Polis noted that the report, produced by Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes and U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Bob Abbey, singles out lands included in the Boulder Democrat’s Eagle and Summit Counties Wilderness Preservation Act.

A rock outcrop at Castle Peak in Eagle County (Hidden Gems photo).

Polis painstakingly produced that legislation from the controversial and much broader Hidden Gems proposal after months and months of public meetings in his 2nd Congressional District, which includes mountainous Eagle and Summit counties.

“In putting together this report, Secretary [Ken] Salazar has found common ground by focusing on wilderness and conservation lands that have bipartisan and local support,” Polis said. “Conservation has a long history of bipartisanship, and the West has benefited greatly from it. It’s my hope that today’s report can form the foundation of a proposal that Congress can quickly get behind and pass, in spite of partisan gridlock elsewhere.”

The study, which looks at 18 areas in nine states, is called the “Preliminary Report on BLM Lands Deserving Protection as National Conservation Areas, Wilderness or other Conservation Designations.” It includes the Castle Peak area north of Eagle and near the Colorado River.

“Due to its mid-level elevation and plentiful precipitation, Castle Peak supports a wide variety of plants and wildlife,” according to the Hidden Gems campaign. “In addition to beaver ponds, the area offers superb summer range for 400 elk and 1,000 deer. The area also has outstanding geologic, natural, scenic and recreational characteristics ….”

Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat, says Castle Peak, along with Browns Canyon, McKenna Peak and Bull Gulch, are four Colorado areas in the new Interior Department report that are proposed for protection in her Colorado Wilderness Act of 2011.

A much larger proposal than the Polis bill, DeGette’s legislation would create 28 new wilderness areas and add land to three existing wilderness areas. In total, the DeGette bill would permanently protect nearly 700,000 acres of federal land. DeGette has been advocating additional wilderness protection in the state for more than a decade and lately has been sharply critical of Republican attempts to roll back wilderness protections.

She welcomed the Interior Department report on Thursday.

“Over the past 12 years, as I’ve worked on the Colorado Wilderness Act with citizens across the state, I’ve heard many different opinions, but those opinions are most often rooted in a set of shared state-wide values,” DeGette said in a statement. “Coloradans want to preserve their history, their quality of life and their opportunities.”

According to the Interior Department (DOI), the BLM manages more than 245 million acres of land nationwide, mostly in 12 western states. Of that total acreage, 8.7 million acres have been protected as wilderness, or about 3.5 percent. DOI lands see more than 400 million visits a year, with outdoor recreation responsible for 6.5 million jobs and $1 trillion a year in economic benefit.

“As we continue our push to responsibly expand oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, geothermal, and other resource development on public land, we also have a responsibility to expand the backcountry recreational and outdoor opportunities that generate billions of dollars in revenue for local economies across the West,” BLM Director Bob Abbey said in a release.

The Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act of 2011 (pdf) seeks to block the ban proposed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar within a 1-million-acre buffer zone around the nation’s most iconic national park. Conservation groups say the move is needed to protect the Colorado River watershed and to prevent industrialization of an area heavily reliant on outdoor recreation and tourism.

“We are disappointed in this jobs-killing legislation,” said Roger Clark, air and energy program director at Grand Canyon Trust. “Uranium mining threatens thousands of tourism-related jobs in northern Arizona. Salazar has found the right balance between protecting Grand Canyon and the $700 million tourism industry while leaving promising mining areas further from the national park open to exploration and mining.”

McCain countered that Salazar’s move would be a job-killer.

“The Department’s proposed mining withdrawal would kill hundreds of potential jobs to ‘save’ the Grand Canyon from the same form of uranium mining that conservation groups once supported,” McCain said. “It also threatens to unravel the spirit of the Arizona Wilderness Act and will raise significant questions for future Wilderness bills if agreements to accommodate responsible land uses are neither genuine nor enduring.”

House sponsors of the bill include Arizona Republicans Jeff Flake and Trent Franks.

“It is unconscionable that Senator McCain and Representatives Flake and Franks are seeking to undermine protections for Grand Canyon and its watershed and showing so little regard for the people of Arizona, including all of those who expressed strong support for protecting these lands from uranium mining and the pollution it produces,” said Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter.

The Grand Canyon has been under growing pressure from surrounding mining and power-generating activities, including haze from coal-fired power plants.

Colorado is increasingly in the crosshairs of uranium mining and milling controversy, including a legacy of contamination from the state’s uranium heyday in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar sent a letter yesterday to Interior Department Inspector General Mary Kendall arguing that her investigation into the circumstances surrounding the release of a 30-day report on the oil spill “confirms that there was no wrongdoing or intent to mislead the public.”

Kendra Barkoff, Interior Department spokeswoman, highlighted the letter in an attempt to downplay the report:

Secretary Salazar’s letter speaks for itself. There was no intent to mislead the public. The decision to impose a temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling was made by the Secretary, following consultation with colleagues including the White House.

In addition, Barkoff pointed to a June 3 letter to Dr. Per Holland addressing his concerns that the report misrepresented the extent to which he and other experts reviewed the recommendations. In the letter, Interior Department Deputy Secretary David Hayes said:

By listing you as a member of the [National Academy of Engineering] panel that peer-reviewed the 22 safety recommendations contained in the Report, we did not mean to imply that you also agreed with the decision to impose a moratorium on all new deepwater drilling. We acknowledge that you were not asked to review or comment on the moratorium.

Barkoff, referencing Hayes’ June 3 letter, said that the issue had been resolved months ago:

As the report makes clear, the misunderstanding with the reviewers was resolved with the June 3rd letter and a subsequent conference call with those experts.

The report, obtained by Politico, said scientists and industry experts “had neither reviewed nor supported such a policy decision and had never been asked to do so.”

Interior Department officials told the department’s inspector general that they never intended to give that impression in their version of the report. But a White House edit of the executive summary of the report,  by staffers in White House climate and energy policy director Carol Browner’s office, “led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed by the experts,” the report said.

????Here is the text in question, from the executive summary of the report:

The Secretary further recommends an immediate halt to drilling operations on the 33 permitted wells, not including the relief wells currently being drilling by BP, that are currently being drilling using floating rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling operations should cease as soon as safely practicable for a 6-month period.

The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering. Those experts, who volunteered their time and expertise, are identified in Appendix 1. The government also consulted with a wide range of experts from government, academia and industry.

An Interior Department official who worked on the report, Steve Black, told the inspector general that the executive summary was not intentionally unclear, and he stressed that the recommendations that came later in the report were peer reviewed, though the moratorium recommendation was not.

The inspector general report was requested by a number of Republicans, including Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who opposed the drilling moratorium.

The four-page notice to lessees (NTL) also specifies that any operator of a new deepwater drilling project using a blowout preventer will be subject to an evaluation by the Bureau of Energy Management as to whether it can contain a massive oil spill.

The NTL comes as the Interior Department has issued a number of new deepwater drilling safety and spill response rules.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in a statement, said the new requirement would serve to hold companies accountable for their drilling operations.

“This will serve to confirm that oil and gas companies are accountable and responsible for their operations as we work to strengthen safety, oversight and environmental protection at every stage of the drilling process,” Salazar said.

His priorities, according to a written statement, include increasing domestic energy production “through an all-of-the-above energy plan” and ensuring that the Obama administration is held “accountable” for its new offshore drilling policies.

Here is his full statement:

Now is the time for Republicans to get to work and prove that we have truly listened to the American people.

Like all committees, one of our top priorities on the Natural Resources Committee will be cutting spending and bringing fiscal sanity back to Washington, D.C.  The days of big government spending are over and we must take a hard look at what our country can truly afford during these times of soaring deficits and record debt.

Creating new jobs and giving a much needed boost to the economy will also be at the forefront of our agenda.  Through the responsible stewardship of our natural resources we can put Americans to work, strengthen our economy and protect the environment.  This includes increasing domestic energy production through an all-of-the-above energy plan and ensuring that public lands are actually open to the public.  The livelihoods of rural communities, especially in the West, are dependent on the smart use of our public lands, water, timber, minerals and energy resources.

Finally, the Committee will provide much needed oversight of the Obama Administration’s policies that have largely gone unchecked for nearly two years.  Our goal will be to hold the Administration accountable and get much needed answers on a range of issues including the de facto offshore drilling moratorium in the Gulf, potential new monument designations and plans to lock up vast portions of our oceans through an irrational zoning process.

The move is the latest effort by the Interior Department to increase offshore drilling safety in the aftermath of the BP oil spill. Salazar has also issued a series of new drilling safety and oil spill prevention rules.

In a statement on the institute, Salazar said:

The Deepwater Horizon tragedy highlighted the importance of raising the bar on offshore drilling safety, practices and technology. The Institute would serve to coordinate and institutionalize the lessons and strategies learned from the oil spill so that the United States can stay at the forefront of drilling safety, containment and spill response.

Salazar is now looking for industry and government “partners” for the institute and hopes to get their ideas by Nov. 30.

“No. We are in a constant reform cycle big time,” Hayes, who was the first Obama administration official to visit the Gulf after the oil spill, said. Hayes enumerated the Interior Department’s many drilling safety and oil spill response reforms and added, “We continue to be focused on the need for reform. … It’s going to be an ongoing effort. There’s no finish line here.”

Hayes said one of the problems with the Interior Department before the oil spill was that “industry expertise outpaced government expertise.” He suggested that the administration may need to set up an entity similar to the one established by the nuclear industry that “provides a place for government to pool its resources with industry and NGOs.”

Of the 8,000 oiled birds found by the government in the aftermath of the spill, just 2,000 were alive, and 1,300 of those have been released back into the wild. Of the 1,100 sea turtles found covered in oil, 535 were found alive, and 360 have been released back into the wild.

According to a letter yesterday to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and current Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey:

BLM’s management did not issue warnings, institute disciplinary actions, or otherwise hold Mr. Henke accountable. Nor did BLM’s ethics officials exercise sufficient due diligence when apprised of Mr. Henke’s stroll through the revolving door to go work as the president of an oil and gas association.

The accusations are significant given reports of undue oil industry influence at the Department of Interior, particularly at the former Minerals Management Service.

POGO, in its letter, notes these concerns:

Mr. Henke’s actions, and BLM’s subsequent inaction, are of particular concern because BLM handles onshore oil and gas leasing. We need not remind you that the Deepwater Horizon disaster exposed how years of excessive coziness between the petroleum industry and the now-defunct Minerals Management Service (MMS), which handled offshore oil and gas leasing, was a significant contributing factor in the Gulf spill.