Documents’ notes reveal strategy
Interior agency accused of pushing U.S. lands’ commercial use
In a quest to shrink national monuments last year, senior Interior Department officials dismissed evidence that these public lands boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries, according to documents the department released this month and retracted a day later.
The thousands of pages of email correspondence chart how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his aides instead tailored their survey of protected sites to emphasize the value of logging, ranching, and energy development that would be unlocked if they were not designated as national monuments.
Comments that the department’s Freedom of Information Act officers made in the documents show that they sought to keep some of the references out of public view because they were “revealing [the] strategy” behind the review.
Presidents can establish national monuments in federal land or waters if they determine that cultural, historical or natural resources are imperiled. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing Zinke to review 27 national monuments established over a period of 21 years, arguing that his predecessors had overstepped their authority in placing these large sites off-limits to development.
Trump has already reduced two of Utah’s largest national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, and has not ruled out altering others.
The new documents show that as Zinke conducted his four-month review, Interior officials rejected material that would justify keeping protections in place and sought out evidence that could buttress the case for unraveling them.
On July 3, 2017, Bureau of Land Management official Nikki Moore wrote colleagues about five draft economic reports on sites under scrutiny, noting that there is a paragraph within each on “our ability to estimate the value of energy and/or minerals forgone as a result of the designations.” That reference was redacted on the grounds it could “reveal strategy about the [national monument] review process.”
Officials also singled out Bureau of Land Management acting Deputy Director John Ruhs’ July 28 response to questions from Katherine MacGregor, acting assistant secretary of lands and minerals management, as eligible to be redacted. MacGregor had asked about the logging potential of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument if Trump reversed the expansion that President Barack Obama carried out at the end of his second term.
“Previous timber sale planning and development in the [expansion area] can be immediately resumed,” Ruhs wrote.
Zinke proposed removing some of the forested areas within Cascade-Siskiyou, where three mountain ranges and several distinct ecosystems intersect, to “allow sustained-yield timber production.” Trump has yet to alter the site, which was established by Bill Clinton as a 65,000-acre monument and then enlarged by nearly 48,000 acres days before Obama left office.
These redactions came to light because Interior’s Freedom of Information Act office sent out a batch of documents to journalists and advocacy groups on July 16 that they later removed online.
“It appears that we inadvertently posted an incorrect version of the files for the most recent National Monuments production,” officials wrote the next day. “We are requesting that if you downloaded the files already to please delete those versions.”
Aaron Weiss, a spokesman for the advocacy group Center for Western Priorities, said in an email that the “botched document dump reveals what we’ve suspected all along: Secretary Zinke ignored clear warnings from his own staff that shrinking national monuments would put sacred archaeological and cultural sites at risk.”
“Trying to hide those warnings from the public months later is disgraceful and possibly illegal,” Weiss added.
Asked for comment, Interior Department officials said they were looking into the matter.
Robert Vanasse, who represents groups that have lobbied to allow commercial fishing in national marine monuments in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, said Trump administration officials have been more open to outside input than their predecessors.
“[Obama officials] had a lot of meetings with our folks but didn’t listen,” he said, adding that even some Massachusetts Democratic lawmakers objected to the New England marine monument.
Other supporters of the rollbacks said the Trump administration has been too slow to undo the changes made by the Obama administration. On May 11, 2017, for example, Oregon Farm Bureau officials wrote Zinke to thank him “for taking time out of your evening” to meet with their delegation at the Trump International Hotel and hear ranchers’ objections to the Cascade-Siskiyou expansion.
Sharon Waterman, the bureau’s 1st vice president, said in an interview that while she was glad her group had “a chance encounter” with Zinke at the Washington hotel, she was “very disappointed” that the monument’s boundaries remained unchanged more than a year later.
“It doesn’t seem like what we have done has made an impact, but I don’t know why,” she said. “It’s really sad that they continue this expansion, because it’s really important that [timberlands] stay in production.”