BY GAIL BINKLY

Better a national conservation area than a national monument.

That was the view expressed by the majority of the panelists Tuesday night at a San Juan Basin Farm Bureau forum on the proposed Canyon of the Ancients National Conservation Area.

Rep. Scott McInnis and Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell are sponsoring legislation to create the area on 164,000 acres of BLM land in western Montezuma and Dolores counties. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who visited the region in May, has called for greater protection for the Anasazi ruins scattered across the landscape.

Supporting the NCA legislation — which allows for continued grazing, hunting and oil and gas drilling — is preferable to letting President Clinton declare a national monument, several panelists told the audience of approximately 200.

"I don’t say we’re happy. We’re not happy," said Shell CO2 representative Rich Hansen of the possible change in status for the McElmo Dome area. Shell, the county’s largest taxpayer, leases about three-quarters of the land in the proposed conservation area for carbon-dioxide extraction.

"But we’re cautiously comfortable we can live within the conservation proposal, and that’s why we support the (county) commissioners and their idea."

Hansen said that under a national monument designation, Shell might not be permitted to continue drilling the one or two new wells it needs every year, while the NCA legislation is more flexible.

But a large portion of the audience clearly remained skeptical about the McInnis-Campbell bill, and two members of the 10-person panel expressed outright opposition to it.

Carl Knight, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute tribal council, expressed general opposition to the process by which the legislation was proposed.

"The Ute Mountain tribe was the last people to hear about what was going on here," he said, although tribal representatives were present at Babbitt’s first visit in May. "Nobody has respect for the Ute Mountain tribe, from the local government to the people up in Capitol Hill. . . .

"Are we going back to the old ways where the white man talked with forked tongue?"

Neither Campbell or McInnis had a representative at the forum.

Rick Keck, representing the Southwest Colorado Landowners Association, said there are no real differences between a national monument and a national conservation area in terms of management.

"Our historical uses of the land will change forever," he said. He argued that the national-monument designation, which would be done unilaterally by President Clinton under the 1906 Antiquities Act, could perhaps be overturned, while a conservation area could not be.

"What happens if the president declares this area a national monument?" Keck asked. "Nothing, if Congress doesn’t approve it." He also said some national monuments have been abolished in the past, including two in Colorado.

"We can take a stand like our neighbors in Utah did," Keck said. The Utah Association of Counties has filed a lawsuit against Clinton and Babbitt for declaring the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah in 1996.

But Cortez Mayor Joe Keck, a member of the citizens’ group that prepared a report for Babbitt regarding local opinion on ruins protection, said fighting the monument designation would be impractical.

"We can spend the next 10 to 15 years and spend thousands of dollars every year in litigation costs trying to fight this and have a national monument in the meantime," said Keck, who said he was not representing the views of the city of Cortez.

The Campbell-McInnis bill, he said, is one of very few pieces of legislation that include specific grazing and mining rights for public land.

He said it was important to "maintain the diversity we have in our economy and not become just a tourism-based economy," and that the NCA bill would help agriculture and the Shell project to continue.

"In my 15 to 20 years dealing with the federal government, I’ve learned when the government takes a position on things like this, it’s extremely difficult to move into a litigation mode," Keck said. "In my experience, you usually come out better if you try for a negotiated settlement."

Jeff Widen, of the Colorado Environmental Coalition in Durango, who was booed when he was introduced, agreed, saying Babbitt had made it clear the county will have either a monument or a conservation area.

"Doing nothing for the area really isn’t an option," Widen said. "Whether any of us like it or not, those are our two options."

He said his group will support the bill if it is changed to designate about 30,000 acres of wilderness within the NCA to protect "pristine canyons" such as Cross Canyon. Grazing would continue to be allowed there, he emphasized.

"If we want areas to stay like they are, wilderness is a way to do it," he said.

Archaeologist Bruce Bradley praised local farmers and ranchers, saying "nobody knows this land better than you people that are on it."

He said that although the area is "being reasonably well protected" at the moment, more resources are needed to preserve the Anasazi ruins for the future.

"To me, protection isn’t ‘fence it off, don’t let anybody near it’," he said. "If we as archaeologists can’t care about the people who live here now, why care about the people in the past?"

Several in the audience also questioned why the NCA border stops at the Utah state line.

Bradley admitted there was no archaeological reason for the arbitrary boundary, and Widen said it was probably "nothing more than the politics of dealing with two congressional delegations."

County Commissioner Kent Lindsay said the county decided to support NCA legislation because it allows the area’s management plan to be drafted with local input rather than by the BLM alone.

"With the national conservation area, we would have a working group and representation," he said. "That’s where we’re at."

But a number of audience members asked skeptical questions about whether they could trust the BLM or the secretary of the interior to protect their rights once the bill was passed.

In response to one question about buffer zones possibly being required around the area under the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, both Roger Alexander and Gary Thrash of the BLM said they knew of no laws that would mandate such zones.

"To my knowledge, on BLM lands we have not seen any buffer zones enacted on adjacent lands," Thrash said. "We have a number of subdivisions adjacent to our borders."

"I’ve read FLPMA from start to finish," Alexander said. "I may have missed something, but I am not aware of any buffer zones created through that act." The McInnis bill specifically states that there will be no protective perimeter zone around the Canyons of the Ancients NCA, he said, "and that’s pretty plain language."

Another audience member asked why some of the panelists wanted to let Babbitt get away with "blackmail."