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Interior Department's Public Land Giveaway
Department of the
Interior documents indicate that the agency is poised to adopt a streamlined
process for considering and approving requests from county governments
in the West to gain control of thousands of Jeep tracks and faint
trails. This could entail the federal government’s effectively
surrendering control of the tracks, some of which cross national
parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, wildernesses, and wilderness study
areas.
Some counties hope the new
process will literally pave the way for an explosion of off-road
vehicle use and extractive uses of federal lands, and block potential new wilderness designations.
Adding to the alarm
public-lands defenders feel about the news is the fact that an agreement
being quietly negotiated between the Utah office of the Bureau of Land
Management and Kane County (Utah) is likely to be a model—a template
it’s called in the documents—to be used throughout the West. Anyone
with even a passing interest with RS 2477 and the long-running
controversy surrounding it knows about
Kane County, a law unto itself. Upon creation of the Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the county sent in heavy
equipment to “maintain” little used jeep tracks, turning them into
significant roads. Angered that the BLM would not agree to open miles
of dirt tracks in the monument, the county installed signs announcing
that the tracks were open anyway. BLM threatened to sue the county, so
the county sued the BLM. And now, the two entities are
cooking up a settlement
that could lead to the giveaway of rights-of-way to thousands of miles
of trails and faint tracks, possibly even streambeds.
The documents also show
that the agency appears ready to revoke a
standing department policy
that placed a hold on recognizing new
rights-of-way. And if that weren’t enough, the Interior Department
seems ready to effectively recognize through “road maintenance
agreements” numerous two-track roadways as county highways, thus
relinquishing a significant measure of federal control over them. Much
of this flies in the face of a
federal law passed nearly
a decade ago that prohibits the Interior Department from adopting a
final rule or regulation concerning RS 2477.
The documents mentioned
above include a
“Status
Report and Potential Implementation Plan” dated January 26, 2006,
and distributed by agency official Kit Kimball at a meeting held the
following day and attended by Colorado Counties, Inc. There are also
three emails—one, from December 16, 2005, from Paul Smyth, an
agency lawyer in Washington, DC, to two colleagues, which mentions
“the Secretary’s revocation of earlier Secretarial RS 2477 guidance;”
and another email the same day from Dorman to Daniel Domenico, another
agency lawyer, which mentions working on “road maintenance agreements”
and going on to suggest that the Kane County agreement could be “a
good model for dealing with most of the issues we’re talking about.”
Lawyers for Earthjustice
and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance have
written to BLM officials in Utah to inquire about the negotiations
between the agency and Kane County and the regulations under
consideration and to insist that the public be involved in the
process, as has
Congressman Mark Udall.
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