Judge Won’t Okay Grazing Deal
Without Considering Stockmen

TUCSON, Ariz. — A federal judge last week refused to sign a deal worked out between government bureaucrats and environmental activists that would bar cattle from the vicinity of many Arizona and New Mexico streams because the owners of those cattle had no voice in the arrangement.

Activist groups and the U.S. Forest Service reached a tentative agreement last Tuesday, but U.S. District Judge John Roll said Wednesday he would not sign the agreement because of objections by the Arizona and New Mexico cattle growers associations.

The rancher groups had intervened in the two lawsuits the agreement would affect.

However, a spokesman for the Tucson-based Southwest Center for Biological Diversity said the center was negotiating with ranchers and the Forest Service in a further effort to settle the dispute.

The anti-grazing activists filed suit in October seeking to force the Forest Service to remove cattle from 92 grazing allotments through which streams flow, supposedly to protect rare fish.

Affected were the Gila River and its tributaries in Coronado, Apache-Sitgreaves, Tonto, Coconino, and Prescott national forests in Arizona and Gila National Forest in New Mexico.

Later, Forest Guardians filed a lawsuit seeking removal of cattle from 110 grazing allotments with streams in the Apache-Sitgreaves, Prescott and Gila forests, and the Cibola, Carson and Santa Fe national forests in New Mexico.

Several of the allotments are cited in both lawsuits.

The agreement Roll rejected would have barred cattle from around streams in most of the allotments in the Forest Guardians lawsuit, leaving unresolved nearly 50 that are cited only in the Southwest Center lawsuit.

Pat Jackson, the appeals litigation officer for the Forest Service's southwest region, contended that the agreement didn't mean cattle would be banned entirely from grazing allotments.

Instead, he said the settlement would ratify steps the Forest Service already has taken to keep cattle away from streams in most of the allotments in the Forest Guardians suit.

Those steps include fencing, natural barriers, water tanks and herding cattle away from streams, Jackson said.

The Southwest Center's suit claimed to seek protection for the razorback sucker, Sonora chub, Apache trout, Gila trout, Gila topminnow, loach minnow and spikedace. The Forest Guardians' lawsuit cited protection for the loach minnow and spikedace and for the officially "endangered" southwestern willow flycatcher.