DENVER (AP) — U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s plan for a major realignment to put more of his department’s decision-makers in the field has a fundamental flaw in the eyes of some who spent their careers making those decisions: They’re already out there.

Eleven former Interior Department officials with decades of experience in both Washington and in local offices told The Associated Press the agency already has a well-established system for decentralized decision-making.

“Ninety percent-plus of the decisions that get made get made at the local level,” said Scott Florence, who retired after 38 years with the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department’s second-largest branch.

The problem, some said, is that over the past few years, an increasing number of decisions that should have been made locally were ultimately decided in Washington because of political pressure, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

And since 91.5 percent of the department’s workforce of about 70,000 is already based outside the Washington area, most of the former interior employees said they doubted pushing more employees out of Washington would improve things.

Zinke has made the overhaul of the Interior Department — which manages 780,000 square miles of public lands, mostly in the West — a signature mission since taking over the agency a year ago. He says it would streamline bureaucracy and lead to better decisions made closer to the field.

Parts of his realignment proposal have run into resistance from some politicians from both parties, particularly in the West, who fear it will disrupt relationships between state and federal officials. That criticism echoes a 2015 letter sent to leaders of the Bureau of Land Management, objecting to a far more modest proposal to combine the bureau offices in New Mexico and Arizona.

The letter from 13 members of Congress — including Zinke, then a Republican congressman representing his home state of Montana — also expressed fear the proposal was part of a larger plan to create more multistate offices in the bureau.

“We believe this is a poor model and should be abandoned,” the lawmakers wrote.

The Interior Department eventually dropped the idea in the face of opposition from both Democrats and Republicans.

Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Smith said Zinke’s reorganization proposal, which includes appointing 13 new regional directors , is different than the attempted merger of the two offices in 2015.

State-federal relationships would be strengthened under his proposal because governors and other officials could contact regional officials, she said.

“More decisions and authority will be at the regional level, with fewer decisions kicked up to Washington, so the ability of governors to reach key decision makers will be enhanced by the secretary’s proposal,” she said.

The 11 former Interior Department officials who spoke with the AP came mostly from the Bureau of Land Management but also the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Their job experiences ranged from park ranger to director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Each spoke on the record.

Their opinions on Zinke’s proposal ranged from skepticism to strong opposition, and all said they knew of no former Interior Department employees who supported it. But one of the 11 — Dan Ashe, the former Fish and Wildlife Service director — said reorganizations are almost always unpopular.

Some worried moving more career employees with field experience out of Washington would make things worse.

“By having those people there, they at least have some influence on the decisions that are being made in Washington,” said Mike Ferguson, a wildlife biologist who became the Bureau of Land Management’s top financial officer before he retired.

“If you move them west, you break that link, but the decisions are still going to be made in Washington,” he said.

Some said the problem with the department’s current structure is that a growing number of local decisions are being made in Washington by political appointees for political reasons. The trend has continued under both Republican and Democratic administrations, they said.

Washington officials once dictated to Interior Department workers in Idaho what kind of vegetation they could plant after a wildfire on federal land, said Steve Ellis, who retired in 2016 as deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management.

“That is a field-level decision,” he said. “But it became very political,” probably because the livestock industry wanted a specific kind of grass for cattle.

Swift said the former employees have the same concerns as Zinke about decisions being made in Washington, not locally.

But restructuring the agency and moving employees aren’t the solution, Ferguson said.

“It’s not a matter of changing the organization. It’s a matter of allowing the employees in the organization to do the job that they were hired to do,” he said.

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Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP. His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/dan%20elliott.

DENVER — From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Bureau of Land Management oversees some of the nation’s most prized natural resources: vast expanses of public lands rich in oil, gas, coal, grazing for livestock, habitat for wildlife, hunting ranges, fishing streams and hiking trails.

But more than 99 percent of that land is in 12 Western states, hundreds of miles from the nation’s capital. Some Western politicians — both Republicans and Democrats — are asking why the bureau’s headquarters isn’t in the West as well.

“You’re dealing with an agency that basically has no business in Washington, D.C.,” said Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, who introduced a bill to move the headquarters to any of those dozen states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington or Wyoming. The Bureau of Land Management manages a combined 385,000 square miles in those states.

Colorado Republican Rep. Scott Tipton introduced a similar measure in the House, and three Democrats signed up as co-sponsors: Reps. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Jared Polis of Colorado and Ed Perlmutter of Colorado.

Some Westerners have long argued federal land managers should be closer to the land they oversee, saying Washington doesn’t understand the region. Now they have a powerful ally in Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a Montanan who is leading President Donald Trump’s charge to roll back environmental regulations and encourage energy development on public land.

Zinke said in September he wants to move much of the Interior Department’s decision-making to the West, including the Bureau of Land Management, which is part of the agency.

The Washington Post reported last month Zinke’s plan includes dividing his department’s regions along river systems and other natural features instead of state borders, and using them to restructure oversight.

A big part of the bureau’s job is to lease drilling, mining and grazing rights on public land to private companies and individuals. That puts it at the center of a heated national debate over how those lands should be managed, and by whom.

Some recent disputes:

n Much of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, created by President Barack Obama and greatly reduced by Trump, is on Bureau of Land Management land.

n Rancher Cliven Bundy’s long battle against federal control of public land, which culminated in a 2014 armed standoff in Nevada, began on bureau acreage.

n More than 50,000 square miles of Bureau of Land Management land in the West is at the heart of a debate among conservationists, ranchers and energy companies over how much protection to give the shrinking population of the greater sage grouse, a ground-dwelling bird.

The bureau manages more public land than any other federal agency, ranging from about 1 square mile in Virginia to nearly 113,000 square miles in Alaska. That doesn’t include national parks or national forests, which are managed by other agencies.

It has about 9,000 employees, with fewer than 400 in Washington. The rest are scattered among 140 state, district or field offices.

“The larger issue is that states and counties that are predominated by public lands are deeply affected by decisions made by BLM,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance in Denver, which represents the oil and gas industry. “So it makes sense (for the headquarters) to be in a state where there are a high percentage of public lands.”

In Nevada, where the Bureau of Land Management manages 66 percent of the land — a bigger share than any other state — Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei called the idea intriguing but stopped short of endorsing it.

“I’m excited about the fact that they’re looking at it,” he said.

Amodei said he has spoken with bureau officials in Washington who know so little about Nevada they thought the land under a highway interchange was wildlife habitat.

Few say moving the bureau’s headquarters would tilt its decision-making toward commercial use or preservation and recreation.

But some environmental groups question whether it would produce real benefits.

Aaron Weiss, media director for the Center for Western Priorities, said Zinke has been limiting opportunities for local comment on national monuments and BLM planning, and moving the headquarters West wouldn’t reverse that.

Weiss also suggested Zinke could use a headquarters move as a cover to get rid of employees he considers disloyal.

“We absolutely question his motives,” Weiss said.

Zinke’s spokeswoman, Heather Swift, said Weiss’s claims are false. More than 2 million people submitted comments during the Interior Department review of Bears Ears and other national monuments, and Zinke held more than 60 meetings with local people, she said.

Zinke doesn’t believe his proposed reorganization will result in job cuts, Swift said.

Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s public lands program, said the Bureau of Land Management is already decentralized, and moving the headquarters would waste money.

“It’s a solution in search of a problem,” he said.

Some Bureau of Land Management retirees also are skeptical of the move.

The bureau needs a strong presence in Washington for budget and policy talks, said Steve Ellis, who was the agency’s deputy director when he retired in 2016 after 38 years in civil service, both in Washington and the West.

“The relationships in the West are so important, but the relationships in Washington are also important,” Ellis said. “You need the both for the agency to be successful and thrive.”

DENVER — Sales of outdoor equipment are slipping as millennials drive changes in U.S. consumer habits by favoring clothes and sporting goods that are less specialized and more versatile, analysts say.

Industry retail sales totaled $18.9 billion from December 2016 through November 2017, down 6 percent from the previous 12 months, according to NPD Group, a market research company that tracks trends in two dozen industries.

The company announced the numbers this week as manufacturers and buyers gathered in Denver for the Outdoor Retailer and Snow Show, the industry’s biggest winter marketplace.

Millennials — sometimes defined as people born between 1982 and 2004 — are less likely than the previous generation to demand outdoor gear that stands up to extreme conditions, said Matt Powell, NPD’s senior adviser for the sports industry. He used boots as an example.

“The hardest, the most extreme condition some of these boots are going to have is walking from the Prius to the craft brewery,” he said.

Powell also cited mountain bikes, which riders can use on streets or trails without special clothing and usually cost less than specialized road bikes.

“I describe it as good-enough products. A product that will get me through most of what I want to do, and a product that is versatile,” he said.

Millennials are outdoorsy and support environmental preservation and sustainability, Powell said, but they have a different take on health and fitness than their predecessors. They have a more lighthearted approach that involves their friends, he said.

Some individual retailers and manufacturers have adapted, but the overall industry has not, Powell said.

“I think the outdoor industry has not responded enough to this shift in the mindset of consumers,” he said.

Greg Thomsen, U.S. managing director for Adidas Outdoors, said his company is focusing on consumers in their 20s and younger.

“This industry has been aging for a long time, and it’s nice to bring in some new people,” he said.

Thomsen said millennials like Adidas’ Flyloft jacket, which isn’t suitable for severely cold weather but still works for outdoor recreation. It’s less expensive, easier to care for and more versatile than more a hard-core outdoor jacket, he said, and it’s suitable for a day in the mountains or a night on the town.

The Outdoor Retailer and Snow Show gives retail buyers a look at goods they can sell starting next fall. About 1,000 manufacturers are showing new products to 11,000 retail buyers at the show, which opened Thursday and runs through Sunday.

The 500,000-square-foot expo is packed with nearly everything outdoors people might need, and a few things they might not: Ski parkas and bikinis, snow boots and sandals, axes and accounting software, snowboards and sleds, bicycles and camper vans, packaged food and Colorado whiskey.

Displays range from a humble table to elaborate, two-story exhibits with changing rooms or conference tables. Some exhibitors wore clingy ski pants; another wore a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform complete with scarlet tunic.

This is the first Outdoor Retailer Show since it left its longtime home in Salt Lake City. Some big players in the outdoor industry argued that Utah’s political leaders were too hostile toward preserving public lands, so the show moved to Colorado, whose environmental politics are more in tune with the industry’s.

This week’s show is also the first since its producer, Emerald Expositions, acquired the SnowSports Industries America Snow Show, which had been held each January in Denver. Organizers say it’s the first time in nearly 30 years that the outdoor and snow industries have a combined show.

Snow industry sales, which include skis, snowboards, boots, bindings and other equipment, are faring better than the larger outdoor industry. For the first four months of the current winter season, sales totaled $2 billion, up 7.8 percent.

Associated Press writer James Anderson contributed to this report.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) — Two Western governors on Tuesday warned the Trump administration against making big changes in a plan to protect a ground-dwelling bird across the West, saying it would send a message to states not to bother working together to save other imperiled species.

Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper and Wyoming Republican Matt Mead said a 2015 conservation plan designed to save the greater sage grouse was the product of long negotiation among state and federal governments, conservation groups, industry and agriculture.

“If we go down a different road now with the sage grouse, what it says is, when you try to address other endangered species problems in this country, don’t have a collaborative process, don’t work together, because it’s going to be changed,” Mead said. “To me, that would be a very unfortunate circumstance.”

Hickenlooper said, “We are both very concerned that the new administration is going to take away all the guide rails that allowed this collaboration to exist.”

They appeared together at an energy conference at Colorado State University.

The 2015 plan is designed to protect the bird without putting it on the Endangered Species List, an outcome that most states try to avoid because it usually brings strict restrictions on oil and gas drilling, mining, agriculture and other activities to protect habitat.

But Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in June his department would consider changing the plan to give states more flexibility to allow mining, logging and other economic development. Environmentalists have said the planned revision was just a back-door attempt to open up more land to mining and drilling.

Millions of sage grouse once lived across the U.S. West, but development, disease, livestock grazing and an invasive grass that encourages wildfires has reduced its number to fewer than 500,000.

The 2015 plan covers 11 states and had the approval of the Obama administration. It took years to negotiate and was hailed as a model for saving a species through cooperation, rather than the hammer of the Endangered Species Act.

The Interior Department has not released the full details of its planned revisions, but the agency announced in early October it would withdraw protections for about 15,600 square miles (40,000 square kilometers) of sage grouse habitat on federal lands to allow energy development.

Despite Mead’s support for the 2015 plan, Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Smith said the department has been in contact with Wyoming officials “and many, many others who took serious issue with the Obama-era plans.”

“We look forward to continuing to work with the governor on this and many other issues,” Smith said in an email to The Associated Press.

Mead said protecting endangered species has become a serious problem, citing figures that show less than 2 percent of the species protected under the act since it was passed in 1973 have recovered enough to be removed from the list.

“Now, if you care about species, or you care about energy production or you care about commerce, we’ve got to do better than that, and a collaborative process that brings in Western states on endangered species, in my mind, is the best way to go,” he said.

Not all Western governors support the 2015 plan. Idaho Republican C. L. “Butch” Otter filed a lawsuit shortly after the plan was released, contending the Obama administration illegally imposed federal land-use restrictions. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in January, but Otter has appealed.

ALBANY, Wyoming — Vast stands of dead timber in the Western U.S. have forced firefighters to shift tactics, trying to stay out of the shadow of lifeless, unstable trees that could come crashing down with deadly force.

About 6.3 billion dead trees are still standing in 11 Western states, up from 5.8 billion five years ago, according to U.S. Forest Service statistics compiled for The Associated Press.

Since 2010, a massive infestation of beetles has been the leading cause of tree mortality in the West and now accounts for about 20 percent of the standing dead trees, the Forest Service said. The rest were killed by drought, disease, fire or other causes.

Researchers have long disagreed on whether beetle infestations have made wildfires worse, and this year’s ferocious fire season has renewed the debate, with multiple fires burning in forests with beetle-killed trees.

But no one disputes that dead trees — snags, in firefighter parlance — present an unpredictable threat, prone to blowing over onto people or getting knocked down by other falling trees. Amid the noise and distraction of a fire, firefighters sometimes get little warning.

“That’s the scary thing about snags,” said Ben Brack, a firefighter and public information officer on the Keystone Fire, which burned across a forest full of beetle-killed trees around the tiny communities of Albany and Keystone in southern Wyoming in July and August. “You don’t always see them coming.”

To avoid broad stands of beetled-killed trees, firefighters sometimes have to cut containment lines farther from the flames. That allows the fires to gobble up more forest before they’re brought under control.

“When we do that, fires get bigger, and often they burn longer,” said Bill Hahnenberg, a veteran Forest Service incident commander who helped corral last year’s Beaver Creek Fire in beetle-killed trees in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming. “So that’s one of the trade-offs fire managers have had to go to.”

Firefighters used that tactic on both the Beaver Creek and Keystone fires. They’re also using it on two big fires currently burning in beetle-killed trees in western Montana.

“I’m very much in favor of it,” said Mark Gunnerson, whose family owns three cabins in Keystone, one dating to 1870. “I would rather start over than one person get hurt.”

This summer’s fire edged to within 40 feet (12 meters) of one of his family’s cabins, but none was damaged.

Other factors, such as rugged terrain or drought-baked forests, can prompt fire managers to take a safer, less aggressive approach to minimize the danger. They say it’s impossible to know how much bigger fires grow because of that.

The Beaver Creek Fire scorched nearly 60 square miles (155 square kilometers) and burned for about four months. The Keystone Fire was discovered July 3 and contained in mid-August, after blackening 4 square miles (10 square kilometers).

No deaths or injuries were reported in either fire. But since 1987, at least 13 U.S. firefighters have been killed and five injured by falling dead trees, according to reports gathered by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, a coalition of federal, tribal, state and professional firefighting organizations.

Massive forest die-offs have occurred before, researchers say, and even healthy forests have standing dead trees. John Shaw, a Forest Service analyst, said the percentage of dead trees can vary widely over decades.

About 17 percent of all standing trees in 11 Western states are dead, roughly double the proportion in the 1990s ? but that was a time of above-normal precipitation, Shaw said.

Since 2000, two dozen species of beetles have killed trees on nearly 85,000 square miles (220,000 square kilometers) in the Western U.S. That’s an area about the size of Utah. Beetles have killed nearly 80,000 square miles (206,000 square kilometers) of forest in Western Canada.

The outbreak stems from a combination of factors, including crowded, aging forests, drought-stressed trees and warmer temperatures that allow the pests to survive the winters, researchers say.

The bugs bore under a tree’s bark, where they lay their eggs and release a blue fungus. The newly hatched larvae eat away a thin later below the bark that the tree needs to transport nutrients, and the fungus cuts off the flow of water.

In the past 18 months, more than a dozen Western wildfires have burned in forests with some beetle-killed trees, blackening a total of 570 square miles (1,450 square kilometers). At least five of those fires are still burning.

Some wildfires in British Columbia this summer were also in beetle-infested areas, Canadian officials said.

The spike in dead trees in the past five years, both from beetles and other causes, probably did not lead to an increase in the number of wildfires, said Matt Jolly, a Forest Service research ecologist. Weather, lightning strikes and human blunders all play a role, as well as dry trees.

“Weather kind of trumps everything,” he said.

An individual beetle-killed tree doesn’t burn differently than a tree killed by other causes, Jolly said. But a beetle infestation can leave behind a staggering expanse of dead forest.

“The big thing is just the sheer number of dead trees we get,” he said.

“We know once a beetle attacks a tree, it dries out,” Jolly said. “We know the burn rate increases as the fuel dries out.”

Other researchers say it makes little or no difference whether fires are burning in a forest full of beetle-killed or a forest with more healthy, living trees.

Fires move quickly and burn only the outer layers of trees, pine needles and small twigs, said Chad Hanson, a research ecologist and principal scientist for environmental group the John Muir Project.

“On the surface, it makes so much sense to believe that dead trees would burn more easily,” he said. “The problem is, it’s not true. It’s been tested over and over again in real fires, and it’s not happening.”

Utah’s $1.9 billion claim against the Environmental Protection Agency for a multi-state mine waste spill says Utah’s water, soil and wildlife were damaged, but it offers no specifics.The Utah Attorney General’s Office provided a copy of the claim to Th…

DENVER (AP) — Global warming is already shrinking the Colorado River, the most important waterway in the American Southwest, and it could reduce the flow by more than a third by the end of the century, two scientists say.

The river’s volume has dropped more than 19 percent during a drought gripping the region since 2000, and a shortage of rain and snow can account for only about two-thirds of that decline, according to hydrology researchers Brad Udall of Colorado State University and Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona.

In a study published last week in the journal Water Resources Research, they concluded that the rest of the decline is due to a warming atmosphere induced by climate change, which is drawing more moisture out of the Colorado River Basin’s waterways, snowbanks, plants and soil by evaporation and other means.

Their projections could signal big problems for cities and farmers across the 246,000-square-mile basin, which spans parts of seven states and Mexico. The river supplies water to about 40 million people and 6,300 square miles of farmland.

“Fifteen years into the 21st century, the emerging reality is that climate change is already depleting the Colorado River water supplies at the upper end of the range suggested by previously published projections,” the researchers wrote. “Record-setting temperatures are an important and underappreciated component of the flow reductions now being observed.”

The Colorado River and its two major reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are already overtaxed. Water storage at Mead was at 42 percent of capacity Wednesday, and Powell was at 46 percent.

Water managers have said that Mead could drop low enough to trigger cuts next year in water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada, which would be the first states affected by shortages under the multistate agreements and rules governing the system.

But heavy snow in the West this winter may keep the cuts at bay. Snowpack in the Wyoming and Colorado mountains that provide much of the Colorado River’s water ranged from 120 to 216 percent of normal Thursday.

For their study, Udall and Overpeck analyzed temperature, precipitation and water volume in the basin from 2000 to 2014 and compared it with historical data, including a 1953-1967 drought. Temperature and precipitation records date to 1896 and river flow records to 1906.

Temperatures in the 2000-2014 period were a record 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the historical average, while precipitation was about 4.6 percent below, they said.

Using existing climate models, the researchers said that much decline in precipitation should have produced a reduction of about 11.4 percent in the river flow, not the 19.3 percent that occurred.

They concluded that the rest was due to higher temperatures, which increased evaporation from water and soil, sucked more moisture from snow and sent more water from plant leaves into the atmosphere.

Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved in the study, questioned whether the temperature rise from 2000 to 2014 was entirely due to global warming. Some was likely caused by drought, he said.

Udall said warming caused by climate change in this century will dwarf any warming caused by drought. He noted that during the 1953-1967 drought, the temperature was less than a half degree warmer than the historical average, compared with 1.6 degrees during the 2000-2014 period.

Udall said climate scientists can predict temperatures with more certainty than they can precipitation, so studying their individual effects on river flow can help water managers.

Rain and snowfall in the Colorado River Basin would have to increase 14 percent over the historical average through the rest of the century to offset the effect of rising temperatures, he said.

“We can’t say with any certainty that precipitation is going to increase and come to our rescue,” Udall said.

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Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/dan%20elliott .