On March 16, 2018 the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its third attempt to develop a plan for managing off-road vehicle use in the West Mojave portion of the California Desert.
Unfortunately, BLM’s latest draft closely mirrors prior attempts that a federal court found illegal. The draft plan once again inadequately protects areas with high conservation and cultural values and prioritizes off-road vehicles over other uses. It appears the agency has struck out when it comes to honoring its legal obligation to protect irreplaceable resources in the desert.
The new draft plan would designate a spaghetti network of 6,300 miles of OHV routes crisscrossing the West Mojave (WEMO) portion of the BLM’s California Desert Conservation Area. That is over eight times the length of Interstate 5 from San Diego to the Oregon border. Though an improvement over the 2015 draft plan that proposed over 10,000 miles of routes, this plan does nothing to end decades of poorly managed off-road vehicle use by designating thousands of miles of routes that were created by illegal, haphazard off-roading. In 2009, a federal court found that BLM’s 2006 plan, which designated a 5,000-mile route network, harmed fragile desert resources, improperly elevated off-road vehicle use over other forms of recreation, and violated numerous environmental laws. The latest draft plan explicitly states it was designed to include the “least amount of changes” from the illegal 2006 plan. (The above courtesy of The Wilderness Society.)
Members of our community submitted comments to the BLM on thousands of route segments of concern in 2015-2016 but many problematic route segments remain in place in the new proposal. Links to the new maps and an archive of the 2015 maps can be found here.
The comment period for the current routes ends June 14, 2018.
The BLM is conducting a series of Public meetings – all at 5PM – 7PM at the following locations:
- April 17 – Victorville – Hilton Garden Inn, 12603 Mariposa Rd, Victorville, CA 92395
- April 18 – Ridgecrest – Kerr McGee Center, 100 W. California Ave. Ridgecrest, CA 93555
- April 24 – Lone Pine – Statham Hall (Lone Pine Senior Center), 138 N. Jackson St., Lone Pine, CA 93545
- April 25 – Joshua Tree – Joshua Tree Community Center, 6171 Sunburst St, Joshua Tree, CA 92252
We urge you to attend one of these meetings and express your concerns to the BLM.
We are analyzing the new BLM WEMO proposal and will publish advice on effective ways to submit your comments in the near future.