January 10, 2008
Resource Concepts Says DOE Environmental Impact Statement Inadequate

By Dave Maxwell

The N-4 Grazing Board, which represents ranchers in White Pine, Lincoln and parts of Nye County, met in Pioche January 4. John McLain, of Resource Concepts, in a telephone report, stated that the Department of Energy Caliente Railroad Impacts-Alternatives-Mitigations Study for Lincoln County is “woefully inadequate and full of massive holes.” Resource Concepts of Carson City has done range consulting work for the Grazing Board regarding the proposed Department of Energy railroad through Nevada to the planned Yucca Mountain Repository. They issued their comments last November to the Department of Energy.

Board Secretary, Connie Simkins, said that Resource Concepts made two reports, one for Lincoln County and one for the N-4 Board. She said the Lincoln County report recognizes that the DOE railroad, “If it’s ever built will ruin some of you.” “The report for the N-4 Board had comments that are even stronger,” she said. On one page, she noted, the report says, “Lincoln County views the impacts to the livestock industry to be major in the case of grazing allotments. The impacts are devastating and may result in the loss of several grazing operations in Lincoln County.”

During the telephone conference, Jeremy Drew, of Resource Concepts, in reviewing the DOE’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, said the 24 questions which had been formulated by the N-4 Grazing Board in 2004 to the DOE were, “for the most part not answered well, rather very ambiguous, very scratchy on the surface,” leaving the EIS at best, “to be inaccurate, incompetent and inadequate.” Drew told the Board the biggest oversight in the DOE statement was “where they think the impacts to grazing allotments were only going to be small. What they fail to realize is that they’re going to upset the entire allotment.” He also said, “You can’t consider impacts within a thousand feet (of the rail line) and say they are small because it’s just not a proper analysis, which is exactly what they did.”

Another of the 24 questions that had been asked in 2004 was the issue of security. Drew said the DOE report almost never talked about security, except to say that “future land use may conflict with operations of the rail.” He said he felt that the DOE had not really disclosed what the plans were to protect the rail line, but it might include building a fence along the entire length, giving the ranchers only limited access to grazing lands on the other side. In Drew’s opinion, the DOE thought it would be easy to have livestock move through underpasses from one side of the track to the other in given allotments because the report stated, “livestock would acclimate to the rail and be able to move across (or under) it freely.”

The Board also noted that not much was said in the EIS about mitigation for movement of livestock after the grazing lands were greatly disturbed and a railroad went across the land. McLain pointed out that all the EIS said about mitigation was that “they could, not that they would.”

He also strongly urged the Grazing Board to join with John Ruhs, Manager of the Bureau of Land Management Ely Field Office, and write a letter to the DOE expressing their deep concerns about the impacts to grazing and the livestock industry within the Environmental Impact Statement.