BLM Failed to Protect Desert Life, Report Says

Despite promises to do so, the federal Bureau of Land Management has failed to devote enough money or staff to protect Mojave Desert wildlife from humans, the General Accounting Office said in a report to be made public today.

Congressional advocates of a Mojave National Park immediately seized on the report to renew their effort to give part of the Southern California desert to the preservationist National Park Service, while at the same time locking up in wilderness preserves much of what the BLM would keep.

“This report bears witness to the BLM’s failure and to the urgent need for the Mojave National Park,” said Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica) after seeing an advance copy of the analysis sought by Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.).

“The verdict is in,” Levine said. “Now, the longer Congress delays, the more we lose.”

Rebuttal to the report’s conclusions could not be obtained over the weekend from the BLM or from off-road vehicle owners’ groups or others who represent recreationists, miners and other desert users.

Response Not Included

A BLM response was not included in the report.

Nonetheless, the GAO was as detailed in its criticism as it was harsh.

The report noted, for example, that eight years after the start of a comprehensive planning program, nearly half of the BLM’s wildlife preservation plans for the heavily used desert are uncompleted and 35 of 57 required habitat management plans remain to be developed.

Such plans are very important, the GAO said, because the delicate, slow-to-heal desert lands are within half a day’s drive of 15 million people who use the Mojave for recreation, housing, military maneuvers, mining and telephone, gas and electrical transmission lines.

Even when plans have been completed, the GAO added, the recommended actions are often not pursued.

A review of 22 wildlife-related plans found that 46% of their “goals, objectives and action items” had not been started as of March; another 21% were only partially completed. Only one-third were finished.

Indeed, the congressional watchdog agency observed that the BLM has done so little work that it does not even have enough useful information--in the form of wildlife inventory--to determine precisely how poorly a job it has done.

However, the GAO warned that what little information is available indicates serious, perhaps irreversible, problems.

Desert tortoises, for one, have fallen in number by 50% since 1979, and some biologists believe the species will become extinct in some parts of the desert.

“BLM has, nonetheless, opposed California’s efforts to give (the tortoise) greater protection by listing it as a threatened species under the state’s own endangered species program,” the GAO report stated.

In a series of articles on BLM mismanagement that The Times printed earlier this year, bureau officials in California said they had attempted to delay the California listing in order to give their own federal agency more time to come up with a tortoise-protection plan.

Despite such apparent interest in wildlife, GAO alleged that BLM designated large sections of both the Johnson and Stoddard valleys as “free play” areas for off-road vehicles, even though scientists believe the designated areas are important tortoise habitats.

In a similar vein, the congressional probers chastised the BLM for reviving a controversial Barstow-to-Las Vegas motorcycle race. Critics charge that the race destroys vital habitat, not only for the endangered tortoise but bighorn sheep and other mammals and birds.

Compounding all these problems is a severe and chronic lack of the staffing and funding needed to do the job assigned by Congress.

For example, the GAO said that in fiscal year 1988, which ended last September, congressional economists estimated that BLM required $23 million to properly manage the desert; President Reagan requested far less than that, so the BLM’s desert district wound up with about $13 million.

Of that amount, the GAO study said, most was spent on trying to accommodate miners, motorcycle riders and other so-called consumptive users, rather than on trying to repair past damage, prevent new damage or plan for the long-term use of the area.