FEDS TARGET POT GARDENS IN SIERRA

FRESNO -- For the past couple of years, the Tulare County Board of
Supervisors has banged the drum in Washington, D.C., trying to bring
attention to the problem of marijuana being grown in the Sequoia
National Forest and other public lands in the Sierra Nevada.

Apparently, it got somebody's attention. On Thursday, Mark Rey, the
U.S. Department of Agriculture's undersecretary for natural resources
and the environment, announced a multipart plan intended to push
illegal marijuana growers -- whom officials say are largely tied to
Mexican drug cartels -- off of the public lands and put the people
financing them behind bars.

The plan calls for the following:

# A joint plan to be announced next month by the U.S. Forest Service
and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to work on destroying
the marijuana gardens.

# More focus on finding and arresting the cartel leaders behind the
gardens, not just destroying the plants.

# Closer work with local law enforcement agencies, possibly more
formal alliances.

# A new program to clean up large amounts of garbage and dangerous
chemicals -- including herbicides, pesticides and rodent poisons --
left behind by workers at marijuana gardens after they are raided or abandoned.

Officials say the chemicals alone soak into the soil and contaminate
water systems.

# Hiring more forest service law enforcement officers. More than half
of them will be stationed in California.

The added officers will work primarily on finding marijuana gardens
and conducting investigations to try to find the leaders of the drug
operations behind them. The forest service has 75 officers in this state.

Rey said seven of the additional officers will be assigned to the
national forests in Tulare and Fresno counties, part of a $10 million
appropriation by Congress in May.

He said his department is working to get $15 million more starting in
October to continue paying for the new hires and possibly allowing for more.

Officials said the pot gardens first became a large-scale problem in
California about a decade ago.

Not only are more gardens being found in the state in recent years,
but they are spreading to national forest land in Oregon, Washington
and Idaho as well as the southeastern states, including Kentucky,
West Virginia and Tennessee.

"But California is still 80 percent of the issue," Rey said. He said
marijuana growing operations have been found in every national forest
in the state.

Finding the gardens is a long process, usually done from the air,
according to Capt. Kevin Mayer, who oversees law enforcement for the
Sequoia and Sierra national forests in Tulare and Fresno counties.

When the raids occur, people tending the gardens --usually
undocumented immigrants -- scatter into the woods and are hard to
find, he said, adding that when they are found and arrested, they
usually know little about the people who hired them.

Forest service officials said pot growers have fired guns at law
enforcement officers raiding their camps and at helicopters overhead.

Ron Pugh, special agent in charge for the service's southwest region,
said Thursday that the two most important parts of the forest service
plan are to continue raiding the gardens -- which the cartels locate
in the forests because they are isolated and have access to water --
and then to "go for the throat" by working with the DEA and other
agencies to track down the cartel leaders.

During a press conference Thursday at an Army National Guard hanger
at the Fresno-Yosemite International Airport, Rey described the
illegal gardens as "the most significant forest service law
enforcement priority we have today."

Rey was flanked by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Visalia, and Tulare County
Supervisor Allen Ishida, both of whom have lobbied for more support
to combat the marijuana garden problem.

Ishida said the forest service's plan was a good start but that other
law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the U.S. Justice
Department and the Department of Homeland Security, need to get involved, too.

For his part, Nunes said he's going to continue pushing in Washington
to make sure that the funding remains in place to carry out the
forest service's plans.

"But so far, I think we're in the right direction," he said.