Obama picks Nevadan Neil Kornze as next BLM head Jodi Peterson | Nov 11, 2013
A native Nevadan is expected to become the next overseer of much of the West’s public lands.
Neil Kornze is President Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres, mostly in Western states. Kornze joined the agency in 2011, and has been its principal deputy director since March. He replaced acting director Mike Pool, who stepped in after Bob Abbey retired in May 2012 (see our
interview with Abbey).
At 34, Kornze would be one of the youngest agency heads ever, but he has a pretty impressive resumé. Raised in Elko, he's the son of a geologist who discovered
major gold deposits near the town (now an open pit mine operated by mining giant Barrick). He graduated from Washington’s Whitman College with a degree in politics (seems he’s got some chops as a journalist too – he and another student shared a prize for Best Feature Story in the college newspaper). He earned a master’s in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science,
then went to work for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Neil Kornze has been nominated to head the Bureau of Land Management.
As a policy adviser with Reid, from 2003 to 2011, Kornze worked on public lands, water, renewable energy, wildlife and mining. Reid is notoriously friendly to the mining industry (see our story “
Nevada’s Golden Child”), but Kornze doesn’t appear to have been a mining booster (
industry interests complained that he “fought the mining industry’s opposition of the Pine Grove-Esmeralda Wilderness efforts”). He helped put together the
2009 public lands omnibus bill. The bill designated 2 million acres of wilderness, codified the
National Landscape Conservation System, and added 1,000 river-miles to the Wild and Scenic river system, among other things. He also helped reauthorize the
Secure Rural Schools program, which provides funding to rural counties that formerly relied on income from timber sales, and the
Payment-in-Lieu-of-Taxes program, which compensates states with a lot of federal land for loss of property tax revenue from that land.
At the BLM, as senior advisor, Kornze worked on renewable and conventional energy development, transmission siting, and conservation policy. He was instrumental in the Western Solar Plan, which established 17 solar energy zones on public land, and in approving nearly 50 utility-scale renewable energy projects.
He was also key in developing the BLM's rule for regulating hydraulic fracturing on public lands. Enviros felt the
final version was watered down to appease industry, though. Under his watch, the BLM also
withdrew public lands from mining claims to make them available for renewable energy development.
Neil Kornze (left) at site of proposed Northeast Nevada Wild Horse Eco-Sanctuary. Photo courtesy BLM.
Kornze’s nomination has been greeted with approval from enviro groups, and, predictably, dismay from conservatives and off-roaders. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell sang his praises in a press release:
“Neil has helped implement forward-looking reforms at the BLM to promote energy development in areas of minimal conflict, drive landscape-level planning efforts, and dramatically expand the agency’s use of technology to speed up the process for energy permitting.”...
http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/obama-picks-neil-kornze-as-next-blm-head
