New West Feature

The New Future for Valles Caldera Depends on Action by a New Congress

By Bobby Magill, 1-26-11

	The largest grass valley in the Valles Caldera. Who will manage it after the great experiment? Photo by Bobby Magill.

“It’s Your Experiment” is the official slogan of northern New Mexico’s Valles Caldera National Preserve, a broad volcanic valley in the heart of the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos.

The slogan doesn’t refer to a science experiment, but to the preserve itself and its unorthodox management scheme. Congress created the preserve in 2000 to be managed by the Valles Caldera Trust, a wholly-owned government corporation with the mandate to make the national preserve financially self-sustaining by 2015.

With that goal looking increasingly unlikely, a Sen. Jeff Bingaman-led effort to end the experiment failed in December when the lame duck Congress sidelined an omnibus public lands measure that included a bill that would have transferred management of Valles Caldera from the trust to the National Park Service. The NPS manages the adjacent Bandelier National Monument and oversees many of the nation’s other national preserves.

With the Government Accountability Office recommending Congress act to solve the preserve’s financial troubles, advocates are holding out hope that Bingaman, a Democrat, will introduce a bill in the new Congress completing the preserve’s transfer to the NPS.

“The trick is negotiating through the slalom course of Republicans,” said Tom Ribe, director of Caldera Action, one of the groups leading the transfer effort. “We are gong to persist. We’re optimistic we may be able to pull it off in the next couple of years.”

With the new Congress still in its infancy, Bingaman’s staff isn’t sure when the best opportunity will come along to reintroduce the bill.

Bingaman spokeswoman Jude McCartin said she can’t guess what the bill’s chances of passage would be with Republicans wielding more power in Congress and when the time might be right to move forward.

“All I can say is the bill has had bipartisan support in the past, and we’re hoping it has bipartisan support in the future,” she said.

That support included the Republican-dominated Los Alamos County Council and the Republicans for Environmental Protection.

Convincing budget-minded Republicans of the necessity of the transfer shouldn’t be a tremendous challenge, Ribe said, because managing Valles Caldera under the NPS may not cost any more than it does today.

The NPS would plan to consolidate the staff of both Bandelier National Monument and Valles Caldera, creating a more efficient operation, said Bandelier Superintendent Jason Lott, who sits on the board of the Valles Caldera Trust.

“Both parks, they’re neighboring areas, they have a common boundary,” he said. “It’s one large ecosystem here.”

If Congress doesn’t act and the Valles Caldera Trust never reaches self-sufficiency, the law calls for the experiment to end in 2020, when the trust may be dissolved and the popular Valles Caldera may become part of Santa Fe National Forest.

Ribe said that would be a worst-case scenario.

“Managing the public is what the Park Service does,” he said. “The Forest Service never had the funding or the mandate to do that sort of thing.”

Until Congress acts, Valles Caldera will continue to be operated as it as been for the last decade, trust spokesman Terry McDermott said.

“Our job is to maintain and manage the preserve, and we’ll comply with whatever law we’re under,” he said.

Find Bobby Magill online at bobbymagill.com.

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