Salazar denies administration plans national monument designations

Interior secretary Ken Salazar told a Senate committee Wednesday that the Obama administration is not considering national monument designations in the west.

Salazar's comments follow a two-week long controversy generated by the leak of a memo from an Interior Department employee that specifically mentioned particular areas of public land as places where a national monument declaration could be appropriate.

Included in that memorandum were 14 separate areas of federal land in nine states.

Salazar, under questioning by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-New Mex., said that the Obama administration has no "hidden agenda" to create new preserves, which it can do under the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906.

"As secretary of the department, I'm interested in finding out what my employees are thinking," Salazar said. "I do think there are a lot of other people out there who have ideas. No one should be too worried that there is a hidden federal agenda because there is not."

Republicans used the leaked memo to argue that President Barack Obama planned the designations without seeking community input or considering the preferences of natural resources extraction industries.

Former President Bill Clinton generated controversy when he declared several national monuments in the west during the 1990s.

Sen. Feinstein seeks additional protections for land in California desert

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has announced that she will introduce legislation aimed at expanding protections of public land in the Mojave Desert.

The bill, which will be called the California Desert Protection Act of 2010, would create two new national monuments, expand Death Valley National Park and Joshua Tree National Park, and designate 250,000 acres of wilderness near Fort Irwin.

Feinstein, who sponsored another landmark measure aimed at preserving land in the Mojave Desert in 1994, told the Los Angeles Times that she thought the bill could become law in 2010.