As the Bureau of Land Management prepares to revise its grazing regulations on millions of acres of public lands across the West, Park County commissioners want a seat at the table.

The BLM announced in January that it’s beginning an effort to “update, modernize and streamline” the agency’s roughly 25-year-old grazing regulations to “provide greater flexibility for land and resource management.” Some 18,000 grazing permits and leases and the 155 million acres of federal land now being leased stand to be affected by any changes.

In February, the BLM officials held public scoping meetings in Casper, Miles City, Montana, New Mexico and Nevada to gather input on which regulations might need to be revised.

Last week, Park County commissioners asked to be added as a cooperating agency in the revision process.

“... Park County has special expertise relating to the analysis of the federal agency’s proposed decision on the county’s physical environment, socio-economics, customs, culture and local tax base,” said the commission’s letter, sent to the head of the BLM’s Pinedale office. “Additionally, grazing on federal lands is a vitally important issue to the county and local cattle producers.”

If granted cooperator status by the BLM, commissioners would get the chance to be more involved in the discussions. Commissioner Lloyd Thiel, who raises cattle at his Clark ranch and leases a small portion of BLM land, is serving as the commission’s representative on the effort.

“This will take a lot of time,” Thiel said at the March 10 meeting, “but it gets our foot in the door basically as part of the policy input.”

It shouldn’t cost Park County much more than time to participate in the process, as Thiel said the discussions are generally taking place through conference calls.

The Wyoming County Commissioners Association has also organized a multi-county working group on the grazing rule revisions, which Thiel called “a big deal.”

He’s already been soliciting input from other area ranchers.

“More than anything, the biggest concern, if you’re going to be rewriting the rules, is to keep local management …,” Thiel said in an interview, laying out his view that decisions should be made at the local level rather than on a national scale.

He wants the BLM — which is in the process of moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado — to write rules that recognize every area is different.

“... it’s not all the same,” Thiel said, “and you just can’t have a rule because somebody[’s] special interest said that you can only have one animal for 40 acres.”

The grazing situation on the ground varies based on the area, recent weather and other factors that the BLM’s local range conservationists can recognize, he said.

The BLM’s public “scoping” process — in which the agency sought input on the scope of issues and resources it should analyze — closed on Friday. However, the public will have additional opportunities to offer comments — including when the BLM completes its draft Environmental Impact Statement and its proposed changes to the grazing regulations. Those documents are expected to be out for public review in late July.

The agency says its overall goal is to “improve existing land use planning and grazing permitting procedures while simultaneously promoting conservation on public lands.”

The last comprehensive revision of the rules took place in 1995.