A reintroduced Owyhee River Canyonlands wilderness bill could get a hearing before a Senate committee in November.

SALEM — A reintroduced Owyhee River Canyonlands wilderness bill could get a hearing before a Senate committee in November.

Senate Bill 4860, the Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act, was introduced Sept. 15 by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon. The bill was read and referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

A hearing has not yet been set. The Senate is not scheduled to be back in session until after the Nov. 8 election, “but we are hoping for a hearing in November,” said Hank Stern, Wyden’s press secretary.

It is a shorter version of the original bill that Wyden and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, introduced in November 2019, Stern said.

The bill and its reintroduction reflect “the need to keep the discussion going, with the continued goal of working together,” Stern said.

It would designate about 1.1 million acres in Malheur County as wilderness, preserve grazing even in wilderness-designated areas, give the U.S. Bureau of Land Management a degree of implementation flexibility, and improve road access for recreation and firefighting.

Wilderness Watch opposed the legislation, saying its protection of undisturbed lands falls far below Wilderness Act standards. Wilderness designation traditionally prohibits manipulating vegetation, including by mechanical or chemical means, as well as using bulldozers or other equipment to build roads or fire fuel breaks, the group said. The bill’s flexible management approach risks favoring ranchers, and its use of a single programmatic environmental impact statement every 10 years — instead of site-specific analyses — reduces public input.

The new bill did not change much from its predecessor and includes the same general concepts, said Elias Eiguren, a southeastern Oregon rancher and treasurer of the Owyhee Basin Stewardship Coalition. More than 90% of the areas slated for wilderness protection under the first bill remain in the new version, he said.

A longstanding coalition of stakeholders in recent months has been working through the new bill’s language. The council hopes that during a hearing, “we will have clarity about the BLM’s implementation on the ground,” he said. “What we hope is that BLM’s vision for implementation of this bill aligns with the larger collaborative group, with a strong focus on ecological health in the Owyhee area.”

Ranchers decades ago kept access to a key winter grazing area in wilderness thanks to a pipeline built atop the west rim and sourced by Owyhee tributary Crooked Creek. “We were afraid we were going to lose the whole thing,” said Bob Skinner, a Jordan Valley rancher and past president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association and the National Public Lands Council.

The current bill would protect additional grazing land from exclusion, but rugged terrain and remoteness would continue to limit cattle usage in the corridor, he said.

Ranchers, conservation groups, tribes, recreation and sporting interests and communities continue to participate in the process. They share a desire to preserve the Owyhee region’s long-term ecological health, said Ryan Houston, executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a member of the coalition.

“We are talking about legislation that would create permanent protection, and it’s valuable to to stick it out, be patient and continue to work on it,” he said.

The bill also aims to enable the recreation and tourism economy to grow sustainably and safely in light of population increases, Houston said.

Without a legislative solution, a national monument designation “will be a reality in the next couple of years,” said Eiguren of the Stewardship Coalition.

“There is real traction for a hearing in November,” he said.