Congress rejects expansion of Nevada Test and Training Range into wildlife refuge

[TexasTowelie]

A bipartisan deal reached by Congress on an annual defense policy bill keeps protections for Nevada’s Desert National Wildlife Refuge, blocking for at least one more year a military proposal to expand an Air Force bombing range.

Conservationists viewed the final agreement on the bill as an all-out victory, avoiding both the Air Force’s proposal and a compromise measure that would have traded some military expansion for separate wilderness designations.

The Air Force had for years signaled it would seek to expand the Nevada Test and Training Range, a 2.9 million-acre facility in southern Nevada that is the largest military operations site in the country, into the nearby wildlife refuge. The conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill that authorizes all military spending, renewed the Air Force range for 25 years, but did not expand its acreage.

The desert refuge, designated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is the largest national wildlife refuge in the contiguous United States and is a prime habitat for Nevada’s state mammal, the big-horned sheep, said Patrick Donnelly, the Nevada director for the national environmental group Center for Biological Diversity.

Read more: https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2020/12/05/congress-rejects-expansion-of-nevada-test-and-training-range-into-wildlife-refuge/