No slam dunk

Ex-New Mexico Wilderness Alliance staffer accuses Sen. Jeff Bingaman of being "one of the worst" for not delivering on a bill last year for a Taos County national conversation area.

A botched effort last year to preserve a large swath of northern New Mexico including the Rio Grande Gorge and Ute Mountain may be revisited after November. (Photo By Caitfish/Flickr)

SANTA FE -- In April 2007, just a few months after a hard-fought and ultimately successful battle to ban energy development in northern New Mexico's pristine Valle Vidal, local conservationists were brimming with confidence and had their sights set on another chunk of rugged beauty near the Colorado border. On the eve of Earth Day that year, the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman unveiled an ambitious proposal to protect 300,000 acres of what the Wilderness Alliance describes as "some of the most spectacular lands in all of New Mexico."

A Bingaman spokesperson at the time called the area "a stunning place" and "an obvious place to preserve." The Democratic senator and chairman of the powerful Energy and Natural Resource Committee would introduce legislation "within days" to designate the land a National Conservation Area, she said.

More than a year later, however, Bingaman has yet to introduce the legislation, even as a slew of other wilderness proposals across the country move through Congress in what The Washington Post this week dubbed "a wilderness renaissance." The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance staffer who spearheaded the campaign but clashed with Bingaman's office over its implementation has been fired. And for the past year, conservationists and Bingaman's office have been scrambling to win support from land-grant heirs, ranchers and other stakeholders who, many of the proposal's supporters belatedly learned, opposed the plan for fear that their access to the land would be restricted.

Wilderness supporters insist the plan is still very much on the table and will likely be introduced early next year, when a new Congress convenes. But the bumpy ride for a conservation bill that a year ago seemed poised for more immediate success in favorable political conditions illustrates the complex behind-the-scenes political maneuvering required to successfully sell such ideas, both in Congress and in New Mexico. Activists, congressional staffers and other bureaucrats call it "groundwork" -- mobilizing local support and convincing potential opponents that a particular piece of conservation legislation won't hurt them and may, in fact, be in their best interests.

"Because we've been here 400 years, because we have more (stakeholders), wilderness legislation requires more organizing here than in other states," said Steve Capra, executive director of the Albuquerque-based Wilderness Alliance.

Strategic mistakes on the ground, however, may have held up the 2007 conservation proposal, even though it surfaced on the heels of the successful Valle Vidal bill and as wilderness legislation elsewhere appears to be advancing more easily. Who's to blame -- if anyone -- depends on whom you ask. Regardless of who's to blame, conservationists are now working to avoid similar hangups in the future.

As I reported in the Albuquerque Journal last year, the proposed conservation area runs along the Colorado border between Ute Mountain and the Rio San Antonio, and is roughly bounded on the east and west by the Rio Grande Gorge and U.S 285. The area -- most of which is owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management -- extends from the state border south to the Taos Junction Bridge. Nearly 25,000 acres of the parcel around Ute Mountain and the Rio San Antonio would be off-limits to most motorized vehicles, but motorized traffic would be allowed on designated routes in other parts of the conservation area. Energy development would be prohibited throughout.

While none of the area is under consideration for oil or gas drilling, conservationists don't want to leave anything to chance. The Wilderness Alliance says on its Web site that, as it learned in the battle over energy development in the Carson National Forest's Valle Vidal, "No matter how ‘lacking’ in exploitative possibilities it may be, someone, sometime is going to come after that land."

Jim O'Donnell, who was then the Wilderness Alliance's northern office director, first mentioned to me in early April 2007 that his group was working with Bingaman's office on legislation to protect the area from "unforeseen threats." He said he was willing to release details of the proposal, but that they would be embargoed for publication until Bingaman's staff had time to fine tune the legislation and get it introduced. My story was published on April 19, three days before Earth Day. O'Donnell subsequently offered reporters an aerial tour of the area (I was unable to participate) and pitched the proposal further in the blogosphere.

"We have wide-ranging support on this effort from the ranching community, the local elected officials, the acequias [associations], the sportsmen community, the boaters and the biologists," O'Donnell wrote on the Democracy for New Mexico blog in late April 2007. "Any day now, Senator Bingaman will introduce legislation to assure the wild character of this land through a National Conservation Area (NCA) designation."

Neither of those statements turned out to be true, and the effort stalled. Officials with knowledge of the conservation-area campaign, both inside and outside the federal government, have suggested to me that O'Donnell is to blame -- that he moved too quickly with his media blitz, before Bingaman's office could line up congressional support. John Olivas, who succeeded O'Donnell as the Wilderness Alliance's northern director, said that after the proposal was publicized, ranchers and land-grant heirs in the area were caught off-guard and became suspicious of the government's intentions.

"They stood up and said, 'You guys aren't asking us about what's going on here,'" Olivas said in a phone interview this week. "The land-grant communities, landowners and grazers in the area are the ones opposing it and are actually making a pretty loud noise out there, saying they don't want [the conservation area] because they think it's going to restrict a lot of the access."

Olivas and representatives from Bingaman's office say they have since been working to repair relations with those skeptics, trying to convince them that their grazing privileges and other rights won't be adversely affected. O'Donnell, however, has a much different take on what went wrong, and he says he's a scapegoat for serious miscalculations made in Bingaman's office. He was fired, he says, for criticizing those missteps and for criticizing Bingaman directly.

"He's constantly one of the worst for promising things and not delivering," O'Donnell told me this week.

O'Donnell said that a Bingaman staffer approached him in late 2006, shortly after President Bush signed off on legislation banning energy development in the Valle Vidal. O'Donnell had led that anti-drilling campaign in New Mexico and Bingaman was a key congressional ally, who, along with Rep. Tom Udall, a Santa Fe Democrat, introduced legislation to ban development. O'Donnell says that Bingaman's staff wanted to act quickly on the new wilderness legislation and that they claimed they had already talked to ranchers and other stakeholders who indicated support. O'Donnell was then dispatched to do more groundwork.

"I got out there on the ground, talking to ranchers, and I just got attacked," he said. "These people on the ground had not heard anything about it. The things that Bingaman's staff told me about support was absolutely bunk."

O'Donnell said he repeatedly raised concerns with Bingaman's staff about on-the-ground opposition, but was instructed by Bingaman's office to push ahead with some media interviews, which were to be embargoed until a few days day before Earth Day, when Bingaman planned to introduce the bill.

"So then the story hit the press, and then nothing came out of Bingaman's office," O' Donnell said. "They didn't drop the bill ... Meanwhile, this is in the media and people are freaking out -- the acequia folks, the cattle growers."

O'Donnell says he became increasingly critical of Bingaman, both publicly and privately, for the office's handling of the issue and for relying too much on the support of Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who is retiring at the end of the year. Domenici has yet to take a public stance on the Taos County conservation area, but he says he's heard concerns from land-grant heirs, acequia associations and some local governments about the legislation, according to his spokesman Chris Gallegos.

O'Donnell's former boss, Capra, declined to discuss why O'Donnell was fired earlier this year, and Bingaman's office likewise declined to respond to his accusations.  Spokeswoman Maria Najera said only that the office has "encountered a couple of barriers" to the proposed national conservation area and is working to build consensus on the legislation.

"We're trying to work with people and don't want to place blame," she said.

Another Bingaman spokeswoman, Jude McCartin, added: "It's much easier to get wilderness legislation passed when the entire [congressional] delegation is behind it."

That was evident during the long battle to ban drilling in the Valle Vidal. The proposal was delayed for months because Domenici, then the Energy Committee chairman, declined to take a position on it. When he finally did announce his support, in November of 2006, the legislation quickly found its way to the president's desk, where it was signed a month later.

In the end, Domenici's support may not matter for the proposed National Conservation Area. If the legislation is introduced next year, he will have retired and a new senator will have his voting privileges. The bill's supporters are hoping for that person to be Udall, who played such a key role in the Valle Vidal energy development ban. He is facing Rep. Steve Pearce, a Hobbs Republican and former oilman, in the November general election. Bingaman's office and the Wilderness Alliance, meanwhile, say they've made great strides in drumming up local support for their proposal and that they will be in a good position when the bill is finally introduced. Waiting until after this year's elections -- when Democrats hope to gain more seats in Congress -- is now the most practical strategy, according to supporters.

"There's still not enough Democratic control of Congress to move bills at times." Capra said, adding later, "We just made the decision with Senator Bingaman's office that there was no need to push this now."

John Olivas, the Wilderness Alliance's northern office director who also works as a hunting guide and outfitter, adds that the extra time spent on building support for the current conservation proposal will lay important groundwork for future projects.

"This is only one issue that's taking place at this time," he said. "This isn't going to be the last time this will come up. We're trying to pave the way for the other projects that are going to be introduced in the future and create a process to mitigate a lot of these problems in the future."

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