By Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Submitted July 2, 2008
It was a standing room only crowd in the Overton Community center that night. And folks were riled up. Representatives of the Bureau of Land Management had come to the Moapa Valley Town Advisory Board (MVTAB) to present plans that would close off a large percentage of roads in vast tracts of public land in surrounding areas. These lands included areas across the Mormon Mesa and in the Gold Butte region that had been used by local families for generations in recreational and ranching purposes.
The year was 1998. It was right in the midst of a push to draft plans to protect the endangered desert tortoise. The tortoise had received protection under the federal Endangered Species Act nearly ten years before. Since that time, Clark County had been developing a Multiple Species Habitat Conservation Plan (MSHCP) that would put it in compliance with federal laws. As part of this plan the BLM had been mandated to designate specific roads in outlying areas that would remain open for use. All undesignated roads would be closed.
The BLM representatives had already been to the little town of Searchlight. They had presented a similar plan to residents there that would close off over 25% of their back-country roads. In Searchlight, the BLM had seen very little pushback from the community on this plan. And so they expected similar ambivalence in the Moapa Valley area.
But they were mistaken. “People went absolutely crazy when they heard what was being proposed,” said Moapa resident Elise McAllister who was in attendance that night at the MVTAB meeting. “I think it really took the BLM by surprise. It was a very loud and angry meeting.”
Afterwards a handful of concerned local residents stayed behind in the parking lot to discuss what had happened. McAllister was among that small group. “In the course of the conversation we determined that screaming and yelling in public meetings would not accomplish anything,” McAllister said. “If anything was going to be accomplished, it would have to be by becoming a part of the process. To create change, it had to happen by participating on the inside and not by yelling from the outside. So we decided to form an organization for that purpose.”
From that evening discussion over a decade ago, Partners In Conservation (PIC) had its early beginnings. PIC was organized as a private 501c3 non-profit organization in 1998. Since that time, the mission of PIC has been to serve as an information conduit that fills the gap between rural communities and the government entities managing public lands. In this way PIC has hoped to foster greater rural involvement in the complex decisions regarding the management of public lands.
PIC is governed by a board currently consisting of four members. Logandale resident, Lindsey Dalley, serves as the Chairman of the Board. Other members of the Board include Logandale resident and MVTAB member, Gene Houston as well as Mesquite residents, Kurt Sawyer and Paul Henderson. Board meetings are held once a month. Board membership is an unpaid, volunteer position.
In addition to the Board, PIC has two staff members. Elise McAllister has served as the organization’s Administrator, and chief driving force, for its entire ten year existence. Also on the PIC staff is bookkeeper, Lola Egan. These two staff positions are paid but staff members have no vote on the Board.
Finding Funding
Shortly after PIC was organized, the Board came to the determination that it needed a paid administrator. Recognizing that public lands issues were tremendously complex, they realized that it would be impossible for part-time volunteers to be able to stay in step with everything that needed to be done.
But how would they raise sufficient funds to pay an administrator? PIC doesn’t offer an open membership, so it doesn’t get funding from membership dues the way that many non-profit environmental groups do. This being true, the group began to seek other ways to fund the organization.
They hit upon the idea that, since the group was a conservation organization, its funding efforts should get at the roots of that concept. “We started to look for common-sense conservation projects in the area that would, not only bring grant funding, but give a win-win for everyone involved,” McAllister said.
A Community Spin On Tortoise Fencing
One opportunity was found in the new need for tortoise fencing in the desert. With the enacting of the MSHCP, grants were available for groups willing to participate in building protective tortoise fencing across vast areas of desert. In the year 2000, PIC began making proposals for tortoise fencing projects across the Mormon Mesa, along Interstate 15.
The BLM initially took a measured approach to these proposals granting a small trial project to PIC of about 3600 feet of fencing in 2001. “We were a new organization so they wanted to test us out and see what kind of job we would do,” McAllister said. About six months later, PIC was granted another small project of about 6000 feet. Then, having proved itself capable of completing the projects, PIC was, in the next few years, granted much larger contracts of tortoise fencing at 40,000 to 60,000 feet each.
It was obvious that PIC needed a lot of manpower to complete so much work. So McAllister headed up a massive effort in coordinating various groups to participate in the project. Over the following six years, 95 different groups from Moapa Valley, Mesquite and Las Vegas gave nearly 16,000 volunteer hours to the fencing project. These included Boy Scouts, church youth groups, school sports teams, FFA groups and many others.
In each of the stages of this project, PIC collected the grant money. Part of the funds went to pay the PIC administrative costs. But then the organization made donations to each of the groups that participated. “That way, in addition to it being a fundraiser for those groups, it also developed a sense of ownership in the project,” McAllister said. “What better way to educate people about the desert habitat than to have them out there participating hands-on in a project like this.”
BLM officials were happy to see this innovative way of recruiting the public. “I don’t know of any other groups that carried it off that way and I think that it was a great spin on the program,” said Robert Wandell of the BLM Las Vegas Field Office. “The fact that this degree of public buy-in came out of the rurals speaks volumes to the ability of the PIC organization and to the people in those communities. We would love for that kind of thing to go on all over.”
A Verifiable Road Inventory
Another opportunity came through the same BLM roads designation process that had originally sparked the PIC organization into being. McAllister and others had noticed that the initial BLM roads proposal for Mormon Mesa and Gold Butte had been somewhat incomplete. A lot of the existing roads were not on the BLM map. “We said, how can you talk about closing roads without a full idea of what roads are even out there,” McAllister said.
It became clear that the BLM needed a complete inventory of existing roads. “We found that we needed to create a transparent and verifiable record that included everything out there including any roads that were missed along the way and needed to be captured,” said Gayle Marss-Smith who worked with PIC on the project.
But this would involve taking GPS readings of hundreds of miles of back country roads. This was not something that the BLM was equipped to do alone. So PIC applied for grants to complete this inventory. PIC then went to Rotary Clubs and veterans organizations in Moapa Valley and Mesquite and got volunteers that could do the legwork. Four years later, the job was completed with 1,500 volunteer hours and 1,200 miles of GPS data collected on roads. Again PIC received the grant money for this project and donated much of it to the organizations who had participated.
“I can’t speak highly enough of PIC,” said Marss-Smith. “They are very much needed. They have developed a lot of respect in the rurals and at the BLM. It has been a very positive relationship.”
Conduit To The Community
The administrative funds coming from these projects have allowed PIC to be involved in many other efforts as well. The group has coordinated over 1300 community volunteer hours in the removal of 200 tons of trash from the desert. McAllister also makes frequent educational presentations to schools in Moapa Valley, Mesquite and in the Las Vegas valley to discuss responsible use of the Mojave Desert environment. She is an active member in the Nevada OHV Coalition; a group that is currently working toward establishing registration laws for OHVs in the state of Nevada.
McAllister spends a considerable amount of time in public meetings as well. She estimates that she attends an average of 4-5 public meetings every week. “In dealing with public lands, you have to be in attendance at all of these meetings to know really what is going on,” she said. “You can’t expect to keep up with things from the outside.”
McAllister then brings back what she has learned in these meetings to local town boards. Her reports have become standing items on the agendas of Town Boards in Moapa Valley, Moapa and Bunkerville. She also reports at Mesquite City Council Meetings regularly.
“PIC has done a fabulous job in keeping the town boards up to date on things that the BLM is doing especially in the Mormon Mesa and Gold Butte areas,” said MVTAB Chairwoman, Judy Metz. “The Board Members can’t hope to be fully educated in all these issues. But PIC has been to every meeting, has done all of the background research and has filled us in on the issues and what needs to be done. They have been an invaluable resource to us.”
The Future Looks Strong
What is the future for the PIC organization? McAllister says that she has more than enough to keep her busy well into the future.
The BLM is currently working on a new management plan for the Logandale Trails area. PIC has been actively involved in that process. The BLM is toying with new ideas of allowing private organizations to partner in the management of public lands. PIC would like to play a part in that at Logandale Trails.
PIC has also been focusing efforts for some time now on the Gold Butte area. There has been recent movement by environmental groups to designate the entire Gold Butte area as a National Conservation Area (NCA) with Wilderness Areas. While McAllister agrees that the area needs management, she feels there are other options than federal designations.
In recent years, PIC has put some focus on the Whitney Pockets area. This area has become a very popular camping spot in the Gold Butte area. It has seen a lot of use. Unfortunately, there are no formal campsites designated and very little management of the area taking place. “There is a need there for some formal structure to contain the use rather than allow it to spread out all over the place,” said McAllister.
To address this problem, PIC members went to State Senator Warren Hardy. They began to work with Hardy on securing grants for campgrounds to be built at Whitney Pockets. But they soon found that most of the grant programs wanted to know if the proposed action was a part of a master plan for the area. Unfortunately, there is currently no master plan in place for the Gold Butte area and a plan was not even on the voluminous priority list of the overtaxed BLM.
“We realized that a master plan was needed, not just for Whitney Pockets, but for all of the open lands in Northeast Clark County,” McAllister said.
McAllister and PIC Board members traveled to Carson City and spoke before the State Legislature to request grant funding for a master plan. The Legislature expressed interest in this idea, but wanted to start with a smaller area as a pilot. PIC was granted $250,000 to hire a consultant and complete a plan for the Whitney Pockets area.
McAllister said that when she took the news of this grant back to the BLM administrators, they were overjoyed. “The BLM staff said that they jumped for joy,” McAllister said. “They were ecstatic that a private organization had gone out and come up with means to fund this plan.” In response, the BLM came up with additional funds to partially match the state grant.
McAllister recognizes that, given the current state budget crisis, the state grant may be on the chopping block. “At least it is on the priority list now,” McAllister said. “And if that funding falls through, my next step will be to go out looking for another source of funding to get the project completed. I’m confident that the funding is out there.”
McAllister admits that this is a different approach to conservation than the proposals being made by environmental groups which include NCA and Wilderness designations. “There are different roads to conservation,” she said. “Some roads lead to rather restrictive outcomes. But there are other routes to take that can accommodate all of the different recreational uses.”
McAllister points out that nearly every NCA designation has resulted in a much more restrictive plan for the area, plans that usually involve a complete ban of motorized vehicles in the area. “Our message is that there are other ways to do it that can protect and manage the resources while being much more inclusive of all uses,” she said.
BLM official, Robert Wandell said that the future looks strong for Partners in Conservation because of this common-sense philosophy of inclusion. “PIC is a group that respects the resources while, at the same time, recognizes the recreational opportunities that are so important,” Wandell said. “They see the need to look out for all things, and not just pull for one particular resource or issue.”
