Losing national monument designations would hurt local economies
A day after the Trump administration announced it would review the protections of national monuments designated by presidents in the past 21 years, Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said stripping those designations would jeopardize jobs and local economies throughout the state and across the United States.
National monuments and parks have attracted tourists and outdoor recreation enthusiasts to the state, and have “helped build [New Mexico’s] outdoor recreation economy, with over 60,000 jobs that generate over $6 billion in annual economic activity,” Heinrich told reporters Tuesday during a teleconference hosted by the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based liberal think tank.
“If this president really wants to make America great, he will use the American Antiquities Act the way that previous Republican and Democratic administrations have to protect some of our greatest public assets,” Heinrich said.
He was referring to a 1906 federal law that authorizes presidents to designate “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” that are on federal land as national monuments — and to restrict how that land is used.
The administration of Republican President Donald Trump confirmed earlier this week that Trump will order the Interior Department to examine national monument designations in the past two decades to determine whether they fit within the law’s intent. The order is part of a broader move taking aim at President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, including an effort aimed at expanding offshore drilling.
There are more than a dozen national monuments in New Mexico, including the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument near Cochiti Pueblo south of Santa Fe, Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos and White Sands National Monument near Alamogordo. Heinrich said the ones most likely to be jeopardized by Trump’s executive order are the 242,000-acre Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in Taos County, designated in 2013, and the 496,000-acre Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument near Las Cruces, which was designated in 2014. Obama designated both of those.
Last month, Mike Matz, who directs the Pew Charitable Trust’s U.S. public lands program, wrote a commentary published in The New Mexican about the Rio Grande del Norte’s economic benefits to Taos.
“After the monument’s first year,” Matz said, “the Bureau of Land Management’s Taos Field Office reported a 40 percent increase in visitors to the area. The same year, the town of Taos enjoyed a 21 percent boost in tax revenue from stays in hotels, motels, and bed-and-breakfasts, and an 8.3 percent jump in gross receipts revenue in the accommodations and food service sector.”
According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, Trump’s executive order was spurred mainly by Obama’s designation in December of the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a move blasted by Utah Republicans, including the state’s governor and congressional delegation.
The Bears Ears land is sacred to several Native American tribes and contains thousands of archaeological sites. The Navajo Nation and Zuni Pueblo are among five tribes that help manage the monument.
Heinrich said he and his wife and children recently visited Bears Ears. “That is one of the most spectacular cultural landscapes in the world,” he said.
Earlier this month, Heinrich, U.S. Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico and seven other Western Democratic senators wrote a letter to Trump encouraging him to keep the national monument designations. “Removing protections for any of these areas would threaten the cultural, historical and biological wealth of our country,” the letter said.
Heinrich and Udall also have introduced legislation to protect wilderness areas within the Rio Grande del Norte and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks national monuments — though the success of the proposal in the Republican-controlled Congress seems unlikely.
Last year, Republican State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn criticized an amendment the New Mexico senators added to a federal energy bill to create two new wilderness areas within the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument north of Taos. Dunn said the measure would lead to the loss of state trust lands in those areas. The Energy Policy Modernization Act ultimately failed in Congress.
But the State Land Office has since been negotiating a land swap with the Bureau of Land Management, Dunn said Tuesday, and Trump’s order for a monument review could scuttle the deal. Dunn and the BLM have been discussing a trade of state land within the boundaries of the Rio Grande del Norte for federal land outside of Taos County.
If it takes more than 60 days for the Interior Department to review the national monuments, Dunn said, that would throw a monkey wrench in the timetable for the land swap, which would involve public hearings and other red tape.
“It would have been a good deal for the BLM and for the State Land Office,” Dunn said of the trade.
