This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Once again, the Utah congressional delegation is about to fail in its effort to pass a public lands bill for Utah. Why are they failing? Because they keep proposing bad bills that are not supported by Utah's citizens.
The delegation's PLI (Public Lands Initiative) was developed by excluding 99.5 percent of Utah's citizens from the process, namely those along the Wasatch Front. The 1,200 meetings claimed by the delegation must mean that they met with the same small groups of rural Utahns over and over again. Largely locking the public out of planning for a "public lands" bill is the complete opposite of democracy, and pretty much dooms the PLI to failure.
The PLI is another bad bill that rolls back current protection for 170,000 acres of public lands, fails to protect over 60 percent of qualified lands in eastern Utah and fast-tracks dirty energy development.
The PLI process also ignored and insulted Native American tribes both locally and nationally, short-changing the first proposal for a national monument ever made by tribes and endorsed nationally: the Bears Ears, which is the most significant unprotected cultural landscape in our nation.
The Utah delegation can and should develop a much better proposal for the extraordinary public lands in our state.
Barry Bonifas
Salt Lake City