By Christina MacIntosh
Jackson Hole News&Guide
Via- Wyoming News Exchange

JACKSON — A bill introduced Monday in Congress and co-sponsored by Harriet Hageman would replace Biden-era land management guidelines for 3.6 million acres of federal land in southwest Wyoming with a new plan emphasizing energy and mineral development.

The Rock Springs Resource Management Plan was just finalized this past December after a 13-year process involving extensive public participation.

“My main concern at this point is the public process,” said Nat Paterson, the policy coordinator for the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, a sportsmen’s advocacy organization that was part of Gov. Mark Gordon’s task force that reviewed and commented on earlier drafts of the plan. “To effectively throw most of that out is pretty disheartening.”

The 2024 plan was crafted to balance conservation and development after Wyoming lawmakers lambasted a more conservation-focused draft from 2023, worried about its impact on the Cowboy State’s extractive industries, recreation and public land access. 

The updated plan closes 1.08 million acres to oil and gas development. The southern Wind River Range, the Little Mountain area and parts of the Red Desert make up more than half the closure area.

Under the new bill, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Hurd, R-Colo., the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management would be required to alter the Rock Springs decision. Specifically, the bill would require the federal government to abandon its current plan blending development and conservation in favor of another alternative it had considered that had the least-restrictive management of energy development and the least-protective management of water, wildlife, wetlands and vegetation.

Hurd’s bill would require federal land managers to take similar action on other land plans in Colorado and Wyoming, including in the Powder River Basin. In the waning days of the Biden administration, a new BLM resource plan there ended coal leasing.

Hageman, a Republican who is Wyoming’s only voice in the U.S. House of Representatives, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

But this is at least the second attempt to overturn the Rock Springs RMP that she has backed. In 2024, she sponsored a bill that would block the BLM from implementing the plan and she has since supported overturning the decision.

“I am optimistic that with President Trump and a Republican majority in the House and Senate, we can reverse the disastrous Rock Springs RMP in 2025,” Hageman told WyoFile in November.

Wyoming lawmakers already won concessions from the BLM on the Rock Springs Plan by tying it to the fate of the Kelly parcel, a 640-acre inholding surrounded by Grand Teton National Park. 

The National Park Service, also overseen by the Interior Department, wanted to buy the square-mile inholding from the state of Wyoming. The state Legislature conditioned that $100 million sale on the BLM easing restrictions on rights of way for road and new transmission lines and oil and gas development in the Rock Springs area. The BLM agreed, and the sale went through in the final days of the Biden administration.

The Wildlife Federation got involved in the management plan process because of the high-quality hunting and fishing in the area, which includes habitat for elk, mule deer, pronghorn, moose, greater sage grouse and cutthroat trout, as well as the world’s longest mule deer migration, a 150-mile trek from the Red Desert to Hoback. Paterson is particularly concerned about drilling occurring on mule deer winter range and surface disruptions in the Greater Little Mountain area, a high desert region with sensitive soil and small creeks.

“If that area is disturbed, it could increase sediment in small creeks and crush the spawning habitat of native cutthroat,” he said.

The revised plan did not please everyone, including Gordon, who filed a formal appeal of the plan and said the plan might not be long for the world.

“With President Trump in office, former [North Dakota] Governor Burgum at the head of the Department of the Interior, and a Republican Senate and House, I am confident that we will have the ability to finish the job and right a course that has been so far off track over the last four years,” he said in December.

On President Trump’s first day in office, Gordon issued an executive order to “unleash” American energy by encouraging energy exploration and production on federal lands.

Paterson understood that the Rock Springs plan did not please everyone. He and the Wildlife Federation had issues with it as well.

“The way these plans are designed is that everyone gets something. No one’s going to get everything they want,” he said. “We thought the plan they came out with was pretty good.”