This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Someone is again posting phony information about Bears Ears National Monument around San Juan County, and it's worth $500 to the local sheriff to find out who is behind the disinformation campaign.
Sheriff Rick Eldridge on Monday announced a $500 reward for information about those creating and posting the signs, which appear to be aimed at further inflaming tensions around the recent designation of the 1.3-million-acre monument proposed by Native American tribes.
The notices, posted in several locations outside Monticello and Blanding, announce that the new monument charges a $100 entrance fee, payable when visitors enter at the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park — even though Bears Ears is several miles away from this tribal park near the Arizona-Utah state lines. The signs falsely indicate wood cutting, ATV riding and hunting are not allowed in the new monument.
"If you catch someone hanging these signs, take a picture of the individual and call the Sheriff's Office immediately. 435-587-2237," the sheriff posted on Facebook. The fliers have so far been found posted on Cedar Mesa and near Recapture Canyon, as well as in a national forest campground west of Monticello, according to Eldridge.
"We have local citizens bringing them in who are outraged," he said.
These latest signs echo those posted last summer by monument detractors bent on spreading inflammatory misinformation. One of those earlier signs announced the Interior Department would ban access to Bears Ears for ceremonial activities and wood gathering and would take over 4 million acres of the Navajo Reservation, while another announced a monument designation celebration that was to coincide with then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell's visit to southern Utah to hear local sentiment about the monument proposal.
"No Utah Navajos are invited because we in Window Rock [the seat of Navajo government in Arizona] are taking your sacred land and stopping your wood cutting and other activities on this land and you have been complaining about that," that flier read.
"I think it's the same group of people or individual. I have a hunch who it is. I would love to expose who is behind it, to get to the bottom of this, because they are false and bogus," Eldridge said.
A prominent anti-monument blog, The Petroglyph, accused environmentalists of generating "fake news" and suggested pro-monument groups posted the fliers themselves, but without offering evidence.
The misinformation in the recent fliers reflects some of the anti-monument rhetoric leveled in the state Legislature, in support of a resolution calling on President Donald Trump to rescind the monument. Rep. Mike Noel, for example, has repeatedly complained that motorized use, wood gathering and hunting would be curtailed on the monument, even though the monument proclamation suggests these activities would continue.
The Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service will start a monument management planning process with public meetings in coming weeks. The eventual plan will guide how myriad activities, from plant gathering to motorized recreation, would be regulated. The five tribes behind the monument proposal have empaneled a commission that, under the monument's proclamation, will offer recommendations that the BLM must either incorporate or explain in writing why it cannot.
—
Brian Maffly covers public lands for The Salt Lake Tribune. Brian Maffly can be reached at bmaffly@sltrib.com or 801-257-8713. Twitter: @brianmaffly