Environmentalists and ranchers debate new grazing regulations

Depending on whom you ask, federal grazing regulations announced Wednesday are either a roadblock to good management or a rollback from bad rules.

The rules apply to 160 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land in the West, including Utah, and impact 15,000 livestock operators.

According to Jim Catlin, director of the environmentalist Utah Wild Project, the Bureau of Land Management's new rules will prevent users of the public land from "applying these proven solutions to restoring rangelands," he said.

But Brent Tanner, executive president of the Utah Cattlemen's Association, says the rules will "roll back some of the bad regulations" established by the administration of former President Bill Clinton.

According to a BLM press release, the new regulations:

• Allow the government and a rancher using the public land to share title to future range improvements.

• Phase in grazing use decreases or increases, if they are more than 10 percent beyond present practice, "over a five-year period." But the BLM will retain authority to make quick changes required by drought, fire or other resource concerns.

• Promote "a consistent approach by BLM managers" in considering social, cultural and economic effects of decisions about grazing use.

• Remove a restriction that limited temporary nonuse of a grazing permit to three consecutive years.

• Require monitoring data if BLM officials suspect a grazing allotment is failing to meet rangeland health standards.

• Allow BLM up to 24 months to analyze and plan action where grazing practices are at issue. Before, the agency had to make these decisions prior to the start of the next grazing season.

Tom Gorey, BLM spokesman in Washington, D.C., said the changes are a positive step. They improve "working relationships with public land ranchers in Utah and other western states," he added in a telephone interview.

Allowing shared ownership of certain range improvements is good for ranchers who may want to make improvements on the federal range when they may not want to pay the whole cost, he said. And the new rules will let ranchers have some ownership.

"We will keep all of our emergency authority, so if there is a situation of drought or wildfire," or some other condition that endangers the range, the BLM reserves the authority to act quickly and order changes in grazing levels.