Theodore Roosevelt National Park will go public in two weeks with its preferred plan for killing more than 1,000 elk in the park, and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., says he'll attempt a change in law if it doesn't allow volunteer hunters to kill the animals and keep the meat.

Since the park has already said it can't allow public hunting in a national park, it appears Dorgan may have to go to Congress to force the matter.

Dorgan said his legislation would require the approach that has been used at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming for nearly six decades.

"I will push this legislation if the park service doesn't respond with some common sense," Dorgan said.

Park superintendent Valerie Naylor said she will release the park's preferred alternative before the end of May and open it to public comment for 30 days.

Naylor says federal law prohibits hunting in national parks. "We can't consider that," she said.

There are about 900 elk in the park and the park proposed four reduction options - all of them lethal - in a draft Environmental Impact Statement released in December.

Now, it's ready to tell the public which of the four, or some combination, is preferred.

Two options do utilize public sportsman. In one, certified sportsmen would accompany federal agents and could take the shot, but not the meat. In another, elk would be driven outside park boundaries for public hunting.

The total number that will have to be killed ranges as high as 1,360 because more will be born during the five years the park plans to implement the reduction to get down to a herd size of about 200.

Dorgan says the park service doesn't need million-dollar killing plans when it could use volunteer North Dakota hunters instead. The four options range from $1 million to $2.2 million in cost.

"The National Park Service has spent three years looking at this, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to outside consultants, and I am worried that they still don't get it," he said.

Dorgan said the park service paid the Louis Berger Group $266,000 to write the elk reduction plan when using North Dakota hunters would have cost nothing.

Naylor said the Louis Berger Group is frequently hired by the park service's Environmental Quality Division to write complex documents that are beyond an individual park's resources.

"It's not unusual to pay that much or more for an assessment that takes several years," she said. "I think they did a good job."

Naylor said the park received 385 public comments on its four alternatives and the preferred alternative that will soon be released takes them all into account.

She said it's important to go through the process and the preferred alterative will be cost efficient and get "the best job done possible."

The four alternates under consideration are: federal sharpshooters accompanied by qualified volunteers also serving as sharpshooters; rounding up for euthanasia; rounding up and killing more than 300 elk to reach a statistical certainty of no chronic wasting disease and then transferring animals elsewhere; and using helicopters to push animals out of the park for public hunting.

The park will release a final Environmental Impact Statement on the elk plan late this year for implementation starting in 2010, Naylor said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 701-748-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)