YUMA — A military training facility could expand its boundaries by up to 500,000 acres, potentially crossing into several protected wilderness areas, authorities said.
The U.S. Army has been looking into enlarging the 840,000-acre Yuma Proving Ground, about 30 miles northeast of Yuma, where the military tests weapons and hardware.
Officials there want to be able to test artillery with greater firing ranges than weapons used there now, said Chuck Wullenjohn, public-affairs officer for the proving ground.
Several protected wildlife areas are close to the proving ground, including the Kofa, Cibola and Imperial national wildlife refuges and the Eagletail Mountains Wilderness Area.
Officials studying the expansion are trying to work around wilderness areas, Wullenjohn said.
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However, some environmental advocates are concerned about an expanded facility's effects on sensitive areas.
Daniel Patterson, ecologist and Southwestern director of the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said he wants proving-ground officials to offer the public more information about the expansion.
"It's a real unique and sensitive part of the Sonoran Desert," he said. "We want a transparent, open process. It involves protected national public lands, and it needs to be a public process."
Officials at the Bureau of Land Management, which holds the land adjacent to the proving ground, said they won't know how the lands would be affected until the facility solidifies its plan.
"We don't even know what they're talking about doing, so it's hard to know if there would be any impacts," said Mike Taylor, deputy state director of resources for BLM.
The Army has not yet endorsed the expansion, which right now is "purely a local investigation," Wullenjohn said.
Turning over a piece of public land that large to the Department of Defense would require an act of Congress, Taylor said. It can take three to five years once the process starts.
