Ross Kaminsky Show, Perry Pendley, October 10, 2019
Station: KHOW, 630 am
Show: Ross Kaminsky Show
Guests: Pendley, Perry
Date: October 10, 2019
Topics: GEO
HOST ROSS KAMINSKY [00:00:00] [I’ll] tell you what we were going to do when we come back, [it’s] very exciting. Is this the first time we met in person?
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF POLICY & PROGRAMS EXERCISING THE AUTHORIY OF THE DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT, PERRY PENDLEY [00:00:11] Absolutely!
HOST ROSS KAMINSKY [00:00:12] So, joining me in studio, [is] Perry Pendley. You’ve heard him many times on the show through all the legal adventures he’s been involved with, really working on behalf of property rights primarily, other things as well in the Mountain West. Now he’s the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. We’ll talk with Perry right after this.
[00:00:34] [commercial break]
HOST ROSS KAMINSKY [00:00:50] [intro] All right, good morning, everybody! Happy Thursday! Happy birthday to me. I’m not telling you how old I am today. I’m just one day older than yesterday. But anyway, and I feel much better than I did — you know — 12 hours ago because it was the end of Yom Kippur and I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for 24 hours. So I’m feeling pretty good. And I’m feeling especially good that Perry Pendley is joining me in studio. Boy, we’ve talked so many times and yet I don’t think we’ve ever met in person until today.
PENDLEY [00:01:18] I don’t — I don’t think so. And I thought about it as I drove through the ice, here, on this beautiful October day. But no, I think most of the time it has been out of my house in Evergreen, long distance, having our conversation. So it’s great to be in the studio.
KAMINSKY [00:01:35] Perry used to be the brains and the muscle behind the Rocky Mountain — [correcting himself] Mountain States Legal Foundation and now is — people call him the Acting Director of the Bureau of Land Management, which is part of the Department the Interior. But what is actually your official title?
PENDLEY [00:01:51] Exercising the Authority of the Director. This is a designation by the Secretary of the Interior. My official title is Deputy Director of Policy and Programs. I’m the political appointee in the Bureau of Land Management. We have a Deputy Director for Operations, who’s our career employee. But I — you need somebody to sign the document. You know, when the director of the BLM has to take due action, you need somebody in charge. That’s me. And to do that, the secretary has to name me or someone Exercising the Authority of the Director.
KAMINSKY [00:02:26] Is it fun?
PENDLEY [00:02:27] It’s great. I love it. It’s a full plate. I think it’s the most diverse agency in all of government certainly the most diverse agency in the Department of the Interior. You look at the Park Service — the Park Service does parks. But we do, essentially, parks, we do oil and gas, we do mining, we do Trona — up in my home state of Wyoming, we do recreation, we do e-bikes. We have wild horses that we got to take care of. It’s a full darn plate. Every day is an adventure.
KAMINSKY [00:02:57] I love the fact that the Secretary of the Interior is from Colorado and you’re from Wyoming. So, we’ve got peo– I mean, because this is where the lands are that you have to manage.
PENDLEY [00:03:08] Oh yeah, absolutely! It is 245 million acres, 10% of the nation, and all west of the hundreth Meridian. I guess we have about 60,000 acres east of the hundredth Meridian, in the eastern states. But the overwhelming, overwhelming majority — and 97% of our people are out here. And so, one of the reasons why we’re making the move that the secretary has ordered out to Grand Junction, is to get our most senior, seasoned people on the ground, here where decisions are made, get boots on the ground and help the people out west. Because the Bureau of Land Management for a lot of states in the West — certainly in Alaska and in rural communities — it’s the 500 pound gorilla [in the room]. What the BLM says you can do in your county determines the future of your county. If you can’t mine or log or timber or drill or have recreational activities — if you’ve got districts set aside saying, “We won’t let you do nothing,” well, you’re toast. You can’t have hospitals, you can’t have schools, you won’t have your kids come back to live and raise their kids and your grandkids.
KAMINSKY [00:04:17] Yeah. The other thing — and this is kind of a macro- thing, but, you remember the stories from a few years ago about, you know, the families fighting with the government, and there was a shoot out and whatever — those ranchers or whatever I don’t even remember their names. But the macro kind of thing I’m looking at is this idea that government is supposed to work for the people and too often some of the folks who are running the government feel like the people work for them. Clearly, you’re not in that mold, fortunately.
PENDLEY [00:04:46] Oh, absolutely not! I’ve been on the other side of the equation. Over the last 30 years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with loggers, miners, ranchers, recreationists, canoeists, boaters. You name it, I’ve worked with them, represented them, gone to the Supreme Court on their behalf. And so, I get their situation.vis a vis the federal government. When I was with the Reagan administration, our desire was to be a good neighbor — [for] the federal government [to] be a good neighbor to local citizens. That’s President Trump’s desire. That’s Secretary Bernhardt’s desire, to be a good neighbor. But we can’t be a good neighbor if we live somewhere else. And so, you’ve got to be a neighbor to be a good neighbor. That’s what we want to do, and work for local folks.
KAMINSKY [00:05:28] A listener would like you to elaborate a little bit on the wild horse program. Could you just give us 30 seconds on that?
PENDLEY [00:05:34] Well. I was there I was there at the birthing, almost. I worked for Senator Hanson of Wyoming when the Wild Horse and Burro Act was passed. And it was given a mandate to the federal government to take care of these animals. A lot of people — they’re really kind of a mythological characters for a lot of folks. And I get that. I think that’s wonderful. But what has happened over time is horses do — and burrows do– what they do, and they procreate. And we have a ton of them. We’ve got 88,000 of them on the prairie that the Bureau of Land Management experts — the people in the bowels of the agency who are the experts on this –tell me that there’s parts of BLM rangeland today that will never –never — recover from the presence of wild horses [and] burros. And “never” is a long darn time, and to think–. And I’ve seen some of the devastation. So, we’ve got to take care that. Congress gets it. We have a group of the animal welfare folks and the grazers [who] have gotten together, they’ve come up with a kind of a solution we’re working on so we can get those horses and burros at a level where we can take care of them and we can take care of the range lands. But we have an Adopt a Horse program, Adopt a Burro program, and it’s been tremendously successful. Here’s a great here’s, Ross. We have an Adopt a Horse program, and one of the people in Oklahoma City works for the BLM said, well, why don’t we develop an incentive program. We’ll give them $500 when they get the horse, and we’ll give $500 a year later when they get title and everything is solid and we think it’s a good home. And our adoptions have skyrocketed in the past year. It’s larger than we’ve had in the last 15 years of the program. And I think that says two things: the creativity of BLM; but also somebody in Oklahoma City. It wasn’t somebody in Washington D.C. [who] came up with this bright idea. So we have got to get people out to the field. But it’s a big issue. If I could segue on this, we had some killings near Needles, California, where we think about 43 burros were were slaughtered by somebody out there with a high powered rifle or shooting for fun. And we wanted to get to the bottom of it. I put my law enforcement people on it. But I said, “Let’s get a $10,000 reward out there to find the bad guys.” And I also said, “Let’s reach out to the animal welfare people and see if we can get them to pony up.” And they ponied up. And our reward is now up to $60,000.
KAMINSKY [00:08:02] Wow!
PENDLEY [00:08:03] [That is] big money, in rural California. We’re trying to find the bad guys. And it just shows: hey, we can work together with people that were butting heads with on occasion.
KAMINSKY [00:08:10] And, one quick follow-up question that the listener wanted to know. Are these horses being sold outside of the United States, as far as you know?
PENDLEY [00:08:16] Absolutely not.
KAMINSKY [00:08:17] Okay. Let’s just talk briefly about e-bikes. You mentioned e-bikes. We’ve got -probably a minute-and-a-half, here, maybe two minutes. So we’ll take a break and then we’ll have you back in the next segment, as well. But, what is an e-bike? And how do they fit into BLM’s role?
PENDLEY [00:08:34] Well, it’s an electronic bike. I — frankly, I hadn’t heard of them until friends of mine in Evergreen used them to get up and down the hill to the doughnut shop in Evergreen, which is kind of curious as far as I’m concerned. But it’s an electronic bike. It’s powered. It’s noiseless. And [when] you look at it, you can’t really tell the difference between a regular bike and that bike until you’re going uphill and somebody passes you and you’re not pedaling! And so, previously — question up in the air: can we use e-bikes on trails on BLM land or Department of Interior land? The secretary issued an order saying, “Yeah, let’s do it! Let’s do it!” [The] Park Service had the lead. They jumped out in front, and then we played a little bit of catch up. We’ve caught up. We’ve instructed our people in the field,if you have the authority to authorize bikes where every other bike is allowed on a regular route or a trail — not off-road, but where ordinary bikes are — you can do it. And we’re doing that. I’ve got an op-ed out on it, simply because when my Marine son was little we rode a tandem all across Colorado. We were in the Ride the Rockies, we climbed Mount Evans.
KAMINSKY [00:09:44] Wow!.
PENDLEY [00:09:44] We did a lot of fun rides together. And so, you know, those days are past. But an e-bike offers a new opportunity for folks.
KAMINSKY [00:09:52] And so, do you have authority over parks, as well, or are they separate from you?
PENDLEY [00:09:58] No, they’re totally separate. The secretary has authority over the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamaion, the Buereau of Land Management, U.S. Geological Survey, on and on, — also surface mining. And so my purview, the Bureau of Land Management ent U.S. Geological Survey on an Office of Surface Mining. And so my purview is simply the Bureau of Land Management. It’s 245 million acres. It’s 9,000 employees. It’s a $1 billion budget, mostly in the American West and Alaska.
KAMINSKY [00:10:24] Wow! Is most of that — and just give me a quick answer, since we’ve got to hit a quick break, here, but — driving around kind of the American West over the years, BLM land has seemed to me to be very large sections of land, generally in the West, and, you know, a fence and a sign, as opposed to, like, a National Park where there’s rangers and a whatever. So, is that a correct perception — like, BLM land is not staffed the same way that a National Park is, and that it’s really a different kind of animal?
PENDLEY [00:10:53] Oh, it’s a totally different kind of animal. And the thing about the Bureau of Land Management you’ve got to realize — your listeners need to know — is it’s a multiple use thing. The Park Service, it’s a single use: go there, look around, take shots, and leave no footprints. With us, we don’t want to leave footprints, but you can mine, drill, log, or graze, use e-bikes, lots of things.
KAMINSKY [00:11:16] Very cool. All right, we will be right back with Perry Pendley, Acting Director of BLM, or more formally, Deputy Director for Policy and Programs Exercising the Authority of the Director. Keep it right here on 630 KHOW.
[00:11:35] [commercial break].
KAMINSKY [00:11:43] [bumper music playing “Don’t Fence Me In”] Not that we’d want him to, but my special guest in studio — not necessarily known for his singing voice, but other talents — Perry Pendley, the Deputy Director for Policy and Programs Exercising the Authority of the Director for the Bureau of Land Management, otherwise known as the Acting Director of BLM. Perry, we’ve [only] got a few minutes, here, so first let’s talk about what you are working on regarding energy policy, in terms of thinking about how people who live near BLM lands can benefit from this explosion in energy development.
PENDLEY [00:12:21] Well, absolutely. And of course, back in the Jimmy Carter days, Jimmy Carter said we were going to run out of natural gas by 1990.
KAMINSKY [00:12:27] [laughs mockingly].
PENDLEY [00:12:27] And because of the energy. economic, and environmental miracle that is hydraulic fracturing, we’ve had a boom in energy development America. We’re nearly energy independent. And all of America has benefited from that, but primarily on private lands and state lands. Federal lands have been left out of it. And then President Trump came in and said, “I want federal lands to be part of this picture.” And so Secretary Bernhardt has moved aggressively to increase oil and gas leasing activity, because when we do it on federal lands in a state, half of the money we make off of that goes back to the state, goes to the schools. Our Deputy Secretary, Kate McGregor, was in New Mexico last year, presented a monstrous check to New Mexico for the largest oil and gas sale ever in the history of BLM in New Mexico. So, this is a wonderful thing we’re bringing in. Of course, we’re checking the boxes, were adhering to all environmental laws, because that’s what we’re mandated to do. But at the end of the day, people in the West are going to have good, high-paying jobs and we’re going to have our experts from Washington — no longer in Washington — out here in Grand Junction, helping work with the states and local communities to be part of the economic, environmental, energy solution.
KAMINSKY [00:13:43] I don’t know if you’ve studied it down to this granular level yet, but what’s the potential impact of these regulatory changes on Colorado, specifically?
PENDLEY [00:13:52] Well, we’re going to be able to make decisions much, much, much, more quickly. The Secretary has mandated, “Stop with these big environmental books!” We’ve gone — I was in one meeting when the EIS, the Environmental Impact Statement, previously had been 3,000 pages. And we sent it back and said, “Do over!” And it came back at 300 pages. And the state director said, “Now I can read this. I can vouch for this.” And it’s [made] sensible, and people could read it and understand it. We’re doing it in half the time. We’re getting APDs — Applications for a Permit to Drill — issued quickly so people can get out there, drill, make the discoveries, put people to work, and light up our homes.
KAMINSKY [00:14:13] We’ve got about 90 seconds left. We had a pretty easy year for forest fires because we had such a wet spring and early summer. But it’s not going to be like that every year. What are you guys doing in terms of fire protection-slash-prevention?
PENDLEY [00:14:44] Seventy percent of Department of Interior firefighting activity is done by Bureau of Land Management. And– [coughs, clears throat][ excuse me. Fire season is no longer “fire season.” Fire season is year-round. And so, we’re either out there in the field fighting the fires–. We had a big, terrible fire season in Alaska –not so much in the lower 48, thank God!. But we’ve got to get out there. We fight the fires. And then, during the off season, we are out there, we’re getting rid of this hazardous fuel buildup, cutting the debris, getting the stuff that’s going to bust up the next fire season out of there. And for the BLM, that’s primarily range land fires. When we think of Smokey the Bear and we think of fires, we think of forests going up. We have prairies going up. We can’t do that. That’s not good for the economy. That’s not good for the environment. And it is not good for people.
KAMINSKY [00:15:34] Perry Pendley, Acting Director of the BLM, or Deputy Director for Policy and Programs Exercising the Authority of the Director, that is a — you must have an oversized business card.
PENDLEY [00:15:42] [laughs] You love to say that!
KAMINSKY [00:15:42] I do love saying it. I do love saying it. Thanks so much for being here.
PENDLEY [00:15:49] Awesome!
KAMINSKY [00:15:49] It’s great to meet you in person. And you know what? Thanks for standing up for rationality and and property rights and an understanding that government works for the people and not the other way around. Not just in this job, but for all the years I’ve known you and for the years before I’ve known you, I really appreciate everything you’ve always done.
PENDLEY [00:16:09] It’s an honor to do it.
KAMINSKY [00:16:11] We’ll be right back on the Ross Kaminsky Show with — with a little luck — the chief economist of the Ross Kaminsky Show, Steve Moore — if he decides to show up — in studio with me in just a few minutes. Keep it right here on Talk Radio 630 KHOW.
