MISSION STATEMENT
1. PROTECT THE RURAL ECONOMIES
OF ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO.
2. EDUCATE THE PUBLIC ON
THE ISSUES FACING RURAL ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO.
3. ORGANIZE AND ENCOURAGE
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT AND SUPPORT ON
ISSUES CONFRONTING FEDERAL LAND
USERS.
4. REINSTATE AND REINFORCE
THE INTEGRITY OF THE FEDERAL AND MULTI-USE POLICY.
5. MAINTAIN OR INCREASE THE
ECONOMIC BASE WHICH RESULTS FROM THE
MANAGEMENT OF OUR FEDERAL LANDS
INCLUDING EMPLOYMENT, PUBLIC
AND PRIVATE REVENUE, AND TAXES.
6. ESTABLISH, DEFINE AND
PROTECT THE VESTED RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS AND
INDUSTRIES HEAVILY DEPENDENT
UPON UTILIZING RESOURCES FROM FEDERAL
LANDS.
7. SEEK A PROACTIVE SOLUTION
TO COUNTY ECONOMIC PROBLEMS WHICH BOTH
PROTECTS AND ENHANCES PLANT AND
ANIMAL SPECIES LISTED AS THREATENED
OR ENDANGERED UNDER THE ENDANGERED
SPECIES ACT (ESA) AND, AT THE
SAME TIME, REDUCES THE NEGATIVE
EFFECTS OF ESA RESTRICTION ON STATE,
FEDERAL AND PRIVATE LAND USE
AND DEVELOPMENT.
8. SEEK TO ESTABLISH AN EQUITABLE
BALANCE OF WILDLIFE/LIVESTOCK FORAGE
ALLOCATION AND MANDATE MANAGEMENT
OF WILDLIFE NUMBERS IN
COMPLIANCE WITH THE SHARE OF
FORAGE WHICH IS ALLOCATED FOR WILDLIFE.
9. WORK TO PREVENT THE TAKING
OF VESTED PROPERTY RIGHTS BY STATE OR
FEDERAL REGULATORY AGENCIES WITHOUT
GUARANTEEING THE PAYMENT
OF JUST COMPENSATION.
10. SEEK TO ENFORCE PRESIDENTIAL
EXECUTIVE ORDER 12630 AT THE FEDERAL
LEVEL AND SEEK STATE
LEGISLATION PATTERNED AFTER THIS EXECUTIVE
ORDER.
11. ADDRESS TIMBER, MINING,
WILDLIFE AND GRAZING ISSUES ALONG WITH ANY
OTHER APPROPRIATE
MULTIPLE USE ISSUE ON FEDERAL LANDS BY OFFERING
SOUND TECHNICAL ADVICE
IN A PROFESSIONAL CAPACITY.
12. MONITOR THE IMPLEMENTATION
OF EXISTING REGULATIONS; I.E., THE ESA, AND
THE INTRODUCTION
OF NEW REGULATIONS WHICH WILL ULTIMATELY IMPACT
MANAGEMENT ON PRIVATE
AND FEDERAL LANDS AND VESTED PROPERTY RIGHTS.
____________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_8096902
Into the fray
Utah guv stakes a claim on roads
By Patty Henetz
The Salt Lake Tribune
01/28/2008
Employing a 2-year-old state law for the first time, the Governor's Office
is claiming ownership of roads that cross federal lands as a way to keep
them open to off-highway recreation and oil and gas drilling.
The maneuver, which relies on a bill sponsored by
Kanab Republican Rep. Mike Noel that passed during the 2003 and 2006 legislative
sessions, could be a tidy way to skirt federal law.
Or it could set up yet another expensive series of
courtroom fights and ratchet up the New West's already intractable civil
war over wilderness and access to some of Utah's most beautiful wildlands.
The state law allows counties to record the roads
on their master land documents. Federal agencies, organizations and
other members of the public have 60 days to protest the action in state
court. If no one protests, the county assumes ownership of the right
of way.
In its first action under the 2006 Noel bill, the
state's Public Lands Policy Coordination Office has sent a list of 60 Class
B roads to Box Elder County for recording, and will do the same with 23
more counties by mid-summer, said coordinator John Harja. Salt Lake,
Weber, Davis and Cache counties have opted out of the program, and Morgan
County doesn't have any affected public lands, he said.
"We're recording [our] belief we have a property interest,"
Harja said. "We are putting the [U.S. Bureau of Land Management]
and the rest of the world on notice."
Heidi McIntosh, conservation director for the Southern
Utah Wilderness Alliance and an attorney, expressed some wariness about
possible legal precedents the state's new efforts could set. During
2006 House floor debate, Rep. Jacki Buskupski, D-Salt Lake City, called
the bill an "open invitation to further litigation."
Glenn Carpenter, manager of the BLM's Salt Lake City
field office, acknowledged the arguments but wasn't keen to be drawn into
the politics of the state's action.
Carpenter was a defendant in a federal court case
filed by an OHV group, the Utah Shared Access Alliance, over his decision
to close portions of Box Elder County to OHVs in 1999 to protect critical
deer and sage grouse habitat. Shared Access Alliance, defeated in
district and appellate courts, tried again with the U.S. Supreme Court,
but the court refused the case.
Carpenter said he was aware of the 60-road list Harja's
office sent to Box Elder County in mid-December, but had no plans to protest.
Besides, he said, the U.S. government is sovereign. "We're bound by federal
law," he said.
For now, the lists focus on Class B roads, which are
graded, graveled, open to general use and generally noncontroversial. Harja
said he expected to have all the B roads by mid-summer, and then start on
Class D roads.
That's when hostilities between wilderness advocates,
energy developers and OHV users could erupt in court, McIntosh said.
Class D roads - which include recognizable two-tracks,
but also meandering livestock paths, abandoned pathways oil and gas drillers
once used for seismic exploration and even narrow trails across creeks
- are the real front lines in the access war, she said.
"People are going to be furious," McIntosh said. "What's
driving this is wilderness. That's something the counties have long tried
to fight."
Wilderness designation depends in part on the public
lands' roadlessness. In opposing wilderness, counties point to generations
of driving the disputed byways as a way to continue motorized access on federal
lands.
Road claims rest on Revised Statute 2477, a Civil
War-era mining law that granted rights of way across public land. Congress
repealed the law in 1976, but grandfathered in existing claims. In 2005,
a federal appeals court ruled that such ownership claims were dictated
by state law. In Utah, that means proving the road was in continual use
for 10 years prior to 1976.
The counties have gotten road-claim help from the
state, which through the now-defunct Constitutional Defense Council and
now the Public Lands Policy office, has spent $9.6 million since 2001 in
legal and other fees on road claims, according to Harja. The money, allocated
by the Legislature, comes from royalties paid on oil and gas drilling on
state land.
Even though public money has supported the Public
Lands office's information gathering, and even though the information is
being used in both federal lawsuits and the state claims on behalf of the
counties, Harja's office won't make the work public before the lists are
sent to the recorders. And under a confidentiality agreement crafted in
2000, participating counties are forbidden from sharing the information
with the public.
Such evidence was part of a federal lawsuit seeking
ownership of old roads across federal land in six rural counties that the
state recently withdrew.
Roger Fairbanks, the assistant attorney general who
oversees R.S. 2477 claims, said the state abandoned Utah v. United States
because the six Class B roads at issue in Beaver, Box Elder, Emery, Uintah,
Washington and Wayne counties weren't really threatened with closure.
SUWA agrees with the decision, but will continue to
fight the state's federal lawsuits to claim roads in Canyonlands National
Park, the San Rafael Swell and the Deep Creek Mountains.
Fairbanks said the state doesn't seek to bulldoze
the areas. "We don't want to destroy the environment," he said. "On the
other hand, we don't think roads should be closed."
In the west desert Deep Creek Mountains, Snake Valley
residents want to drive in Granite Canyon, where about a mile of the road
is in a wilderness study area near Ibahpah Creek. "All the locals want
to do is open the road to Camp Ethel," Fairbanks said.
--
Howard Hutchinson
Executive Director
Coalition of Arizona/New Mexico Counties
P.O. Box 125
Glenwood, New Mexico 88039
Phone 575-539-2709 Please Note New Area Code
aznmc@earthlink.net
"Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of
retaining another--too often ending in the loss of both." Tryon Edwards,1809-1894
"A principle cannot be compromised, for once compromised it is actually
abandoned and no principle exist." Christine Smith, December 13, 2007