The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has released its Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (FSEIS) and Proposed Land Use Plan Amendment for the West Mojave Route Network Project (WMRNP) – WEMO. The announcement in the Federal Register on the motorized route network designation and implementation strategy opens a 30-day protest period, which will run through May 28, 2019. The entire set of documents that this FSEIS is comprised of can be found here.
During the WEMO process that has been on-going since 1980 many organizations and our community have engaged in legal actions and expressed concerns to the BLM regarding inappropriate routes for OHV riding and other related issues. (Some of the history of this process is documented on this website.) Most recently many people submitted comments on OHV routes of concern to them during the last WEMO comment period that ended in June 2018.
Your participation and submission of comments has, in many cases, had a positive impact in having the BLM reconsider and limit the designation of OHV routes. Community ORV Watch and many other organizations and citizens have advocated that OHV riding on WEMO route segments in mixed private and public (checkerboardED) areas such as the Morongo Basin should not be allowed. In the maps issued during the 2018 comment period many of these routes were (in Alternative 2, Street Legal Only Sub-Designation) assigned such a “street legal only” access and many comments you submitted advocated such designations.
This current FSEIS includes Alternative 5 – the BLM’s Proposed Action Alternative. On the associated map (see below) you can view the specific route designations in this alternative. COW’s initial review of Alternative 5 (particularly in the Wonder Valley area) appears to show that most of the “stop/start” route segments have been designated “street legal only” as we have been advocating for many years. But this may not be the case of routes in areas that you are concerned with. If you have areas with routes that you are concerned with and which you have previously submitted comments on you should examine the current Alternative 5 on the map and in the associated documents and to see what the “final” route designations are and if you want to file a protest comment by the deadline of May 28, 2019. The requirements and instructions for submitting such comments is found at this link.
Viewing the routes in the “final” Alternative 5: You may view the BLM WEMO route designations on the most recent map that has been available via the link at the very bottom of this page under the heading “Web Maps”. (Sorry, direct link to map not available.) Please note that in the past the BLM provided PDF format maps that we have used to review route designations. For this “final” review the BLM is not providing those PDF maps but rather a web based “interactive” map. (This is unfortunate because as difficult as those PDF maps were to use we all expended a lot of effort to cope with them.) As you review your areas of concern on this map you may also want to reference the route by route designation details in this document.