Land Management

The Rouse Co. is best known for its retail meccas, including Baltimore's Harborplace and Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and its planned communities, Columbia and, Summerlin, Nev., outside of Las Vegas. With tens of thousand of acres in each of those communities, plus smaller land holdings elsewhere, Rouse has a less-flashy third business that's helped anchor it in a cyclical industry, Wall Street and real estate experts note. That business? Land sales. Rouse has kept a tight rein on land that it sells to other developers for offices, homes and other projects.

Picture this. You're headed off on a hunting trip, driving your pickup with the gun rack on back through the wide-open spaces of the West. Mostly it's federal property, but under the management of a variety of different agencies that have different rules for permissible activities. At some point, you pass from open range, under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, into a national park, and get busted by a ranger for carrying a loaded firearm. Oh, the inconvenience! Nearly half the Senate considers the idea that a hunter might alternatively travel around with guns unloaded to be unacceptably burdensome and a violation of Second Amendment rights.

In trying to fashion a growth-management plan acceptable to environmental activists, a Senate committee may have put the entire measure in jeopardy. If Maryland is to make any headway this year on land-use controls, compromise is essential.The Schaefer administration, working with local governments, developers and farmers, crafted a bill that would force localities to identify sensitive areas and to plot coordinated strategies to protect them and handle population growth. This bill passed the House of Delegates with surprising ease -- probably because the governor turned last year's enemies into this year's allies.

SHERIDAN, Wyo. -- The oil and gas boom in the West has opened vast lands to discoveries by an unlikely group - archaeologists such as Kevin O'Dell. With crews spaced 100 feet apart, O'Dell and other archaeologists are walking thousands of acres of sagebrush highlands, valleys and hills, and they're achieving a remarkable increase in identification of prehistoric and historic sites - from those of ancient Native Americans to the homesteaders of the last...

When is an empty steel barrel safe to use as a trash can? No, this isn't a riddle posed by the arch-enemy in the new Batman movie. It's the quandary that faced Carroll County's Bureau of Land Management.The bureau recycled 55-gallon drums that previously contained highway paint as trash barrels for Freedom Park in South Carroll and immediately was criticized for possibly endangering public health. Saving public dollars is a good idea and so is recycling empty steel drums. Carroll's land management bureau likes to use these barrels as trash receptacles because they are cheap and people don't steal them.

Margaret Romagnoli, 73, of Watertown, Mass., who with her husband, Franco, proved there was more to Italian cooking than spaghetti and meatballs with a cookbook, television show and restaurant, died Monday in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. The Romagnolis produced and were hosts of two 13-part nationally televised Italian cooking series for WGBH-TV in Boston in 1973 and 1974. The following year, they published their first cookbook, "The Romagnolis' Table." From 1979 to 1989, they owned and operated Romagnoli's Table restaurant at Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston.

The Carroll County Recreation and Parks Department is requesting essentially no increase in its fiscal 1992 operating budget, even thoughit has more facilities to watch over.The department has requested a budget increase of three-tenths of a percent -- excluding salary increases and new positions beginning July 1, even though the land management and maintenance office will assume responsibility for the grounds at Carroll Community College and additional facilities at the Carroll County Sports Complex.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration reversed an 11th-hour Clinton administration ruling on mining policy yesterday, making it easier for companies to mine for gold, copper, zinc and lead on public lands. It also issued a legal opinion that could clear the way for a Nevada company to dig an open-pit gold mine in a part of the California desert considered sacred by a local American Indian tribe. Officials of the Bureau of Land Management said they were removing unduly burdensome provisions of the mining regulations.

WASHINGTON -- One year after President Clinton pleased environmentalists by declaring a wide swath of southern Utah a national monument, his administration decided yesterday to open the region to oil and gas drilling.The Bureau of Land Management, taking advantage of what critics say was a loosely worded presidential declaration, gave Conoco Inc. permission to explore for oil and gas in the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on the basis of a lease signed before Clinton declared the land off-limits.

CARSON CITY, Nev. -- The federal government is preparing to auction 27,000 acres of public land near Las Vegas estimated to be worth $500 million to $1 billion, with almost all of the proceeds to stay in Nevada instead of going to the Treasury.Like many cities in the West, Las Vegas is surrounded by public land managed by the Interior Department. The Bureau of Land Management has designated 55,000 acres of desert within a 460-square-mile zone around the city for disposal to developers and local governments.

Every once in a while, some event in the news offers a peek into the cloistered lives of folks lucky enough to own a vast expanse of land. Like the Carroll family of Howard County, who have kept mostly to themselves for three centuries 2,000 acres of uniquely historic property, and the Armstrongs of South Texas, whose 50,000-acre spread was the site of Vice President Dick Cheney's recent hunting mishap. Most Americans will never know the luxury of such breathing space. And many of those who have managed to find their way onto smaller farms and ranches are being so squeezed by property taxes rising from the real estate boom that they fear they will be forced to sell out. Even in places like Maryland, where conservation easements are available to relieve some of that pressure, officials say property owners are finding developers' offers increasingly hard to resist.

While I'm out in Utah at the Olympics, we're running pieces from the book, Land That We Love, produced by four public land management agencies. The U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the Utah Division of Parks and Recreation paid for this book to give real people - rather than bureaucrats - the opportunity to write about the great outdoors. This second piece, interestingly enough, comes from someone with roots in this area. Brandon Griggs has been an arts and feature writer at The Salt Lake Tribune since 1994.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration reversed an 11th-hour Clinton administration ruling on mining policy yesterday, making it easier for companies to mine for gold, copper, zinc and lead on public lands. It also issued a legal opinion that could clear the way for a Nevada company to dig an open-pit gold mine in a part of the California desert considered sacred by a local American Indian tribe. Officials of the Bureau of Land Management said they were removing unduly burdensome provisions of the mining regulations.

The Rouse Co. is best known for its retail meccas, including Baltimore's Harborplace and Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and its planned communities, Columbia and, Summerlin, Nev., outside of Las Vegas. With tens of thousand of acres in each of those communities, plus smaller land holdings elsewhere, Rouse has a less-flashy third business that's helped anchor it in a cyclical industry, Wall Street and real estate experts note. That business? Land sales. Rouse has kept a tight rein on land that it sells to other developers for offices, homes and other projects.

FRUITA, Colo. -- But for the dusty hiking boots and fleece pullover, Bruce Babbitt could have been a game show host: gripping a microphone, swishing the cord out of the way and announcing to the audience, "Let's have at it!"With gusto, the Interior secretary launched into a two-hour free-for-all with a not-totally, friendly gathering of local residents at the Colorado National Monument last week, listening to land-use concerns while selling his message of accelerated public lands conservation to a crowd of skeptical Westerners.

CARSON CITY, Nev. -- The federal government is preparing to auction 27,000 acres of public land near Las Vegas estimated to be worth $500 million to $1 billion, with almost all of the proceeds to stay in Nevada instead of going to the Treasury.Like many cities in the West, Las Vegas is surrounded by public land managed by the Interior Department. The Bureau of Land Management has designated 55,000 acres of desert within a 460-square-mile zone around the city for disposal to developers and local governments.

Picture this. You're headed off on a hunting trip, driving your pickup with the gun rack on back through the wide-open spaces of the West. Mostly it's federal property, but under the management of a variety of different agencies that have different rules for permissible activities. At some point, you pass from open range, under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, into a national park, and get busted by a ranger for carrying a loaded firearm. Oh, the inconvenience! Nearly half the Senate considers the idea that a hunter might alternatively travel around with guns unloaded to be unacceptably burdensome and a violation of Second Amendment rights.

SHERIDAN, Wyo. -- The oil and gas boom in the West has opened vast lands to discoveries by an unlikely group - archaeologists such as Kevin O'Dell. With crews spaced 100 feet apart, O'Dell and other archaeologists are walking thousands of acres of sagebrush highlands, valleys and hills, and they're achieving a remarkable increase in identification of prehistoric and historic sites - from those of ancient Native Americans to the homesteaders of the last...

WASHINGTON -- One year after President Clinton pleased environmentalists by declaring a wide swath of southern Utah a national monument, his administration decided yesterday to open the region to oil and gas drilling.The Bureau of Land Management, taking advantage of what critics say was a loosely worded presidential declaration, gave Conoco Inc. permission to explore for oil and gas in the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on the basis of a lease signed before Clinton declared the land off-limits.

BOULDER, Utah -- In this wild blue yonder, rock canyons rise like steeples and vistas stretch for 60 miles. Western bluebirds flit across a cloudless sky. And junipers have deep roots in the sand.But conflict has intruded upon this landscape. A graffito painted across a bridge delivers a message: Keep it like it was.This sentiment echoes through the towns around the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.When President Clinton declared these 1.7 million acres a monument last fall, he set off a divisive land war that people in these parts compare hyperbolically to the Middle East.