Thursday was a deadline for about 200 federal workers to decide if they will move from Washington, D.C. into the Bureau of Land Management’s new official national headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado.
The Department of Interior has yet to indicate how many of the high-level staffers will make the move but media reports suggest few will leave D-C for western Colorado, according to Colorado Public Radio.
When the push to move the BLM headquarters west started to ramp up about a year ago, it was presented as a hopeful idea, not a political divider. Now the large-scale restructuring has become sharply divisive along party lines.
In an ad from last November, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet smiles alongside Republican Sen. Cory Gardner as they ask Secretary David Bernhardt to choose Grand Junction as the BLM’s new home. The pair extolled Mesa County’s vast public lands and the front-row seat to the Colorado River.
Then, as whimsical music swells, they say in unison: “It all comes together here in Grand Junction, Colorado.”
Many former BLM staff remain unconvinced.
“I think it’s nonsense,” Bob Moore said, with a laugh.
Moore, who worked at the BLM for 40 years and retired as its state director, has heard talk of moving the agency for decades. But talk was all it was. Until now.
At a time when there’s been an unprecedented focus on energy production from the Trump administration, he sees the moves as part of a larger agenda that worries him as areas are opened up to oil and gas leasing that were previously deemed too sensitive.
“The fewer BLM employees they have in Washington, the simpler it is for the political appointees in Washington to make those kinds of decisions,” he said.
But in Grand Junction, soon to be home to more than two dozen BLM top-level employees, many local leaders want to keep politics out of it. Robin Brown, head of Grand Junction Economic Partnership, has been part of the push to get the BLM to her town since the Obama administration.
“It’s disappointing that it’s become such a partisan issue and that it’s become a tool for each of the sides to beat each other up over, when it never started out that way,” she said.
Former and current Govs. John Hickenlooper and Jared Polis, both Democrats, support the move. But as this has gone from a pipe dream to near-reality, outside of Colorado, more and more prominent Democrats have questioned it, while more and more Republicans have championed it. When the BLM leased office space in the same building as oil and gas companies, opponents of the move cried foul. But Robin Brown thinks that misses the point.
“Because we want the BLM employees and the BLM directors and the people making land policy decisions to know our oil and gas companies,” she said. “We also want them to know our ranchers and we want them to know our mountain bikers and we want them to know all of the users of the land and understand how we all operate.”
The Public Lands Foundation, made up of current and former BLM employees, opposes the move. They argue most of the BLM’s D.C. staff have already spent time in the West anyway. Thirty retired senior BLM leaders have also voiced their opposition to the move in a letter sent to Interior Secretary Bernhardt.
Along Main Street, Grand Junction, however, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t find landing the headquarters exciting. Brooke Mecham, a recent transplant from Tennessee, hadn’t even heard about the relocation.