BLM’s new grazing rules halted

BOISE – In a ruling that harshly criticized the Bureau of Land Management, a federal judge on Friday blocked the agency’s new grazing rules, saying it had given in to livestock industry pressure.

The BLM violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in creating the rules, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ruled.

Winmill’s 52-page ruling said the BLM’s rule revisions would have loosened restrictions on grazing on millions of acres of public land nationwide, limited the amount of public comment the BLM had to consider and diluted the BLM’s authority to sanction ranchers for grazing violations.

“While the BLM justifies the changes as making it more efficient, the BLM was not their originator – it was the grazing industry and its supporters that first proposed them,” Winmill ruled in a lawsuit brought two years ago by the environmental group Western Watersheds Project to challenge the revisions.

“The judge saw it for what it was, which was BLM’s efforts to ignore its own scientists, freeze out the public and transfer ownership of public resources to the livestock industry – all of which would cause pernicious effects on threatened and endangered species,” said Todd Tucci, an attorney for Western Watershed Project.

Matt Spangler, a BLM spokesman in Washington, D.C., said the agency had just received the ruling and could not yet comment. Andrew Anes, spokesman for the Department of Justice, also said the decision was under review and that he could not comment.

Winmill also found fault with the rules themselves. The BLM reduced the number of interested parties that would be given notice of grazing allotment issues, and stopped consulting, cooperating and coordinating with the interested public at all on several types of allotment changes.

“The changes substantially affect both the amount and quality of public input,” Winmill said.

“The BLM is changing course here,” Winmill said. “While the 1995 regulations erected protections against grazing damage and guarded against delay, the revisions at issue here promote delay.”