BLM leaders busy in Grand Junction this week
- September 21, 2022
Dennis Webb, The Daily Sentinel
Bureau of Land Management leaders this week are getting a closer look at the city that briefly served as the agency’s national headquarters and is now being established as its western headquarters.
The agency’s executive leadership team is meeting this week in Grand Junction. The meeting “is focused on Administration priorities and will include tours of local BLM lands and popular recreation sites,” the agency said in a brief, emailed response to Daily Sentinel inquiries regarding the leadership’s presence in town.
The meeting comes after the agency earlier this month provided clarity about its plans for its western headquarters. Agency Director Tracy Stone-Manning, in a recent email to employees, outlined plans for some of the positions that would be based at the western headquarters, and last week the agency said it will be basing 56 jobs there. That’s up from the 36 the agency previously had planned for the BLM’s Horizon Drive western headquarters office. It also is more than the 41 that previously had been allocated to the location when it had been established by the Trump administration as the national headquarters, an action the Biden administration reversed, sending the national headquarters back to Washington, D.C.
Culver once worked for The Wilderness Society. In August, the group Protect the Public Trust said the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General found that Culver didn’t comply with President Biden’s ethics pledge, after the group complained that she participated in a BLM matter in which her former employer was involved.