Volunteers sought for panel on wilderness study areas

Sorting out which local lands should be protected as wilderness and which should be used more freely will be the goal of a new Park County Commission-led task force.

Although they’re still not sure the process will be worth the time and energy, commissioners have decided they will participate in the Wyoming Public Lands Initiative.

The primary aim of the initiative — launched by the Wyoming County Commissioners Association — is to examine places that the federal government has identified as possible new wilderness.

Those “wilderness study areas” have sat in limbo for decades, waiting to see if Congress will make them into actual wilderness.

Park County has two wilderness study areas: the popular McCullough Peaks area on Bureau of Land Management property south of Powell and the High Lakes area in the Beartooth Mountains, inside the Shoshone National Forest.

Commissioners are creating an 11-member committee — consisting of Commissioner Bucky Hall as chairman plus 10 volunteers representing various interest groups and the general public — to study how best to manage those areas.

Anyone interested in serving must submit an application to the commissioners by April 8.

The committee will be tasked with ultimately making recommendations to commissioners, who will make recommendations to Wyoming’s governor, who’ll make recommendations to Congress.

Commissioners expect the 23,290-acre study area in the McCullough Peaks will prove to be the hottest topic.

“Maybe the majority of people in this county want that to stay wilderness — maybe. Or maybe the majority of them want it to be like partitioned into a part of it wilderness and a part of it not,” Hall said last month, adding, “I really don’t know, but I think that’s what we should make an attempt to find out.”

Commissioners have long been unhappy with the study areas, which are treated as de facto wilderness, and they’ve previously said they don’t want any more local lands turned into wilderness.

But they expressed some willingness to listen to other opinions through the public lands initiative.

“There’s part of me that says, OK let’s go ahead and recommend today we want a hard release (of the restrictions) on all the (wilderness study areas) and be done with it,” Commissioner Joe Tilden said last month. “But there’s another part of me that thinks the process might be kind of fun and ... I say, let’s just let the mayhem begin.”

While the process will focus on the study areas, the county’s free to make any recommendations about any lands it wishes. If Congress accepts the recommendations and passes a law, the county would effectively bypass the land managers at the Forest Service or the BLM who typically make those decisions.

It means the process could put anything on the table for a “big picture” discussion about how best to manage certain lands.

Wyoming County Commissioners Association Executive Director Pete Obermueller has said the process won’t necessarily result in a consensus — “Ain’t going to happen,” Tilden said Tuesday — but it is meant to be a collaboration between interests ranging from oil and gas developers to environmentalists.

The prospect of involving environmental groups made Park County Commission Chairman Tim French wary.

“They’re welcome to come, but if the room’s packed with 50 people ... from somewhere else, from some environmental group, that’s not right,” French said last month. “It’s our decision. It’s not theirs.”

In January, Obermueller assured commissioners there’s no downside, “because you can define for yourselves what you want out of the process.”

“If you’re a pro-wilderness person in Wyoming and you want more wilderness, the politics in this state are not great for you,” Obermueller added. “If you want more wilderness, we’ve set up a process, we’ve set a table that they have to come to.”

Commissioners initially viewed the initiative as a “lot of work for nothing,” but were ultimately won over.

“I’m not hopeful, but I’m seeing more stuff that leads me to believe there might be a chance,” Commissioner Lee Livingston said last month.

Hall thinks the process will start a lengthy debate.

“But at least it will be at the local level and we won’t have bureaucratic oversight from the feds, altering what happens at the local level,” he said. “And that’s why I think it’s worth a shot.”

Hall hopes the committee will make its final recommendations to commissioners by the end of the year.