Trust Lands Administration Challenges Monument
23-Jun-1997
The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration will file an action in the United States District Court for the District of Utah seeking to prohibit the United States Department of Interior from implementing changes in federal land use practices based upon President Clinton's September 1996 proclamation designating 1.7 million acres of federal lands in southern Utah as the Grand Staircase -- Escalante National Monument. The timing of this week's filing is nine months and one week after the president's statement in his monument proclamation that the monument "...will not come at the expense of Utah's children..." The Trust Lands Administration believes that the Department of Interior has chosen to ignore the President's promises to protect Utah's schoolchildren from the effects of the monument through speedy and fair exchanges of school trust lands out of the monument. Approximately 176,000 acres of school trust lands, and an additional 25,000 acres of trust mineral lands, lie scattered within the exterior boundaries of the monument. Historic income from trust lands within the monument boundary has been in excess of $100,000 per year. Although these trust lands were technically not covered by the monument proclamation, the withdrawal of surrounding federal lands drastically impacts the use of state trust lands by making large scale mineral development -- particularly for coal and natural gas -- much more difficult. Since the monument designation, several imminent projects that would have brought millions of dollars in additional bonus and royalty income to the Permanent School Fund have been canceled. The Trust Lands Administration believes that the creation of the monument by a secretive group of federal appointees and bureaucrats, without planning, public input or notice to those most affected, violated the National Environmental Policy Act, and went far beyond the authority granted to the President by the Antiquities Act of 1906, the law used by the president to justify his action. We also believe that the withdrawal of mineral lands within the monument from mineral leasing and entry without notice to Congress violates the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act. As a matter of policy, the lack of public input prior to the proclamation of the monument is disturbing to us and many others affected by the monument. The Antiquities Act, used appropriately, was the original basis for a number of very special national parks and protected areas in Utah and elsewhere. But our research indicates that other presidents have used the Antiquities Act judiciously and only after consultation with a broad range of local and state leaders. In this instance, the president has never visited nor even seen the lands in question, and internal federal documents we have obtained indicate that special priority was given to keeping the proposed monument secret from Utah officials, including the Trust Lands Administration. When Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906, no one contemplated that a single White House staffer, without accountability or consultation, would one day have the power to decide that 62 billion tons of coal would be forever off limits to society, or to eliminate economic development and human influence in an area of land almost as large as the state of Connecticut. In this situation, the Trust Lands Administration believes that it is appropriate under our system of laws to ask the judicial branch of government to resolve whether the president and executive branch exceeded the power and authority granted them under the Antiquities Act, and whether these actions must follow other laws -- particularly the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act -- enacted since 1906.