More trouble ahead?

Another aspect of the Bureau of Land Management’s ongoing land-use plan revision could get the agency sued, according to a local conservation advocate.

Jaina Moan, executive director of Friends of Gold Butte, said the bureau may have violated federal environmental regulations early this year when it held a series of public meetings on the plan revision but excluded Gold Butte National Monument from the conversation.

The BLM originally said it would develop a management plan for the 2-year-old monument as part of the regionwide plan update. Then, just before the public meetings, bureau officials abruptly put the Gold Butte planning process on hold pending a possible boundary reduction by the Trump administration. The planning process resumed several weeks later, after the meetings had been held.

To date, no action has been taken by the White House to reduce the size of the Obamaera monument.

“When they removed it from consideration at the public meetings, I think they discouraged comment,” Moan said. “I don’t know what to say (to the BLM) other than, ‘You skipped your public scoping process for Gold Butte.’ ”

John Asselin, spokesman for the BLM in Nevada, said in an email that the public will have a chance to comment on the Gold Butte management plan when it is released with the Southern Nevada plan late this summer. “We don’t foresee any problems in the process.”

Moan stressed that her group has no immediate plans to sue over the issue, but other groups might.

“They’re vulnerable. Let’s just say that,” Moan said of the BLM. “I wish they weren’t.” Henry Brean process as a positive opportunity to complete a plan that is in much need of revision,” Asselin said.

The Southern Nevada District Resource Management Plan serves as a sort of blueprint that guides specific land-use decisions for 3.1 million acres of federal land in Clark and

Nye counties.

The sweeping document hasn’t been significantly updated since

1998, when the region was home to 1 million fewer residents than it is today.

The BLM started revising the plan in 2008, leading to the publication of a 2,200-page first draft in 2014. The document drew thousands of critical comments and some outright hostility, prompting the bureau’s state director to shelve the process for more than a year.

The effort began again last fall and led to a series of public meetings in January. At the time, BLM officials said they planned to simply revise and expand the 2014 draft rather than start from scratch, but now they will have to find a way to slash 2,200 pages down to 300.

Asselin said he couldn’t speculate on whether the bureau will be sued over of the new planning directive.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @Refriedbrean on Twitter.