After more than a decade of work and a firestorm of public backlash, the Bureau of Land Management’s Rock Springs plan is headed back to the drawing board — on a tight new deadline, Oil City News reports.
Two years ago, BLM Wyoming staff sat through packed meetings full of anger, rumors and dramatic comparisons to America’s darkest wars over a conservation-heavy draft plan for managing 3.6 million acres in southwest Wyoming.
Nine months after that plan was finalized, the Trump administration ordered the agency to redo it.
On Wednesday, BLM staff were back in Rock Springs to start that redo — and this time the tone was a lot calmer.
No shouting, no war analogies. Instead, a few dozen locals, elected officials and advocates quietly wandered poster boards and peppered staff with questions.
“At this stage, we’re not bringing a proposal,” BLM-Wyoming acting state director Kris Kirby told the crowd at the Sweetwater Events Complex. “The intention here is to ask the public what we should be analyzing.”
The redo won’t touch everything in the 2024 Rock Springs Resource Management Plan.
BLM says the changes will be limited to “special management areas”, including:
- Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACECs);
- Special Recreation Management Areas.
Maps at the meeting showed a dozen ACECs and several recreation areas. That’s where the agency says revisions will be focused.
“Areas with special protections and special designations, that’s what we’re analyzing,” Kirby said. “Really nothing in the checkerboard, because there’s not a lot of special management areas there.”
Unlike the last go-round, which involved a full Environmental Impact Statement, this revision will use a lighter Environmental Assessment.
And the clock is already ticking: BLM says it must have a new Record of Decision signed by Oct. 2, 2026 to comply with updated federal environmental review rules.
BLM hasn’t said exactly what it will change, but the direction seems pretty clear.
When the 2024 plan came out, state agencies and some local officials blasted it for expanding ACECs from about 226,000 acres to 935,000 acres. Many of those same voices are now pushing to roll that back.
“Some of them just need to go away,” Sweetwater County Commissioner Mary Thoman said at Wednesday’s meeting.
She specifically called out the Golden Triangle area, protected under the South Wind River ACEC.
“It’s got to be multi-use for sustained yield,” Thoman said. “They totally diverged and made it one use: conservation. That’s the biggest issue.”
Rock Springs resident Glenn Lehar, a retired Jim Bridger Power Plant mechanic, echoed the frustration.
“The people who decided on this, they don’t even live here,” he said. “They don’t even got a clue what goes on out here.”
Others at the meeting warned that undoing those protections would come at a cost, especially for wildlife.
Retired Wyoming Game and Fish warden Duane Kerr pointed to a BLM idea floating around to open parts of the Golden Triangle to oil and gas leasing — including near what’s believed to be the world’s largest sage grouse lek.
Under the current plan, leasing and drilling aren’t allowed there. If the South Wind River ACEC disappears or shrinks, that could change.
“That’s a horrible thing, in my opinion,” Kerr said. “If you care about wildlife, you can’t do that.”
Joey Faigl, president of the Muley Fanatic Foundation and a longtime player in the Rock Springs planning process, said his group is mostly happy with how protections currently look — especially around the Greater Little Mountain Ecosystem, which has both an ACEC and a special recreation management area.
“The way it sits now, we’re supportive of it,” Faigl said. “It came to where we wanted it, and we’re all good with where it sits.”
He’s been involved since the very beginning — his first field trip tied to this plan was back in 2008.
After 17 years of meetings, drafts and fights, Faigl summed up what a lot of people in the room seemed to be thinking:
“I want it over,” he said.
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