DANIEL JUNCTION—Jon Boroff isn’t a fan of the new Union Wireless cell tower that pierces the sky from a ridgeline rising over his Sublette County ranch.
“If it wasn’t in my backyard, I wouldn’t care one way or the other,” the rancher said midday Friday.
Boroff, out hiking the ridgeline with the cell tower with friends for exercise, doesn’t like the eyesore. He’s less concerned about whatever effects the vertical structure will have on sagebrush-dwelling wildlife in the Green River Basin, like mule deer, pronghorn and sage grouse.
“This isn’t going to bother them,” he said.
But the Wyoming Game and Fish Department did have concerns.
Although it’s just a cell tower that doesn’t directly alter big tracts of land, habitat protection specialists with the state agency recommended the Bureau of Land Management find another site for the structure in June 2021.
Their reasoning? Ecologically, the tower was in an exceptionally rich area.
The hillside rising over the Boroff ranch across the highway from Cora Butte is traversed annually by mule deer that seasonally move dozens and even hundreds of miles from the Red Desert to Hoback River Basin and beyond. In fact it’s classified as a “high use” and “stopover” portion of the deer herd’s migration corridor — the first delineated corridor designated by the state of Wyoming. Those are the most critical habitats for migrating ungulates: “high-use” areas are traveled by the highest number of animals, while stopover sites are food hotspots where deer and antelope spend a bit more time eating along their journey.
The tower was also within what Game and Fish considers crucial winter range for mule deer, a “core area” habitat for sage grouse and also a “low-use” portion of the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s potentially designated migration path, which state biologists say is at “high risk” of being lost.
“The Department recommends the communication tower(s) are relocated outside of sage grouse core area and outside of a designated migration corridor, if possible,” Amanda Losch, the state agency’s habitat protection supervisor, wrote to the Bureau of Land Management officials who administer the land where the tower now stands.
That letter was sent in June 2021. Three months later, the state agency softened its request.
Losch signed her name to another Game and Fish letter, this one addressed to Union Wireless site acquisition specialist Tyler Tholl. Gone was the recommendation to move the tower. Instead, she instructed Union Wireless to limit “surface disturbance and human presence” to levels that “maintain the corridor functionality” and don’t cause migrating mule deer and antelope to abandon the corridor.
Lots of wiggle room
Leaving space for development has been the norm when industrial and other human activity has been proposed within Wyoming’s first three designated migration corridors. Partly that’s because the policy — a Gov. Mark Gordon-led executive order — altogether exempts private land.
Developers have taken advantage, setting in motion subdivisions and luxury resorts within the corridor not far from Boroff’s ranch. But development in migration paths is also allowed on federal and state land, where designated corridors have not been a roadblock for any proposed projects to date. That’s largely by design. Unlike the state of Wyoming’s sage grouse policy, the migration policy does not define thresholds for the level of development that is and isn’t permitted.
“In the past three years that the [migration policy] has been in place with the three mule deer herds that are designated, the Game of Fish has reviewed somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 projects that had a nexus with a migration corridor,” Will Schultz, Game and Fish’s habitat protection supervisor, said in mid-November at the Sublette County Library in Pinedale
Of the 60 or so projects proposed in state-designated migration corridors so far, all have been allowed to advance, he said. Those five dozen projects were vetted, but ultimately biologists or other officials made the judgment call that they wouldn’t impede migration.
“It’s going to come down to a site-specific, case-by-case evaluation,” said Doug Brimeyer, deputy chief of Wyoming Game and Fish’s wildlife division. “We’ll try to look at the topography … and if there’s a way that we can place something that gives the animals a little bit of an opportunity to still move through the area, that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
Brimeyer and Schultz made the remarks at a meeting focused on the state working toward designating the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration corridor, a portion of which pushes through to Jackson Hole and is known as the Path of the Pronghorn.
There is one portion of ungulate migration paths — pinch points known as bottlenecks — where the state’s policy does not allow for any development whatsoever, imposing “no surface occupancy” stipulations. So far, there haven’t been any project proposals in bottlenecks, Schultz said.
At least that’s true in officially designated corridors.
Months before Game and Fish’s long-awaited announcement that it would examine the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s web of migration, the state leased out a parcel to Kirkwood Oil and Gas that was squarely in a not-yet-designated bottleneck for $19 an acre. Game and Fish and the Office of State Lands and Investments tried to alter the lease after the fact, but industry representatives pushed back. The State Board of Land Commissioners capitulated, dismissing the state agencies’ concerns.
Industry groups had successfully pressured the state on migration policy before. Nearly five years ago their protests halted Game and Fish’s first attempt at recognizing the Path of the Pronghorn, ultimately leading to a whole new process in which the governor ultimately calls the shots.
Political pressure has also swung in different directions.
The politics
The governor and other Wyoming officials have publicly hinted at displeasure with how federal land managers have leaned too far into conservation when dealing with migration. When the State Board of Land Commissioners in October OK’d the pronghorn bottleneck lease for $19 an acre, Gov. Mark Gordon digressed and used the meeting to criticize how the BLM treated migration in its under-development, controversial Rock Springs Resource Management Plan.
“It appears that they didn’t look at compromise, they didn’t look at the potential to define development — they took the ceiling,” Gordon said. “In the Rock Springs RMP, you had the heavy hand of federal government decide, ‘Enough is enough, we’re going to do it this way.’ And I think that that does not represent conservation to me, that represents only somebody trying to make points.”
Minutes later in that meeting, Secretary of State Chuck Gray, State Auditor Kristi Racines and Treasurer Curt Meier approved the gas lease squarely in the most important, constrained portion of the pronghorn migration path — a bottleneck. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder recused herself from voting because her father helped run the company that won the gas lease at auction. Gordon, meanwhile, opposed the measure, but only after other commissioners voted and the lease’s fate was sealed.
Portions of the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s mapped, though undesignated migration corridor run into the BLM’s Rock Springs Field Office. So does the designated Red Desert-to-Hoback mule deer migration. In its “preferred alternative” of a draft environmental impact statement, the BLM proposes stout protection for migration corridors: The policy would close the entirety of designated routes to all mineral sales and development, buffering the corridors by a half-mile on each side.
Another alternative in the plan — not identified as preferred by the BLM — reads more like Wyoming’s migration policy. It would allow mineral development in corridors so long as “activities are pursued in a manner that maintain habitat function” and don’t drive away migrating pronghorn and mule deer.
Gordon told WyoFile in November that he prefers the state’s approach.
“I don’t think they’re experts on the data, we’re the ones who have the research,” Gordon said in Teton Village, where state executives gathered for the Western Governors’ Association conference.
People need time to understand the migration policy, the governor said. Forceful top-down regulation could be perceived as “a taking,” he said, and it’s “ultimately better to let the state lead the effort.”
Gordon contended “wildlife is a state issue, not a federal issue,” though that’s sometimes the source of disagreement. His chief energy advisor, Randall Luthi, agreed.
“The state should have a lead on migration corridors,” Luthi told WyoFile. “Lead means they go through the designation process. BLM and other federal agencies should fall in line with that.”
Toward another designation
There’s a long process ahead for Wyoming Game and Fish to even complete its next proposed designation, the famed migration of the Green River Basin pronghorn herd that’s been known by researchers for a quarter-century. First, the state agency released a draft “threat evaluation.” The public could weigh in, and at least a couple hundred people and groups sent in comments, according to Game and Fish spokeswoman Breanna Ball.
Next, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission will decide whether to tell the agency to proceed. If that happens, a more detailed “risk assessment” will be completed, then a stakeholder group will also be convened to review the proposal. After that, the proposed designation will again go back to the Game and Fish Commission. And it will also need to pass muster with Gordon, or his successor.
There might be significant opposition to doing anything more.
Industry groups contested a Path of the Pronghorn designation in 2019, before the governor stepped in and back when the process was the purview of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
“If you’re not familiar with Pinedale and Sublette County, [the migration] cuts down the spine of the sixth-largest natural gas field in the country and then dumps into the eighth-largest natural gas field in the country,” Paul Ulrich, vice president of government affairs for Jonah Energy, told Game and Fish commissioners at the time. “I’m questioning why we’re talking about a draft corridor and a migration corridor for pronghorn in two of the most intensely filled fields in the country.”
At the Pinedale public meeting nearly five years later, Ulrich said he was undecided about whether he’d support a designation under the new process. It’s unclear whether a designation “does anything to impact pronghorn,” he said.
“That’s a good question,” Ulrich said. A lot of what the state’s migration policy outlines occurs anyway, he said.
“We work with Game and Fish on every single [application to drill] to avoid and minimize any impacts as best we can,” Ulrich said. “So that’s nothing new for us.”
Wyoming Game and Fish’s leadership has stood behind its policy, which has been described as one of the most robust actions by a governor in a Western state to conserve wildlife migration.
“I do feel strongly — we haven’t solved it all yet — but we have used this now three different times and we’re working on a fourth and I do believe it works for Wyoming,” Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik told the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee in November at a migration-focused meeting in Jackson.
The policy’s permissiveness follows the science, Nesvik said. That science suggests that the high-use portions of migration corridors, stopover areas and bottlenecks are “the most important habitats to conserve and not allow surface disturbance,” he said.
At least with the cell tower located in a “high-use,” “stopover” deer migration site near Jon Boroff’s ranch, the policy did not prevent development, despite the agency’s initial request to move it.
Game and Fish Deputy Director Angi Bruce said the policy worked as it was designed.
“It went perfectly, exactly as the [migration policy] was supposed to work,” Bruce said about the tower’s approval. “No concerns on our part.”
The first letter the state agency sent to the BLM with the recommendation to move the tower was a “desktop exercise,” she said. Then there’s site visits and more conversations — which sometimes leads to a change.
“It isn’t that we flipped or changed our mind,” Bruce said. “We went out there, we dove into the weeds, it was a field[-based] versus a desktop exercise, and it led us to the conclusion where we landed.”
Yet, many environmental advocacy groups have concerns about how Wyoming’s migration policy factored — or didn’t — into the BLM’s decision. The Wilderness Society, Pew Charitable Trusts, Wyoming Outdoor Council, Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance and Wyoming Wilderness Association submitted a joint letter in response to the Sublette Pronghorn Herd migration review. Overall, they wrote in bold, they “strongly support” designation.
But the letter also contended that the BLM failed to act on Wyoming’s migration policy when the cell tower went through the federal approval process. The policy states: “within stopovers in high-use portions of the corridor, surface disturbance should be avoided.”
Nick Dobric, who works as Wyoming conservation manager for The Wilderness Society, believes there’s room for improvement. The cell tower going through the way it did, he wrote in an email, was “a missed opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of the state’s policy.”
“If the state is serious about conserving our big game migrations with its executive order, they need to take more ownership for these types of projects,” Dobric wrote. “We’re not saying the state needs to stop this kind of small-scale development, but they do need to lead community engagement and coordination with the BLM to explore siting options.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
