The US federal government has seized one third of
the US landmass. They US Constitution forbids the federal government to own
land beyond what it needs to operate. This land grab started in 1872 with the
establishment of Yellowstone National Park.
No Constitutional Amendments have ever been ratified by the States to
allow this expansion of the federal government’s “enumerated powers”.
Trump to visit Utah on Monday to announce his plans
to shrink Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, by Juliet
Eilperin, 11/29/17, Washington
Post
This post has been updated.
President Trump will
travel to Utah on Monday to lay out his plans to cut the size of Bears
Ears and Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, according to individuals briefed on the
matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been formally
announced.
Democratic presidents
established the two national monuments in southern Utah under the 1906
Antiquities Act, and both of them have generated considerable
controversy. Barack Obama last December established Bears Ears, a
1.35-million-acre expanse that is home to tens of thousands of ancestral Pueblo
archaeological sites, while Bill Clinton designated the nearly
1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996.
Interior Secretary
Ryan Zinke recommended
scaling back both monuments,
along with several others, as part of a report he delivered to the White House
in August. Since that time, White House officials have been working with staff
at Interior and the Justice department to draft proclamations that they think
have the best chance of withstanding an inevitable court challenge from
conservation and tribal groups, according to a senior administration official. White House
spokeswoman Kelly Love said in an email Tuesday that she had “no announcements
at this time” to make about the president’s travel plans to Utah.
While administration
officials have not announced how much Trump plans to reduce either monument,
they have privately indicated he intends to shave hundreds of thousands of
acres off both. Trump signed
an executive order in April instructing Zinke to scrutinize any national monument larger
than 100,000 acres that has been established in the last 21 years, saying at
the time his administration would “end these abuses and return control to the
people, the people of all of the states, the people of the United States.”
The president will
reduce Bears Ears by more than 1 million acres, Interior officials
have informed multiple individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they were not authorized to speak on the record. And Ron Dean, an
aide to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), testified before the Utah Legislature’s
Commission for the Stewardship of Public Lands this month that “Grand Staircase
will probably be somewhere between 700,000 acres and 1.2 million” under the
revised designation.
State and local officials,
nearly all of whom are Republicans, fought the designation of Bears Ears as a
national monument and lobbied the Trump administration to either rescind it
altogether or scale it back significantly.
“We’re extremely
grateful for the president’s visit, and the [Interior] Secretary’s work that
led up to this visit,” said San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman (R) in
an interview Tuesday. “We feel like we’ve been listened to, and that means a
lot to us.”
Trump does not intend
to visit the monuments themselves, individuals briefed on the plans said, but
will instead travel to Salt Lake City.
Environmentalists
quickly decried the move to shrink the monuments, and vowed to
block it through litigation.
“This illegal action
will cement Trump’s legacy as one of the worst presidents in modern history,”
said Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the advocacy group Center
for Biological Diversity. “Trump has no clue how much people love these sacred
and irreplaceable landscapes, but he’s about to find out. He’s shown his blatant
disregard for public lands, Native Americans and the law. We look forward to
seeing him in court.”
Trump’s effort to cut
Grand Staircase-Escalante may face a serious legal obstacle because Congress
passed legislation in 1998 that ratified a land exchange between the federal
government and Utah as part of the monument’s designation and modified its
boundaries slightly. The federal land that Utah acquired has generated hundreds
of millions of dollars in state revenue over the past two decades, including $1.5
million in monthly royalties from coal bed methane development for more than 10
years.
The push to scale back
the monuments has sparked opposition even from those conservation groups that
sought to work with Zinke at the outset of his tenure.
The Nature
Conservancy is the largest private landowner within Bears Ears, and its
staff took the secretary on a tour of its property when he visited the monument
this summer. In a statement Tuesday, Conservancy President and Chief Executive
Mark Tercek said that “we do not support modifying any national monument
designations” and that Bears Ears “should remain as is.”
“Bears Ears National
Monument was established after Congress failed to protect the area through
legislative means,” Tercek said. “It is now time to move forward to develop and
implement the management plan called for by the original Bears Ears
proclamation. This path forward serves the best interests of this resource and
the nation.”
Backcountry Hunters
& Anglers President Land Tawney, who had supported Zinke’s
confirmation, said he and Trump were defying the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt,
the Republican president who ushered the Antiquities Act into law.
“Public lands
sportsmen and women already have made clear our position: We will not stand for
this sellout to industry. An attack on one monument is an attack on them all.”
The administration is
in the process of drafting other proclamations under the Antiquities Act that
would alter the size of some national monuments and change the way others are
managed. Those proclamations will be issued over a period of several weeks
following the Utah trip, a senior administration official said.
San Juan County
Commission Chairman Bruce Adams said in an interview Tuesday that changing the
size of Bears Ears was only “half the race,” because he and others want
Congress to limit the president’s authority to designate protections on federal
land under the Antiquities Act.
Adams noted that more
than half of the county’s land is federally owned and another quarter is made
up of Navajo reservation land, thereby restraining local officials’ ability
to raise money through private property taxes.
“We don’t want to have
to go down this road every four years, in San Juan County or in the state of
Utah,” Adams said. “We’re challenged with providing services for 5 million
acres, whether we get revenue from those 5 million acres or not.”
Comments
American
Communists, including those at the Washington Post, will view this review of
federal lands as contrary to their goal to have the federal government own
everything. They will incite their
American Indian cohorts to protest against this initiative in Utah.
Trump is
responding to unnecessary federal overreach and expense in every part of the
federal budget and this land grab scam is part of that effort to reduce the
federal government footprint.
The
“federal lands” scam has always been justified as “conservation” with the right
emotional component to get lots of “right-brainers” to demand that we need to
“preserve” the wilderness. They want the federal government to continue to add
wildlife refuges and wilderness areas. But these sites are underutilized and
most Americans can’t afford to visit them.
In
addition, our annual forest fire festival needs to end by enlisting timber
companies and farmers and ranchers to occupy the “fire breaks” next to all
burnable land that borders these federal lands. At the same time, zoning
residential development in many of these areas needs to be tightened.
UN Agenda
21 implementation in the US included the initiation of the “Wilding Project”,
designed to remove the US population to “mega-cities” and returning 95% of the US
landmass to become “wildlife preserves”. These need to be abandoned. We already have wild animals wandering into
the suburbs in developments bordering these federal lands and homeowners are
not allowed to defend themselves.
This land
belonged to the States and to those who held title to the land and the federal
government stole it. The voters who actually live near this land in these Western
States seem to support having the federal government out of the picture and
prefer to be able to take care of this land themselves. Much of this land has
been restricted due to lack of infrastructure and State control can change all
that. The federal government doesn’t have the funds to reverse the damage done
by UN Agenda 21 implementation.
When a
country is in debt, it needs to go to work to produce whatever is in
demand. For the US, this includes fossil
fuels like oil and natural gas. We also
have things to mine like coal and minerals. These federal lands have been “off
limits”
and that
needs to change.
Finally,
we finally have an Interior Secretary that can see that the expense of
maintaining one third of the US landmass is unsustainable.
Turning
federal lands over to the States will not result in the closure of all the
parks. These States want tourism and
will actually improve the parks to draw more visitors.
I trust
that Trump and his team will ensure that this process will solve the problems
associated with this badly needed reform. Hunters will get to hunt.
Tree-huggers will get to visit. Archeologists will get to dig. Forest fires
will be contained. Communists will go nuts seeing their 45 goals being
reversed.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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