WINNEMUCCA - The Pine Forest lands bill broke loose from the logjam it's been caught in for months, and with a unanimous vote from the House Natural Resources Committee, moved on downstream to a position where it can be voted on by the full House of Representatives.
"I'm glad to see the Pine Forest bill finally move," said Humboldt County Administrator, Bill Deist. "Hopefully it will pass Congress before the end of the year."
If the bill does pass Congress it will facilitate road relocations, will release some lands from wilderness study designation, while giving formal and final wilderness designation to the Pine Forest and Blue Lake Wilderness Study Areas. It will also facilitate private land exchanges that border the proposed wilderness.
The Pine Forest bill that finally moved out of committee yesterday is formally titled the Pine Forest Range Recreation Enhancement Act of 2013.
The Pine Forest Act was one of a total of seven northern Nevada lands bills in the package that passed out of the committee last week.
Former northern Nevada resident Jim Jeffress headed much of the work that went into formation of a diverse stakeholders group that formulated the agreements encompassed in the Pine Forest bill. Jeffress, who worked as a backcountry coordinator for Trout Unlimited's Sportsmen's Conservation Project, confessed to being surprised by the bill's sudden movement out of committee. He'd been told earlier this year that the chances of the lands bill being voted on by the committee and moving on the full House were non-existent.
"Then I got an email early this week that said, "It's moving," said Jeffress.
"We're not really sure why the logjam broke before the August congressional recess, but we're glad to see it," he added.
The whole process began, according to Jeffress, because Wilderness Study Areas were designated long ago, and no progress was ever made toward a final designation one way or the other.
"These Wilderness Study Areas are managed even more strictly than Wilderness Areas in some ways," said Jeffress. "We were looking for a way to find some resolution to the uncertainty."
In October of 2010, the Humboldt County commissioners approved moving forward with work to put together a county lands bill that would lead to wilderness designation for some of the county's most treasured areas, while removing the Wilderness Study Area spectre from the remainder of the area.
The commissioners agreed with Jeffress that it was better for a county to put its own lands bill together by bringing all the stakeholders together in one place to work on the bill in a true local/regional process.
The idea was to work out all the details up-front with all of the groups that had a stake in the final product. The stakeholders group included representatives from sportsmen's groups, ranchers, farmers, conservation groups, and wildlife conservation groups, among others.
Getting all of those interests to agree to all the provision of the bill was supposed to take all the controversy out of the picture, and put the bill in position for smooth passage through Congress, according to Jeffress. And the bill was hailed as a template for how lands bills should be done.
The stakeholders were surprised when four provisions were added to the bill by Doc Hastings, Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee. The additons brought controversy to the bill that those who'd formulated the compromises had sought to avoid. Two of those additions have now been removed, but two remain.
Both Jeffress and Deist mentioned that changes made to the original language that all had worked so hard to craft are still a concern. They still hope the bill can be revised to pass "as it was originally drafted by Nevada residents," said Deist.
"We're having our people look at the two changes that remain to see if they would really be that big a problem if the bill passed with those provisions still in it," Jeffress said. "It just adds controversy to the bill that wasn't there to begin with, and isn't needed," he concluded.
Senator Dean Heller said, after the bill passed on July 30, "I would like to commend my friend Congressman Amodei for his hard work in negotiating a compromise between the Nevada House delegation and the Republican and Democrat Natural Resources Committee leadership. In the Nevada delegation, we have a strong tradition of working cooperatively and in a bipartisan manner on public lands bills, and Congressman Amodei's work should be recognized."
Heller said he would continue to work with Senator Harry Reid on building bipartisan momentum to "Send the proposal to the President for signature before the end of the 113th Congress."
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