Push back against the National Park Service's proposed plan to reduce elk at Theodore Roosevelt National Park has reached the interior secretary nominee.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said he received assurance Tuesday that Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., will look at the matter when he takes office.

Salazar is President-elect Barack Obama's pick to head the agency that oversees federal land management.

Dorgan, as well as the North Dakota Game and Fish Department and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation are all opposed to the park's plan to use volunteers as citizen sharpshooters, escorted into the park by federal agents, told to kill select elk and the elk meat would be donated to charities, or others, rather than kept by the shooter.

Rod Gilmore, North Dakota director of the elk foundation, said he doesn't think hunters will volunteer to sit on a directed knoll and simply pull the trigger on five cow elk in a bunch.

"It's not going to be a sporting hunt," Gilmore said. "They're looking at a reduction that doesn't resemble a hunt. I don't see any of our member hunters volunteering the way the park service has it structured."

Dorgan and Gilmore said they'll continue to press for a solution like one proposed by the North Dakota Game and Fish Department.

That agency proposed certified volunteers check in and out of the park, kill elk and either keep or donate the elk meat. The park rejected that method because it amounts to public hunting, which is not allowed in national parks.

Game and Fish spokesman Randy Kreil has said the agency was disappointed and still thinks its proposal is the most economical and most likely to be supported by sportsmen.

Dorgan said he's willing to introduce legislation, if it comes to that.

The use of qualified citizen sharpshooters is one of four action alternatives the park named in a draft Environmental Impact Statement it released last month.

There are about 1,000 elk in the park, and the ideal population for the habitat is about 200. The park needs to kill somewhere between 800 and 1,350 elk over the next five years to reach the ideal population.

The herd has grown so large because of a moratorium against translocating big game for threat of spreading chronic wasting disease, which still remains undetected in any game species in the state.

Dorgan said Salazar is "sympathetic" to the proposition that qualified hunters could do the job, keep the meat and save the federal government millions of dollars.

He said the park's position that it's getting around a federal policy ban against hunting in federal parks by disallowing volunteers to recover the meat "spins logic on its head."

Gilmore said he isn't optimistic that the National Park Service's environmental "train" can be stopped, or rerouted in its tracks.

However, Salazar's support, along with Dorgan's, could provide the necessary leverage, he said.

Dorgan serves on the Energy and Natural Resources National Parks Subcommittee and the Appropriations Interior Subcommittee.

Park Superintendent Valerie Naylor, who is traveling and not available for this story, said earlier the plan to pair certified volunteers with federal agents and donate the meat is a compromise in view of the ban against hunting in national parks.

She said the volunteers would be "more sharpshooters" than hunters in the park's plan, which was reached after five years of studying the issue from every angle.

Other alternatives are to round up and kill 800 elk in the first year to immediately reach the population goal; another is to kill 370 elk to reach a statistical certainty that the herd is free of chronic wasting disease and gradually locate them elsewhere; and a third is to push elk outside the park, in cooperation with Game and Fish and local landowners, for public hunting.

Naylor said the public comment period will be extended to 90 days, and public meetings will be held starting next month.

Anyone who wants to look at the draft EIS can go on the Internet to http://parkplanning.nps.gov/thro.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)