Range revolution heats up in Elko

Elko is one of those towns where the main drag is posted 25 mph, and drivers still abide by it.

It's a place where store clerks ask how you are and mean it, and ranchers smile and wave to a stranger.

Churches still have stained glass and steeples. Mountains get snow in time for Thanksgiving.

It's American as apple pie.

American as revolution.

"For such a little town, we're an awful lot of rebels," said Barb Mitchell, a waitress at the Scoreboard restaurant in Spring Creek, southeast of Elko.

So many, in fact, that U.S. Forest Service workers around the West have sarcastically dubbed the county "The Republic of Elko."

For federal workers, the barb is rooted in reality. Lurking behind the cowboy banter and postcard innocence is a seething hostility that makes federal workers afraid to live in Elko County.

How bad is it?

One forest ranger routinely checks his car for bombs. Another forester's kids are sometimes harassed in school -- by teachers. The local feud with the feds even pops up in some Sunday sermons, forest service workers say.

And they've had enough.

In a Nov. 19 letter to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck, Nevada's forest service employees called their working environment a "toxic atmosphere."

They penned the missive less than two weeks after Gloria Flora resigned her post as supervisor of Nevada's Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest because, she said in an open letter to employees, the "level of anti-federal fervor is simply not acceptable."

She was Nevada's top-ranking forest service official and in charge of the largest national forest outside of Alaska. She held the post for 16 months then left, refusing to participate in what she described as "a charade of normalcy."

In joint statements issued Tuesday, officials from the U.S. Attorney's Office officials in Las Vegas and the forest service's regional office in Ogden, Utah vowed "vigorous investigation" of claims involving threats against and harassment of forest service employees. The forest service is creating a fact-finding team to probe claims of threats and other mistreatment of its Nevada workers.

In a September memo to Flora, a Nevada forest service law enforcement officer complained that since 1990 Nevada federal prosecutors had refused to investigate at least 21 felonies and 52 misdemeanors involving more than 100 people.

Collectively, forest service employees will describe being taunted by local law enforcement officers, being refused service at commercial establishments, being shunned at church and enduring malicious comments directed at them or their families by the same people they call neighbors.

Individually, however, they say nothing. It's not worth it, said Cheri Howell, an ecologist and public affairs specialist for the forest service's Elko office.

"People are fearful. They don't speak out," Howell said. "If you're quoted in the newspaper, you have to be very careful about what you say. You can't afford to screw up at all, or you'll end up paying for it."

Howell's husband, a Wells rancher, is angered by people's comments about her. Teachers have confronted the couple's children about their mother's employer, she said.

"There's a lot of conflict at home for a lot of forest service employees. It's often harder on the spouses," she said.

An Elko-based forest service employee stays two to three years on average, compared to an average of five or six years in other regions, Howell said.

"It's hard to fill positions here because nobody wants to come into this climate."

That climate is a firestorm of anger that has swept through teeny Elko County towns like Spring Creek, Lamoille, Carlin and Elko. Residents and elected officials say they are fed up with the federal agencies that manage 88 percent of the land in a county that has about 50,000 residents.

It's a community built on generations of sweat by gold miners, cattle ranchers and Basque sheepherders -- people who forged livings and towns from the windswept high desert plains and the craggy Ruby Mountains.

Many are proud that the Sagebrush Rebellion started here. The 1979 movement began when lawmakers in Nevada and five other Western states passed laws that claimed state control of federally managed lands.

Nevada's law has never been enforced. But Elko County residents say rebellion will continue until the federal government butts out of land management in their neck of the woods.

"It's just going to get worse. People want to go to the places they've always been able to go," said Brad Marvel, a miner who lives in the town of Spring Creek. "I know people who have torn down whole rows of fences the government put up."

Elko County residents are weary of edicts from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which calls for cleaning the Humboldt River to a level Elko County officials say is impossible.

They're tired of the Federal Aviation Administration, which recently required pilots to bypass Elko -- sometimes without forewarning passengers -- when they have less than three miles sight distance due to bad weather.

But they are angriest with the U.S. Forest Service. Most recently county officials and forest managers have locked horns over a mile-long, flooded-out stretch of dirt road along the Jarbidge River in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest northwest of Elko.

Residents want to rebuild it.

Forest Service officials say no way.

Elko County commissioners say they will rebuild it one way or the other.

This four-year tussle over a road that dead-ends in a wilderness area has cost county taxpayers about $400,000 and was the last straw for Flora. It has taken all of the county attorney's time with public hearings, mediation attempts and federal litigation.

A U.S. District Court of Nevada suit has been lodged against Elko County officials and State Assemblyman John Carpenter, who assembled an illegal work party in October to clear the road.

U.S. District Court officials also have demanded that Elko County pay $400,000 for restoration work the forest service performed after a county crew cleared the Jarbidge riverbed and rebuilt the road on forest service property in July 1998 without the agency's permission.

The river had to be restored to its former condition and the road had to be obliterated in order to protect habitat for the bull trout, which conservationists say is threatened in Nevada. The Jarbidge River offers the southernmost breeding spot for the bull trout in North America.

But Ben Siminoe, supervisor of the forest service's Elko office and the agency's second-highest ranking Nevada official, says the trout is a red herring. Elko County isn't fighting over a road or a fish.

"It's really about who owns the federal lands," Siminoe said.

"The national forest is here for the long-term, and that's how we're approaching this conflict," he said. "That county commission will not always be here. But until the American people decide they no longer want national forests, we'll be here."

Merlin McColm, a retired Nevada Division of Wildlife officer and member of the Sierra Club's Elko chapter, said those crying for rebellion aren't the majority. They are simply loudest.

"There's only a handful of people who are orchestrating it," McColm said. "I've seen it happen time and again. If it was up to these people, they'd sell off all the public lands. For years they controlled the policies, the money and the land. And they use the Constitution as a reason to break the law.

"This is a neat little community, and it's inflamed," McColm said. "They're doing it just like they did back in 1880. But things are more complicated now."

The situation isn't complicated in the minds of many longtimers. It's easy to see how the closing of a remote dirt road is part of a bigger plan of control, said John Connolly, a gold mine assayer from Spring Creek.

"All these things point back to who are the public servants, and who are they managing the land for?" he said. "We're tired of being regulated by a public servant."

The "Jarbidge Rebellion" dominates many local coffee shop discussions. Those fighting federal regulation don't see themselves as lawbreakers. They say they are patriots who draw their strength from the Constitution and each other.

"It has united the community because we're tired. They want to take everything away from us," Mitchell said as she waited tables at the Scoreboard.

Connolly said the situation is a prime example of how rural Westerners perceive decisions made by people in Washington, D.C.

It doesn't matter whether it's about forest roads, mining leases, grazing rights or wilderness areas.

The issues change, he said.

The resentment doesn't.

"They want to protect our West because they screwed up their East. But we've been doing just fine," Connolly said.

"They've already closed down so much of our country to us," his wife, Susan, added. "Everything has a fee. Everything has a charge."

Cowboy poet and mine worker Walt Cheney said it's silly for the forest service or any other agency to close a section of land and call it wilderness.

"We don't live in the wilderness anymore. Doesn't matter if it's the highest peak or the driest valley in the state. There's some way to get into it," Cheney said. "We should never close down a road."

Bob Mann, who is retired from the U.S. Air Force and the mining industry, says forest service workers' claims that they've been mistreated by their neighbors are "hogwash."

"Elko County is the friendliest place in the world," Mann said, adding that he doesn't know any of the local forest service employees.

"And I don't want to," he said.

Although rabble-rousing seems to be the daily special on everyone's plate, there are those in Elko County who say the rebellion is an embarrassment stoked by a handful of grand-standing politicians and their vocal, misinformed followers.

Those rebelling against the rebellion typically decline to give their names, fearing retribution of a small-town variety. They are afraid.

And they are angry.

"Anybody who's got more than an eighth grade education has a different opinion," said an Elko County firefighter who declined to be identified.

"Anytime they think they can get their foot in the door against the government, they will," he said. "A lot of regular taxpayers are tired of this. It doesn't do the taxpayers any good. It doesn't do any good for the county."

It certainly doesn't get a school bus up to Jan Halaburda's neighborhood.

Halaburda and her grown children own houses along a narrow, muddy road five miles from downtown Elko called Ohio Street. The name is hand-painted on a hunk of wood and nailed to a stake where the single-track path crosses another, rough gravel road called Fifth Street.

They are among at least 60 manufactured homes that sit along such roads that shoot off the unpaved section of Last Chance Avenue. The U.S. Forest Service office sits at the paved end of Last Chance, a county road that intersects the main highway between Elko and Spring Creek.

But the county only maintains the paved section, Halaburda said. A local gravel pit owner who uses the road for his trucks maintains the gravel section. The side roads, like the one Halaburda lives on, go unnoticed and unchecked.

For Elko County to continue a lengthy and expensive fight for a dirt road "that goes nowhere" is a travesty, Halaburda said.

"We have no school buses, no mail delivery. We've got all these people out here, and everybody drives their kids to school. We could have 50 feet of snow, and the only person who would plow it is my son-in-law," Halaburda said, pointing to his home across the road.

"We have to follow the regulations of the county. We get taxed the same as everybody else, but we don't have anything," she said. "I think (South Canyon Road) is really a nonissue to those of up us here."

Elko County Commission Chairman Tony Lesperance admits the South Canyon Road issue has used up a lot of county resources. He says he, too, is frustrated.

"We spend a lot of our money, and a lot of our time. When does it end?" Lesperance said after the monthly commission meeting in Carlin Nov. 17.

The Jarbidge situation and its assorted dealings took up two-thirds of the commission's three-hour meeting. A decision involving proposed upgrades to the county's law enforcement building was postponed because Elko Deputy District Attorney Kristin McQueary had been too wrapped up in Jarbidge litigation to look over the construction contracts.

McQueary spent part of the commission meeting trying to convince Lesperance and the four other commissioners that they needed to participate in a court-ordered mediation with forest service officials over the road situation.

The first mediation conference call scheduled Tuesday was designed to set up a schedule. But Lesperance would have nothing to do with it because of his anger toward Siminoe and Gloria Flora, the Humboldt-Toiyavbe National Forest chief who resigned earlier this month.

"I will not participate in any kind of mediation when this kind of atmosphere exists. I will not participate in mediation if (Flora) is involved," Lesperance told McQueary.

A couple of days later, McQueary said she hoped cooler heads would prevail as mediation unfolded.

"I would hope we find a method to have a continuing, civilized dialogue with the forest service," she said. "Elko County has a long history of working with the forest service on projects. This situation has destroyed that relationship. It's obviously going to take some work."

Most of the local American Indians laugh at the bitter brew simmering in Elko County, said Wallace Garcia a Klamath-Modoc Inidian who is employment and training coordinator for the Inter-tribal Council of Nevada's Elko office.

Local American Indians figure Elko officials can stand in line when it comes to feeling betrayed by federal decisions, said Garcia.

"They've been doing it to us for 100 years. It's old hat to us," he said with a chuckle.

"(Indians) think it's funny to see the nonIndians fighting with each other. They make a joke of it," Garcia said. "But I guess that's the way we handle things. You get a lot of laughter and reduce a lot of stress. We don't put our problems in public. We don't put it in the newspaper and splatter it all over.

"We sit down and talk."

Vince Garcia, Wallace's son, runs a ranch on the Te-Moak Indian Reservation about 30 miles from Elko. He worked as a schoolteacher until taking a hiatus this year, and he made an unsuccessful bid for Elko County assessor a couple of years ago.

The time for revolution and tea parties is past, and county officials would do better by their constituents to make peace with the federal employees who must live in Elko County and manage almost 90 percent of its land.

"You need to get to the point where you realize you're never going to return back to what there was when the first Americans -- if that's what you call them -- were here," Garcia said.

"We're in a new time. You've got to go in with the thought of compromise," he said. "That's what I call government."

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