TUCSON CITIZEN: Thurs., April 26, 2007

Bill seeks oversight of conservation areas

By BLAKE MORLOCK

Much of the federal land set aside for conservation in southern Arizona has patchwork management which critics say is underfunded and can change greatly from administration to administration.

Four members of Congress have sponsored a bill to give national conservation areas, national wilderness areas and national monuments more security under permanent management. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, whose job has been more about doling out land for economic ventures than environmental protection, has been stuck managing these lands.

The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Tucson, would establish the National Conservation Land System and make protection of these lands permanent and create an agency specifically to oversee them. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate last week by Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. The bill's other sponsors are Republicans Mary Bono of California, Rick Renzi of Arizona and Democrat Jim Moran of Virginia.

"It designates that system as an important system and it gives the lands status important for protection," Grijalva said.

The bill, if approved, represents the last step in turning the Wilderness Act of 1964 into hard and fast conservation, said Matt Skroch, executive director of a Tucson-based environmental group, Sky Island Alliance.

"For the first time (the land system) has congressional acknowledgment as worthy of protection," Skroch said.

The lands will be managed comprehensively under a perpetual bureaucracy that will resist radical changes from changes in the executive branch. The managers can also lobby Congress for money to take care of the lands, officials said.