Udall, Allard: Turn Flats into wildlife refuge

ROCKY FLATS — If two Colorado congressmen have their ways, the once festering, toxic Rocky Flats nuclear facility will be the pristine home of a national wildlife refuge.

Rep. Mark Udall and Sen. Wayne Allard plan to introduce the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge Act of 2000 in early September after Congress reconvenes, says Doug Young, a spokesman for Udall.

A campaign to turn Rocky Flats from a nuclear hotbed to rambling open space began officially last May with the announcement of an 800-acre preserve called Rock Creek Reserve. Officials with the Department of Energy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed an agreement, announcing the preservation area in May 1999.

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Since then, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has drafted a habitat management plan for the reserve. The four primary recommendations include expanding the boundaries of the reserve to 1,700 acres to blend better with its ecological surroundings. The service also plans to reintroduce native fish species to continue controlling noxious weeds.

The management plan is set for release for public comment in the next 30 days, and public comment will be collected for the rest of the year, says John Rampe, DOE deputy assistant manager for environment and infrastructure. The DOE will review the plan and work with the service on implementation since the site is jointly operated by the two agencies. In its February annual report, the Fish and Wildlife Service also advocated for the establishment of Rocky Flats as a national wildlife refuge.

Rampe says the agencies’ plans are well in line with what would be needed to establish Rocky Flats as a wildlife refuge, while the idea is not in the official management plan for the reserve.

No cleanup in that area was needed because it was located within an undeveloped buffer zone, Rampe says. The zone’s status as undisturbed during the nuclear components manufacturing lifetime of Rocky Flats made it ideal for open space and moved the DOE and the Fish and Wildlife Service to preserve it, Rampe says.

“We want this to be the cornerstone of our open spaces,” Rampe insists. “The ultimate goal is to fit into open space plans of our neighbors as well.”

The Rock Creek project, located in the northwest section of a 6,000-acre buffer zone surrounding Rocky Flats’ 385-acre industrial core, is the only definite plan in the works for the future use of the contaminated property.

Allard, a Republican, and Udall, a Democrat, want far more than 1,700 acres preserved. Their proposed bill to convert the Rocky Flats lands into a national wildlife refuge came after both men had drafted separate legislation to convert Rocky Flats, or portions, into permanent open space. Udall introduced the first, H.R. 2179, the Rocky Flats Open Space Act, on June 10, 1999, calling for the buffer space only to be managed as open space by federal authorities. The bill stalled in the House’s subcommittees on Health and Environment and Finance, and Hazardous Materials.

Allard wrote the backbone of the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge Act of 2000 and released it for public comment earlier this summer. The act would make the entire Rocky Flats site a refuge managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which manages national parks and open space. Major components of the bill include prohibiting roads running through Rocky Flats and preventing annexation of any Rocky Flats property by neighboring governments.

The draft bill allows options for transportation improvements along the outer edges of the buffer zone. Government agencies have to meet a laundry list of requirements, however, to run a transportation corridor around Rocky Flats.

Extensive provisions allow for the continued cleanup of the contaminated lands. Other details mention a possible visitor’s and education center or museum for the site, much like the one at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. The arsenal was another cleaned munitions site in the Denver metro area converted into a wildlife refuge.

The bill also demands public input on the management of the refuge by a committee made up of citizens and representatives from federal, state and local governments.

The act would preserve a threatened species, such as the Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse, a threatened mouse living among prairie and marsh lands in the Rock Creek Reserve, Rampe says, adding that the reserve is also home to a herd of mule deer, rare plant communities, nearly 200 bird species and an old homestead known as Lindsay Ranch. Lindsay Ranch would be permanently preserved in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act, according to the bill.

The idea for the national wildlife refuge has a supporter in the Sierra Club.

“We definitely support leaving the land undeveloped,” says Eugene DeMayo, Rocky Flats issues chairman for Sierra Club. DeMayo says the Sierra Club will not support any development to the land, because the group doesn’t believe the current cleanup effort will be enough to cleanse the land well enough for human contact. Sierra Club would like to see the site thoroughly washed.

“We don’t care how long it takes, whether it takes generations or not,” DeMayo urges.

The Udall/Allard bill does not include specific cleanup levels required to establish a wildlife refuge at Rocky Flats, saying only that cleanup efforts will not be impeded. That’s fine with Sierra Club. DeMayo says that such an action would likely doom the

bill because most communities wouldn’t agree with a standard specific level.

The uncertainty of how clean Rocky Flats will be after the official cleanup is the primary reason that DeMayo would support the land being left as open space. He likens the situation to that of the arsenal, but he feels better about the Rocky Flats land being converted to a refuge than the arsenal. He says the nuclear materials at Rocky Flats can be buried and kept away from surfaces. Thus, there is a chance that wildlife may not be affected. He says the hazardous chemicals used for weapons manufacturing at

the arsenal are more pervasive.

The Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site, which has for years been under massive scrubbing to remove highly radioactive amounts of plutonium and other materials used in the development of nuclear weapons, is set for closure in 2006.