BLM director makes hometown pitch for conservation rule, funding

Joshua Murdock

Aug. 16 was a homecoming of sorts for Tracy Stone-Manning.

The director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management stood in a rippling meadow of waist-high grass along Belmont Creek on the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage to announce $1.5 million her agency was granting to local groups for “shovel-ready” habitat and stream restoration projects. Up the dusty trail alongside the Blackfoot River tributary on a hot, smoky afternoon, Stone-Manning spoke from firsthand experience when she described former industrial logging in the Blackfoot corridor. A longtime Montanan, Stone-Manning lived in Missoula when the area was logged through the 1980s. Now as the head of the nation’s largest land management agency, overseeing 245 million acres, or 1 of every 10 acres in the U.S., she splits her time between Missoula and Washington, DC.

People are also reading…

Stone-Manning was flanked by local BLM staff and surrounded by tribal representatives and representatives from groups including Trout Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, the Blackfoot Challenge and the Clark Fork Coalition.

The money is split three ways: $500,000 each to the Blackfoot Challenge, Big Blackfoot Chapter of Trout Unlimited and

View Source