RMP comment extended to June

by Julia Stuble

The Pinedale Field Office for the Bureau of Land Management has announced it will extend the public comment period for the draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Resource Management Plan (RMP). RMP comments can now be submitted until June 18, 2007.

Many speakers at the public hearing for the RMP, held at the beginning of the month, asked the BLM for more time to digest the lengthy document. Several noted they had just sent off their comments for the Anticline’s SEIS.

Was the extension the result of this public comment? “At least in part,” Kellie Roadifer, a Planning and Environmental Coordinator with the BLM said. “The governor also asked for the extension.”

This extension, according to Roadifer was to “allow the general public and the agencies we work with more time to comment.” She noted that several of the state or federal agencies had also just finished going through the SEIS.

“We have a lot of documents out there right now, and there’s more coming!” Roadifer commented. The RMP will be the guiding document for the Pinedale BLM’s management of 922,880 acres of public land, and 1.2 million acres of mineral estates across Sublette and Lincoln counties.

The Preferred Alternative for the RMP would allow for 8,383 new wells, though about two-thirds of those would be in the existing Jonah and Anticline fields, says a BLM release.

To submit comments, email them to PRMP_WYMail@blm.gov, directly upload them by resource at www.blm.gov/rmp/wy/pinedale/ or mail them to Pinedale RMP/EIS attn: Kellie Roadifer, Bureau of Land Management, Pinedale Field Office, PO Box 768, Pinedale, WY, 82941. They can also be delivered to the field office at 432 Mill Street, in Pinedale.