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Representatives of the land speed racing community say they are pursuing an alternative course of action after this week's discussions about the deteriorating Bonneville Salt Flats yielded no new plan from the Bureau of Land Management.

Although the agenda had called for choosing a path forward, when the meeting convened on Tuesday the moderator announced there had been a mistake, and no such decisions could be made.

While the racers will have "no choice" but to continue to negotiate with the BLM to hold their events, Dennis Sullivan, chairman of the Utah Alliance to Save the Salt, said his organization is now also pursuing alternatives — including federal legislation — to save the flats.

The group does not yet have a sponsor for its proposed bill, he said, but it has several prominent lawmakers "in the wings." He did not describe what the bill would require.

"Is this the strategy of the BLM, to just stall everything until we either give up and the salt flats are gone away?" he asked.

The racing community, which gathers on the flats to test cars capable of exceeding 300, 400 and even 500 miles per hour, on Tuesday proposed pumping upwards of a million tons of salt onto the flats to restore the landscape to its previous glory, when the salt crust was reportedly two to three feet thick.

But scientists, the BLM and industry representatives said the proposal was too risky — increasing the brine might damage the flats, they said.

Intrepid Potash, a mineral extraction company that mines potassium out of the flats, already pumps hundreds of thousands of tons of brine onto the salt flats each year, according to a provision they voluntarily added to their agreement with the BLM.

The BLM said it would instead seek funding to replace a vandalized weather station on the flats. University of Utah researchers who are studying the salt flats' decline have said more accurate weather data would help them determine which factors are responsible for changing the flats.

That study has been funded in part by Intrepid Potash, according to the terms of the mining company's 2012 agreement with the BLM, said Lisa Reid, a spokeswoman for the BLM. Attempts to reach Intrepid for comment were unsuccessful.

Louise Noeth, who goes by the nickname Land Speed Louise, said those who spent thousands of dollars to travel to Utah from around the nation were misled to believe Tuesday would represent some sort of negotiation. She said she dropped $1,300 on the trip from St. Louis on the belief that her attendance could influence the BLM's decision.

"If there are certain rules where they can't make these changes, great," she said, "but why the hell did they not tell us that up front?"

Noeth said she suspected that the BLM never intended to listen to the racing community's suggestions, but rather hoped to "bleed" the racers' funding while hosting surface-level discussions intended to make the BLM look good to lawmakers. "I thought we were working together, but we got fully put in our place," she said.

Reid said the agency never meant to mislead anyone and had always intended to for Tuesday's meeting to be a simple exchange of information.

"We tried really hard to get… a platform for all the entities to get together and discuss all the issues that are surrounding the Bonneville Salt Flats," she said.

Additionally, she said, the BLM has in the past incorporated recommendations from the racers into its management plan for the salt flats. But the agency received this latest proposal from the racers on May 12, she said, and the BLM hasn't had enough time to consider it fully.

Noeth said she has increasingly come to see the BLM's point of view that taking action before the completion of the U. study, which is due in 2018, could be harmful to the salt flats.

In light of preliminary evidence presented at Tuesday's conference that suggests the area of salt depletion is slightly correlated with the location and direction of the "race tracks" set up for events like Speed Week. Noeth said she would be willing to entertain a moratorium on racing to save the flats.

But she believes the BLM should consider a moratorium on all activity on the flats, including Intrepid's mining lease.

"Will you tell me that absolutely positively there is no further damage being done by allowing continued mining?" she said. "How come science only works when we want to restore something, but there's no science applied when they're mining?"

Sullivan said that's a hard line position he doubts most of the racing community would agree to. But he agreed that his fellow enthusiasts, who believe racing has no impact on the salt flats and that the brine pumping has improved their condition, learned an important lesson Tuesday about collecting scientific data.

"We cannot just say that at the end of that period we had an 11-mile race track, because that's not empirical data," he said. "We have to show with data that a massive salt laydown is of benefit to the salt flats."

In the meanwhile, he said, Intrepid and the BLM should be held to the same standard.

"If that's the game we're playing — if you can't prove either way, then you just stop it — then there are a lot of other things that need to stop out there," he said.

But that just isn't going to happen, Reid said.

"The BLM is not generally in the business of issuing moratoriums," she said, "but of making prudent management decisions."

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