Montana Goes Ahead With Suit Against Feds

Montana will proceed with its lawsuit against two federal agencies over their failure to control brucellosis in Yellowstone National Park’s bison herd, Gov. Marc Racicot said Saturday.

“We have to come up with a plan for capture and quarantine for this coming winter,” but a timetable submitted by the National Park Service offers no specifics on how or when the plan would be put in effect, Racicot said.

State livestock and wildlife officials told the governor that midlevel park service managers are dragging their heels on a program under which the park service would capture, test, quarantine and cull bison both inside and outside the park.

“I guess I would disagree that we’re dragging our feet,” said park spokeswoman Marsha Karle. “We’re as anxious to find a solution as anybody is.”

Racicot and senior officials of the park service and the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service met Jan. 31 in Washington, D.C., and agreed in principle on a long-term bison management plan.

At the time, Racicot said he might suspend the state’s lawsuit, filed Jan. 17, if the park service offered an acceptable timetable for the plan and the inspection service provided a letter reaffirming Montana’s brucellosis-free status.

The inspection service wrote such a letter to the state last week.

Meanwhile, the Park Service came up with a proposed timetable that says a final environmental impact statement on the bison plan could be completed no sooner than late September 1996.

And Racicot said it offers no time line for building confinement areas to round up bison and test them.

Many of the park’s 4,200 bison are believed to be infected with brucellosis, a disease that causes cows to abort their calves. Montana officials fear the bison will transmit the disease to domestic cattle.