by Bill Hedden, Executive Director
With his April 26th executive order instructing Secretary of the Interior Zinke to review national monuments established since 1996, President Trump has set himself up as the arbiter of history. He will determine, after just 120 days of study, the fate of at least 27 large monuments, each of which involved years of study by his predecessors. Considering the complications raised by just the first-designated of the monuments under review, the president may discover monuments to be yet another subject that is more complicated than he imagined.
When President Clinton stood at the south rim of the Grand Canyon in 1996 to read the proclamation establishing Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, scarcely anybody knew what he was about to do. Although the landscape is extraordinary and more scientifically valuable by the year, there is validity to the claim that the public was cut out of the process. Nevertheless, more than twenty years later, the monument has proven enormously beneficial to Utah. Undoing it would raise many thorny questions.
One complication for opponents of the monument involves the very real benefits Utah’s school children have realized from the Grand Staircase-Escalante. President Clinton instructed Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to negotiate a land exchange trading the state lands out of the monument so that they would not be trapped without potential to generate revenue. The final exchange involved trading 200,000 acres of state land out of the monument in return for 177,000 acres of federal lands holding rich hydrocarbon reserves in northeastern Utah. A typical acre of state land generates mere dollars per year from grazing leases, while the coalbed methane land Utah received in Drunkard’s Wash, for example, has generated $1.5 million a month over the intervening decades. Yet, despite this state windfall, the federal government also paid Utah $50 million cash to consummate the exchange.
The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration established the Land Exchange Distribution Account to dole out the proceeds from these state/federal trades. At least 27 Utah counties have received their share of the $441 million in the fund that never would have been received without the exchanges. If President Trump and Utah’s leaders are truly interested in solving problems rather than creating them, they should leave the Grand Staircase alone and, instead of attacking the Bears Ears, they ought to take the opportunity to negotiate a similar land exchange for the state lands enclosed in that monument.
