Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
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As the 65th MT Legislative Session opened for business last week, the usual calls for budget cuts were exceedingly shrill. What made matters worse this year was the loss of revenue due to the demise of the coal and oil and gas industries in Montana. We knew this day of reckoning was coming, so now the budget knives are being sharpened and the fun has begun. I have a suggestion. In the last legislative session the Governor proposed (and the legislature dutifully passed) $10 million to assist sage grouse populations. This was in addition to the...
Dear Governor Bullock: I, David Pippin, a lifelong resident of Valley County (political subdivision of the State of Montanan), do here by protest the “HiLine Proposed Resource Management Plan and Final Environmental Impact Statement (PRMP/FEIS)" on foundation herein. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), contrary to the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and the Data Quality Act (DQA) have ignored many pertinent facts, previously published in a BLM sponsored study publications, and not preformed the requirements for a document of this magnitude... Full story
Too often in our debates over Montana’s public lands, we seem to forget just how incredibly lucky we are to have these lands at all. This is especially true of the 2.4 million acres of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management in the Hi-Line District of central and eastern Montana. These lands are the grasslands, sagebrush, hoodoos and coulee country that may lack the breathtaking scenery of Glacier National Park or the Beartooth Plateau, but are every bit as valuable for livestock grazing, energy development, hunting and fishing, and a m...
Dear Editor: The Hi-Line District of the BLM is, right now, developing a management plan that will determine what happens to some of the very best intact and undeveloped public lands for decades to come. This “Resource Management Plan” will include about 2.4 million acres of publicly accessible land from the Missouri Breaks north to the Canadian border. This is a hunter’s dream country – from Ponderosa pine coulees to sagebrush plateaus. Good habitat for elk, mule deer and antelope and spectacular habitat for species in a thousand other places....
A Canadian oil exploration company has withdrawn the offer it made to lease minerals on land belonging to Valley County, citing the difficulty of conducting business under restrictions intended to protect the habitat of the threatened sage grouse. In an email to the Valley County commissioners sent on Tuesday, Don Lee, an attorney for Montex Oil Co., said, “Unfortunately because of the sage grouse habitat issues involving federal lands, it will be extremely difficult to conduct exploratory o...
When did the sage grouse become a national priority surpassing energy independence, and does this fowl really require millions of acres of energy-rich land to survive? Those are the obvious questions that arise when reading the Bureau of Land Management’s recent 812-page Resource Management Plan for the Hi-Line. The document, released this Spring and currently out for public comment, is a good example of the unfortunate trend toward declaring Montana off-limits to development. It contains a few bright points, but mostly the plan deprives the H...
The Bureau of Land Management is taking comments on a draft resource management plan (RMP) for the 2.4 million acres of public land and 4.2 million acres of federal minerals it manages in the HiLine District, which stretches from the Rockies to North Dakota, and from the Canadian border to south of U.S. 2 and to the Missouri River. An updated plan was due, since the district is operating with plans that are more than 25 years old. The pressures of oil and gas development, threats to the greater sage-grouse, increased conflicts between land use...