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

One of the dysfunctional elements of having a politically-appointed Board of Trustees manage the Valles Caldera National Preserve is the hole in leadership that can exist after a change in presidential administrations.

Specifically, three of the seven appointed positions on the Trust have been vacant for the more than ten months since President Obama assumed office.

According to the Valles Caldera Preservation Act (the legislation that authorized the purchase of the Baca Ranch in 2000), the Board of Trustees of the Valles Caldera National Preserve should consist of seven members who are appointed by the President of the United States to four-year staggered terms. This legislation also mandates that each member should have a specific area of expertise.

The three empty seats on the Board of Trustees are designated for individuals with expertise in forestry, cultural and natural history, and “nonprofit conservation organization concerned with the activities of the Forest Service” — not unimportant components to the management of a piece of land replete with dozens of square miles of forest and 10,000 years of human history.

According to the above legislation, there are two additional ex-officio members of the Valles Caldera Trust: the Superintendent of Bandelier National Monument and the Supervisor of the Santa Fe National Forest. However, in practice, these members have taken a backseat in clout to the politically-appointed members of the Trust.

A source close to the office of Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) tells VallesCaldera.com that there are currently hundreds of appointees of President Obama’s that are in line to be vetted and confirmed. This includes Obama’s proposed nominees to join the Caldera’s Board of Trustees: Ray Powell, the former New Mexico Land Commissioner (and executive director of the VCNP); Melissa Savage, the executive director of the Santa Fe-based Four Corners Institute; and Ken Smith, the former director of the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute at New Mexico Highlands University.

One positive benefit of having an experienced, professional land management agency (such as the National Park Service) manage the Valles Caldera would be the lack of a leadership vacuum when a new administration assumes office. While high-level administrators of the National Park Service might change with different presidents, superintendents of national parks and preserves are typically professional, career public land managers who have been working in their field for decades, and are not swapped based on the political leanings of a particular administration.

If the National Park Service managed the Valles Caldera National Preserve, there would be continuity of leadership from administration to administration, without a nearly year-long vacancy of nearly half of the the management of one of the most treasured pieces of public land in New Mexico.

The latest addition to VallesCaldera.com’s section of 360° virtual-reality panoramas comes from a meadow on top of a foothill on the eastern flank of Cerro del Medio (which means “middle mountain”). Also known as “CDM,” the mountain is the oldest ring-fracture dome in the Valles Caldera (formed about 1.2 million years ago). The Valle Grande can be seen through the trees as the panorama opens.   Click here to download this panorama.  You can also see some views from the sky of Cerro del Medio here and here.

QuickTime (version 5.0 or above) must be installed to view our 360° panoramas. Click here to install QuickTime. You also need to have a high-speed internet connection, as this panorama is more than seven megabytes in size. QuickTime will automatically launch when the panorama has been downloaded.

Once the panorama loads, enter full-screen mode (by pressing Command-F on a Mac or Control-F on a PC) for the most enjoyable viewing experience. Drag the cursor in any direction to change your perspective. You can also press the shift key to zoom in, and the Command key (Control key on a PC) to zoom out.

Finally, enjoy the remainder of our collection of virtual-reality 360° panoramas — many of which feature locations that the public has rarely, if ever, been granted access.

—

In this controversial chapter of the post-Baca Ranch era, in which a spirited debate about alternative visions of future management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve has been extensively covered by state and national media, it is fitting to reflect on this Thanksgiving Day about certain historical aspects of the scenic crown jewel of New Mexico for which one should be thankful, because without these details of history this land might not be owned by the American people today.

1. The Baca Ranch was never subdivided.  Throughout the entire 140-year history of private ownership of the Baca Location No. 1 (the land that became the Valles Caldera National Preserve), the parcel of land (originally 99,289.39 acres) was never subdivided.  This was despite, among other things, an 1898 court decree calling for the partitioning of the land amongst the dozens of various heirs of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca (and other landowners, including Joel Parker Whitney and Maríano Otero) who each held fractional interests in the ranch (this order was later overturned by court-appointed commissioners).  If partitioning had happened then (or at any time in the next century) it is not unrealistic to conclude that our Caldera might today be a patchwork of communities, resorts, golf courses, and hotels.  It also certainly would have made the establishment of the Valles Caldera National Preserve in 2000 impossible.
2. The Dunigans were responsible stewards of the land, and played hardball to stop clearcutting.  The Dunigans of Abilene, Texas, were the final private owners of the Baca Ranch, having purchased the land in 1963.  However, they did not own the timber rights to the land; in 1918, a 99-year lease to the timber rights had been signed by the Redondo Development Company, which later deeded the rights to the New Mexico Timber Company.  In the mid-20th century, New Mexico Timber Company began clearcutting the forests of the Baca Ranch (clearcutting is a logging practice in which all trees are cleared from an area).  In fact, the owner of New Mexico Timber, T. P. Gallagher, Jr., stated about the timber on the Baca Location that his company “intended to log it all” (Anschuetz 2007).  Chagrined at the harm that this practice was causing to the land, James Dunigan sued the owners of the timber interests in 1964.  Clearcutting continued for the next seven years as a legal battle was waged between the Dunigans and New Mexico Timber, until Dunigan purchased the timber interests back from the company in 1971, ending clearcutting on the Baca Ranch.  He bought back the timber rights for $1.25 million, which was a hefty 50% of the $2.5 million that he had spent eight years prior to purchase the entire ranch.  Author Kurt Anschuetz pays tribute to the good land stewardship of the man from Abilene as such: “Dunigan… went to extraordinary lengths, as shown by his lawsuit against New Mexico Timber, Inc., to try to restrain wasteful land use. Further, his companies eventually sold the Baca Location back to the public after his death…It is clear that Dunigan was interested in long-term conservation and went to great lengths to restore and sustain the property’s scenic qualities.”  Without Dunigan’s efforts, the scenic and environmental values of the Caldera might today be substantially diminished because of clear-cutting, and were it not for Dunigan’s wish that the Baca Ranch be sold to the American people upon his death, it is not unreasonable to assume that in 2000 the land would have been sold to private interests, precluding the creation of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.
3. After 140 years, the Baca Ranch was purchased by the American people.  Q. What do the following have in common:  Jemez National Monument (1916-1932), Pajarito National Park (1916-1932), Jemez Crater National Park (1939), Valle Grande National Park (1961), Valles Caldera National Park (1979)?  A. All of these names represent unsuccessful efforts by local residents and political leaders throughout the 20th century to have the Baca Ranch purchased on behalf of the American people (the years represent when each proposal was floated).  For nearly a century, these efforts failed, until the Dunigan family sold the ranch to the American people in 2000 for $101 million, with the money coming from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.  Given that there had been so much energy invested for so many decades in finding a way for the Baca Ranch to become public land, without success, it was a remarkable confluence of events and circumstance that enabled New Mexico’s representatives from both political parties (as well as the President of the United States) to work together and find the political will to compromise on a deal that enabled the Baca Ranch, at long last, to be preserved into perpetuity.

The Pueblo of Jemez, in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been awarded nearly $5 million of federal stimulus funds by the Department of Energy in order to study the geothermal potential that exists on the Jemez reservation, according to a story published this week in the Los Alamos Monitor. Click here to read this article in its entirety.

According to scientists, the Jemez Mountains’ magma chamber lurks just 3-4 miles beneath the surface of the earth in some points. This molten rock heats subterranean water, which comes to the surface in the form of hot springs.

Such hot springs (or “ojos calientes”) exist in a variety of locations throughout the Jemez Mountains, including in Jemez Pueblo, on the banks of the Jemez River. Managers of the newly-funded project hope to drill two wells (each 3,000 feet deep) near these springs in order to gain an inventory of possible underground reservoirs of hot water that could be used to generate electricity (or at least, according to the article, facilitate the operation of a spa therapy center, greenhouse, or aquaculture facility).

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.

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.

Yesterday’s edition of the Santa Fe New Mexican featured a story by reporter Staci Matlock about the recent release of a GAO audit of the Valles Caldera Trust. The article begins as follows:

The group charged with managing the Valles Caldera National Preserve is five years behind schedule and suffers from weak planning, a new federal report says.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, which released its latest review of the preserve on Oct. 30, notes the Valles Caldera Trust has fallen short in its efforts to meet mandates Congress set for the Jemez Mountains property. Most problems stem from a mandate that the preserve pay for itself and be free of federal financial help by 2015.

The findings likely will bolster a push by a Santa Fe-based group, Caldera Action, to dismantle the trust and place the preserve under National Park Service control.

“Our thoughts on the report is that it confirms what the earlier report shows and that they really haven’t made any progress,” Tom Jervis, a Caldera Action board member, said. “They say they can run the place like a business, but they can’t.”

Jervis also indicated in the article that Caldera Action has collected over 1,500 petition signatures in support of a plan to have the National Park Service assume management of the Valles Caldera as a National Park Preserve. This idea is currently being studied by the NPS at the request of New Mexico’s U.S. Senators, Jeff Bingaman (D) and Tom Udall (D), and is supported by the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.

Click here to read the full article.

The Los Alamos Monitor covered last week’s release of a Governmental Accountability Office audit of the Valles Caldera Trust in a front-page story today. Click here to read this article in its entirety. A portion of the story is included below:

The Valles Caldera Trust is at least five years behind a timetable set in 2004 to become financially self-sustaining.

A congressional report by the Government Accountability Office released Friday found that the preserve’s governing board still hasn’t developed an adequate management plan for its role as a federal corporation….

To measure progress, the GAO evaluation used the trust’s 2004 report to Congress, in which the officials laid out the next two five-year plans, starting with completing a National Environmental Policy Act analyses for developing a system of road and trails and getting started on building a basic interpretive center and a science and education facility.

But, five years later, only the science and grazing programs at the preserve have moved into phase two. If the current public use and access is completed on its current schedule in mid-2010, recreation can begin to move into phase two as well.

“Thus, at the close of fiscal year 2009, the Trust continued to work mostly on phase one of its programs and activities — at least five years behind its anticipated schedule,” GAO reported.

Recreation, infrastructure and forest management are still expected to be in phase one, with only another five years to go before Congress, according to the founding legislation, could decide to stop appropriating money and possibly let the property default to the Forest Service.

Former Carlsbad Caverns National Park Superintendent Rick Smith, a resident of Placitas, submitted a letter to the editor of the Albuquerque Journal that was published on Sunday. Click here to read his letter. [After clicking on this link, non-subscribers to the Journal will have to click “trial premium pass” at the lower left corner of the screen to read the letter]

Smith describes the legislation that purchased the Jemez Mountains’ Baca Ranch from Texas landowners in 2000 and established the Valles Caldera National Preserve, but which stipulates that the Preserve should be financially self-sustaining by 2015.

Self-sufficiency, however, is an extraordinarily difficult goal. It is virtually impossible to sell enough hunting or fishing permits or charge the public enough for access to the Preserve to meet operational costs. The Trust has responded by proposing $50 to $100 million dollars in high-end development, believing that such development would bring them closer to self-sufficiency.

A number of concerned New Mexicans, believing that such development would destroy the very resources for which the Preserve was created, began to look at other options. On June 25th of this year, Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall asked the National Park Service to assess the potential for including the Preserve in the National Park System. Several environmental organizations such as the New Mexico Wildlife Federation and Caldera Action are supporting the inclusion of the Preserve in the park system. Such groups favor the continuation of hunting and fishing in Valles Caldera as is permitted in other national preserves managed by the Park Service.

Stressing that “Valles Caldera is a national treasure. It deserves the highest standard of care and should be open to all who wish to visit it,” Smith urges members of the public who are interested in the future of the Valles Caldera National Preserve to contact the members of the New Mexico Congressional Delegation with input on this proposal. Contact information for our members of Congress follows:

New Mexico’s U.S. Senators:

U.S. Senator Tom Udall
B40D Dirksen Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Phone: (202) 224-6621
Email Sen. Udall by clicking here

U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman
703 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Phone: (800)443-8658
Email Sen. Bingaman by clicking here

The member of the U.S. House of Representatives who represents the Valles Caldera is:

U.S. Representative Ben Lujan
502 Cannon HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: (202) 225-6190
Email Rep. Lujan by clicking here

The other two members of the New Mexico Congressional Delegation are:

U.S. Representative Martin Heinrich
1505 Longworth HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: (202) 225-6316
Email Rep. Heinrich by clicking here

U.S. Representative Harry Teague
1007 Longworth HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2365
Email Rep. Teague by clicking here