State to assess federal land management

Montana State Senator Jennifer Fielder was on hand at the regular meeting of the Mineral County Commissioners on Friday to discuss Senate Joint Resolution 15 and its importance to the county.

The resolution, which was sponsored by 60 state legislators and approved by 80 percent of the legislature, gave the interim Environmental Quality Council the authority to analyze how federal land within the state is currently being managed in an effort to find solutions to land management issues.

“I wanted to bring this particular piece of legislation to your attention because it’s pretty critical for Mineral County, I think, that the state takes a closer look at the federal lands and management issues that we are having,” Senator Fielder said. “We want to try to find solutions to some of the problems that we know we have.”

The resolution will begin with a survey of all of the counties in Montana that have a “significant” amount of federal land within them. Senator Fielder said the survey will ask county commissioners to give their opinions on a variety of topics ranging from environmental aspects to public health and safety.

“Once we receive the official responses back from the counties to our survey questions we will have a pretty good idea of what the trends are,” Senator Fielder said.

Senator Fielder said along with the water compact, the management of federal lands in the state is her “top priority” due to the impact it has on the citizens of Montana.

“(It is a top priority) to make sure we find proper resolutions for the people that are affected by these decisions the most and that is western Montana,” Senator Fielder said.

After going over the specifics of the resolution (SEE PAGE 3 FOR FULL TEXT), Senator Fielder once again stressed its importance.

“There’s a number of people who will say ‘well we can’t do anything because it’s federal land and we are just a state’ and I disagree,” Senator Fielder said. “It’s the land in Montana and it affects the people that live here. It affects your county, your county’s economy. It affects your citizen’s health, safety and welfare for which you have jurisdiction over.”

In preparing the committee and the resolution, Senator Fielder looked at several solutions that occurred both within the state and outside the state relating to the management of federal lands.

“There’s quite a variety,” Senator Fielder said.

“I think if we come up with a bon-a-fide report from the state level that captures all of the input we’ve received from the counties in terms of the risks, and the threats and the concerns that you are experiencing with federal land management. If we can put that together with what our desired goals and solutions are that would be different from what we are seeing we can put that together with the successes we are seeing being utilized as well as some possibly new ideas that the state of Montana and our counties can enact to address these problems.”

Senator Fielder added that once that is accomplished she believes that it is her duty as an elected state official to “not wait” for the federal government to solve the problems but for the state to figure out how to solve them.

“For us it is a high priority,” Senator Fielder said. “Mineral County is 82 percent federal land but it’s just not going to be as high a priority for eastern states because they don’t have that much federal land.”

Commissioner Roman Zylawy then asked Senator Fielder about the successes she mentioned when it comes to the states taking more control of federal land management.

“There are some very big solutions being suggested in an attempt to address this in some of the western states,” Senator Fielder said.

On top of the examples she gave from outside of the state, Senator Fielder also mentioned the efforts of the Sanders Natural Resource Council as an example of a “small” success.

“This is a citizens group that dug into the forest service resource plans and were very concerned with the amount of roads being closed,” Senator Fielder said.

Two of the council members were concerned with a specific road near their property that was scheduled to close due to a lack of maintenance funding.

The members studied the engineering reports, found out how much it would take to fix the problems in the road and then worked with the forest service to bring in heavy equipment to fix the road.

“This has become a model project now where citizens can come in and fix a road,” Senator Fielder said. “We’ve had these projects where citizens have fixed a trail but we think this is the first one where they have brought in heavy equipment to fix a road for motorized traffic.”

Senator Fielder added if projects such as the one in Sanders County continue it could be a step in the right direction for keeping access open to federal lands in communities such as Mineral County.

Surveys will be mailed out to the counties and will be given back to the Environmental Quality Council prior to their second interim meeting in September.