GARDNERVILLE - The owner of Mack Ranch said Monday that she has seen no paperwork on a proposal to convert more than 450 acres of her land next to Minden to open space.
"We haven't made any decisions," Renee Mack said. "We haven't seen any documentation."
On Thursday, county commissioners approved sending a letter to the U.S. Forest Service to fund converting the land between Minden and the East Fork of the Carson River.
A Carson Valley native and fourth-generation rancher, Mack descended from H.H. Springmeyer, who settled here in the 1860s.
Mack Ranch is the last ranch remaining in the extended Springmeyer family.
Mack said she has been getting calls from numerous attorneys since an article ran Friday in The Record-Courier and Monday in the Nevada Appeal.
Former ranch manager and owner of Terra Firma, a company that brokers open-space deals, Jacques Etchegoyhen is exploring a deal to keep Mack Ranch open.
An application for funding from Southern Nevada Public Lands was submitted a few weeks ago.
Together with numerous other applications, it will be submitted for consideration in the next couple of months. Etchegoyhen said he does not know when they will get an answer.
The Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which became law in October, 1998, allows the Bureau of Land Management to sell public land within a specific boundary around Las Vegas.
Proceeds from those sales are then available for certain types of projects, submitted each year to the Secretary of Interior for approval.
The program is administered by the U.S. Forest Service.
Mack Ranch claims water rights dating back as far as 1858, though the owners didn't officially make claim to the land until 1868, Etchegoyhen said.
