Gov. Spencer Cox signed a deal Thursday with the U.S. Forest Service that, the parties said, will give Utah a seat at the table in managing more than 8 million acres of national forests while furthering the Trump Administration’s goal of increasing timber production on the land.
“This will be better in every single way for our lands,” Cox said. “It’s not just going to make them better for the people but make them better for the conservation we believe in.”
Cox said the agreement does not change the ownership of the forests or limit the normal environmental review for projects, but it does enable the state to “combine capacity, funding and expertise” to make the planning process more effective and efficient.
“It’s more than a partnership. It’s a friendship,” said U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz. “This isn’t just about asking for input in the process. This is having a seat at the table, side by side, working through these projects together.”
Schultz said that President Donald Trump has ordered increased timber production from the national forests. The agency is projecting a 25% increase in timber production over the next four years and a reduction of imports from Canada.
(Robert Gehrke | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz sign an agreement that will expand Utah's input in managing more than 8 million acres of national forests in the state.
Last June, the Trump administration announced it was rescinding the Roadless Rule, which dates back to 2001 and protected 58 million acres of forest land from road construction and logging. About 4 million of those acres are in Utah.
Environmental groups said in a joint statement that the Utah agreement sets the stage for a drastic expansion of commercial logging, as well as mineral extraction and grazing, while reducing the oversight and public input.
It lays the groundwork, they said, for the state to attempt to take control of federal lands.
“This agreement strips federal protections, shuts the public out of decision-making and puts Utah’s old-growth forests directly on the chopping block,” said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The American people will see this latest scheme for what it is, a backdoor push to privatize our public lands.”
The Utah partnership is a model, Schultz said, that the service wants to reproduce across the country. Similar, albeit more limited, stewardship agreements have been signed with governors in Montana and Idaho.
Utah has had a Shared Stewardship Partnership with the Forest Service in place since 2019, but Joel Ferry, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, said the previous agreement only dealt with timber and wildfire management.
The new partnership goes further and takes a more “holistic” approach, he said, giving the state and counties more say when it comes to planning and implementing watershed restoration, grazing and recreation projects like trails and campgrounds.
There are no specific projects identified in the agreement. Instead, Ferry said it will let the state help provide its insight on projects it believes could be beneficial early in the process, rather than providing comment on the backend.
For example, Ferry referenced campgrounds near Flaming Gorge that are owned by the forest service, but are dilapidated and overcrowded.
“Could we, as a state, step in and say, ‘Hey, we’re really good at managing campgrounds. Let us take these over and help manage those and we can provide a better opportunity to people that want to go up there and spend time with their families and recreate,’” Ferry said.
The state could also help provide funding and labor for the collaborative projects.
Garfield County Commissioner Leland Pollock said “I don’t think anybody knows yet” how the agreement will change forest management, “But it’s a shared goal, finally, to start cleaning up the forests. I mean, nobody likes these catastrophic fires.”
“I want to stress, we are not going to do clear-cutting. We are going to do thinning, and there’s a big difference,” he said. “[Environmentalists] have thought in the past that we’re just going to go out and rape the land. No. We’re going to make the land better.”
The environmental groups see the situation differently.
“The Shared Stewardship Agreement is nothing more than a sneaky way to clearcut roadless areas in National Forests in Utah,” said Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. “Roadless areas provide clean drinking water and function as biological strongholds for populations of threatened and endangered species.”