Court Win Against Ranchers A Marvel

HAILEY, Idaho For the better part of a decade, architect Jon Marvel has spent his ample spare time spearheading one of Idaho’s most aggressive environmental movements aimed at reining in ranching on public lands.

His group, the Idaho Watersheds Project, has been trying for years to outbid cattle and sheep ranchers for some of the state’s best grazing permits. Throughout the 1990s, he has been denied the chance to bid for some land and has seen his high bid rejected for others.

The Legislature has crafted laws specifically to thwart his efforts. But recently, the state Supreme Court threw out one of those laws and reopened two years of decisions made under it. A week later, a federal court ruled 68 grazing allotments in Owyhee County were voided.

After years of losing, Marvel’s on a winning streak, and he’s feeling a little giddy.

“Who doesn’t want to be on the winning side?” he asked. “We want to win, too. And we’re in a state where the political cards are stacked against us.”

Marvel’s stance is well-known in Idaho: Unfettered grazing damages creeks and rivers. Fewer than 1 percent of the state’s livestock owners control 75 percent of the public-land grazing permits. Idaho, by fostering an old-boy network of cheap leases with no accountability, is subsidizing these 200 or so ranchers while shortchanging public schools, which receive most of the income state lands generate.

He’s battling a five-member Land Board and core group of ranchers who believe land is to be used, and the best use of these lands is grazing. They point to the rural communities that built up around ranch clusters and point to Idaho’s reliance on them, culturally and economically.

But the years of confrontations and standoffs have forced the arguments to transcend the issues. Marvel’s aggressiveness has an in-your-face quality, and his name raises the bristles on ranchers’ necks around the state.

“The downside of Jon Marvel is that he has a burning dislike for livestock, livestock grazing and people who own livestock; or at least he seems to,” said state Sen. Laird Noh, R-Kimberly, a two-decade veteran of the Statehouse and a sheep rancher who went nose-to-nose with Marvel over an allotment a few years back.

“He has sort of a caustic personality,” Noh said. “He’s not dearly loved, even among people in the Wood River Valley.”

For the past six years, Democratic Controller J.D. Williams has held, in his Land Board seat, a front-row venue for what he calls “grazing lease gymnastics.”

He thinks of Marvel as a friend - the two traveled together to the 1996 Democratic National Convention. But he knows Marvel’s uncompromising manner.

“A lot of it is a matter of style,” Williams said. “He was a confrontationist. He stuck his tongue out at me at one of our meetings once.”

At times, it’s gotten personal. Particularly between Marvel and Secretary of State Pete Cenarrusa, the Land Board’s elder statesman, who has held elected office in Idaho for close to 50 years.

Cenarrusa grew up on a sheep ranch not far south of Marvel’s Hailey home. But the 81-year-old official came from a Blaine County that survived on sheep and minerals, at a time when Ernest Hemingway canoed down Silver Creek with a shotgun and The Mint bar was a rough-and-tumble miner’s hangout.

Marvel was born in Copenhagen 51 years ago, the son of the American ambassador to Denmark. His Hailey lives on wealthy tourists. Sportsmen can’t use barbed hooks on Silver Creek, let alone hunt there. And Bruce Willis owns The Mint.

Despite their differences, though, Cenarrusa doesn’t hold a grudge.

“He’s not a bad sort of guy to speak to and associate with,” he said. “When I meet him we shake hands. I don’t think he has anything personal against me. I don’t have anything personal against him.”

But there’s a lot Marvel does take personally. He blasts the Land Board members for their “arrogance of power” and for “fabricating their motives and actions.”

His recent legal victories have brought him satisfaction and no small sense of joy. After reading from an article quoting a deputy attorney general calling the lawsuits frivolous and absurd, Marvel paused and smiled.

“Well, the court didn’t think it was frivolous,” he said.

He thinks the decisions underline a long-term decay of the power and control ranchers wield. But ironically, he noted that by going so far out of its way to defeat him, the Land Board has furthered his cause. If the Watersheds Project was given leases early on, Marvel maintains he would never have had the time to do what he’s done.

“Nobody could say that I or our group have any political clout in this state; we have none,” he said. “But what they’ve done - they’ve given us the newspapers.”

He held up a thick stack of copied articles, editorials and opinion pieces.

“Look what happened,” he said, waving the stack. “I didn’t expect all this to happen. The only result has been trouble for them.”

Most now agree Marvel has had some positive impact on Idaho ranching.

“I think there was a need for the Land Board and for some permittees to improve their management,” Noh said.

Williams said he thinks ranchers are more open to stewardship reviews and management plans than they’ve ever been before.

But Noh said the personality clashes have prevented compromises, and have sent too many decisions to the courts.

For Marvel’s part, the victories have added to his resolve.

“Nothing’s going to change as fast as I want it to,” he said.

“But I’m not going away; I live here,” he said. “One way or another, they’re going to have to learn to deal with me.”