Lawmakers challenge BLM to explain its police force

      WASHINGTON -- Facing an outcry from the West, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew a set of law enforcement regulations in March.
      On Thursday, the agency was challenged on why it needs its own police force in the first place.
      Lawmakers on a House public lands committee demanded to know where the bureau got the authority to enforce drug laws and other criminal statutes on federal property when other government bodies already have that responsibility.
      "You're not the FBI," Rep. James Gibbons, R-Nev., shot at agency director Sylvia Baca at a hearing dominated by western Republicans who are routinely suspicious of the bureau, the largest landholder in the region.
      "The BLM is supposed to be a land-management agency and you are expanding that," said Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo.
      Supporting that view were sheriffs from Utah and Nevada who said there is no need for Bureau of Land Management police rangers.
      "At a time when Congress is looking for ways to cut costs, the BLM police department ought to be high on the cut list," said Ed Phillips, sheriff of Millard County, Utah. Eureka County Sheriff Kenneth Jones said he refused to deputize bureau rangers when the agency asked him in 1991. Among other things, he said the rangers offered to help write traffic citations on county roads.
      "I told them, `The next time you see one of those unscrupulous ranchers hauling hay to their cattle in a old pickup truck where the tail lights don't work, call 911, and we'll come out," he said.
      At the hearing, Baca said it is clear the bureau has legal authority to pursue a broad range of crimes on federal land, but lawmakers remain skeptical.
      "Congress ought to restrict that authority and just solve this problem," said Rep. Rick Hill, R-Montana.
      The Bureau of Land Management has 154 law enforcement rangers and 50 criminal investigators who enforce federal law on federal land, "with a few exceptions," Baca said. In some areas, the agency enforces state and local laws with state or sheriff's consent.
      But in that case, critics wanted to know whether BLM law enforcers really needs to be making traffic stops, or arresting minors found with alcohol in the back of their pickups, both examples given at the hearing.
      "It is not the policy of the BLM to be out there ticketing people and harassing people," Baca said.
      Interest in the topic was triggered when the agency year proposed late last year a set of regulations it said would consolidate its authority to enforce laws on bureau property. The bureau had been given various police responsibilities in the 1976 Federal Land Policy Management Act, and piecemeal authority that was added through a dozen other laws passed since then, agency officials said.
      However, when the enforcement rules were gathered together and reworded out of bureaucratese and into plain language, Westerners got a full picture and challenged them as an overstepping of BLM authority.
      "It was a simple consolidation of our authorities all in one place and to put them in English," Baca said. "It did not change anything; it simply consolidated all the authorities that had been given to us over the past 20 years."
      Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt withdrew the proposed regulations in March, but the BLM said that does not reduce its responsibility to enforce the law.