NEVADA VIEWS: Gates and fees aren’t the answer at Calico Basin

If, as the Bureau of Land Management contends, there’s a recent increase in visitation at Calico Basin, any such increase is from the agency’s own actions. The BLM’s newly installed bureaucratic barricade at Red Rock pushed people over to Calico Basin, and soon its gates and fees at Calico Basin will push people to the next place, where the bureau will suddenly discover increased use and then claim it as justification to erect yet more gates and charge more fees.

It’s a problem-producing solution that guarantees more gates and more fees in perpetuity.

Feeding on its recent victory at Red Rock, where it imposed restricted access to the scenic loop, Calico Hills and Rocky Gap Road, the BLM has fashioned its own create-a-mole, whack-a-mole dynamic that suits the few and excludes the many. If anything, this absurdity proves the BLM’s plans for Red Rock and Calico Basin are critically flawed and need to be abandoned, not doubled down upon.

Would that those who frequent Calico Basin could trust that the BLM would engage respectfully in give-and-take analysis of issues and mutually work to resolve any demonstrated problems. But when a BLM official barefacedly says, as reported in the Dec. 2 Review-Journal, “We’re not putting in a system that restricts access,” one must see the agency’s raw use of deception and its disrespect for the public as but cover for the gates-and-fees fix it already has on its launchpad.

Evidence foretells the BLM will mechanically conduct its required check-the-box public meeting but never engage in a listen-and-learn public meeting. It is also obvious that any “comments” that those who do not own homes in Calico Basin submit will be mechanically processed out of consideration, even as the BLM’s favorite fix is being processed in.

We’re witnessing a bureaucratic self-serving fix. Instead of getting ahead of what was obvious to all (that use of public lands would increase) and then designing access to public lands to accommodate the public, this solution favors more efficiently the bureaucratic bloc’s inner-most goals to just put up gates and charge fees. And all this is built on the erroneous first premise: that increased use equals abuse. Ah, but this engaging meme serves well the real goals of the BLM’s phalanx of gate-and-charge bureaucrats.

What should the BLM do? Two things. First, the agency should not install gates or charge fees for access to Calico Basin. Second, the BLM should reverse its recently imposed restrictive access to Red Rock and reinstate the previous condition, one that was never broken but only grossly under engineered. Moreover, the BLM should earnestly work to make the Red Rock area more accommodating to more people. That’s its job, after all.

Will the BLM do any of this? Of course not, not without pressure. It’s a bureaucratic game, and the “comment” process is a disgusting show-trial charade. Given these givens, unless would-be visitors to Calico Basin gain the active and effective support of national, state and local politicians, it’s a done deal. The BLM will build gates and charge fees. Remember this when next you vote.

Greg and Jan Moo write from Las Vegas.