The Nevada Environmental Coalition (NEC) at a news conference on Friday, Jan. 29th accused the Bureau of Land Management of failing to provide legally required oversight of the Clark County Shooting Park.
The NEC contends that the BLM violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by filing a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) for the park, thus abrogating its duty to write up a full blown Environmental Impact Statement.
In the NEC’s response to the FONSI, available here (.doc), the NEC had the following concerns:
- The BLM based the FONSI on out-of-date data.
- The only way to obtain up-to-date information would be to do a full Environmental Impact Study for the park.
- The BLM failed to take into consideration the effects of large numbers of visitors, including out-of-town tourist traffic, on the surrounding neighborhoods.
- Local officials for the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Clark County ignored the impact of the park when making zoning decisions about surrounding areas. For example, why wasn’t the surrounding area zoned commercial or mixed-use instead of residential? (Hmm. Why not put some gasoline stations around the park? That way errant bullets will fly into gas pumps instead of people and the family dog. More collateral damage for your buck, public officials!) Of course, the answer was obvious: back in the bubble, local officials were happy to kowtow to developers and carpet bomb the valley with housing developments.
- Citizens of Nor’Town won’t be able to tell the difference between shots fired at the park and shots fired during a holdup, or the weekend disagreement at the local watering hole. Now, that’s a very important Nor’Townie survival skill they’re messing with there.
And apparently the park won’t be solving one of the problems officials – like state Senator John Lee – promised it would. The park was supposed to reduce and possibly eliminate the practice of folks heading out into the North Valley Wash and setting up illegal practice targets for their gun play. There have been reports, however, that such “rogue” target practice continues just south of the park.
Yeah, about where the proposed national monument will be. I guess mammoth bones make pretty nice targets.
So, what happens when the BLM trots out to do environmental impact studies for the national monument and finds all the traffic, noise, dust, litter, corpses, and leaching lead incompatible with a national monument? Crank up the shooting park fees to pay for the clean-up?
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