Nevada State Office
1340 Financial Blvd.
P.O. Box 12000
Reno, NV 89520-0006
775-861-6400
http://www.nv.blm.gov

The BLM manages nearly 48 million acres of public land in Nevada, comprising 68 percent of the State's land base. These public lands feature high mountain lakes and pine forests; canyons and valleys; sagebrush, playas, and hot springs; rimrocks and Joshua trees; sand dunes and mesquite thickets; and arroyos and cacti. BLM lands also offer open space, an increasingly precious resource in the fast-growing West.

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area attracts more than one million visitors a year from nearby Las Vegas.

Nevada's population is growing faster than any State in the nation. As Nevada's towns and cities expand, they reach Federal land that surrounds all of Nevada's major cities. As a result, planners and developers in Las Vegas, Reno, Sparks, Henderson, and Carson City look to BLM land as they deal with the pressures brought by rapid growth.

Nowhere is this pressure more acute than in the Las Vegas area. In response to the critical need for space in the Las Vegas Valley, Congress passed the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998. Under this law, BLM-Nevada will auction off nearly 27,000 acres of the valley's public land, which is difficult to manage for multiple uses. Eighty-five percent of the land-sale proceeds will remain in Nevada, where Federal agencies will use the money to buy environmentally sensitive land; write a multi-species habitat conservation plan in Clark County; develop parks, trails, and natural areas in Clark County; and make capital improvements at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, and the Spring Mountain National Recreation Area. Ten percent of the land-sale proceeds will go to the Southern Nevada Water Authority and five percent to the Nevada State Permanent School Fund.

Housing construction in the Summerlin Master Planned Community, built by the Howard Hughes Corp., in western Las Vegas on the border of the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.

The first public auction of land under the Act, which occurred in November 1999, generated sales totaling $9.4 million. The average price of the auctioned land was $90,000 per acre; prices ranged from $70,000 on a 3.75-acre parcel to $1.7 million on a 12.5-acre parcel. The BLM plans to hold two land sales per year until all 27,000 acres are sold.

The growth of Las Vegas and other cities brings with it public needs and demands for infrastructure and amenities related to BLM land use. In fact, BLM-Nevada received 37 percent of all rights-of way (ROW) applications–such as power and fiber optic lines–that the BLM received nationally last year, creating a casework backlog in Nevada of more than 550 ROW applications.

Outstanding mountain biking opportunities at Virginia City.

Population growth also affects open space. Such growth in and around Reno and Sparks—plus the resulting increase in recreation activities on nearby public lands—led Washoe County officials to define and delineate open space in the county's master land-use plans. According to the plan, undeveloped lands that have natural, scenic, and recreational resources important to the local quality of life should be kept as open space. Large portions of the land defined by Washoe County as open space are managed by the BLM whose land-use plans–which form the foundation of the agency's decisionmaking ability–need to be updated. Accordingly, the Bureau is working to amend its Lahontan Resource Management Plan in a way that conforms with Washoe County's land-use plans.

Nevadans' interest in the public lands is not limited to the State's urban areas, as evidenced by the growing popularity of many rural recreation and historic sites. Next to the town of Gerlach, the Black Rock playa, a flat, dry lake bed has attracted diverse forms of recreation during the past 20 years. The extensive Black Rock desert is the site of world land-speed records, arts festivals, land sailing, large-scale amateur rocketry, and historic trail trips. People camp, hike, ride mountain bikes, hang glide, rock hound, drive Off-Highway Vehicles, soak in hot springs, and hunt in the Black Rock region. These events and activities draw more visitors to the region every year.

Mine entrance on the edge of Las Vegas. BLM-Nevada is working to reduce many such hazards to users of public lands.

Because of this increased visitation, BLM-Nevada is focusing more time and effort on protecting cultural and historical resources in the Black Rock region. The agency is also responding to visitors' interest in preserving vistas along the California National Historic Trail, long Nevada segments of which look much like they did 150 years ago. The potential for geothermal developments and other mining activities has prompted public concern that these impacts would compromise visitors' experiences of the historic trail. To deal with these resource protection issues, BLM-Nevada is writing a land-use plan amendment for the Black Rock area.

Besides visitation, other management issues are expanding BLM-Nevada's workload. For example, wildfires that struck Nevada in the fall of 1999 severely affected the health of wild horses and burros in six Herd Management Areas. The Bureau had to remove 1,900 animals from the range because forage and water sources were no longer available to sustain healthy herds. Through its adoption program, the BLM found private homes for many of the displaced wild horses and burros; it placed others in temporary holding facilities until the range has recovered, usually in two to three years.

Caithness Power Inc. geothermal power plant in Dixie Valley, Nevada.

As part of its effort to increase the number of wild horse adoptions, BLM-Nevada pioneered a satellite broadcast in 1999 that allowed qualified adopters throughout the nation to bid on Nevada's wild horses. Interested parties adopted 87 wild horses at the completion of a lively competitive bidding process conducted by Superior Livestock Auction Company of Fort Worth, Texas. The BLM transported the adopted animals to its facilities in California, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Tennessee, where the new owners picked up the horses. Nevertheless, today there are still nearly twice as many wild horses on the public lands as is appropriate. Adoption is the Bureau's only tool to keep wild horse and burro herds at the appropriate management levels. Without adequate resources to increase marketing efforts to adopt more animals, some of Nevada's watersheds are in peril, which also threatens continuing public land uses in those areas.

The extraordinary wildland fires of 1999, which burned 1.7 million acres, also added to BLM Nevada's rangeland workload. The need to restore this burned area, which suffers from a wildland fire–weed cycle that is damaging the land, requires rangeland-related funding above current levels. As it is, the BLM worked hard in conducting assessments of Nevada grazing allotments, resulting in assessed rangeland health standards on 77 allotments. These allotments totaled 7.3 million acres, or 23 percent of the total acres assessed Bureau-wide. Overall, despite its budgetary constraints, BLM-Nevada renewed all expiring grazing permits where active grazing was occurring in 1999.

Increasing visitor use led the BLM to prepare a draft land use plan amendment to develop a better management tool for the Black Rock Desert playa.

While working to keep up with its range management responsibilities, BLM-Nevada is also working to reduce hazards to users of the public lands. Inasmuch as 99 percent of Nevada's public lands are open to recreation, visitors can and do go almost everywhere on these lands. However, more than 150 years of mining have left such physical hazards as open adits, discarded equipment, abandoned leach ponds, and mine tailings. About 165,000 abandoned mine sites are scattered throughout public, private, and State lands in Nevada, and more than 50,000 of these—many of which contain deadly chemicals and gases—pose hazards to the recreating public.

BLM-Nevada and the State Division of Minerals are working jointly to fence or fill these sites, and last year the two agencies made about 200 sites safe. But with 50,000 sites still awaiting protective measures, the Bureau considers a rate of 200 per year to be unacceptably slow. Adequate funding and more partnerships are essential for getting this work done, and the need for timely action is clear, as most accidents involving abandoned mines have occurred during the past 10 years. Public use of BLM lands is expected to increase, further raising the danger posed by open, abandoned mine sites.

With an adequate budget and by working together with its local, State, and Federal partners, BLM Nevada will succeed in ensuring the health and productivity of Nevada's public lands.

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