BUNKHOUSE
CalPLC and PLC advocate on your behalf – even if you’re not a permittee by CCA Director of Government Affairs Kirk Wilbur It’s been a busy—and for me, an eye-opening—summer for CCA and the California Public Lands Council (CalPLC). At this year’s Midyear Meeting in Rancho Murieta, members of CCA’s Federal Lands Committee urged the leadership of BLM’s California State Office and the US Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region to provide CCA staff detailed maps of the 85 vacant BLM allotments and 211 vacant Forest Service allotments in California. True to their words, BLM and Forest Service staff had provided me those maps by mid-July. Since then, a handful of CCA members have reached out to me to learn about vacant allotments in their regions. To my surprise, almost none of those members are current permit-holders on federal allotments; some wondered if there might be opportunities for permit applications on federal lands, and others were merely concerned about federal management of public lands in their communities. When we hosted this year’s Southwestern regional meeting of the California Public Lands Council, I was likewise surprised when one-third of ranchers in attendance were not federal lands permittees (for more on
this summer’s CalPLC meeting, see page 26). Sure, a couple of attendees own private property adjacent to vacant allotments on the Los Padres National Forest and are eager to get the vacant allotments opened to graze their livestock there. But for the most part, folks are merely concerned with how federal agencies are managing public lands, as fire-prevention, wildlife management and a host of other management decisions have impacts that reverberate well-beyond the boundaries of our national forests and BLM allotments. One more public-lands-related anecdote: Last month, CCA and grazing permittees on the Stanislaus National Forest were handed a hard-fought victory in Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center v. Stanislaus National Forest, in which radical environmental groups had alleged violations of the federal Clean Water Act and California’s equivalent, the Porter Cologne Water Quality Control Act, resulting from livestock grazing on three grazing allotments (for more information about the lawsuit, see page 12). Early in the litigation, there was concern that victory for the environmentalists would allow them to weaponize the clean water laws even against
8 California Cattleman September 2019
KIRK WILBUR livestock grazing on private property; fortunately, that outcome has been avoided. These examples all reveal the same truth: management of our public lands does not merely affect federal grazing permittees, but potentially impacts all California ranchers. That is why I write to encourage ranchers throughout the state— permittee or not—to support the work of CalPLC and our national affiliate, the Public Lands Council, with a contribution to CalPLC. The ...CONTINUED ON PAGE 10