09.11.15

Ranking Member Grijalva Hails BLM Decision to Maintain Separate Arizona and New Mexico Offices, Continue Local Services

Washington, D.C. – Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva today hailed the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) newly announced decision to continue operating separate Arizona and New Mexico field offices, a decision that will maintain the agency’s high level of local service and management expertise in each state. Grijalva has been a leading opponent of calls to consolidate the offices, which would have burdened the new single office with managing more land than any BLM office outside Alaska or Nevada.

Grijalva has called for adequate congressional funding rather than unproductive office closures as the best path forward for BLM. As he wrote in a June 25 letter to Reps. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), the chairman and ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, “Nationwide, BLM has taken substantial reductions in funding and the number of employees over the past few years. The Arizona and New Mexico state offices are no exception and it is unclear how they can continue to accomplish their top work priorities.

“However, the solution is not to combine offices and require our Arizona public lands and resources to be managed from afar. Rather, the answer lies in Congress taking the necessary action to fund the BLM at a level that will enable them to do the essential job of managing our public lands for all Americans.”

As the letter pointed out, the Arizona BLM State office is already responsible for 12.2 million acres and the New Mexico State office is responsible for 13.4 million acres – and the two offices combine to oversee nearly 72 million acres of subsurface federal minerals. The New Mexico State Office already oversees BLM lands in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, making the potential addition of more than 12 million additional acres in Arizona an unnecessary burden.

“While I’m glad the agency made the right decision today, it should never have been put in this position in the first place,” Grijalva said today. “Cutting land management and conservation funding every year and then demanding the impossible from our federal land managers is no way to lead, and the American people don’t support it. We have to start funding BLM and the rest of the Interior Department adequately or we’ll just be back in this position time and time again, and we all know that doesn’t serve the people we represent.”