Nuiqsut leaders plan to unite to protect the area around Teshekpuk Lake and the caribou herd that calves and migrates through it from oil and gas development.
During a meeting last week, the Nuiqsut City Council unanimously approved a resolution to move forward in creating a nonporfit organization that would communicate with the federal government and work to prevent oil and gas development around Teshekpuk Lake.
Located in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska about six miles from the Beaufort Sea, the lake and the million acres around it are habitat to waterfowl and, most critically, caribou the city officials said. A Nuiqsut-led nonprofit, called the Nuiqsut Trilateral Inc., would establish conservation easements in the sensitive area.
“This is to help protect the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd, in particular, and make sure that their prime springtime grounds and migration corridors around the lake are protected,” said Patrick Munson, an attorney for Kuukpik Corporation.
The Bureau of Land Management, responsible for managing the NPR-A, approved the Willow project in the reserve last year. Following that approval, the agency proposed to develop a mitigation measure that would help offset the impacts of the Willow project on the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd, according to BLM’s Record of Decision.
Specifically, BLM proposed a measure to protect the “habitat areas for the maternal and migrating caribou of the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd, including Teshekpuk Lake, a buffer around the lake, and the migration corridors to the east and northwest,” according to BLM. The measure’s goal is to help local communities “directly influence the pace, scale and location of future leasing activities and/or surface development impacting an important subsistence resource,” the agency said.
After discussing ways to carry out the measure, the Nuiqsut city, village and corporation leaders agreed on creating a community organization to represent the residents and the interests of the users of the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd, Munson said.
“Nuiqsut would really have a good deal to say about what happens up there but oil and gas infrastructure would pretty much be off limits unless you guys decide that you want to allow it,” Munson said.
The Nuiqsut Trilateral Inc. would have a board of directors, including the mayor and vice mayor of the city, the president and vice president of the village and the president and vice president of the Kuupik Corp. The seventh seat would be held by a person outside of Nuiqsut, such as the North Slope Borough mayor. If the mayor doesn’t join, board members can pick another person who can represent the interests of the region, according to the bylaws of the proposed organization.
While the nonprofit would work to protect the area from resource development, those limitations won’t affect any access to the lake, camps and cabins through the Community Winter Access Trails, roads, snowmachining and boating, Munson said.
The resolution supported by the city authorized the mayor and vice mayor to participate in organizing the nonprofit. The next step is filing paperwork during the next trilateral meeting in late July. The plan is to form the organization before the election, Munson said.
NPR-A lawsuit
In recent weeks, the North Slope Borough and a coalition of groups from the region, Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, sued the Interior Department over the new rule to limit oil development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The borough argued in their filing that BLM did not consult with them when preparing an environmental impact statement and didn’t conduct an economic analysis of the impacts to the borough. The Voice argued that the agency failed to conduct a full environmental impact statement and meaningfully engage with the North Slope residents.
During the Nuiqsut city assembly meeting, several participants wondered how the creation of the nonprofit to protect Teshekpuk Lake coexists with the recent lawsuits the Voice and the borough recently initiated.
Munson said that the Voice and the borough are challenging the federal regulatory process for NPR-A as a whole. The Willow project Mitigation Measure 27, which led to the creation of the nonprofit, is related entirely to the approval of Willow, he said,
“That is a completely separate process that BLM and Nuiqsut are undertaking that Voice of the Arctic, has had not much to do with,” he said. “I don’t know (if) the North Slope, borough mayor and Voice of the Arctic are going to go against something that Nuiqsut strongly wants and is strongly fighting for on its own.”
Munson argued that since the Voice and borough repeatedly criticized the federal government for leaving local decision-makers out of the rulemaking process, it would be logical for them to support the Nuiqsut-led initiative.
“This effort to preserve a million acres of caribou and water habitat around kind of the crown jewel of the North Slope ecosystem, Teshekpuk Lake, to me, is a really important community-led conservation effort,” Munson said. “The resolution that came forward on Monday night is an important step of that but the big picture here is kind of a groundbreaking, remarkable community-led effort to control their own, important in the traditional subsistence use, land and amid of oil and gas development that is taking place throughout the NPR-A.”