How Utah could ramp up its fight over public lands

Utah leaders are seeking more money and power to help ramp up their fight over public lands.

From reducing Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments to more active management and logging in national forests, bills and funding requests moving through the Utah Legislature show lawmakers’ priorities for asserting more control over millions of acres of federal land in the state.

One resolution encourages Congress to consider land sales and exchanges within or next to cities, towns and population centers for the purpose of moderate-income housing.

“I think this harkens back to a time when we used to do these exchanges,” Rep. Doug Owens, D-Millcreek, said in the House Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environment Committee on Monday. “We used to be less polarized. We used to be more pragmatic, working across lines to do things that were obviously beneficial for the state.”

However, any public land transfer may upset some Utahns. “Moving public land, while well meaning, is coming at a time when there is a huge lack of trust” following Sen. Mike Lee’s public land sell-off bill last year, Kael Weston, former candidate for the U.S. House, told the committee.

HB546, introduced by Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, asserts that Utah has “legislative jurisdiction” over 96% of federal land in the state.

The bill “doesn’t have anything to do with the transfer of public lands,” Ivory, who was the bill sponsor of the Transfer of Public Lands Act, said during a committee hearing Monday. “It just has to do with better management and access, health and productivity of the land.”

But John Ruple, research professor at the University of Utah College of Law, said discussion over the bill indicated that it was part of Utah’s effort to exert more control over those lands.

“The bill is little more than pre-planning based on the state’s unflagging belief that federal public lands in Utah—lands that belong to all Americans—will someday be gifted to the state,” Ruple told The Tribune over email. “Utah wants nothing more than to be ready for that possibility.”

It’s possible the state aims to have structures to guide the management of federal lands “in the hopes that doing so will grease the skids for federal legislation to dispose of public lands,” Ruple added.

If that disposal does not happen, though, Ruple said that “one thing is legally indisputable: Our Nation’s Founders vested exclusive control over public lands in Congress, not with the states.”

Despite that, Ivory’s bill directs the state’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office to map “landscape-scale lands,” equal to or greater than 250,000 acres across the state, and identify “public nuisance” areas on the landscapes, such as forests with a high density of trees.

The wildfire debate

Ivory and county commissioners who spoke in support of the bill blamed the uptick in wildfires across the state on federal management of the forests.

“If we allow them to maintain or continue in a nuisance condition, it decimates the watershed for decades,” Ivory said during the committee meeting. “It devastates the habitat for decades. It incinerates wildlife, and that’s why we’re looking at those big, broad landscape scale lands.”

Sevier County Commissioner Greg Jensen was among several rural county leaders who spoke out in support of the bill. The Monroe Canyon Fire tore through his county last summer, burning around 74,000 acres.

“We want to make sure that the state is being managed in the right way so that these big, massive fires … don’t happen,” Jensen said.

Doug Tolman, policy manager for Save Our Canyons, told The Tribune that those concerns over wildfire risk, though, “should be addressed by partnerships and resources and funding for those federal land management agencies, not by baseless narratives that the state should and has control or jurisdiction over these lands.”

He called arguments linking federal management to increased wildfire risk “fear mongering,” noting that the state has cross-agency partnerships on forest management.

Federal and state agencies have worked to reduce wildfire risks in the area burned by the Monroe Canyon Fire for a decade, including thinning efforts, prescribed burns, and more, according to a video from the team that fought the fire last year.

Without collaboration among various state and federal agencies, the Monroe Canyon fire could have been even worse, Thomas Peterson, central area manager with the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, said in the video.

Following the money

Beyond bills, legislators have also requested additional funding for the state’s forest management and public land goals.

Rep. Carl Albrecht, R-Richfield, requested $900,000 for the Department of Natural Resources to “increase the pace and scale of active forest management on national forest lands in Utah.” The request form says the Legislature will know if the project succeeds if the state sees “measurable increases in the number and volume of timber sales … on national forest lands in Utah.”

It will also measure success by the number of federal environmental reviews completed and faster project timelines than usual.

Utah will have a greater role on the more than 8 million acres of national forest lands in the state after signing a deal with the U.S. Forest Service earlier this year. The agreement supports Trump’s executive order to expand timber production, according to the Forest Service.

The appropriations subcommittee voted to support the request and ranked it as fifth on its priority list for new funds.

Two other requests further down on the appropriations subcommittee’s list would give the Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office an additional $3 million — $1.5 million per request — to further the states’ public lands priorities.

A funding request from Sen. Keven Stratton, R-Orem, lists benchmarks for the state’s success, including:

Most items on the list include a deadline of Jan. 20, 2029 — the end of President Donald Trump’s presidency — and include coordination with the Trump administration.

The other request for the office would support ongoing litigation over RS 2477 — a statute from an 1866 mining law that allowed for the construction of roads across public lands.

That statute was repealed in 1976 when Congress enacted the law that set up the Bureau of Land Management’s current governing framework. Roads that were in use prior to then, though, were exempt, and the state has filed dozens of lawsuits to secure access.

Those two priorities aren’t new but rather a continuation of the states’ ongoing public land efforts, Dillon Hoyt, deputy director of the office, told The Tribune last week. He also said his office doesn’t know how much, if any, money they’ll actually get.

The Legislature will vote on the final appropriations bills by the end of the session on March 6. Then Gov. Spencer Cox will have 20 days to sign or veto bills.