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

The long-awaited audit of the Valles Caldera Trust by the Government Accountability Office was released this afternoon.

Click here to read the entire GAO audit.

Click here to read the highlights page.

Click here to read the GAO’s recommendations.

The audit’s Executive Summary follows:

“The Trust has taken steps to establish and implement a number of programs and activities to achieve the goals of the Preservation Act. It has rehabilitated roads, buildings, fences, and other infrastructure; created a science program; experimented with a variety of grazing options; taken steps to manage its forests; expanded recreational opportunities; and taken its first steps toward becoming financially self-sustaining. Nevertheless, it is at least 5 years behind the schedule it set for itself in 2004. According to Trust officials, a number of factors–including high turnover among Board members and key staff and cultural and natural resources and infrastructure that were not as healthy or robust as originally believed–have delayed its progress. Through fiscal year 2009, the Trust had yet to develop and put in place several key elements of an effective management control program for a government corporation. Specifically, the Trust lacked a strategic plan and annual performance plans, and it had not systematically monitored or reported on its progress–elements called for by the Government Performance and Results Act and recommended by GAO in its first report in 2005. The Trust’s financial management has also been weak. Consequently, it has been difficult for Congress and the public to understand the Trust’s goals and objectives, annual plans and performance, or progress. According to current Trust officials, becoming financially self-sustaining, particularly by the end of fiscal year 2015 when federal appropriations are due to expire, is the Trust’s biggest challenge. Most of the Trust’s other challenges follow from this one, including identifying, developing, or expanding revenue-generating activities that would enable the Trust to raise sufficient funds; obtaining funds for major capital investments; and addressing a number of legal constraints–such as its authority to enter into long-term leases or acquire property–which potentially limit its ability to attract long-term businesses that could generate revenues. Nevertheless, the Trust is continuing to explore opportunities for becoming financially self-sustaining.”

The Santa Fe New Mexican this week published a letter to the editor by Santa Fe resident Charles McCurdy.

In his letter, McCurdy says that “any rancher” would agree that it is not possible to manage the Valles Caldera National Preserve at a profit:

I’ve skied and hiked in the preserve a number of times, carried to trailheads to hike in a preserve van. The experiences were delightful and the staff terrific. But we’re told that more studies need to be done before more public use can be permitted. Millions have been spent. It’s time to turn the site over to the National Park Service, an agency experienced in managing visitor use at less user cost.

Click here to read McCurdy’s letter in its entirety.

Roger G. Kennedy, who served as Director of the National Park Service from 1993-1997 (and has authored 17 books), expounds upon his support that he announced this month for the Valles Caldera to be managed by the National Park Service in a in a lengthy and detailed memorandum on the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees web site: “Toward a Valles Caldera National Park as a Landscape for Learning.” Click here to read Kennedy’s essay.

Earlier this month, Kennedy first revealed his support for the NPS taking over management of the Caldera (formerly known as the “Baca Ranch”) in a brief op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle. In his most recent essay, Kennedy opines:

The Valles Caldera of New Mexico, the centerpiece of the Jemez Massif, is worthy of national park status for its astonishing natural beauty, for its geological and archaeological wonders, for its wildlife, for the history that was played out upon it or near it, and for the military and geopolitical saga inherent in its title deeds…

The times are ripe for the Valles Caldera to become a national park, one that is the core of a larger landscape for learning… The Valles Caldera National Park should become the nucleus of a cooperative educational mission of preservation and education with the neighboring Pueblos and villages, the National Laboratory and city of Los Alamos, the National Forests, and Bandelier National Monument…

A comprehensive vision for the Valles Caldera and Massif as a landscape for learning would include geothermal science, industrial, agricultural and grazing history, archaeology, geopolitics, ethnography, and conservation.

Kennedy declares that, upon creation of the Valles Caldera National Preserve in 2000, “the Valles Caldera trustees were instructed, however, not to attribute any value to it as a learning landscape,” but rather, the Preserve became “subject to the requirement that it become self-supporting without further overgrazing and over-timbering.” He notes that a template for how to run the Preserve as a self-supporting entity was found at the Presidio Trust in San Francisco, “though the situations in the city on the bay and the Valles Caldera had little in common. The Presidio already had 790 buildings, including three hospitals, a movie theater, and several churches on 1491 acres, and [the Presidio Trust] was expected to build many more. The Baca has 90,000-acres of open space, and (counting barns and sheds) less than forty buildings, of which barely a dozen would be habitable.”

With this in mind, Kennedy concludes his piece as such:

This paper is written to urge that the National Preserve be revalued as a national asset, which, like all national parks, cannot be expected to pay for itself. The Preserve can be as “self-supporting” as Independence Hall or Yellowstone Park, with their money costs balanced by their educational benefits. The Valles Caldera should be placed within the responsibilities of the National Park Service, with provision for active participation by the neighboring Pueblos and communities, as an example of a park that includes the neighbors in its deliberations about educational programs and management policies.

Today it is an inhabited landscape with nuclear scientists next door and cows competing with elk, situated among neighbors having many appropriate interests to reconcile. For teaching and learning purposes, these complexities are advantages rather than impediments. The Bicentennial Commission now in the final stages of making its report on the National Park System is urging that the National Park Service fulfill its mission of preservation and education in cooperation with others. The Valles Caldera should be made a National Park exemplifying that cooperative style, with a broad mission and message.

Kennedy asserts that the National Park Service “has been devoted to public education as well as landscape protection since Franklin Roosevelt consolidated the national parks into a single National Park System and provided that system with a Service that included educators, historians, and scientists trained by the CCC.”

He also introduces specific curriculum ideas for how the Valles Caldera could become “the core of a larger landscape for learning.” In addition to “sustained and sustainable grazing,” and “scrupulous forestry,” he lays out five particular themes for an educational focus, which are detailed in the essay, including:

• Recapitulating the First Sight of the Great Plains and Other Environmental Lessons
• From Megafauna to Superpowers
• Living on the Edge – Agriculture, Architecture, and Climate
• 1851-1863 – Garrisoning the Frontier – Grants, Titles, and Surnames
• 1899-2000 – Toward An Inhabited and Working Landscape as the Core of a New Kind of Park

“The looming 100-foot instrumentation tower nestled among the pines in the southwest corner of the Valles Caldera National Preserve may help scientists answer some of the most important questions of our age,” according to an article published this week by the Los Alamos Monitor, which was penned by Dave Menicucci. Click here to read the full article.

The piece reports on a study being administered by the University of Arizona (UA) on the earth’s “Critical Zone,” which is “the zone from the treetops to the bottom of the groundwater table,” and was labeled as such “because of its key role in processing and cycling water, carbon and nutrients necessary for life,” according to UA. In addition to the Valles Caldera, the study is also taking place at five other sites nationwide, including in the Catalina Mountains near Tucson, AZ. In September, UA was awarded a $4.35 million grant by the National Science Foundation to extend this project for another five years. Click here to read a UA press release announcing the grant.

Valles Caldera National Preserve Chief Scientist Bob Parmenter explained in the Monitor piece how the Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) will help scientists observe processes that will aid them in achieving new insight about the Critical Zone, which is particularly important in an arid state such as New Mexico that depends on rainfall from mountains as the source of a significant portion of its water:

Too dense a forest will trap snow on the tree limbs, which allows the ice to sublimate directly to the air. With too little forestation, the snow hits the ground, but the lack of shade allows the sun to quickly melt it and it evaporates. In both cases, the water does not seep into the ground or flow to the streams. This implies that there is an optimal forest density for this area, which the CZO project will help us to establish.

The piece notes that Parmenter is planning to incorporate this study into the Preserve’s science education program by inviting students and teachers to visit the CZO site for experiments and observation, while being lodged at the Preserve’s new Science and Education Center.

The Monitor article concludes as such:

“While the Valles Caldera has been the focus of intense public scrutiny and controversy over the past year, its science programs under Parmenter’s capable tutelage have been steadily progressing. The CZO project is one of the preserve’s premier scientific achievements and its benefits are expected to be realized for years to come.”

An audio recording of the most recent public meeting of the Valles Caldera Trust is now available at VallesCaldera.com.  Click here to listen to this meeting in its entirety, and see below for a detailed overview of the meeting.

VallesCaldera.com will endeavor to provide online access to audio recordings of all future public meetings of the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.  Until this point, such recordings have never before been made available online to the public.

Among the developments from the meeting, which was conducted on Sept. 29, 2009 in Las Cruces, it was revealed that Preserve management is now in possession of a draft copy of a Government Accountability Office audit of the Valles Caldera Trust.  This audit has been mentioned by Sen. Tom Udall as a tool that that will help the New Mexico Congressional Delegation “take stock of where we are today” as a precursor for determining “the options in the future” regarding management possibilities for the Valles Caldera.  The GAO audit (the contents of which the Trust could not reveal) should be released to Congress on Oct. 31, according to Trust Chairman Stephen Henry.

Additionally, it was disclosed that Trust management has established a maximum potential total capacity of the Valles Caldera National Preserve during its summer recreation season of 23,000 visitor-days (which is the amount of total days that each visitor could spend on the Preserve. For example, one person visiting for three days as well as three people visiting for one day would both yield three visitor days). For the sake of comparison, the Preserve’s neighboring Bandelier National Monument hosted 243,765 visitors in 2006, which is more than ten times this amount (the most recent official figures provided by the Trust to Congress show that 15,000 people visited the Preserve in 2008). A Preserve representative stated that maximum visitor capacity would generate $865,000 (which is 20.2% of the most recent estimation provided to Congress of total annual Preserve expenditures of $4,278,508).

The meeting also featured an extensive presentation on the impact of grazing on the riparian areas of the Caldera, with a detailed discussion about the overall health of the two main Caldera watersheds.  Dr. Colleen Caldwell, who performed the presentation, declared that the Valles Caldera is home to “the greatest density of salmonids seen in the intermountain West” and that the lower East Fork of the Jemez River “would be a wonderful place” to reintroduce the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout (see this detailed U.S. Forest Service report on the Cutthroat in PDF).  She also advised that some streambank restoration work on the East Fork needs to take place in order to maximize the health of that river and its population of fish.

A compilation of the highlights of the meeting is as follows.  Each highlight is preceded by the timestamp for the point on the recording that the discussion or quote takes place.

1:27 — Chairman Stephen Henry stated that the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve is “not governed by the Open Meetings Act.”

1:42 — Henry mentioned that the Trust has received a draft of an audit of the Valles Caldera National Preserve that has been conducted by the Government Accountability Office.  He stated that the Trust is preparing a response, but is not permitted to discuss the findings of the audit until it is officially released.  The GAO will submit the report to relevant Congressional committees on Oct. 31, 2009.

4:15 — Henry stated that he was reelected by the board of Trustees to be its chairman “for however long, if and when the Trust continues to exist.”  Ed Tinsley will remain vice-chair of the Trust.

Continue reading ‘Audio from most recent Trust meeting now available here; GAO audit of Trust to be released Oct. 31; maximum summer capacity at Preserve set at 23,000 visitor days’

In the nearly four months since New Mexico’s U.S. Senators requested that the National Park Service study the possibility of assuming management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve, there has been a great deal of discussion in the media about whether NPS management of the Caldera would be more fiscally responsible than continuing with the current Trust management structure.

One measure of fiscally efficient management for public lands is the amount of taxpayer funds appropriated to a unit of land divided by the number of visitors that the unit of land serves.

The analysis below has compared the annual federal appropriations and visitor totals for three separate groups of public lands:

1. Each unit of the National Park Service in New Mexico (including National Parks, National Monuments, and National Historic Parks),
2. each National Preserve managed by the National Park Service, and
3. a group of 14 prominent National Parks in the western United States.

For fiscal year 2008 (the most recent year that official statistics reported to Congress by the Valles Caldera Trust are available), the Trust reported $3,750,000 of federal appropriations, and 15,000 visitors.

This comes out to $250 of taxpayer funds spent per visitor by the Valles Caldera Trust.

The data below reveal the following:

• The units of the National Park Service in New Mexico spend an average of $13 of taxpayer funds per visitor (which runs from $3 per visitor at White Sands National Monument to $84 at Fort Union National Monument).  The Valles Caldera Trust therefore spends about 19 times the amount of federally appropriated funds per visitor than New Mexico’s National Park Service units as a whole, and about three times more than the NPS unit in New Mexico with the highest amount of taxpayer funds spent per visitor.
• The National Preserves throughout the U.S. managed by the National Park Service spend an average of $12 of federally appropriated funds per visitor.  This figure runs from $2 per visitor in Florida’s Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, to $390 per visitor at Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska.  However, among the NPS National Preserves in the lower 48 states, the figure runs from $2 at Timucuan to $33 at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas.  Therefore, the Valles Caldera Trust spends more than twenty times the amount of appropriated funds per visitor than the National Preserves managed by the National Park Service as a whole, and it spends 7.5 times the amount of taxpayer funds per visitor than the Preserve with the highest figure in the lower 48 states.
• The comparison group of well-known National Parks in the West (including Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Glacier, Big Bend, Rocky Mountain, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Mesa Verde, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, and Petrified Forest) spends an average of $6 of taxpayer funds per visitor, which runs from a little over a dollar per visitor at Utah’s Arches National Park, to $19 per visitor at Big Bend National Park in Texas.  Therefore, the Valles Caldera Trust spends about 41 times as much taxpayer money per visitor than this comparison group of prominent western National Parks, and 13 times as much as the National Park with the highest figure in this comparison group.
• The National Park Service’s Bandelier National Monument, which, like the Valles Caldera, is located in the Jemez Mountains (and shares a boundary with the Valles Caldera National Preserve), welcomed 243,765 visitors in 2006, while receiving federal appropriations of $2,705,000, yielding a federal expenditure to visitation ratio of $11 per visitor.  Therefore, the Valles Caldera Trust spends more than 22 times the amount of taxpayer funds per visitor than its Jemez neighbor.

Please click below to see this analysis’ data tables.

Continue reading ‘Would National Park Service management of Valles Caldera be a better bargain for the American taxpayer?’

Joy Pesonen, a resident of Santa Fe, wrote a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican that was published today. In her letter, Peterson lends her support to transferring management of the Valles Caldera to the National Park Service, suggesting that:

under the National Park Service stewardship, the preserve would serve, inspire and inform all the people… Let’s make this unique area a gift to the American people and to future generations.

Click here to read the full letter.