“Clearly one-fourth of this Monument is state and private property that should not have been included in the first place,” Rehberg said. “Now the map will show what is the Monument and what is not.”

     In 2001, about 81,000 acres of privately-owned land gobbled up with the creation the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. Boundaries for the Monument were set in an executive order signed by then-President Bill Clinton in the final hours of his administration, although “no landowner or lawmaker ever saw a map of the Breaks area prior to its designation as a Monument,” Rehberg said.

     “The president, through [then-Interior] Secretary Babbitt – in the eleventh hour of the last administration – should not have just thrown a dart and taken a line and drawn it around private property,” Rehberg said. “Today’s announcement is a consensus that this was done very poorly and that the ends could not justify the means.”

     Last year, a citizen delegation delivered to Rehberg a petition signed by more than 3,300 Montanans in support of Rehberg’s legislative effort to withdraw the privately-owned land swallowed up by the Monument.  Rehberg presented legislation redrawing the boundaries to exclude private and state-owned property.

     “Today’s designation by the Department of the Interior is a compromise position; I didn’t get everything I wanted. There are still some issues that we want to address,” Rehberg cautioned. “I still have an issue with the sale of property automatically becoming a part of the Monument” without “input from the legislative process, which was created to provide checks and balances” with the Executive Branch.

     “This is the best we can do at this point,” Rehberg said. “And from this point forward the map that's used for management purposes will be our map.”