Salt Lake City News

KANE COUNTY BACK IN THE NEWS

Score One for the Right to Not Have Cows

By Bill Schneider, 2-01-06

Back in October, I wrote about Kane County, Utah, which has more than its share of the most scenic landscape in the world within its boundaries, not knowing how good it had it. The county commission tried to open large tracts of fragile country to rock crawlers and ATVs and destroy its economic golden goose, but lost in court.

About the same time, a nonprofit organization called Grand Canyon Trust decided to do something about livestock grazing within the newly created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument because it harmed the delicate desert environment. But they didn’t sue. Instead, they did it the old-fashioned way that has worked so well for capitalists for centuries. They bought it, spending $1.5 million to purchase about 350,000 acres of grazing allotments.

That started back in 1999 and continued until 2001 when the Trust planned to start retiring the grazing allotments. If a rancher or other private commercial entity would have purchased the grazing permits and planned to continue running cows on them, the local commissioners would have no doubt approved, but a bunch of greens taking cows out of the national monument? No way! In an ironic reversal of the normal way, the government sued the environmentalists, claiming the Trust didn’t have the standing to own the allotments. Kane county Commission (along with adjoining Garfield County commissioners) apparently didn’t want the fragile landscape to recover from overgrazing and took it to court.

And lost again. On January 27, after four years of deliberation, an administrative law judge from the Bureau of Land Management's Office of Hearings and Appeals sided with Grand Canyon Trust.

According to a press release on the Trust’s website, Kane and Garfield counties (along with individual ranchers solicited into the proceedings by the counties) had argued that the BLM should never have transferred the permits because, in their view, the nonprofit lacked the intention to graze and was not qualified to hold the permits because it wasn’t in the livestock business (even though the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that conservation groups can hold permits subject to the same rules as everyone else). The plaintiffs also argued that new permit owners had not grazed the permits so they should be taken away even though the BLM had told the Trust and other permittees not to graze because of the extreme drought.

Judge James Hefferman rejected all of these arguments and ruled in the Trust's favor. In his ruling, Heffernan stated that there is no statutory language which imposes an "intent to graze test" on applicants or stipulates that they must be a grazing entity. And he upheld the agency's ability to close off "areas of environmental concern" under its multiple use mandate.

"It was a long time coming," Grand Canyon Trust Executive Director Bill Hedden was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune, “but this ruling shows that the process we used in working with the BLM, asking them to perform critical environmental assessments to determine how much grazing there should be, was the proper way to go. The counties have had their day in court. They've spent a lot of taxpayer money on this. It's time to move on."

"We're extremely pleased with this ruling," added David Hunsaker, manager of the monument.

At one point during the legal battle, the Trust actually offered to relinquish its grazing permits if the BLM ordered them closed as part of its land-use plan. But with other permit applicants lining up to acquire those permits, Hedden told the agency the Trust would purchase cattle and begin grazing them if the BLM declared the permits open. When the agency did this, the environmental group withdrew the relinquishment offer and purchased a minimal number of cattle to graze the permits.

Now, in the environmental movement, you just don’t see that every day—a green group grazing cows in a national monument to protect it from even more grazing.

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