Federal charges dismissed against mine owner locked in road dispute at Lake Mead

Federal prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against a mine owner locked in a dispute with the National Park Service over access to his property at Lake Mead.

Robert Earl Ford was set to stand trial Wednesday on two misdemeanor counts filed last year in connection with the unauthorized widening of a dirt road that runs through Lake Mead National Recreation Area to his Anniversary Mine property.

Instead, the U.S. attorney’s office in Nevada on Tuesday filed a motion to dismiss the charges “in the interests of justice.”

Ford and Todd Howard Tomlin, the man who drove the road grader that widened the road, initially were charged with one felony count each of “willful depredation against property of the United States,” carrying a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

In May, federal prosecutors reduced the charges to two misdemeanors, one for damaging or destroying plants and the other for performing work without a permit. The government estimated the damage at $1,540.

Under a pretrial agreement finalized Wednesday, the charges against Tomlin will be dropped as long as he stays out of trouble and out of Lake Mead National Recreation Area for the next six months.

The decision to drop the charges against Ford came after the Park Service “successfully pursued administrative remedies and the parties reached a mutually agreeable resolution,” prosecutors said in court documents.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Las Vegas declined to elaborate.

Ford offered his own take: “They had no evidence against me, so they didn’t want to go to trial,” he said.

Ford believes the government only filed charges against him in an effort to strong-arm him into selling or surrendering his land.

“To me it’s harassment,” he said. “That’s how I see it.”

Ford said he entered into a deal to buy the old mine in 2006 and took possession of the land in 2011. The following year, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management sent him a warning letter about unauthorized road work after he put asphalt chips on the dirt track leading to and through his property.

He first made headlines in February 2015 when he put up a locked gate on his portion of Anniversary Mine Road, cutting public access to a popular hiking trail through a nearby slot canyon. At the time, he said he was forced to close the road because it was too dangerous, and his insurance carrier was threatening to drop him if he kept letting people cross his land to reach Anniversary Narrows.

He offered to pave the entire 2½ mile road — two-thirds of which is on federal land — at his own expense, but the Park Service and the BLM turned him down.

The Anniversary Mine was founded in the early 1920s, more than a decade before Hoover Dam was finished and the national recreation area was born in 1936.

Ford mines limestone and other minerals on the 215-acre tract sandwiched between Lake Mead National Recreation Area and the BLM’s Muddy Mountains Wilderness Area, about 30 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

He has also tried a few other money-making enterprises on the land, none of them successful or terribly compatible with the mission of the national recreation area next door. Those ventures included a trash incineration business, a gun range for a Las Vegas company that lets people fire heavy machine guns and grenade launchers, and a three-day music and arts festival called Further Future that wanted to use the mine but couldn’t get the proper permits from the Park Service or the BLM.

Ford said a national conservation group approached him about buying the mine in 2015, but the group offered $1 million and he wanted at least $8 million.

He claims the mineral value of the property is a lot higher than that, but he can’t do much with it without better access to the land.

“The reason I can’t do any mining is because the BLM and Park Service won’t let me use the road,” Ford said. “If you can’t mine the property, the value isn’t there.”

Officials at Lake Mead National Recreation Area didn’t have anything new to say about the ongoing dispute on Thursday, and they didn’t offer much hope to hikers eager to return to the Anniversary Narrows.

“The National Park Service and BLM roads remain open,” said Lake Mead spokeswoman Chelsea Kennedy. “It’s up to the owner if he wants to allow the public on his property or not.”

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @RefriedBrean on Twitter.