BLM, ONDA agree to disagree on Steens roads

Two things are clear about recent actions involving potential road work in the protected area around southeast Oregon’s Steens Mountain – the Bureau of Land Management has scrapped a proposal to maintain 133 miles of often-overgrown roads, and as a result, a Bend-based conservation group has dropped its challenge to those plans.

From there, things get as predictably muddy — we’re talking government legalities here — as any road in remote areas can get after thunderstorms rumble through, including the Steens.

The Oregon Natural Desert Association announced in a news release Tuesday that the BLM had withdrawn its road maintenance plans after ONDA challenged the plan in federal court. And so, it had now withdrawn its lawsuit to block those plans.

However, BLM Steens Field Manager Rhonda Karges said Wednesday the agency’s move to drop the “categorical exclusion” back in February was done not due to the court challenge, but because the agency had determined that it was unnecessary.

Karges said two other management plans for the Steens Mountain area “allow us to do road maintenance for these routes” under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“It was a piece of paper that I really didn’t need, because I already had two other plans in place to do that,” Karges said. “It was confusing, so I retracted the categorical exclusion.”

In the Feb. 22 withdrawal notice, Karges said much the same, adding, “When it issued the CX, the BLM did not intend to authorize any road maintenance or other activities different from or in excess of those already authorized” in the Steens Cooperative Management and Protection Area.

But ONDA Executive Director Brent Fenty said Wednesday that’s not how he sees it.

Fenty said the categorical exclusion would have allowed much more extensive road work than previously permitted, with “no parameters on what they could do on those routes,” and less public input before the work took place. He said the existing plans to which Karges refer to are much more limited in scope, allowing “minimum maintenance” on a smaller number of routes – five in particular.

After that February withdrawal letter, Fenty said they requested more information from the BLM, outlining what routes they’d already done work on. It took a while for that information to be received and reviewed, he added.

Fenty said they found the maintenance work that had been done “was acceptable,” so they dropped the legal challenge.

Here’s the rest of the Tuesday news release:

Bend-based ONDA challenged the plan in federal court in December, saying the agency had failed to first study the proposal’s adverse effects.

ONDA argued that the BLM’s project threatened to establish illegal driving on the iconic desert mountain, thereby damaging land in proposed and existing wilderness areas, fragmenting essential wildlife habitat and opening the mountain to weed infestations.

In February, the group said, the BLM formally withdrew the plan.

“After reviewing agency records to ensure the work had not damaged critical wildlife and wilderness areas, ONDA voluntarily dismissed its suit today (Tuesday),” the organization’s news release said.

“We’re pleased that BLM has done the right thing by withdrawing its plan,” said Fenty. “There is no need for the BLM to upgrade unused and overgrown routes on Steens Mountain — and certainly not without first studying and disclosing potential impacts to this fragile, protected desert landscape.”

In 2000, Congress passed the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act. The law requires that the BLM must manage the mountain to protect the “long-term ecological integrity of Steens Mountain for future and present generations.”

Steens Mountain is situated deep in southeast Oregon’s high desert. It rises 9,734 feet above a broad sagebrush steppe. On its east side, a mile-high escarpment overlooks the ancient Alvord Desert below. The mountain’s various habitats and more than 100 miles of federally designated Wild and Scenic Rivers support a diversity of fish and wildlife species.

In other efforts to protect Steens Mountain, ONDA said it has successfully convinced the BLM to close and rehabilitate 28 miles of roads illegally constructed in 2009, and has obtained court orders barring the BLM from unlawfully upgrading about 90 miles of routes while the agency cures a series of legal flaws identified by a federal district court in 2011.

“We’re happy to close out this case and instead focus our efforts on helping the BLM identify routes that are appropriate for maintaining, as opposed to those that should be left to Mother Nature to rehabilitate,” Fenty said.