PUBLIC LANDS:Utah takes center stage at national monument hearing
Michelle Merlin, E&E reporter
Published: Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) said his home state was "screwed" by President Clinton in 1996, when the president declared Grand Staircase-Escalante, a 1.88-million-acre area of southern Utah, a national monument.
Perhaps that's why so many Utah lawmakers came out so strongly against the Antiquities Act during a hearing yesterday.
The federal government owns 57 percent of Utah's land, and the state got the majority of play at a House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation hearing about the Antiquities Act and the designation of national monuments, with five witnesses hailing from the Beehive State.
Just weeks after President Obama created five new national monuments, several Republican bills were up for discussion, each curtailing the president's power to unilaterally declare national monuments and extending the process of naming them (E&ENews PM, March 25). Although the committee discussed eight such bills for hours yesterday, ranking member Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) called the hearing a waste of time, as the bills would be dead on arrival if they moved to the Senate.
Not that Bishop, who chairs the subcommittee, was deterred.
"This is not necessarily a position about this particular administration," Bishop said. "Both Republican and Democratic administrations have abused the Antiquities Act and have had the same mindset: that they have this legislative power given to them by Congress 100 years ago, and they don't want to give up that power because they don't want to give it up."
Bishop had his own proposal, H.R. 1459, which would subject declarations larger than 5,000 acres to the National Environmental Policy Act, ensure written consent from any private landholders and subject the declaration to a feasibility study years later to determine the costs of maintaining the monument.
Witnesses from Utah agreed with Bishop that his bill should become law.
"It's an unreasonable thing to lock up ground in somebody else's backyard," said John Jones, a commissioner of Carbon County, Utah, speaking on behalf of the National Association of Counties. "I think they [designations] should be voted upon and people's voices should be heard."
"One man's signature changed our lives completely in the forestry area," he added.
Jones, like fellow witness Dave Eliason from the Utah Cattlemen's Association, lamented that no one in the state knew about the designation for Grand Staircase-Escalante until Clinton announced it.
Their view differed from that of fellow witness Molly Ward, the mayor of Hampton, Va., as well as at least eight other town officials from communities where national monuments have recently been designated. They all came out in support of the Antiquities Act and praised Obama for his transparent process in designating the new sites.
These officials and other observers packed the hearing, sporting stickers showing their support for the Antiquities Act (E&ENews PM, April 15).
In addition to Bishop's bill, the committee considered Rep. Jason Chaffetz's (R-Utah) H.R. 250, which would subject any designation to congressional approval; Rep. Virginia Foxx's (R-N.C.) H.R. 382, which would require state approval for designations; and several other bills to prohibit designations in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Montana and Idaho without congressional approval.
They also heard an appeal from Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who proposed a bill (H.R. 885) to expand the boundaries of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park.
