FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Program Threatened By Record Oil And Gas Lease Sale

Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Effort Takes Hit

The Bureau of Land Management published its quarterly oil and gas lease sale notice yesterday announcing 196,736 acres for auction - the agency's largest sale ever for Colorado. Most of the land in the proposed sale is on Colorado's western slope, and includes 20 parcels in the Wolf Creek black-footed ferret recovery area.

The Colorado Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published its quarterly oil and gas lease sale notice Tuesday announcing 196,736 acres for auction-the agency's largest sale ever for Colorado. Most of the land in the proposed sale is on Colorado's western slope, with 118,000 acres in Moffat County alone. The auction is scheduled for May 11, 2006.

The current list of parcels, if sold, will break the previous record set in February, when BLM's auction included municipal watersheds for the City of Grand Junction and Town of Palisade.

The bulk of the land proposed for leasing-122,000 acres-is in two northwestern Colorado resource areas where BLM is preparing management plans to address increased oil and gas development. Leases sold before the White River Resource Area (Meeker) and Little Snake Resource Area (Craig) management plans are complete will not benefit from any new stipulations or designations to protect habitat and other special resources BLM considers during the planning processes.

"The public ought to be given an opportunity to be involved in the planning process in the Little Snake Resource Area," stated Wes McStay, a rancher and Moffat County resident. McStay continued "I seriously question why the BLM is leasing at all, especially on this scale and under split-estate lands, while the agency is supposedly planning for future oil and gas development. I'm not only worried about the next generation, but ours." Of the 93 parcels proposed for auction in Moffat County, 48 involve split-estate lands.

"The acreage BLM is proposing for this sale in Northwest Colorado is staggering," said Reed Morris, with the Colorado Wilderness Network in Craig. "As it stands, the BLM is proposing more land for drilling in this one quarterly lease sale than the agency is slated to manage as wilderness for the next twenty years in the forthcoming plans."

The upcoming sale made headlines earlier this month when state BLM officials overruled local BLM field managers and biologists wanting to defer leasing in a black-footed ferret recovery area in Moffat County. The official sale notice published Tuesday includes 20 parcels managed as the Wolf Creek Management Area for black-footed ferret recovery in the White River Resource Area. "The black-footed ferret recovery effort is just getting off the ground," said Rich Reading, Director of Conservation Biology at the Denver Zoological Foundation. Reading added, "Now is not the time to be experimenting with drilling in critically endangered species habitat."

The BLM also proposes leasing at Pinyon Ridge, an area conservation groups have proposed for protection as wilderness and as a "Special Management Area" closed to drilling to protect black-footed ferret habitat. The Pinyon Ridge area spans both Little Snake and White River resource areas and is popular with hunters and backcountry receptionists.

The conservation groups, along with Moffat County, oil and gas industry, ranchers and other citizens are participating in a process called the Northwest Colorado Stewardship in an attempt to collaborate on the management of the BLM's Little Snake Resource Area in Moffat and Routt Counties. The gas leasing comes before that collaboration process is complete.

BLM is scheduled to release a draft plan for the Little Snake Resource Area in July, and the agency is considering at least one alternative in the plan that would preclude oil and gas leasing in the Pinyon Ridge area. BLM's current policy emphasizes the use of temporary deferrals in areas that are undergoing land use planning processes. Deferring leases during a planning process is not without precedent. In February of 2006, Utah BLM withdrew 30 parcels that were in conflict with an alternative BLM was considering in a draft resource management plan revision in Price, UT.

"We hope that the Colorado BLM will use their discretion and consider holding off some of these areas until the public is given an opportunity to comment on how these lands ought to be managed," stated Jane Yazzie, a Moffat County resident. "The public is already uncertain on what will be the effect of developing the hundreds of thousands of acres already leased," Yazzie noted, "if all those lands become developed, what will be the impacts to our air and water?" In the White River Resource Area, approximately 84% (1.42 million acres) of the available BLM lands are already leased. In the Little Snake Resource Area, leased lands account for over 60%.

"If BLM were to go ahead with this sale and lease Pinyon Ridge," Morris noted, "they would be eliminating an alternative to protect this spectacular area in the revised plan before a draft is even released to the public."

In addition to protecting special areas, conservation groups believe that moving toward clean energy solutions would be a win-win. "Developing the West's clean energy resources provides the cheapest, quickest, and most reliable means to meet our nation's needs. Devastating the West's natural features is a needless sacrifice when we can win real solutions by investing in our region's vast supplies of clean energy sources," said Erin Robertson, staff biologist for Center for Native Ecosystems.

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