§460uu–41 Management plans

Summary

Within three full fiscal years after the fiscal year this subchapter was enacted, the Secretary must write and send two separate general management plans — one for the monument and one for the conservation area — to the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs and the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Each plan must describe how the land should be used and protected. The plans must include a long-term program for public interpretation and education; proposals for visitor facilities, including a visitors center near Bandera Crater and a multiagency orientation center in or near Grants, New Mexico, by Interstate 40; natural and cultural resource plans that stress preserving archaeological sites and allow long-term scientific use (made in close consultation with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Office, and local Indian people and their cultural and religious leaders); and wildlife management plans worked out with appropriate New Mexico state departments and based on past studies. The conservation-area plan must review about 17,468 acres marked as the “Wilderness Study Area” (WSA) and say whether those lands should become wilderness. Until a recommendation is sent and unless Congress says otherwise, the Secretary, through the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, must manage the WSA to keep it eligible for the National Wilderness Preservation System. The monument plan must review all roadless lands inside the monument (except those shown as “potential development areas” on the official map) for wilderness suitability, and until a recommendation is sent the Secretary, through the Director of the National Park Service, must manage those roadless lands to keep them eligible for wilderness status.