Save for a handful of riders brave enough to take on the triple-digit temperatures, the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area is fairly quiet this time of year.
The first rush of dunes visitors won’t descend on Imperial County until October, when the cooler weather kicks off the season at one of the country’s biggest and busiest off-roading playgrounds.
Yet the wind-swept and sun-baked dunes, as empty as they may be today, are still making news, much to the delight of those with an economic stake and much to the detriment of those environmentalists bent on controlling its usage in order to preserve plants and animals that call the desert home.
A recent economic analysis of the Imperial dunes commissioned by United Desert Gateway, a nonprofit that promotes the dunes, showed that dunes visitors spent $415 million locally between October 2005 and May 2006.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week proposed to open up another 5,700 acres of the dunes to off-road traffic, acreage that was part of a larger closure by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Department of the Interior to protect the threatened plant, Peirson’s milk-vetch.
Both issues might seem mutually exclusive, but, in fact, they are inextricably tied.
They are tied because in one of the more economically depressed counties in the state, the money spent in the dunes by way of user’s fees, gasoline, food, supplies and the like come back to the county and the cities as tax revenue.
And since 2000, lawsuits filed by environmentalists shutting down huge swaths of public lands to protect what amounts to a flowering weed, have threatened some of that revenue, though to what level is debatable.
At the height of the closures nearly 53,000 acres were off limits to riders, but if approved after public hearings later this year, the closures could be reduced to 16,108 acres.
That is obviously bad news to the environmentalists who won the early skirmishes with the feds. And while we can understand what they mean when they call for responsible usage of public lands and being good stewards of the environment, we’ve always felt the protection of the milk-vetch was overblown and a bit over the top.
After all, it’s a plant, and in a county where roads need fixing, infrastructure in general needs improvement and money doesn’t exactly bloom like the purple-flowering milk-vetch, we’ll side with the dunes riders over the tree huggers any day of the week.
" I 2nd that. Hello John. It seems that it's always they're way(tree-huggers)or no way at all.Never a happy median.The money poured in at the start of dove season till Memorial Day sure helps the valley tremendously. "
John Eugenio wrote on Jul 31, 2007 1:58 PM:
" Very well stated. "
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lacosta wrote on Jul 31, 2007 5:03 PM: