WASHINGTON COUNTY, Utah — Utah Representatives John Curtis and Celeste Maloy hosted a subcommittee "field hearing" at Sand Hollow's Rock Bowl Monday afternoon. Joined by fellow congressman Blake Moore, the hearing was intended to call attention to what is considered "federal overreach" when it comes to the management of public lands.
"In order to do things like planned roads, we have to go through federal processes," Maloy said. "The federal processes are so broken and so onerous that these are decades-long processes when they should be months-long processes."
Some activists say the time and location of the subcommittee hearing was a deliberate ploy to exclude opposing voices.
"This hearing was announced about only one week ago," says Holly Snow Canada, executive director of Conserve Southwest Utah. "It's being held in the middle of the workday, during the hottest part of the day.... at a location that's about a half an hour drive from St. George."
Other critics also noted a lack of comment from members of Utah's indigenous tribes residing in the area.
"There was no one on that stage here from the Shivwits Band," says Kya Marienfield, a wild lands attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "There was nobody from local tribes or tribes with an interest in the area."
One point of contention is a proposal to build a four-lane highway that would run through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area. Critics say the proposal would threaten local wildlife, such as the Mojave Desert Tortoise, as well as set a dangerous precedent when it comes to the management of federal land.
"The national conservation area was designated to protect cultural resources, recreation, and importantly, the habitat for the endangered Mojave Desert Tortoise," says Marienfield. "Those lands... are specifically designated for use as conservation parcels, and those parcels were specifically designated and purchased by Congress with its appropriations power to conserve [the] tortoise habitat... that's something that I think was left out of the conversation."
Maloy argues that if it wasn't for the proposal for the highway, the conservation area wouldn't even have been designated in the first place.
"There would be no National Conservation Area if there hadn't been the negotiations for the road," says Maloy. "Now, we have, 20 years later, people who have forgotten that... talking about how it would be a horrible precedent to build a road through a national conservation area."
Back on April 18, the Bureau of Land Management announced an update to its Public Lands Rule, originally proposed in 2023. According to the official press release, the final rule directs the BLM to manage public lands in accordance with the fundamentals of land health, clarifies who can obtain a restoration or mitigation lease on federal lands, and further clarifies designations and management for Areas of Critical Environmental Concern.
The rule is set to go into effect within 30 days of its publication in the Federal Register.
