Earth Protect Blog

By Noelle Phillips

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A veteran employee of the Bureau of Land Management in the San Luis Valley filed a whistleblower complaint Monday, saying her bosses are failing to enforce livestock grazing rules on public lands and are jeopardizing the ecosystem along the Rio Grande River.

Melissa Shawcroft, who has been a BLM rangeland management specialist since 1992, is facing a two-week unpaid suspension after her supervisor disciplined her over discourteous emails and a failure to follow rules. Shawcroft is arguing that the discipline is retaliation for her insistence that the bureau take action to stop area ranchers from trespassing by allowing their livestock to graze on BLM property without permits.

The illegal grazing has gone unchecked for years on the nearly 250,000 acres she manages and her pleas for enforcement, which must be authorized by her supervisors, have gone unheeded, she said. Shawcroft has documented damage to the land and riverbanks and has heard repeated complaints from ranchers who pay to use BLM land.

“I’m sick and tired of them telling me it’s my job to solve the problem when I don’t have the authority to do it,” Shawcroft told The Denver Post. “I jabbed at them and they fired back.”

The Bureau has the power to impound livestock or levy fines, but managers are timid because they fear another armed standoff similar to the ones led by the Bundy family in Oregon and Nevada, Shawcroft said.

In 2014 in Nevada, Cliven Bundy, his family and an armed militia organized a standoff with federal agents who had come to round up the rancher’s cows that were illegally grazing on federal land.

“They come right out and tell me we don’t want another Bundy situation,” Shawcroft said.

Steven Hall, the BLM’s Rocky Mountain communications director, said the agency does not comment on personnel issues, but the agency takes unauthorized grazing seriously and is adopting measures to better enforce the rules, he said.

Under federal law, livestock may graze on Bureau of Land Management property when a rancher holds a permit authorizing the land use. Permits are passed down through families and rarely become available for purchase.

The permits determine how many cattle, sheep or horses a rancher can place on federal land and which months the animals are allowed to feed on it. Those rules protect the land from overgrazing and give grass, brush and water time to recover throughout the year.

Shawcroft manages rangeland along the Rio Grande River where property on the east side is private and cows and horses are crossing the river to the federally-owned Rio Grande Natural Area on the west side, she said.

The area is home to endangered and threatened species, including the southwestern willow fly-catcher and the western yellow-billed cuckoo. The Rio Grande River provides water to approximately six million people in the United States and Mexico, according to the Rio Grande International Study Center, and the World Wildlife Federation lists it as a top 10 endangered river in the world.

The cows are fouling the water. And the animals are eating grass and young willow trees down to the ground along the banks.

“It’s almost like pavement,” Shawcroft said. “That’s what happens when you graze from spring into the summer and into the fall.”

Area ranchers who pay for the permits are complaining that lawbreakers are ruining the land for their livestock. It’s such a problem that “chronic livestock trespass” was on the June agenda for the BLM’s Rocky Mountain Resource Advisory Council meeting.

At that meeting, Dario Archuleta, the acting field manager for the BLM’s San Luis Valley field office, said there is a “fine-tuned administrative process they believe will be vastly more effective than the criminal approach,” according to minutes from the meeting.

Archuleta told the meeting’s attendees that the process for impounding livestock is lengthy and complicated and that courts have been lenient on violators.

The BLM has assigned up to 14 employees to address unauthorized grazing through site visits that require a minimum five-hour time commitment, including travel, Hall told The Denver Post.

The agency also has implemented a new GIS tracking tool to collect data such as identifying livestock and the improved documentation has resulted this year in trespass notices being issued, Hall said.

Shawcroft is represented in her complaint by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that works with public employees who want to point out government wrongdoing. The Bureau of Land Management named Shawcroft its range management specialist of the year in 2012 and she’s only had one other disciplinary action taken in her 31-year career, Jeff Ruch, PEER’s Pacific director, said.

“She doesn’t mince words and apparently some of her male supervisors took offense,” Ruch said. “The idea that you’re being hit with a heavy sanction when you use words like ‘gumption’ in an email strikes me as an overreaction.”