by Tim Peterson, Utah Wildlands Director
This spring marks another milepost in the struggle to restore southern Utah’s national monuments at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase.
The last week in March found the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) hosting four open houses in small southern Utah communities: Escalante and Bluff for Bears Ears, and Kanab and Escalante for Grand Staircase. If you live in Salt Lake City, Flagstaff, Denver, Las Vegas, or Grand Junction — all places that see lots of residents visit their public lands at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase — or anywhere else in the country, you are out of luck. The BLM missed a chance to share information with you and to talk with you one-on-one.
These meetings, despite being far from the population centers of the Colorado Plateau, drew impressive crowds. About 200 people showed up in Escalante, a robust showing for a town with a population under 800. Folks came from near and far to learn more about what the Trump administration has planned for the future of these monuments. Visitors viewed BLM posters describing natural and cultural resources and had a chance to chat with local field staff about the land-management planning process for the national monuments compacted by President Trump late in 2017.
Public comments for this phase of the process (called “scoping”) are due April 11, 2018 for Bears Ears and April 13, 2018 for Grand Staircase. (The eplanning site sometimes goes down. If you don't get through right away, please take a break and try again later.)
BLM is in a hurry, and the plans they intend to release can’t help but be slapped-together and incomplete — the Trump administration is demanding that environmental impact statements and final decisions on the management plans be finished less than a year from now, and that the documents be limited to just 150 pages.
This abbreviated schedule and artificially low page count is the result of a Department of Interior memo issued quietly in August of 2017 by Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a Trump appointee who epitomizes the revolving door in Washington D.C., alternating between government service and lobbying for oil, gas, and mining interests.
To put this in perspective, the current Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is governed by a good 1999 management plan that took more than three years to complete, and whose final environmental impact statement is nearly 500 pages long.
Land-management specialists and scientists need the time and freedom to carefully explore the needs of the resources and how the public can best visit these fragile places without doing unnecessary harm to the values the monuments were established to protect. They need space to explore different options to best care for the land and manage visitation, and, of course, to hear from the public and incorporate public concerns.
What will we get from the plans for the shrunken Trump monuments? The writing is already on the wall: they will likely be abbreviated, inadequate, and thin on thoughtfulness.
But the planning races on, despite the fact that many legal scholars agree that President Trump lacked the authority to shrink the monuments as he tried to do in December 2017. The Trump proclamations are under legal challenge by Native American tribes, the Grand Canyon Trust, outdoor business interests, and other conservation and science groups.
Instead of waiting for the courts to weigh in, the Trump administration is trying to ram new management plans through as quickly as possible, hammering another nail into what the administration hopes is the coffin for millions of acres of protected public lands in southern Utah.
Why is the Trump administration in such a rush, eager to waste the time and the budgets of local BLM field offices on hurried and harried planning for monuments that could be overturned by the courts?
Records show that the administration’s goal in shrinking the monuments had much to do with serving the narrow interests of a few fossil fuel lobbyists, and the sooner the plans are done, the sooner they can task staff with processing permits for energy extraction on the lands once protected by Grand Staircase and Bears Ears national monuments.
You still have a chance to weigh in on these plans before BLM prepares alternatives for the draft environmental impact statements expected to be released sometime early this summer.
In a time of uncertainty for these national monuments, we know you continue to support Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments as originally protected. Help us overturn the downsized monuments that President Trump tried to create against the wishes of the public. We’re grateful for your support.
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