Gila Wild and Scenic bill reintroduced in D.C.

In a Tuesday press conference, Democratic U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan announced the reintroduction of federal legislation to protect 450 miles of waterways within the Gila River system under the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

“It’s long past time to protect these segments as Wild and Scenic,” Heinrich told reporters, invoking Aldo Leopold’s pioneering conservationist vision for preserving a swath of the Gila National Forest as the nation’s first-ever designated wilderness area.

“One hundred years ago, the spectacular landscapes and ecosystems shaped by these waters inspired a young forester named Aldo Leopold to call for the establishment of America’s first wilderness area,” Heinrich said. “Aldo Leopold foresaw that we needed to set aside wilderness areas to protect what he called the last big stretches of wild country. That foresight allows today’s visitors to the Gila — including myself — to see much of the same glorious landscapes that inspired Leopold so long ago.”

Heinrich also pointed to the dire situation on the overallocated Colorado River to illustrate the importance of taking action to prevent a future “dewatering” of the Gila River. The Gila and San Francisco rivers lie within the lower Colorado River basin, and the Gila ultimately feeds into the Colorado River downstream in Arizona.

“Some of the clearest and most visible signs of the climate crisis in New Mexico and across the West are evident in the rapidly diminishing flows on the Colorado River, and its shrinking reservoirs,” Heinrich said. “In the face of this, our effort to protect one of the few remaining wild and natural stretches of water in the greater Colorado River watershed could not be more urgent.”

Environmental protection groups celebrated the bill’s reintroduction.

“The Gila River is New Mexico’s last remaining free-flowing river,” a New Mexico Wild spokesperson said in a Tuesday press release. “It is a popular destination for outdoor enthusiasts, offering opportunities to fish, hunt, hike, kayak, camp, picnic, view wildlife and more.

“The popularity of these segments is an important economic driver for the communities in southwestern New Mexico, as many businesses in the region rely on revenue from outside visitors traveling through communities like Silver City to access entry points to the Gila and San Francisco rivers,” the spokesperson continued. “Data released last year by the New Mexico Outdoor Recreation Division found that the state’s outdoor economy is an important and growing sector, accounting for $1.2 billion in income and more than 33,500 jobs in the state annually.”

The Gila Conservation Coalition said the protections would help mitigate the rapidly unfolding effects of the climate and biodiversity crises.

“As we struggle to mitigate the ecological impacts of the climate and extinction crises, Wild and Scenic designation will ensure long-term protection of the Gila’s riparian ecosystem and its threatened and endangered species, while also protecting clean water for irrigation and our outdoor recreation economy,” Gila Conservation Coalition Executive Director Allyson Siwik said in a separate release.

The Gila Conservation Coalition was originally co-founded by the bill’s namesake, author and self-described “redneck environmentalist” Dutch Salmon, who at the time was leading an ultimately successful effort to stop the proposed Conner Dam, one of four large diversion projects that have failed to come to fruition since the 1960s. Salmon died in 2019.

Senate Bill 3670, the “M.H. Dutch Salmon Greater Gila Wild and Scenic River Act,” was originally introduced in May 2020 by Heinrich and then-Sen. Tom Udall, the bill’s original sponsor.

Udall didn’t run for reelection, and Lujan, who represented New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District, went on to beat Republican candidate Mark Ronchetti in last November’s general election. Upon taking office, Lujan signed on to support SB 3670 alongside Heinrich.

The only legislative action for the original bill came during a September 2020 hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands, Forests, and Mining, where testimony was given both for and against the bill.

The Gila Conservation Coalition noted in its press release that “support for protection of the Gila [comes] from local community members, Native American tribes, sportsmen and women, veterans, small business owners, faith and civic organizations, local governments and outdoor recreation and conservation organizations.”

But the proposal has also drawn very vocal opposition from the agricultural and ranching community, as well as unanimous dissent from Hidalgo and Catron county commissioners and southwest New Mexico’s soil and water conservation districts — all of whom have coalesced under the umbrella of the Heritage Waters Coalition.

The opposition group, which lists mining giant Freeport-McMoRan among its supporters and is led by Catron County Commissioner Haydn Forward, has warned of the negative impacts to industry, private property rights and water rights that it says could stem from management plans for each designated segment that, if the bill becomes law, will necessarily be formulated and overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, in cooperation with other agencies.

Sens. Udall and Heinrich, as well as teams from their offices, and now Sen. Lujan and his office staff, have formed a chorus with environmental groups and several local elected officials in Grant County to repeatedly debunk the assertions made by the Heritage Waters Coalition, which, generally speaking, frames the Gila River Wild and Scenic proposal as an industry-killing land and water grab by the federal government.

“I started counting the existing diversions along the San Francisco and the Gila rivers,” Forward told an audience of about 15 people who gathered in the Virden Community Center one evening in mid-June, one of a series of presentations about the dangers of Wild and Scenic designation and the threat posed by President Joe Biden’s 30-by-30 initiative. “We’ve got a total of 24 diversions. All 24 of those diversions are entangled in the Dutch Salmon bill that is amending the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. There lie the risks — and it’s not just risks for irrigation, right?”

Forward went on to tell his audience that a segment proposed for Wild and Scenic designation in the Gila Middle Box south of Bill Evans Lake — an upstream reservoir fed by a diversion on the Gila that ultimately feeds water to Freeport-McMoRan’s Tyrone Mine — would threaten Grant County’s mining economy.

“The Tyrone Mine, all the mining operations around Silver City, rely on their diversions to continue their mining,” Forward told the Virden audience. “Freeport-McMoRan is very nervous about this legislation. Freeport-McMoRan is paying attention. They’re saying, look, this is a true threat to our mining economy in Grant County, where, by the way, mining is 44 percent of their GDP.

“Can you imagine if you go to Morenci, if Wild and Scenic flows downstream to Arizona?” Forward added, referring to the huge open-pit copper mine just across the New Mexico-Arizona border that encompasses miles and miles of the San Francisco River. “Imagine what’s gonna happen in Morenci — it will entangle it as well.”
Freeport-McMoRan hasn’t been responsive to Daily Press inquiries regarding the company’s financial support of the Heritage Waters Coalition, which, as a private organization, doesn’t disclose the makeup of its board of directors or the sources or amounts of donations it collects. But according to publicly available lobbying disclosure documents, the Heritage Waters Coalition has paid Washington, D.C., lobbying firm Freemyer & Associates $110,000 since the start of 2020 to lobby specifically against passage of SB 3670.

As he has for years now — with little effect on the bill’s opponents — Heinrich on Tuesday said the message regarding endangered water rights and threats to private property promulgated by the Heritage Waters Coalition is inaccurate.

Asked about any compromises that may have been reached between legislators and the bill’s opponents, Heinrich indicated that the list of 23 river segments proposed for designation in the original legislation hasn’t been altered.

“That Middle Box segment is really the heart of this proposal,” Heinrich said. “What we have been able to do is make sure that diversions for the actual water rights are protected, and the water rights themselves are [still] governed by state law. We actually wrote that into this legislation, to ensure that all users, whether it’s Freeport-McMoRan or whether it’s a small farmer or a rancher who has valid water rights — and those will continue to be governed by the state — are not affected by this legislation. And we explicitly put that into the bill.”

Lujan echoed Heinrich’s reassurances.

“This act is absolutely clear that it will not condemn private land, or interests in land, and that this act will not change how private landowners decide to use their own land,” Lujan said. “Again, that’s a matter of state and local government, and the legislation is abundantly clear in those places.”

Forward told the Daily Press on Tuesday that Catron County and the Heritage Waters Coalition last submitted “numerous [proposed] changes” to the legislation about three months ago, but “unfortunately, the vast majority of those changes were not incorporated into the current version introduced today, and the map remains unchanged — even though thousands of local citizens have voiced objections.”

Forward’s suggestion was that the U.S. Senate “delay their proposed hearing on the legislation until the diverse groups of professionals within the Gila National Forest make their final comments on designated rivers through the scheduled Gila Forest Plan,” which former Forest Supervisor Adam Mendonca already has said would contain “no recommendations” on Wild and Scenic designation. He also said the most fundamental disagreement between what he recognized as two “polarized” groups would be resolved by changing the language in Section 7 of the 1968 federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

“The legislation as written fails to guarantee existing uses by not amending language in Section 7 of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which entangles private property above and below all designated river segments,” Forward said. “This intentional entanglement threatens unending litigation against current users of the rivers that will be burdened by this federal designation and controlled by federal agencies.”

According to a May 2020 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, “Section 7 explicitly does not prohibit projects or developments that affect WSRs. Instead, it prohibits federal assistance for such projects if — and only if — the relevant conditions given in Section 7 are met.”

It is unlikely that a bill seeking to protect mostly obscure waterways located in southwest New Mexico will be amended to include what would amount to a major revision in an overarching, decades-old law under which 13,412 miles of 226 rivers in 40 states and Puerto Rico are already protected, however. According to the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System website, “this is a little more than one-quarter of 1 percent of the nation’s rivers.”

A webpage with a summary of the reintroduced legislation, along with maps detailing protection areas and answers to frequently asked questions, is available at hein rich.senate.gov/gila. A PDF of the bill also can be found at Heinrich’s website.