The Valles Caldera National Preserve is sometimes referred to as the “Yellowstone” of New Mexico. Photo © Tom Ribe
A satellite image of northern New Mexico shows a clear bull’s-eye in the middle of the state: the Jemez Mountains and their central feature, a huge collapsed volcano, one of the largest in North America. This now-dormant volcano’s flanks of forested canyons and mesas are mostly in the Santa Fe National Forest, but the center of the volcano—the caldera—is the Valles Caldera National Preserve, an 89,000-acre federal land management experiment that is in serious trouble.
The preserve, formerly the Baca Ranch, was purchased from its private owners in 2000 with Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars. The successful campaign for its federal purchase, however, resulted in a clash between those who would emphasize commerce at the preserve and those who sought its preservation as a special landscape.
Former U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, then New Mexico’s ranking representative, opposed purchasing the Baca Ranch, but he acquiesced under the condition that the preserve be governed consistent with semi-privatization ideals promoted by groups like the Property and Environment Research Center. Touted as a new paradigm for public land management, the Montana-based libertarian group believes that private property and private markets are the key to environmental protection. Their approach assumes that user fees and resource extraction revenues—rather than congressional appropriations—would generate sufficient funds to offset the costs of managing a particular piece of land.
The legislation that enabled the purchase compromised these libertarian ideals with an environmental protection mandate. The purchase legislation stipulated that the former Baca Ranch be managed by an independent government corporation referred to as a “trust.” The board of trustees is required to bring the Valles Caldera National Preserve to financial self- sufficiency by 2015, or the land will become national forest land—putting its historic buildings, recovering headwaters and wildlife habitat at risk.
Nine years into this “experiment,” hunting, hiking, fishing and grazing fees plus grants for scientific research have brought in about $750,000 per year, less then a quarter of the trust’s $4 million annual budget.
People sometimes refer to the Valles Caldera National Preserve as the “Yellowstone of New Mexico” because of its large elk herds, vast grasslands, rippling trout streams, historic cabins, hot springs and dramatic volcanic rims cloaked in pine and fir forests. Yet most of the preserve was heavily logged from the 1880s through the 1990s and was severely overgrazed by sheep and cattle. Water quality in its two headwater streams doesn’t meet federal turbidity standards because of livestock damage. Even so, the preserve has a feeling of extensive wildness as its forests and grasslands recover.
As early as 1930, New Mexico politicians and park advocates proposed including the caldera in a large national park centered on nearby Anasazi ruins, which are now partly protected in neighboring Bandelier National Monument. In the 1960s, the caldera’s owners offered the land to the National Park Service, but negotiations failed. The beauty of Valles Caldera’s wide-open vistas and hidden canyons—and its accessibility to New Mexico’s growing urban areas—has kept the land in the forefront of public awareness through the decades.
The quasi-privatization management model was moderated by U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman and then-President Clinton, who insisted that the trust follow all environmental laws and be accountable under the Freedom of Information Act. Those protections, along with a mandate for “adaptive management,” where environmental monitoring from scientific research constrains resource extraction like grazing, has kept livestock numbers low. Many point to the preserve’s science program as setting a national standard because of its integrity and its direct effect on management decisions.
The science program, managed by Dr. Robert Parmenter of the University of New Mexico’s biology department, brings in grants and researchers from around the country interested in ecology, wildlife, geology and archaeology. The preserve takes 26 percent of the grant money for administration, making the science program the top revenue producer next to elk hunting fees.
Even so, the trust experiment is problematic. With just six years left to make the preserve self-sufficient, the trustees are looking to recreation and development to finance its management, but no comprehensive management plan has been produced despite a legislative mandate to complete one quickly. The trustees have not invested in basic infrastructure, such as a water system or visitor center. Planning for public access won’t be complete before 2012, and the trust’s private insurance policy limits the number of people on the preserve. Meanwhile, the public continues to look at Valle Caldera’s spectacular grasslands and forests from across the boundary fence, just as they did in its decades of private ownership.
“This management experiment has been a solution in search of a problem,” says Dr. Tom Jervis with the citizen watchdog group Caldera Action. “They set up their grand experiment with a short time frame, then let it languish in the hands of people who have little idea how to manage public lands.”
No other piece of federal land outside of the Presidio in San Francisco operates under a financial self-sufficiency provision. Because the preserve is outside the purview of any public land agency, its trustees are answerable only to the secretary of Agriculture, and none of them has weighed in on the preserve’s management. The public must resort to taking its grievances to Congress or the courts.
With the failure of the financial self-sufficiency requirement all but certain, conservation groups and other organizations see an urgent need to safeguard this landscape. “The legislation says the preserve will become national forest land in 2015 if financial self-sufficiency is not achieved,” says Caldera Action’s Monique Schoustra. “This is a nightmare scenario, since the national forest lands surrounding the preserve are overrun with cattle, off-road vehicles, and have minimal law enforcement. The place is special, world-class even, and needs high quality management and protection for ever-increasing numbers who want to visit.”
Caldera Action is pressing legislation that would transfer the area to the National Park Service as a preserve where hunting and fishing would be allowed and education and scientific research would be a core mission. With no champions of the trust experiment left in the New Mexico congressional delegation, Caldera Action and its allied groups feel optimistic that the National Park Service arrowhead may soon grace signs in the Valles Caldera National Preserve.