Dear HCN,
When the U.S. Department
of the Interior recently released regulations that would establish
procedures for state and local governments to claim road
rights-of-way under the old RS 2477 law (HCN, 8/22/94), there was
an immediate outcry from Utah’s Sen. Bob Bennett, who said the
proposed rules constituted “… a threat to the economy of
virtually every county in the state.”
As a
member of the governing council of southeast Utah’s Grand County, I
guess I know something about the economy down here, and while I
agree threats exist, I don’t agree lack of roads is the
problem.
Grand County is 95 percent public land;
huge tracts are administered by the BLM, the National Park Service,
the Forest Service, and the state of Utah; and most of this
nationwide RS 2477 controversy arose in southern Utah where
everybody knows we take our roads seriously. So if anyone is going
to feel the effect of the proposed rules, we are. But we all know
that there is a thinly disguised issue here that nobody wants to
talk about – the politics of wilderness.
Claim a
road, stop a wilderness. If we can upgrade a cattle track to a
mining road, and then to a four-wheel drive/mountain bike
recreation route, and then to a “highway,” and we can show cattle
tracks all over Grand County, then there are no roadless areas, and
there is no wilderness. Presto. The anti-wilderness, sagebrush
rebellion groups have found their spotted
owls.
Rural Utah is faced with many problems.
Hard-rock mining is defunct. Agriculture gets a little more
marginal every year. Here in Moab, tourism has become the mainstay
of our economy, but it has brought with it new problems of growth
management, low-paying jobs with no low-cost housing, inadequate
services.
Our economic challenges will not be
resolved unless Congress and the state of Utah recognize that we
can’t fund by ourselves all of the public needs of a national
playground – needs like landfills, health care, sewer and water
systems, and land-use planning.
Here’s my
challenge to the Utah congressional delegation: Wilderness per se
is politically unpopular in southern Utah, so designated wilderness
has been stymied. On the other hand, Utah’s state and federal
legislative representatives can’t seem to secure adequate funding
to help us keep Grand County’s federal-lands playground solvent.
Why not give in to the current Utah wilderness proposals that have
nationwide support in return for more funding for sparsely
populated gateway communities like Moab?
Make a
deal in Congress. The real threat to our economy is not Interior’s
proposed rules nor is it designated wilderness. It’s the threat of
a broken-down county hospital because local funding can’t satisfy
all the needs of the mushrooming tourism
boom.
Charlie
Peterson
Moab, Utah
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The real threat in Utah.
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