HELENA, Mont. - Montana needs its own model for energy development, not one borrowed from places where poor planning has harmed wildlife, a state official told Montana wildlife commissioners Thursday.

"We think Montana deserves the best," planner T.O. Smith of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks staff said as he briefed the agency's commission about energy development. "We believe we deserve better than what we're seeing in other places."

Speaking of energy development in Wyoming, Smith told commissioners, "No one said, 'Wow, we did it, and the wildlife look great."'

Wind, biofuel and clean-coal projects will be the easiest Montana energy work to mitigate for fish and wildlife, Smith said, and the most difficult will be gas projects, including coal-bed methane.

He spoke after Fish, Wildlife and Parks earlier this month protested a U.S. Bureau of Land Management sale of oil and gas leases. In Billings this week, the BLM auctioned 13 leases across the state, including some on 15,300 acres under protest by the wildlife department and private conservation groups. The BLM said challenged sales will be suspended while the protests are studied, and money paid for those leases will be held in escrow.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials on Thursday expressed frustration with the BLM process, saying the timeframe for responding to proposed leasing is extremely tight and the BLM does not supply maps of lease areas, so the state agency must produce its own.

"We've never printed maps for these things because it's never been an issue before, until the last couple of months when the state decided they would like to have us print them a map," BLM spokesman Greg Albright said in a telephone interview. Notices of lease sales provide legal descriptions of lease sites, descriptions that can be used to pinpoint places on maps, he said.

Albright also said Fish, Wildlife and Parks declined an invitation to formally work with the BLM in its development of a management plan completed last year for the Dillon area, a place of concern to the wildlife department.