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Utah is preparing a lawsuit to seek control of disputed roads crossing federal lands, adding its voice to counties that previously have sued for their own routes, a top adviser to the governor said Wednesday.
John Harja, public-lands policy director for Gov. Gary Herbert, mentioned the planned lawsuit when he was defending his office against possible budget cuts in a legislative hearing.
"We're preparing a big case involving access," Harja said.
Up to now, counties have pushed in court for their own rights to historic routes. But Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, said the time is right to push for statewide resolution to the long-festering dispute, given the loss wilderness groups suffered last week in a related appeals court case against Kane County.
"The timing is absolutely appropriate," Noel said.
Responding to a fiscal analyst's suggestion that the Governor's Public Lands Policy Coordination Office could be phased out, Harja said it instead needs more attorneys to battle federal land-use rules.
"The BLM is restricting access everywhere," he said.
Asked later in an interview, Harja said the lawsuit will involve 35 road segments in about 14 corridors statewide, including well-known routes such as the Snake Valley Road and the Pony Express Route in Utah's west desert. (His office is preparing a cost estimate for the court challenge.)
The idea behind the lawsuit is to "advance the ball" on nearly 3,000 routes for which the state has requested title but the Bureau of Land Management has not acted. If it works, he said, more suits will follow.
Noel said he is confident in Utah's claims. "We're going to put hundreds, if not thousands, of roads on the books," he said.
Efforts to reach BLM officials in Utah were unsuccessful Wednesday. Interior Department officials typically have not commented on litigation.
At issue is the 19th-century Revised Statute 2477, by which Congress aimed to encourage development by handing routes across public lands to local jurisdictions. That law was repealed in 1976, when Congress decided to retain most remaining public lands and created the BLM, though claims that predated 1976 were considered valid. Environmentalists and counties have since clashed about what constitutes a road and a valid claim.
San Juan County Commissioner Bruce Adams hopes the state will prevail. His county maintains 2,700 miles of disputed roads that he said are important to its economy.
"They are roads," Adams said, "that we consider have multiple uses: ranching, recreation, mineral extraction, scenic, just about anything that you can think of."
Last week the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that The Wilderness Society and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance had no standing to challenge Kane County's assertion that routes closed by the BLM were county routes open to all-terrain vehicles.
That case involved the county's posting of signs opening the routes. Wilderness advocates said it doesn't change the fact that counties and states must prove their claims to roads.
Noel characterized the roads dispute as a wilderness issue because wildlands generally must contain 5,000 acres of roadless area to qualify for wilderness protection.
Wilderness Society policy adviser Anne Merwin acknowledged the wilderness component to the legal battles, but said what's most important is that local governments follow proper procedure and prove their claims.
"Certainly roads could diminish wilderness characteristics," she said, "but we also recognize that there probably are valid RS2477 roads out there."
Herbert has committed to a compromise process with environmentalists to determine which RS2477 claims in Iron County are legitimate, but SUWA staff attorney Heidi McIntosh said the governor's support of a new lawsuit appears to reverse his collaborative approach.
Herbert spokeswoman Ally Isom did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment.