Representatives of indigenous tribes and conservation groups are voicing concern about an effort to eliminate the resource management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.
On Wednesday, two Utah legislators introduced in Congress a joint resolution of disapproval to undo the monument’s RMP using the Congressional Review Act.
The move could have ramifications for other national monuments.
Rep. Celeste Maloy, one of the legislators, said in a press release that the resolution, if passed, will “reject the Biden administration’s 2025 RMP and restore the 2020 plan.” The release says the monument’s footprint would be unchanged.
"The 2025 Biden RMP was written without the people it affects most having any real seat at the table,” said Maloy in her press release.
The release says, “The 2025 Biden RMP was developed with little to no meaningful input from local leaders, county governments, or the people who live and work in the region. It was opposed by virtually every local elected official in the area.”
Sen. Mike Lee, a longtime advocate for selling off public lands, introduced the resolution in the Senate.
A member of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition, Autumn Gillard, told KSJD a concern for her is that the approved 2025 plan was developed by the Bureau of Land Management with a great deal of consultation with the five tribes in the coalition. The 2020 plan was not.
“There wasn’t a lot of communication happening with the coalition because it was established in 2019,” she said. “In 2020 they would have already gone through their consultation process.”
The Inter-Tribal Coalition is composed of representatives from the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, Zuni Tribe, Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. They work collectively to ensure tribal voices and perspectives are meaningfully included in the monument’s management, according to their website.
In a Jan. 22 press release, the coalition said its members “strongly oppose any attempt to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the current Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Resource Management Plan. Members of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition call on members of Congress to protect Grand Staircase.”
“We’re still fighting the same fight as our ancestors,” said Malcolm Lehi of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in a March 4 press release that says he and others were speaking as individuals, not for the coalition.
“Utahns include Tribal Nations,” said Davina Smith-Idjesa of the Navajo Nation in the same press release. “We are part of this state’s history, present, and future. Undermining Tribal collaboration undercuts trust, weakens public land management, and threatens the integrity of monuments nationwide.”
Gillard told KSJD if the 2025 plan is scrapped, there is no guarantee the 2020 plan would take its place.
“We have seen a lot of information claiming that after the CRA process it would revert to the 2020 given plan, but that is not a definite,” she said.
“Anything could happen because we are going into uncharted territory. We don’t know what will happen to our ancestral lands.”
The legal director for the nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Steve Bloch, agreed.
In a phone interview with KSJD, he said, “There is not a straight line between, if you undo the 2025 plan, you take management back to 2020. It’s not like flipping a switch.”
Gillard said the move could mean the monument would lose significant protections around cultural sites, opening them to vandalism and looting.
If there are concerns about aspects of the RMP, she said, “the appropriate action is amending, not eliminating, the plan. That cuts tribal voices out and the voices of local communities and the process that we are granted as American citizens. It really leaves this void open that we don’t know what could happen next.”
Gillard and Bloch disagreed with Maloy’s statement that local voices were ignored in the creation of the 2025 plan.
“The process the Bureau of Land Management held to create this resource management plan was done through a process that hears all voices,” Gillard said. “The completed plan is a collection of all of those comments that were part of that process, not just the tribes’.
“One thing I found interesting is it actually favors ranchers and locals. It’s about 1.87 million acres in size and 1.7 million of those are open to grazing – about 93 percent.”
Bloch said a fact sheet Maloy has disseminated saying that livestock-grazing has been restricted and target-shooting banned on the monument is wrong, and the vast majority of the monument is open to both activities.
“I think it boils down to, they didn’t get literally everything they wanted in the plan and now they’re trying to break it down,” he said.
“It’s a balancing act. That’s the way these plans work.”
The Congressional Review Act gives Congress the authority to review and overturn regulations issued by federal agencies such as the BLM or Forest Service. Since 2016, the act, which was rarely utilized before that, has been used aggressively.
In 2017, the General Accounting Office decided that resource management plans qualify as “rules” that can be overturned under the act. They had not been regarded as rules before.
So far, a half-dozen management plans have been undone in states including Alaska, Wyoming, and North Dakota
However, if the joint resolution passes Congress, this would be the first time the act has been used to undo management of a national monument.
Gillard said it doesn’t make sense that if the 2025 plan is removed, the 2020 plan would be acceptable.
“It’s a conflict to say the 2025 RMP is a set of rules but not the 2020 one,” she said. “If it’s an overreach on the government’s part, wouldn’t the 2020 plan also be an overreach since it’s also a plan?”
The 1.9-million-acre national monument was established by presidential proclamation by Bill Clinton in 1996. Its supporters say the BLM-managed monument is a vital wildlife corridor, a haven for some 600 species of native bees, home to flora and fauna present nowhere else, and also home to thousands of indigenous and cultural sites as well as a major paleontological site.
In 2017, President Trump downsized the monument by about half, but in 2021, President Biden restored it to its original size.
Bloch said the 2020 plan was based on the proclamation in place at the time, which was the 2017 proclamation that removed monument status from half the acreage.
If the 2020 plan should be reinstated, he said, “one million acres of the national monument generally across the board would be managed to a lower standard than the way the Clinton or Biden proclamations would manage it, and the 900,000 acres would instead be managed for oil and gas leasing, mineral leasing for things like coal, off-road vehicle use, and rights-of-way for utilities.”
Bloch told KSJD if Congress passes this resolution, management plans for more national monuments could be undone.
“What happens in Utah rarely stays in Utah,” he said.
National monuments such as Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado, Bears Ears in Utah, and Vermilion Cliffs or Sonoran Desert in Arizona could soon have their management plans thrown out, Bloch said.
The CRA forbids the agency in charge from creating a new management plan that is substantially similar to the one that was eliminated. How long that prohibition lasts is unknown, Bloch said.
“On its face, it takes another act of Congress” to restore a plan, he said. “And it’s difficult to get Congress to agree to anything.”
Like Gillard, he said if people have problems with a plan, the right way to deal with that is to try to amend it or instruct the agency to write a new plan, “not to undo plans and salt the earth behind them.”
Bloch said, “We feel it’s really important to draw the line in the sand here.”
