ROCK SPRINGS—Two years ago, employees of the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming office encountered misinformation-fueled hysteria during public meetings about a conservation-heavy draft plan for managing a 3.6 million acre swath of southwest Wyoming.
Then, just nine months after the BLM’s especially controversial plan was finalized, the Trump administration ordered the agency to redo the process. On Wednesday, the BLM’s staff reconvened with the public in Sweetwater County’s largest city to hear what locals make of the revision. This time, however, tempers were noticeably cool. There was no likening federal land management planning to the tragedies of historical American wars — comparisons argued publicly in 2023.
Instead, BLM-Wyoming Acting State Director Kris Kirby and her staff encountered a much more typical reception. There was some displeasure voiced, but mostly decorum in a room filled with a few dozen inquisitive locals, elected officials and advocacy representatives who wanted to know what was going on. And at this point in the process — an early stage known as “scoping” — there wasn’t a whole lot to report.
“The intention here is not to have a proposal,” Kirby said from the Sweetwater Events Complex. “The intention here is to ask the public what we should be analyzing.”
The BLM has some parameters for changes to the resource management plan for the Rock Springs Field Office. Poster boards illustrated the various special management areas in the field office. There was one showing a dozen “areas of critical environmental concern” and another outlining a handful of special recreation management areas. Changes will be confined to these designations.
“Areas with special protections and special designations, that’s what we’re analyzing,” Kirby said. “Really nothing in the checkerboard, because there’s not a lot of special management areas there.”
Some aspects of the ongoing revision are more ironclad. The tool that BLM is going to complete is an “environmental assessment,” which is less exhaustive than the “environmental impact statement” the agency published ahead of the 2024 revision. And the timing has already been decided. The BLM will have a signed record of decision on the amended plans by Oct. 2, 2026, to comply with updated National Environmental Policy Act guidelines, Kirby said.
Although the Bureau of Land Management hasn’t shown its hand on specifics, it’s reasonable to expect that the agency will seek to scale back the size and/or number of special designations in the Rock Springs Field Office. While protesting the final plan, several state agencies urged BLM to reduce the areas of critical environmental concern, which increased from 226,000 acres to 935,000 acres during the 2024 update.
Some locals who attended Wednesday’s public meeting want BLM to slash those conserved landscapes.
“Some of them just need to go away,” Sweetwater County Commissioner Mary Thoman said. The Golden Triangle area, which is protected by the South Wind River ACEC, is an example of a protected landscape that ought to go away, she said.
“It’s got to be multi-use for sustained yield,” Thoman said. “They totally diverged and made it one use: conservation. That’s the biggest issue.”
Rock Springs resident Glenn Lehar, a retired Jim Bridger Power Plant mechanic, also believed that the BLM’s 2024 plan tilted too far toward conservation at the expense of the economy.
“The people who decided on this, they don’t even live here,” Lehar said. “They don’t even got a clue what goes on out here.”
But not everyone wanted to see federal land managers roll back special protections and move the needle toward oil and gas drilling, mining and other forms of industrial development.
Duane Kerr, a retired game warden, took issue with a BLM proposal to lease out portions of the Golden Triangle for oil and gas drilling, including near the world’s largest sage grouse lek. Under the existing management plan, leasing and drilling aren’t allowed in the area, but those activities could be permitted if the South Wind River area of critical environmental concern goes away.
“That’s a horrible thing, in my opinion,” Kerr said. “If you care about wildlife, you can’t do that.”
Other parties who attended the Rock Springs meeting will be pushing BLM to maintain the status quo. Joey Faigl, who presides over the Muley Fanatic Foundation alone after co-founder Josh Coursey’s Trump administration appointment, said that he doesn’t want to see federal land managers mess with special designations in the Greater Little Mountain Ecosystem — there is both an area of critical concern and a special recreation management area in that area.
“The way it sits now, we’re supportive of it,” Faigl said. “It came to where we wanted it, and we’re all good with where it sits.”
Faigl has been engaged in the resource management plan revision since its onset, he said. He partook in his first related field trip back in 2008.
The Rock Springs resident offered one more thought.
“I want it over,” he said.
My biggest problem/concern with this is that “multiple use” rarely involved what may be best for Wyoming’s wildlife resources that belong to our citizens
Especially hunting. Killing wildlife is NOT conservation.
If the monied interests succeed in revising the plan to suit there interests, they would be smart to donate some money to benefit wildlife.
Example: wildlife migration overpasses on Rt 28 between Farson and South Pass.
Wyoming’s wild lands are a treasure to be protected. A plan that took years to finalize and one that protected areas that should be protected are now on the chopping block. The dump administration is determined to destroy everything in America. The guys an idiot. Even folks that worked for him say it.
When did the meaning of “conservation” change? I always thought conservation meant “wise use” of natural resources, which would include drilling, mining, recreation, logging, hunting, grazing, fishing, etc when done in a responsible manner that doesn’t go to extremes. And “multiple use” used to be the epitome of “conservation”. Now, the definition of “conservation” seems to have changed to what the definition of “preservation” is, or used to be.
Multiple use has always meant different things to different people.