Great Falls Tribune editorial - Sunday, August 19, 2001
An open letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton

Dear Secretary Norton:

The Great Falls Tribune joins other backers of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in expressing our disappointment over the decision by a Montana governor's task force to recommend shrinking the monument's boundaries.

You and Montana Gov. Judy Martz have made no secret of your opposition to this monument and other 11th-hour designations by outgoing President Clinton in January.

We were happy to see, however, that you apparently said during the Western Governors Association meeting last week in Coeur d'Alene that your department does not have the authority to shrink the boundaries of any of these new monuments.

This was big news to us, because a couple of months earlier you had asked states to make recommendations about managing the monuments, including whether boundaries should be adjusted.

To comply with that request, our governor appointed a task force to make such a recommendation on a very short timetable -- less than a month. In effect, this group was to go back and do in a matter of weeks what your own agency's Central Montana Resource Advisory Council struggled with for more than a year.

After three public meetings on three consecutive days, and not quite a month of comment, the task force tentatively recommended making the monument boundaries match up with the 90,000 acres designated Wild and Scenic back in 1976 -- a 75 percent reduction from the approximately 375,000 acres in the designation.

It did so in spite of a better than two-to-one tilt among written comments against reducing the monument's size.

This is ironic in light of the task force's mandate, stated in a release July 13.

That document said comments made at the hearings also should be made in writing, and it explained further:

"By allowing public comment to be collected during the entire month, it provides a forum in case individuals are not able to attend the public meetings.

"Only written comments will be considered in the task force's deliberations."

In theory, this was a commendable attempt to get the much-ballyhooed input of Montanans for a decision that will have long-lasting effects in our state.

But judging by the task force's recommendation, which is to be solidified and passed along to you by Sept. 1, that mandate should have stated, "Only written comments with which we agree will be considered ..."

We would be more upset with this recommendation, were it not for the Portland Oregonian report last week from Coeur d'Alene, quoting you as saying the monuments' designation and size were out of Interior's hands. That means a major portion of the Montana task force's process is looking more and more like a kangaroo court.

In the meantime, we commend your attention to guest opinions below, one by the Bureau of Land Management's Lewistown field manager, attempting to dispel some of the myths that have grown up around the monument designation, and the other agreeing with much of our previous appeal for civility, written by the executive of the Montana Stockgrowers, an organization that has opposed the monument designation.