PUBLIC LANDS: 2 Utah counties advance proposals for wilderness, energy development
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Greenwire: Thursday, April 2, 2015
Two Utah counties this week approved recommendations to House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) that seek more wilderness, recreation and energy development on public lands within their borders.
The most notable was a recommendation approved Tuesday by Grand County that supports designating roughly half a million acres of wilderness, a 150,000-acre national conservation area, off-highway vehicle zones and other areas with environmental protections.
Summit County, a ski mecca in northern Utah known for its towering mountains, yesterday approved a resolution supporting an additional 24,000 acres being added to the High Uintas Wilderness, a massive east-west expanse of snow-covered mountains dotted with trout-filled lakes and about 400 miles of streams.
Both decisions marked major milestones in Bishop's plan to author legislation covering about 20 million acres of eastern Utah that would settle decades of conflicts over management of public lands.
Bishop is expected to largely defer to counties as he decides which lands to set aside for wilderness, motorized recreation, roads, oil and gas drilling, and mining, and which to include in a massive state-federal land swap.
A handful of conservation groups yesterday touted the recommendation advanced unanimously by the Summit County Council. The council had formed an advisory group of elected officials, conservationists and ranchers who unanimously recommended wilderness additions and watershed management areas.
The watershed management areas would be established "with the goal of improving the overall health and particularly the watershed of the High Uintas Forest," and other designations would seek to restore landscapes, reduce wildfire threats and manage bighorn sheep.
"This is a historic resolution and an important step in protecting the High Uintas Wilderness," said Paul Spitler, director of wilderness campaigns for the Wilderness Society. "The High Uintas are a crown jewel for the state of Utah, and today's action will help to ensure that these vital lands are forever protected for the benefit and enjoyment of current and future generations."
Other supporters of the Summit resolution were the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Grand Canyon Trust, Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council. Summit County lies within Bishop's 1st District.
But less consensus was reached in Grand, a county rich in scenery and mineral resources that many see as a major battleground in Bishop's public lands initiative.
The council voted 4-3 to designate roughly 475,000 acres of wilderness, most of it in the rugged Book Cliffs near the county's northern border, with an additional 100,000 acres of wilderness in eastern Grand extending south from the Colorado River.
The council also recommended a roughly 150,000-acre national conservation area east of Moab and designated areas within Labyrinth Canyon along the Green River for no surface disturbances.
"It was just too much conservation and not enough balance," said Councilman Lynn Jackson, who voted against the overall proposal.
Jackson, who previously worked for decades at the Bureau of Land Management, said he did not support the addition of more wilderness in the eastern Book Cliffs, an area that he said should remain open to energy development, and he was also unhappy with the size of the national conservation area east of Moab.
But it's also much less wilderness than conservation groups were seeking.
The total recommendations include roughly 60 percent of what is identified in the "America's Red Rock Wilderness Act," a bill conservation groups have been using as a starting point for negotiations.
"We gave them a compromise and they compromised further," said Wayne Hoskisson, a volunteer for the Sierra Club who lives in Moab. Hoskisson said he was particularly unhappy that no wilderness designations were recommended in Labyrinth Canyon.
The areas were identified for "no surface occupancy," a designation that Jackson argued would allow energy companies to access mineral resources from outside the area.
Bishop had been expected to introduce a draft bill late last month, but the release date has been pushed back.
In addition to Summit and Grand, Emery County has also put forward a blueprint for how it would like its lands managed under Bishop's public lands bill.
But there is still no consensus in Uintah and San Juan counties, two major battleground areas that border Grand to the north and south. Agreements in those counties among OHV users, conservationists, tribal groups and energy companies will be key if Bishop's initiative is to succeed. In addition, newly elected members of the Daggett County Commission in northeast Utah have decided that a sweeping pact brokered by the commission last October among conservationists, county and state officials, and off-highway vehicle is not acceptable and needs to be revised.
The decision has angered conservationists who had touted the pact's provisions to designate 80,000 acres of wilderness, swap roughly 12,000 acres of federal and state lands, resolve road claims and bolster OHV access (Greenwire, Oct. 22, 2014).
Bishop's initiative, which started years ago with just a handful of counties, now covers upward of 20 million acres and is one of the boldest legislative initiatives the Beehive State has ever seen.
