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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A decade after President Clinton shocked and angered Utah politicians by creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a federal appeals court on Monday said opponents had no standing to challenge the decision.
A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Utah judge's decision to throw out the lawsuit filed by Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation.
The foundation's 1997 suit had been consolidated with a suit filed nine months earlier by the Utah Association of Counties, which didn't join the appeal, and the state Schools and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, which dropped out before the appeal was filed.
"Because we conclude that (Mountain States Legal Foundation) lacked standing to bring this suit, we dismiss the appeal," appellate judges David M. Ebel, Paul J. Kelly and Stephanie Seymour wrote in a decision released late Monday.
The judges said the legal foundation couldn't produce a person who could show he was harmed by Clinton's designation of the 1.9 million-acre monument, which opponents called an abuse of the president's discretion under the 1906 Antiquities Act.
The Mountain States Legal Foundation cited the case of Don Wood, owner of Southwest Stone, who for 20 years mined alabaster from land that later became the monument.
In 1998, the Bureau of Land Management voided Southwest Stone's mining claims for failing to comply with annual filing requirements. He could not renew those claims because the monument had been designated two years earlier.
But the appeals court said Wood's alleged injury did not occur until a year after the lawsuit was brought, while standing is determined by an injury that coincides with the filing of a suit.
That meant the Mountain States Legal Foundation could not meet a legal requirement showing it had a stake in Clinton's designation.
The appeals judges upheld a ruling more than two years ago by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson in Utah, who rejected claims that Clinton had violated a law that has let presidents since Theodore Roosevelt unilaterally create national monuments to preserve the nation's ancient cultural sites or geologic treasures.
The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument has both features and a rich trove of dinosaur fossils.
Clinton's surprise designation came during a campaign swing of the West, less than two months before his 1996 election to a second term. Avoiding Utah, one of the nation's most Republican states, he made the announcement from Arizona's Grand Canyon, 70 miles south of the monument he was creating.
U.S. attorneys and Stephen Bloch, a lawyer for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said no court ever examined a president's motives in creating a monument. And they said that despite repeated legal challenges, no monument designation has ever been overturned.
Clinton went on to designate six other monuments in 2000 before leaving office.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
