Cibola residents upset over Mount Taylor designation

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Kevin Killough
Staff writer

GRANTS — Property owners are alarmed over the prospect that the temporary listing of the Mount Taylor area as a traditional cultural property will become permanent. The regulations, they say, violate their rights as owners and threaten their ability to prosper off their land.

“It’s nothing more than a private property taking ... It’s a land grab,” said state Land Commissioner Pat Lyons.
Most TCP designations are single buildings or specific sites. The Mount Taylor TCP is an unprecedented 622,000 acres of land, which is roughly five times the area of Albuquerque. About 40 percent of the land within the proposed boundaries is private property. Only a small slice is reservation land, while the rest is state and federal land.

Landowner Buddy Elkins said the regulations would have a large impact on his ranching business. He owns 14,000 acres within the TCP boundaries, which his family has been working since 1927. He said that raising cattle is his family’s way of life and part of a cultural that is important to them.

“That mountain is just as sacred to us as it is the Indians,” he said.
After uranium mining companies began seeking permits for small-scale exploratory drilling to update 1970s data on ore body locations, lawyers for the Acoma Pueblo and four other tribal governments pushed the state Cultural Properties Review Committee to give the area the TCP designation. According to Acoma Pueblo Lt. Gov. Mark Thompson, the intent was never to stop industry. It was to ensure that the tribes had a say in the application process for uranium mining permits and other industries.

“It slows it down. It doesn’t stop it,” he said.

He also said he doesn’t know how long the TCP will delay the permitting process or what it will cost the companies, but the tribes will not have the authority to stop any permits from being granted. That decision will be left to the CPRC, he said.

Ann Rogers, who is representing the tribes in their application for the TCP listing, said it would not have any affect on private property.

“All of the private land holdings were excluded, so they are not part of the TCP,” she said.

She also said that the proposed boundaries of the TCP were set to be consistent with the Native American cultural view of Mount Taylor, which considers the whole mountain to be their church. She said that claims that this will affect private landowners are just “horror stories.”

According to Rodgers, there is a possibility in some cases that these fears could be realized, but this will not be typical. This will just add regulations where none existed previously.

But people living and working on the mountain are saying that it’s already stopped commercial activities on private property and threatens many other future operations.

Steve Stewart, president of Stewart Brothers Drilling, said that he’s had to lay off over 70 people this year because of delays from the TCP.

“We expected we’d have a slow amount (of drilling jobs) this year ... and turns out it is none at all,” he said.

Stewart, who has been in the business since the 1950s, denied that the industry was unregulated. He said that there are extensive permitting processes that are much more stringent today than in the past. Even the mining companies that he contracts with have their own sets of regulations that he must follow. According to him, the TCP will cause delays that are enormously expensive and will make operations unprofitable.

Joy Burns, who owns land within the proposed boundaries, said she’s concerned over the language of the New Mexico Cultural Properties Act, which contradicts the reassurances of the tribes that this won’t affect private land. The regulations also include any land adjacent to the boundary. This means that even land outside the boundaries will be affected by the regulations. The act also gives the CPRC authority to recommend that private land be seized under eminent domain if it rules that an owner’s activities threaten the historical or cultural significance of land in and around the TCP area.

“It’s that remote possibility that scares me,” she said.

Tom Drake, spokesman for the New Mexico Historical Preservation Division, said that the CPRC was looking into how to best implement the TCP, and the purpose of the temporary designation was to give time for that research.

He said he was unable to comment on any of the questions that are being posed by landowners until this research was complete.