Cultural Policy and Guidance
Laws and Regulations
BLM's Cultural Program is conducted under Federal mandates. No employee time or effort, contract expenditure or government equipment occurs unless authorized by Federal Statutes. The full text as well as descriptive paragraphs of laws and regulations that pertain to the Cultural Program may be found here. Regulations specify how the laws will be implemented and are cited here.
Manuals
BLM operates and provides guidance to its employees under a system of instructions in the form of BLM manuals. Generally, laws specify what must be done; whereas, the manual provides the guidance as to how it should be done. You may access BLM's current 8100 series manuals that guide the Cultural Program here. These are in "Portable Document Format" (PDF) and may be searched using Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat for specific terms of interest. Earnest work on BLM's Cultural manuals began in 1976 and these documents have undergone many refinements and updates to date. The manuals are regularly reviewed and updated so that they are up to date.
Programmatic Agreement
In 1997, the BLM's Director, the Council's Chairman, and the NCSHPO's President signed a national Programmatic Agreement (PA) explicitly framed "to emphasize the common goal of planning for and managing historic properties under the BLM's jurisdiction or control in the public interest." The national Programmatic Agreement (Section 5. b.) calls for cooperation and enhanced communication among SHPOs and BLM States as well as "a protocol specifying how they will operate and interact under this agreement." Each BLM State has a "Protocol" agreement these may be viewed here BLM States.
Alaska
Arizona
California
Colorado
Eastern SO
Idaho
Montana
Nevada (Under Revision)
New Mexico
Oregon
Utah
Wyoming
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