BATTLE MOUNTAIN - The Battle Mountain District of the BLM administers about 2,520,200 acres of land within Lander County (about 90 percent) and is involved in a wide-range of multiple use projects including hard rock mining, renewable energy development, recreation, habitat restoration and ranching.
Doug Furtado, district manager for the Battle Mountain District, really appreciates the hard work BLM, along with its proponents, partners and community members put forth in 2011 and he looks forward to continuing to serve the public in 2012 through a variety of multiple use projects including hard rock mining and renewable energy development, wildlife habitat enhancement and hazardous fuels reduction projects as well as the planning and completion of new recreation sites and facilities.
"Thank you to the citizens of Lander County for working hand in hand with our BLM employees to actively participate in management of our public lands," said Furtado.
Notable accomplishments for 2011 include:
• Bootstraps crews removed over 400 acres of pinyon/juniper through hand thinning in the Bald Mountain area of the Carico Lake Allotment and constructed three riparian exclosures to help support improved riparian conditions. Various existing exclosures were also maintained by the crews;
• In coordination with the Bootstraps program and cooperating agencies, approximately 1,000 acres of noxious weeds were treated within Lander County and thousands of acres were inventoried for future treatment;
• Significant progress was made on the District's Resource Management Plan revision which included eight public scoping meetings and two socio-economic workshops, formalizing MOUs with NDOW and the National Park Service, drafting a Communications Plan, GIS Management Strategy and Minerals Assessment Reports, as well as a Socioeconomic report;
• Completed mitigation of the Antelope Valley Pesticide dump;
• Facilitated an unprecedented number of Notice level mineral exploration projects (five acres or less) within Lander County as well as worked on many other larger exploration projects including Coral Gold's Robertson Project, Newmont's Argenta, Five Areas, Buffalo Valley and McCoy Cove projects, Barrick's West Hills and Horse Canyon Cortez Unified Exploration Project and the Klondex Fire Creek Project;
• Permitted the McGinness Hills Geothermal Power Plant in Grass Valley;
• Gathered, treated (fertility control for mares) and released wild horses within the Bald Mountain, Shoshone and New Pass-Ravenswood Herd Management Areas;
• Made significant progress toward permitting Newmont's Phoenix Copper Leach project and Newmont's Buffalo Valley project;
• Completed monitoring and assessments of riparian (Properly Functioning Condition (PFC) assessments and Multiple Indicator Monitoring (MIM) and upland (Assessment, Inventory and Monitoring (AIM) strategy, Ecological Site Inventory (ESI) and Key Forage Species Utilization) habitat conditions in sensitive sage-grouse habitats.
In the near future, the district plans on:
• Prevailing under legal challenges to Barrick's Cortez Hills Project;
• Approving Newmont's Phoenix Copper Leach project;
• Approving General Moly's Mount Hope project;
• Processing baseline environmental analysis for a new barite operation with Haliburton in the Slaven Canyon area;
• Rehabilitation efforts to primarily support winter mule-deer range in the Augusta Wilderness Study Area in response to the Ellison Fire which burnt approximately 800 acres of public land;
• Implementation of hand-thinning of pinyon/juniper by Bootstraps within the Eagle Butte area to improve core sage-grouse habitat within the Toiyabe Sage-Grouse Population Management Unit (PMU);
• Issue the Proposed Decision for the Battle Mountain Complex which will effectively improve rangeland conditions, primarily in core sage-grouse habitat within the upper elevations of the Battle Mountain Range;
• Conduct a Rangeland Health Assessment and Evaluation for the Argenta Allotment;
• Finalize all baseline reports for the RMP and sign MOU's with Esmeralda, Eureka, Lander and Nye counties as well as Nellis Air Force Base, Fallon Naval Air Station, the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe and the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.
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