Journal Southern Bureau

Wednesday, January 14, 2004
BLM Otero Mesa Plan Blasted

By Rene Romo

LAS CRUCES- Having had a week to review it, environmentalists on Tuesday blasted the Bureau of Land Management's plan to allow expanded oil and gas drilling on Otero Mesa. Meanwhile, BLM officials hurriedly put on their own news conference to counter criticisms leveled by the Coalition for Otero Mesa at their press
event outside BLM headquarters Tuesday morning.

"We think it's a balanced plan that allows for oil and natural gas exploration to occur while preserving natural resources," said Amy Lueders, manager of the BLM's Las Cruces field office. The resource management plan covers 2 million acres of federal land in Sierra and Otero counties.

But Jim Steitz, an organizer with the Southwest Environmental Center in Las Cruces, said the BLM's proposed gas drilling plan provided fewer environmental safeguards than an earlier draft of the plan.

Coalition members, among other things, said the plan didn't protect adequate land to sustain meaningful pairs of endangered Aplomado falcons. Southwest Environmental Center Director Kevin Bixby said that oil and gas development, which can be damaging to the sensitive ecosystem, is "incompatible with multiple use" of the area, the BLM's stated goal.

In a report the coalition circulated on the difficulty of revegetating the Otero Mesa with rare black-grama grasses, New Mexico State University professor emeritus of biology Walter Whitford wrote that various factors made "the risk of inability to restore the Chihuahuan Desert grasslands of Otero Mesa extremely high."

Lueders acknowledged that because black-grama seeds are not commercially available, the BLM is relying largely on nature to restore itself after well pads have been removed. The BLM plan anticipates that up to 140 wells will be drilled in the two-county area but only 84 will be economically viable. The BLM says about 1,600 acres of land will be directly disturbed by well pads, roads and pipelines.

Steitz said the BLM plan "being forced on New Mexico" was driven by a Bush administration energy policy "designed to meet the needs of the oil and gas industry."

Public protests may be filed until Feb. 9.