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Yesterday, the Bureau of Land Management announced the official establishment of its new agency headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado. The move cost the agency more than 70 percent of its Washington, D.C.-based employees, leaving just 61 of the agency's 10,000 total employees in the nation's capitol. The new headquarters in Grand Junction has struggled to fill the 25 new vacant positions, including senior leadership posts. As of June, just 30 percent of employees designated to move had accepted their relocation assignments.
The proposal to move the agency's headquarters out of D.C. has been met with strong opposition from the start, including from powerful lawmakers in the West, who disagree with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and others that the move will bring employees closer to the lands they manage, disregarding that roughly 95 percent of BLM employees are already located outside Washington, D.C.
New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, the Ranking member of the Senate Interior Appropriations Committee, said in response to the announcement yesterday, "The BLM’s poorly-executed relocation effort is a transparent attempt to weaken the agency and undermine the public servants who work there—or used to work there. There’s little to celebrate here."
Podcast: The fight to save Bristol Bay in Alaska
With the clock ticking on a final Record of Decision regarding the controversial Pebble Mine project in Alaska, CWP's "Go West, Young Podcast" has a conversation with documentary film director Mark Titus and United Tribes of Bristol Bay's Alannah Hurley about Mark's film, The Wild.
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While people may disagree about the future of fossil fuel extraction on public lands, we can surely agree that critical wildlife habitat and recreational areas should be avoided, that all leasing should be conducted through transparent, competitive processes that result in companies paying fair-market royalties and fees, and that strong safeguards and bonding requirements should be in place to reclaim drilling sites."
