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BLANDING — Competing stakeholders are hoping federal agencies will listen to them after voicing concerns about the future of southeastern Utah’s national monuments.
The Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies held the first of four public hearings Monday night in Blanding’s San Juan High School.
The input will help determine new management plans for the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
President Donald Trump drastically cut their sizes in December.
Cattle Rancher Zeb Dalton pleaded with Bureau of Land Management officials to “leave the grazing allotments open, and leave us our access to cleaner ponds and maintaining our wells for clean water sources for our cows.”
“If we don’t have water,” Dalton added, “we can’t use the grass, even if there’s grass there.”
He wants the last 15 percent of Bears Ears National Monument to disappear. Preservationists want all 1.35 million acres back.
Neighbor Shawn Begaye told them teaching visitors to respect the land won’t work.
“We’ve had people, in Utah’s state parks, vandalize stuff,” Begaye said. “You can do all of the education you want, but people are going to do dumb things.”
Begaye referred to men knocking over ancient rock formations at Goblin Valley State Park in 2013. They got probation.
Some out-of-state high school students drove 800 miles to Blanding for the first public hearing on the new Bears Ears as part of fact-finding field trip.
Peyton Broll, 15, said she had information overload from a bunch of people on all sides of the issue.
“I think you should always fact-check and not trust everything they say,” she said. “But everything is biased. They’re telling you their opinions, and they’re probably being pretty honest, but maybe they’re not.”
Her class from Lake Tahoe thought they wanted all 1.35-million acres of Bears Ears National Monument untouched to preserve archaeology and natural beauty.
Then, they met nearby uranium millers.
“They had some very interesting points, so that got me all thrown off,” said Kira Baker, 14. “I was like, totally, go for the monument. But now that I see the opposing view, I’m kind of back in between again.”
Baker and her classmates also learned about the politics that created, and shrank, the sizes of the two national monuments.
The teens and the adults in Blanding considered miners, drillers, ranchers, preservationists, archaeology, recreation and the money and politics tied to them.
The class plans a visit to Bears Ears on Wednesday.
Bears Ears now has two smaller sections totaling 202,000 acres, and Grand Staircase-Escalante has three, amounting to one million acres.
They used to be about 1.35 million and 1.8 million acres, respectively.
The BLM will take public comment online for new management plans through April 11 for Bears Ears, and April 13 for Grand Staircase-Escalante.
