County tells feds: We’re taking over

By Sarah Foster

In the wake of wildfires that raged through western states this
summer, most of them on federally managed land, commissioners of a rural
county in southern New Mexico have taken a bold step that could lead
eventually to the wresting of control of national forests from the
federal government.

Citing “mismanagement practices and policies” by the

U.S. Forest
Service as having created an “imminent threat of catastrophic fire danger,” Otero County commissioners — at the close of a special public hearing Friday — declared a county-wide state of emergency, including the 450,000 acres of the Lincoln National Forest within the county’s boundaries.

In a tersely written resolution, the three-member board called upon

Gov. Gary Johnson to acknowledge and ratify the state of emergency. That would involve ordering New Mexico state forest agencies to meet with the county commission, to decide what measures should be taken to remove the threat of fire and to notify the U.S. regional forester that if these actions are not taken, the state agencies will go in and do the necessary work.

If the governor ignores the request and does not order state personnel to begin remedial measures, the county — in accordance with the New Mexico State Civil Emergency Preparedness Act — is prepared to undertake the necessary tasks itself, whatever those might be. Presumably these would be restoration of logging and continuation of cattle grazing to remove the excessive fuel buildup.

“This isn’t some knee-jerk reaction we came up with,” said Richard Zierlein, chairman of the board of commissioners and a member since 1991. “With the emergency powers vested in the county, we can move forward if the governor ignores us. We have to ask the governor first, and in our resolution we say that after we’ve asked the governor to take over and declare a state of emergency and to ask the Forest Service to get the emergency situation taken care of, then in the next paragraph we say that Otero County can and will go forward.”

The bottom line, says Zierlein, is that “due to the inaction of the Forest Service in not taking care of the forest, we have an extreme fire danger in Otero County that’s a threat to our citizens and to the watershed for the entire county. It’s also an ongoing emergency situation, because we’re in a drought and the fire season is not over. For eight years we haven’t had any logging. None. We’ve had several mills go out of business.”

Zierlein said the county was, in a way, “lucky” to have had only one major fire this year: the catastrophic Scott Able Canyon fire in May. That fire started when a decayed aspen tree fell across a power line in heavily wooded Scott Able Canyon near the tiny community of Weed, N.M. As reported in

WorldNetDaily, the Forest Service had ordered maintenance crews of the Otero County Electric Cooperative not to remove “hazard trees” near the power company’s right-of-way.

“That fire exemplifies how bad the fire conditions are,” said Zierlein. “It left a 17,000-acre footprint [the area a fire covers] in about six hours and burned 64 houses, causing $2.3 million in property damages not counting the timber lost. And it only stopped when it reached areas burned 20 years ago.”

The fire reached temperatures of 2000 degrees, which destroyed seeds and sterilized the ground.

“It will be at least four or five years before anything begins to grow there,” he said.

Nor is this a strictly state or even regional matter — it’s nationwide. According to Mike Nivison, city administrator for the village of Cloudcroft and commissioner-elect to the board of supervisors, of the 191 million acres of Forest Service land, 51 million are in danger of catastrophic fire. And the Service is treating only 1.3 million acres this year — less than last year’s 1.5 million acres.

“At that rate, it’ll take 175 to 200 years to do the necessary thinning,” he said.

The decision to declare a state of emergency and pursue a separate course if necessary was not made easily or for trivial reasons. In passages recalling the Declaration of Independence, the resolution described the problems faced by the commissioners, local residents and even the congressional delegation in ongoing confrontations with the Forest Service, and chastised the Service for blaming the fires on “rural industries” — timber cutting and cattle grazing.

“… the Commission and citizens of Otero County have repeatedly petitioned the Forest Service both collectively and individually at public meetings, by correspondence and by telephone to request that the Forest Service take appropriate action to remove or eliminate the conditions that have created the State of Emergency, but to no avail whatsoever,” the resolution states.


Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NM, and

Rep. Joe Skeen, R-NM have “repeatedly demanded” that the Forest Service take needed actions to reduce the threat of fire.

Instead of taking steps to correct the situation, the Forest Service has a policy of “inappropriately and wrongfully redirecting and misplacing the blame for their inaction … on … the rural industries that are then further victimized by said misplaced blame being used by the Forest Service to justify additional policies frequently adverse to the interests of rural industries, resulting in the State of Emergency.”

“It’s been obvious throughout the west that the Forest Service is eliminating all the uses of the national forest — grazing, logging, mining all those things,” said Bob Jones, a local rancher and president of the

Paragon Foundation, an advocacy organization based in Alamogordo, N.M., that champions property rights.

“Up here on the Lincoln, the Forest Service has made it clear over the last 25 years they were going to put all the people who live here out,” Jones stated. “It’s been a slow process, through different administrations in Washington — and they’ve had time lapses — but I don’t think the mindset of the Forest Service has ever changed, except it changed a little bit about what they considered the final goal to be for the forests. Way back then, it was for recreation. Now it’s this wilderness thing — that seems to be what this administration wants.”

The Forest Service has not responded to the resolution. “We’ve got it, we’re looking at it,” said Larry Sansome at the agency’s Cloudcroft office. “We haven’t had time to evaluate it yet.”

John Horning, of

Forest Guardians, regards the move as “ludicrous” and a “desperate measure to wrest control of the public’s land.” Forest Guardians — an environmental group headquartered in Santa Fe, N.M. — was actively involved in the closing down of the forests in New Mexico and Arizona, using the tactic of suing the Forest Service for violating the

Endangered Species Act
of 1973 or other federal statute by allowing commercial timber harvesting. Timber harvesting, the group claims, causes the destruction of habitat of the Mexican spotted owl, a federally listed subspecies.

The county is “completely out of step with the public’s desires,” Horning said. “It’s a half-baked, ludicrous notion that somehow the county controls federally owned public lands.”

Nivison disagrees. “People in cities do not appreciate the dilemma faced by residents and local governments in areas with a strong federal presence and where an entire industry has been virtually wiped out,” he said. “The sentiment of people here in our area is that everybody hates that we have lost jobs and the timber is going to waste,” he said. “It’s hard for people who don’t live here to understand that you can’t just go out and cut the timber. There are laws against that, and that doesn’t make any sense to them.”

The Emergency Preparedness Act states that the county can declare a state of emergency and call upon the governor for his resources, said Nivison. “We’re not only asking the governor to come on board because this is a statewide issue. We’ve talked and talked with the Forest Service and the environmentalists. We just don’t have any more to give.”

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‘Endangered’ Act blamed for fire

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