Federal officials finalized new land-management guidelines Friday for 3.6 million acres of southwest Wyoming, prescribing future management for beloved landscapes like the Red Desert and the Little Mountain region.
The move comes only weeks before President Joe Biden will leave office and only hours before a possible federal government shutdown.
Revisions to the resource management plan for the Bureau of Land Management’s Rock Springs Field Office were 13 years in the making. On Friday afternoon, the federal agency published a “record of decision” document, closing the door to additional changes.
“I’ve worked for BLM-Wyoming for over a decade … and the Rock Springs RMP has always been something that’s been ongoing,” deputy state director for communications Brad Purdy told WyoFile. “It does feel very nice to get that across the finish line. We can have some good resource management in that area that isn’t from 1997.”
The resource management plan cemented by the decision is unchanged, Purdy said, from what the BLM proposed in the final environmental impact statement, released in August.
Gov. Mark Gordon had asked for a number of changes via an administrative appeal he filed last week. The plan sparked criticism — and even outrage and hysteria — from many Republicans in Wyoming worried the plan leaned too far toward conservation at the expense of industrial activity.
There were major changes, however, during earlier parts of the planning and revision process.
“Between the draft and final, we had an extraordinary amount of public comment, interaction with cooperators, interaction with the governor’s office,” Purdy said. “That allowed us to put together a really good final EIS. After we put that together, and we looked at everything, we didn’t see any reason to make any changes to the [decision].”
This breaking news story will be updated.
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