Take a breather on public oil and gas leases

In a welcome move, the Bureau of Land Management in Colorado has backed off plans to offer 224,341 acres of public lands for oil and gas lease next month, including parcels in the North Fork Valley near Paonia. BLM officials should now focus on rewriting a management plan for the area and reverse their efforts to shorten public comment periods and hasten environmental reviews.

The decision leaves 8,347 acres on the auction block.

Earlier, the BLM had pulled 148,797 acres, mostly in northwest Colorado, from its list of proposed leases.

All or part of the parcels could be brought forth again at future sales, but the deferral creates an opportunity for the BLM to take a closer look at what opening such a large swath of land would mean for the environment and neighboring communities.

Gov. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet both raised concerns about the potential effect of drilling on elk, deer and other big game, as well as greater sage grouse.

Much of the land was part of a 2015 federal and state plan for conserving greater sage grouse, whose numbers have been declining for years.

The bid to open the North Fork Valley also drew objections from officials in Gunnison County and Paonia, who joined residents expressing concerns about potential damage to air and water quality and to tourism and agriculture. The economic impact and effects on wildlife deserve careful study.

Better scrutiny also allows better timing of leases to attain the greatest financial benefit for the public from the sales and resulting royalties.

The Trump administration needs to find a proper balance between land use rights, public profit, energy needs and environmental protection, but speed isn’t an ally in that quest. Officials in Gunnison and Paonia raised reasonable concerns about public comment periods being cut in half to 15 days.

They also objected to revisions to the environmental review process intended to streamline decisions.

In a letter to the BLM this fall, Hickenlooper wrote, “this new process is insufficient to allow for meaningful input” from the public, especially for a sale that would have included more than 220 parcels.

In September, a federal judge in Idaho offered a similar opinion when he issued a temporary injunction against Trump administration changes to the leasing process that would open up large sections of the West.

The ruling involved a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project.

In his ruling, Chief Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush said that the “BLM made an intentional decision to limit the opportunity for (and even in some circumstances to preclude entirely) any contemporaneous public involvement in decisions concerning whether to grant oil and gas leases on federal lands.”

Perhaps there are inefficiencies in the review process that can be rooted out to accelerate decisions, but without proper due diligence and management planning the BLM could harm not only the natural environment but also nearby communities’ economy and quality of life.

In this case, the BLM wasn’t acting as wise stewards of public lands. The bureau needs to start over and ensure the public is heard.