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Letter: Consider these old gloves, Rep. Bishop

(Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune) U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop meets with the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board at the paper's offices in Salt Lake City Monday September 19, 2016.

Rep. Rob Bishop compares the Antiquities Act to an old baseball mitt; having nostalgia value but no longer serving its purpose. Because of this old glove we have Bryce, Zion, Arches, Capitol Reef, Dinosaur and 112 other sites. Remarkably, this glove, used by 17 presidents in a 111-year career, never logged an error. With Bishop’s new glove, the ball would have been dropped on many of our national treasures, like the Grand Canyon, Tetons and four of our five national parks in Utah.

If Bishop wants credibility with his analogy, why no interest in old gloves like the 1872 Mining Act and 1920 Mineral Leasing Act? The mining law has given us a legacy of thousands of abandoned mine sites, including 12 Super Fund sites in Utah alone, with no economic return to the public land owners and taxpayers.

The Mineral Leasing Act provides far less than fair market value to the land owners, some additional Super Fund sites, and great unfunded liability for reclamation of modern well sites. I can relate to the old glove analogy, but shouldn’t we retire the gloves causing the most errors?

Dennis Willis, Price