Jeff Steinborn, state senator, Las Cruces native
“I think if the secretary really wanted to come with an open mind, he would’ve come to that town hall.”
When Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke visited Las Cruces near the end of July 2017, with nearly a month left before he was to submit to the president his judgement on changing conservation protections for Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, he was invited to a town hall with close to 700 residents in attendance.
He never showed.
Jeff Steinborn, 47, a Las Cruces native elected in 2016 to the state senate, said it was just the most egregious example of Zinke not doing the thing he had pledged to do during his national monuments review — listen to local voices.
“We’ll never know with regards to our monument what their intention was from the beginning, but it felt pre-ordained,” Steinborn said in late September inside his office near a plaza in the middle of Las Cruces’ historic downtown. “Meanwhile, he skipped the town hall where he really could’ve met with the public at large.”
For decades Steinborn, who exudes a relaxed friendliness, and keeps his red hair cropped short, had been aware of discussions about increasing conservation protections on the craggy pink and gray mountains that thrust over Las Cruces. “They are the frame that outlines the picture of our life here,” he said. In 2004, Steinborn took a job with the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance and became more active in those discussions. He became more deeply involved still when he was elected to the state house of representatives.
“This had to have been one of the most public processes,” of any conservation initiative in the country, he said. “So much compromise and consideration went into the (national monument) proposal.”
Over the span of more than a decade, stakeholders from every side of the issue chimed in and shaped the scope, the size and the management plans for the national monument, he said. The result was two separate pieces of federal legislation that would have established it. Only when they failed to pass the Republican-controlled Congress did local leaders petition President Barack Obama to establish the national monument by executive order. He did on May 21, 2014.
After President Donald Trump in April 2017 ordered Zinke to review Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, Steinborn said, the city “rolled out the red carpet” for Zinke’s July visit. On his first day, however, Zinke met behind closed doors in a museum with partisans who opposed the monument. On his second and last day he met with a few supporters, who did not know they would be meeting with him until the last moment. But he opted not to attend the town hall.
“It was very piecemeal how they divvied out opportunities for the public to meet with him. It was an underrepresentation of the real support that exists here,” he said. “I think if the secretary really wanted to come with an open mind, he would’ve come to that town hall.”
He added that he suspects Zinke only listened to, “a false narrative” about the national monument.
His first warning that trouble lay ahead for Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument came from a misidentification in a summary attached to a news release Zinke issued in late August, on the day he secretly submitted his review to President Trump. That Aug. 24 summary stated that “World War II desert bombing craters” had been taken into consideration in the establishment of a national monument, clearly a reference to WWII-era targets, a thousand feet in diameter, that were graded into the terrain to train pilots. But because the practice bombs dropped on them had no explosives, the landmarks could not be called “craters.”
“They didn’t even know the resource they were talking about,” Steinborn said. “They didn’t know our history or what it was and they were superficial in their quantification.”
Still, Steinborn remained hopeful that Zinke wouldn’t recommend drastic changes to Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, because, “the overwhelming majority of the community supports it.” For example, it is crucial to an annual month-long tourism campaign in Las Cruces called, “Monuments to Main Street.”
When Zinke’s vaguely-worded report to Trump was leaked to the press on Sunday, Sept. 17, it suggested allowing intensified cattle grazing throughout the national monument, plus more motorized vehicles and industrial water development in sections (The report also said that the Potrillos Mountains portion of the monument “abuts” the border with Mexico, which is false.)
The curation of anti-monument audience for Zinke, the secrecy surrounding his review, the leaked details about increased resource extraction and the factual errors about the national monument all have Steinborn worried that Zinke intends to, “keep it a monument in name but destroy the land.”
“It ended up worse than I think anyone could’ve imagined,” he said.
