Trump overview places 5 California monuments in danger

WASHINGTON – From the revered giant sequoia trees of the southern Sierra to the unbroken vistas of historic Route 66 in the Mojave Desert, five national monuments in California are waiting for President Trump’s Home Secretary to judge whether they are left alone, shriveled, or eliminated by Thursday should be.

The California monuments were reviewed in an unprecedented review – ordered by Trump in April – to see if their protected status prevents potential commercial use. They are among the more than two dozen monuments that Home Secretary Ryan Zinke is examining nationwide.

The United States has 129 national monuments named by President of Theodore Roosevelt under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to improve the protection of the existing state, and none have ever been abolished. No president has tried to downsize a memorial since President John F. Kennedy.

The current review covers monuments created by presidents dating back to Bill Clinton. So far, Zinke has announced that he will likely propose reducing the size of the 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears Memorial in Utah and leaving six others unchanged, including the new Sand to Snow Memorial northeast of Palm Springs, which Created by President Barack Obama.

The government review has sparked outrage from democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who had a strong hand in designating three desert monuments, is grappling with the administration on this matter.

“This is war,” said Feinstein in an interview. “This is our story.”

While Congress has the power to revoke or change monuments, there’s not much a Democrat in the minority party can do to stop Trump from changing them. So the fight has to be fought in court, where Trump’s legal powers are called into question.

In California, the monuments yet to be reviewed are the 330,780-acre Berryessa Snow Mountain Monument, northeast of Santa Rosa; the 204,000-acre Carrizo Plain in San Luis Obispo County, known for its stunning wildflower blooms, but also includes oil and gas leases; the 346,000 acre Monument in the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles County; the 328,000 acre Giant Sequoia National Monument in Tulare County; and the Mojave Trails National Monument, which includes the distinctive stretch of Route 66.

The Cascade-Siskyou National Monument in Oregon, which leads to California, is also being reviewed.

Trump’s executive order demands that it be determined whether the monument awards had no input from local and state officials and “other relevant interest groups” when they were created, or whether they would prevent energy development or “otherwise slow economic growth”.

The California attorney general Xavier Becerra promised in an eleven-page letter to Zinke that he would sue immediately if any monument changes were attempted in his state. A large number of environmental groups are committed to doing the same.

Ryan Henson, senior policy director of CalWild, a California wilderness coalition, called the government’s actions a “time on our corpses.”

Although a president has unilateral authority to erect monuments, the Antiquities Act provides no provision to revoke a designation, and the 1976 federal law governing the administration of state politics expressly prohibits the Home Secretary from revoking or altering a monument.

But the review even has its defenders in California, where public land is overwhelmingly popular. One monument that appears most taboo by name – the Giant Sequoia National Monument – has some local officials calling for its size to be reduced.

A giant sequoia dwarfs the surrounding forest along the Trail of the 100 Giants in Sequoia National Monument north of Kernville, California.David McNew / Getty Images

They say the memorial, named by President Bill Clinton in 2000, threatens the ancient sequoias by preventing logging to smother thin conifers that are now choking forests.

“It sounds very selfish that I work for a sawmill,” said Darren Mahr, wood manager at Sierra Forest Products sawmill in Terra Bella, Tulare County. “But we drew a line around the forest hoping it would be safe and instead we put it on the line.”

A century of fire fighting has turned the open grove forests John Muir described into thick fir and pine thickets, many of which have been killed by drought or beetles.

Stephen Worthley, Tulare District inspector, led a board vote asking Tine for a cut to make the deforestation possible. He said the U.S. Forest Service lacks the money to carry out the controlled burns needed to restore the health of the forest, and cutting down to thinn the trees would pay for itself.

The harsh fire of 2015 put more stress on the monument than it should have been due to the density, he said. Some of the “ancient trees we should protect with everything inside died due to the intensity of the fire,” Worthley said. The groves “are in greater danger today than they were before the monument was erected”.

Rabbit owls can be found on both the Mojave Trails and the Castle MountainsDavid Lamfrom / National Parks Conservation Asso

In Southern California, Rep. Paul Cook, R-Yucca Valley, San Bernardino County, wrote a letter to Zinke asking him to cut the 1.6 million acre Mojave Trails National Monument by half a million acres. The memorial is the centerpiece of three California desert monuments, including Sand to Snow and Castle Mountains, which Obama named at Feinstein’s request last year.

The Mojave Trails Monument protects the last pristine stretch of Route 66 and maintains a biological link between Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve.

If Cook’s request is met, he will help a plan by a private company, Cadiz Inc., to pump billions of gallons of water from the desert aquifer beneath the memorial for sale to southern California cities. Cook joined nine other members of the California House from both parties in a private letter in March, urging Zinke to clear the way for Cadiz.

David Lamfrom, director of California’s desert and wildlife program for the National Parks and Conservation Association, a conservation group, said Cook’s proposed monument reductions “directly overlap with the Cadiz Project.”

Zinke has already overturned Obama-era regulatory decisions that blocked the project. Deputy Home Secretary David Bernhardt is a former Cadiz attorney and lobbyist and his former law firm holds shares in Cadiz. Bernhardt also led a Trump transition team that put Cadiz on a list of the top 50 infrastructure projects in the country.

The aquifer feeds rare desert springs that support plant and animal life, and the US Geological Survey said Cadiz grossly overestimated the aquifer’s natural ability to self-recharge. The National Park Service said the estimates were so out of bounds that they “shouldn’t even be taken into account”.

“The public needs to understand that this is the first big step in the destruction of Mojave Trails,” said Feinstein. She called the Cadiz Project “a murderer. I don’t trust these people. “

Both Cook and Feinstein had proposed laws to protect the Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow, and Castle Mountains, but they never agreed on the exact limits, and so the legislation never got through Congress. Feinstein turned to Obama in frustration.

Cook said in a statement to The Chronicle that the area he plans to remove is not warranted for historic monument status as it was never included in any legislation he or Feinstein created. He called the Cadiz question “immaterial”.

The Yucca Valley Congressman also asked Zinke to include the Castle Mountains Memorial in the review process. It is not known if Zinke will do this. The 21,000-acre monument protects rare tall desert grassland and large Joshua Tree forests. Cook said in his letter to Zinke that downsizing the monument would help a Canadian gold mine.

The methodology that Zinke uses for his monuments review remains unclear. Inside spokeswoman Heather Swift said in an email that Zinke had opened the process for a 60-day public comment period “to make the process transparent and give people a voice.” The department received 2.7 million comments, mostly in favor of the monuments.

Swift said Zinke also held “dozens of meetings” with various groups, including “people and organizations representing all sides of the issue.”

Zinke has visited eight monuments, but none in California.

David Myers, executive director of Wildlands Conservancy, which has bought nearly 600,000 acres of Mojave Desert and donated it to the federal government for protection, said he invited Zinke to visit Mojave Trails but never heard a word. There are approximately 45,000 acres of donated land in the area that Cook plans to remove.

Myers said the Mojave Trails Memorial is “really what keeps the desert intact with this mega-landscape that connects Joshua Tree National Park and Mojave National Preserve. Otherwise there are only protective islands in the desert. “

Jim Conkle, a Marine known as “Mr. Route 66, “for his efforts to protect the historic road, said neither Cook nor his staff would speak to him. “They don’t answer my calls, my emails, I go there to see them, they are there, but they are not there for me,” he said. “You don’t want anything to do with me. Because they know that I just want to sit down and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ “

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, who took former Home Secretary Sally Jewell on two hikes in the Berryessa-Snow Mountain area to help her evict her, said the monument review “looks like another attempt to erase everything President Obama did”. He said the monument review was exhaustive.

“The idea of ​​them coming back and trying to handle this,” he said, “is just a colossal waste of time.”

Carolyn Lochhead is the Washington correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: clochhead@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carolynlochhead