The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Friday released its four-volume final environmental-impact statement and a proposed land-use plan for 1.7 million acres in the Book Cliffs and the Uinta Basin, one of the nation's most active energy-exploration areas.
The document proposes closing 186,917 acres to drilling, nearly three times the amount of land the agency wanted off-limits when it released its draft plan in October.
"You are seeing the effect of public comment," said BLM Vernal field office manager Bill Stringer.
The Vernal plan is the fourth (after Kanab, Moab and Richfield) the BLM has rolled out in the past month and a half. Two more (Monticello and Price) will be released in the coming month. These six plans will be the primary management documents for 11 million acres in southern and eastern Utah.
As with the others, the Vernal plan strives to balance multiple uses, with oil and gas development, wilderness, off-highway-vehicle travel and "quiet" recreation interests fighting for equal access.
Key to the drilling-access changes was the agency's survey of 278,000 acres of public lands that hadn't been designated as wilderness study areas but nevertheless possessed scenic beauty, cultural resources and wildlife.
Stringer said the BLM decided allowing rigs into some of those areas would be inconsistent with wilderness-type management goals. But other issues counted, too: Soil conditions, the steepness of the terrain and the concerns of the Northern Utes regarding wildlife and cultural and religious needs.
In 2007, the Vernal office approved 1,015 drilling permits. This year, about 1,150 permits will be stamped, Stringer said.
Attempts to reach oil and gas industry representatives Friday were unsuccessful.
Despite the drilling cutback, conservationists are unhappy with BLM's decision to manage only 106,000 acres - about 30 percent of the total surveyed - with wilderness-like restrictions. Most disturbing, they said, was the agency's decision to allow motorized access into these special areas.
While commending the BLM for its closer look at drilling restrictions, Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society, said the agency squandered an opportunity to give more protection to wildlife, cultural resources, ecosystems and remote recreation.
"The existence of roads and the use of roads are the biggest factors in wildlife-habitat fragmentation and [harm] to cultural resources," Culver said. The Wilderness Society will protest the plan, she said.
The BLM plan would limit OHVs to designated trails - except for the upper portion of the Lower Flaming Gorge, which will be closed to mechanized travel. OHVs would be allowed to go no farther than 300 feet on each side of a designated road or trail.
That's equal to a football fielda on each side - and too much, said Liz Thomas, an attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
But Mike Swenson, executive director of the Utah Shared Access Alliance, a nonprofit OHV and public-land-access advocate, said wilderness advocates are operating on a fallacy. If there are roads in a wilderness study area, that puts those lands out of the running, anyway. Closing the roads would be pointless.
"We absolutely support wilderness. We don't want to see oil wells everywhere," he said. "What we don't support is closing roads or fighting over old airstrips and mining areas and call them wilderness."
Allowing more people to see nature in the rough, he said, means more appreciation of open space, not less.
Stringer said the environmental study took roads into account. "Those areas we looked at for wilderness characteristics did not have roads."
phenetz@sltrib.com
