes back to George Washington, who insisted that the District of Columbia include open space and preserved wildness – that is why there is old growth in Rock Creek National Park. As for “challenges” – ours are severe, and so were Abraham Lincoln’s. He had a civil war to fight, but he coupled the Homestead Act, for purposeful privatization, with the encouragement of purposeful public protection of Yosemite. Challenges? President Franklin Roosevelt created the modern, comprehensive National Park System in the darkest days of the Depression – a System that almost included the Valles Caldera.

The Udall-Bingaman Bill accords with Stewart Udall’s aspirations for the Caldera, and with Theodore Roosevelt’s hopes for protection of American antiquity through the Antiquities Act of 1906. These traditions – of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries – are worthy of respect, as is the “noble experiment” in self-government that even in difficult times, does its duty to the land, and to the needs of our people.

UPDATE 5/31: This bill has been read on the Senate floor and referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (which Sen. Bingaman chairs). Read this legislation by clicking here.  The bill (the “Valles Caldera National Preserve Management Act,” S.3452), additionally specifies the following:

• Hunting and fishing will be permitted
• Grazing “may” be allowed “in areas of the Preserve in which grazing was permitted during the grazing season preceding the date of enactment of this act, and to the extent that the use furthers scientific research or interpretation of the ranching history of the preserve”
• Immediately upon passage the Secretary of the Interior will have sole management responsibility of the preserve.  Within 180 days of passage, the Valles Caldera Trust will be terminated, at which time the Valles Caldera Preservation Act of 2000 will also be repealed (but this 180 period can be extended if the Secretary of Agriculture “determines that the termination date should be extended to facilitate the transitional management of the preserve”)
• The NPS will, to the maximum extent practicable, coordinate preserve operations with those of Bandelier National Monument
• A comprehensive management plan (which was never prepared by the Trust) will be produced within three years
• The feasibility of creating a Caldera Rim Trail (inside the boundaries of both the preserve and Santa Fe National Forest) will be studied within three years of passage
• The preserve’s universally-acclaimed science and education program will be continued until the aforementioned management plan is prepared, at which time the NPS will establish a new science and education program
• The NPS may establish a science and education facility outside of the boundaries of the preserve (enabling the continuation of the VCNP’s new science and education center)
• All volcanic domes above 9,250 feet will be protected from the construction of roads and facilities, and they will also be protected from motorized access
• The NPS will ensure the protection of traditional and cultural sites in the preserve (as well as access to these sites by pueblo members) and may “temporarily close to general public use one or more specific areas of the preserve to protect traditional cultural and customary uses”
• The boundaries of the Santa Fe National Forest will be modified to exclude the preserve
• All Trust employees will be retained for at least 180 days after the passage of this legislation, at which time the NPS may hire them on a noncompetitive basis for comparable positions at the Valles Caldera or elsewhere in the NPS or Forest Service in New Mexico

Below is the joint press release issued by Bingaman and Udall (which you can also read by clicking here):

U.S. Senators Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall today introduced legislation to transfer the management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve to the National Park Service.

The bill follows on a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) mandated by the Valles Caldera Preservation Act of 2000 and a feasibility study from the National Park Service requested by the two senators.

The GAO reports that the Preserve is at least five years behind schedule in the development of an effective management control system and that the requirement to achieve financial self-sustainability by 2015 is the Trust’s biggest challenge and will be difficult to achieve. It also notes that the revenue enhancement study commissioned by the Trust estimated the need for at least $21 million for infrastructure improvements to support greater public access.

The National Park Service study, which was requested by Bingaman and Udall, determines the Valles Caldera meets the high criteria for inclusion in the National Park System as a National Preserve. In particular, the report highlighted the nationally significant geologic resources found in the area.

The Senators’ bill directs the Park Service to take over management in a way that protects the Preserve’s natural and cultural resources. Hunting, fishing, and cattle grazing would be permitted under the bill. Additionally, the measure strengthens protections for tribal cultural and religious sites and ensures access by pueblos to the area.

“The Valles Caldera is not only one of the most stunning places in New Mexico, it’s one of the most beautiful places in our country. That is why I worked so hard to bring it into public ownership,” Bingaman said. “I believe it is the perfect candidate for the National Park System.”

“For centuries the Valles Caldera has stood out as the icon of the Jemez Mountains,” said Udall. “As one of the largest volcanic calderas in the world, the vast grass-filled valleys, forested hillsides, and numerous volcanic peaks make the Valles Caldera a treasure to New Mexico, and a landscape of national significance millions of years in the making. It is clearly worthy of National Park Service status.”

The first calls to bring the Valles Caldera into the National Park System were in 1899. In four separate studies throughout the next century the Park Service found that the area was suitable for protective status under its management. But it wasn’t until 2000 that Bingaman, former Senator Pete Domenici and then-Representative Udall were successful in acquiring the property for $100 million. The law also established an experimental management framework where a Board of Trustees would manage the Preserve as a working ranch with public access, with the goal of becoming financially self-sustaining by 2015.

“Although the Valles Caldera Trust has done its best to fulfill the original legislative directives, time has shown in my opinion that this management framework is not the best suited for the long-term management of the Preserve,” Bingaman said. “I believe that the desire for increased public access balanced with the need to protect and interpret the Preserve’s unique cultural and natural resources would be best served by the National Park Service.”

“As Senator Bingaman and I take steps today to begin a transition of the Valles Caldera into the National Park System, I want to applaud the decade of work that the Board of Trustees, the Valles Caldera Trust and the preserve employees have invested in this unmatched natural resource,” said Udall. “As we look to the future, we do so with respect to the longstanding grazing, educational, and once-in-a-lifetime hunting opportunities that are cherished and valued by so many New Mexicans. By utilizing the resources and skills within the National Park Service, the Valles Caldera National Preserve will continue to prosper as a natural wonder full of significant geology, ecology, history and culture.”

The measure will be sent to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Bingaman chairs. A hearing could be scheduled as soon as next month.

News of the introduction of this legislation has already been covered widely by the media. Click below to read the media’s coverage:

Associated Press (covered here by KRQE-TV): “Valles Caldera may move to Park Service; Bill introduced Thursday”

Santa Fe New Mexican: “Local news in brief May 28, 2010; Valles Caldera transfer bill introduced”

Albuquerque Journal: “Bill Would Move Valles Caldera to Park Service; Management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve would be transferred”

New Mexico Independent: “U.S. Park Service may take over Valles Caldera preserve”

Los Alamos Monitor: “Bingaman and Udall introduce bills; Legislation would transfer Valles Caldera management to the National Park Service”

Click here to read National Geographic’s profile of the scenic crown jewel of New Mexico. A portion of the feature is shown below:

Home to New Mexico’s largest elk herd, the ranch sits inside an ancient volcanic caldera, combining mountains, coniferous forest, and grassland with diverse wildlife.

A compromise in 2000 created the preserve, technically part of Santa Fe National Forest but managed by an independent board. Since then, dissatisfaction over limited public access has grown, along with renewed efforts to transfer the area to the National Park Service.

A December 2009 Park Service report confirmed the suitability and feasibility of acquiring Valles Caldera—almost certainly under regulations that would still allow hunting.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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).

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.

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.”