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News Nugget

Utah is the latest Rocky Mountain state to consider this sticky question: Should it be legal for cyclists to run red lights—after, of course, they’ve slowed and looked for cars?

It’s legal in Idaho for cyclists to do exactly that at stop signs and has been since 1982. A similar law was on its way in Utah as well. Until the liability problem came up.

House Bill 91 failed on a tie vote in a House committee yesterday, with those lawmakers voting against it noting the liability problem. Rep. Tim Cosgrove says in today’s Salt Lake Tribune: “All things being equal, the burden of proof is on the motor vehicle operator because they’re required to carry liability insurance. So if something happens and someone’s hurt, they’re covered. Under this, bicyclists aren’t required to carry insurance.”

The bill would have, as it puts it, allowed cyclists to “after slowing to a reasonable speed and yielding the right-of-way if required, may cautiously make a turn or proceed through the intersection without stopping;”

Oregon was considering a similar law last year and Montana looked a “rolling-stop” bill in 2009 (see Bill Schneider’s piece on that bill here) but just like the Utah bill, it too died in committee. 

First Friday

NewWest.Net is proud to host Jazmine Raymond and her works this January at our downtown office.

We hope you can join us for an opening reception First Friday, January 8, from 5-8 p.m. at the NewWest.Net office at 415 N. Higgins Ave. in the alley behind the Old Post.

Raymond specializes in working with clay, paint, jewelry and wearable art.

She writes, “My medium is the sensory object.  I love contrast, texture, color, space and enjoy the balancing act of composition involving all elements. My current work always refers to my personal experience, usually directly external but always referencing the internal through the subject, and is often expressed through portraiture.”

News Bite

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests heard from a variety of stakeholders today on Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, including from four Montanans and one Idaho County Commissioner

It was the legislation’s first hearing since Tester introduced the bill, to much controversy, in July. The hearing lasted a little more than two hours and included remarks from Tester, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, Harris Sherman, the USDA’s Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment and Edwin Roberson, the Assistant Director for Renewable Resources and Planning at the Bureau of Land Management

During the third panel, the committee heard from Mike McGinley, commissioner from Beaverhead County in Montana, Ronald Hurt, a commissioner from Idaho’s Fremont County as well as Sherm Anderson from Sun Mountain Lumber, Tim Baker from the Montana Wilderness Association, Chris Wood from Trout Unlimited and Matthew Koehler, the executive director of the WildWest Institute who was testifying as a representative of the Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign, “a coalition of conservation organizations and citizens dedicated to wildlands protection, forest restoration and the sound long-term management of our public lands.”

You can watch the full hearing here and go here to download all the written testimony of the panelists, but below are a few snippets from those testimonies:

News Nugget

Scientists studying the the so-called “super plume” beneath the supervolcano that is Yellowstone National Park say the column of molten rock is at least 410 miles deep—20 percent deeper than researchers originally thought.

The revelation comes from new images collected by researchers at the University of Utah and recently published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research. Geophysicist Robert Smith, who led research, says the new information proves that the earth’s mantle beneath Yellowstone is in motion. 

News Nugget

The Obama Administration today announced that it will settle in the landmark class-action lawsuit against the Interior Department that alleged gross mismanagement of American Indian trust accounts. In a press conference, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric Holder said the settlement will mean $1.4 billion will be distributed to plaintiffs.

The government has also agreed to create a $2 billion fund that will offer new trustees, created by land being “fractioned” by being passed down from generation to generation cash payments for land that has been divided up in order to, as the Interior put it, “free up the land for the benefit of tribal communities.” That brings the total settlement up to $3.4 billion.

Cobell v. Salazar was first filed in 1996 on the grounds that the government mismanaged the trust accounts (involving royalties for grazing, oil and gas and timber, among others) of more than 300,000 Indians. Elouise Cobell, a Blackfeet and the lead plaintiff in the suit, told Indian Country Today that she is thankful the suit is finally coming to an end and that Indian Country especially appreciates the Obama Adminstration moving on the issue. Still, she said the settlement is “significantly less than the full accounting to with the class members are entitled.”

In a release, Salazar called the settlement “historic.”

“This is an historic, positive development for Indian country and a major step on the road to reconciliation following years of acrimonious litigation between trust beneficiaries and the United States,” Salazar said. “...This historic step will allow Interior to move forward and address the educational, law enforcement, and economic development challenges we face in Indian Country.”

Western Politics

Matthew Daly and Shannon Dininny of the Associated Press have a big story out today that uncovers a “vast entitlement” in the program most often referred to as county timber payments or as it was formerly know, the Secure Rural Schools and Self Determination Act.

The law was originally passed in 2000 as a way to help rural communities that were seeing dramatic drops in revenue from logging on federal lands, namely rural schools that heavily relied on that income. The act came after concern for in the 1990s for the spotted owl and other endangered species spurred a reduction in timber harvests. Total, the legislation has allocated more than $3 billion to counties. And, as the AP reports, Oregon, California, Washington, Idaho and Montana got the majority of that money—80 percent. Oregon alone got $2 billion.

When the Act came up for renewal again last fall, and especially after a Bush administration proposal that would have sold off public lands to pay for the program rose and then fell, Western congressional leaders, including Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Max Baucus pushed hard to extend the program, saying it was instrumental in keeping rural communities in their districts a live.

But, as Daly and Dininny discovered: “A four-year renewal of the law, passed last year, authorizes an additional $1.6 billion for the program through 2011 and shifts substantial sums to states where the spotted owl never flew. While money initially was based on historic logging levels, now any state with federal forests - even those with no history of logging - is eligible for millions in Forest Service dollars. Doling out all that taxpayer money is based less on logging losses than on the powerful reality of political clout.”

News Nugget

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today its decision that the black-tailed prairie dog, historically found in the West and Midwest, does not warrant endangered species protection.

An agency press release explained the decision this way:

“Cropland conversion, urbanization, energy development, and invasion of non-native species all occur within the historical range of the black-tailed prairie dog and will continue in the future.  However, with 283 million acres of available rangeland, it appears sufficient potential habitat still occurs within the range of the species in the U.S. Additionally, increasing population trends do not suggest these impacts are limiting factors for the species.”

The black-tailed prairie dog is historically found in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. The black-tailed prairie dog population is most often estimated by range instead of actual number of animals and the current estimate of habitat is about 2.4 million acres. Its historic range is 80-100 million acres, but the agency noted that while the black-tailed prairie dog’s habitat today is lower than the historic range, it’s still up significantly from the 364,000 acres the species populated in 1961.

News Nugget

Today’s news nugget comes from the Salt Lake Tribune which details 10 years of the TRAX commuter rail and how it will continue to shape the communities along the Wasatch Front.

María Villaseñor’s story starts at the very beginning, when TRAX was a big gamble, and a big controversy. Two managers at the Utah Transport Authority even recall days when protesters shouted at them, some carrying signs that read: “Light rail kills children.” Today, more than a million people ride TRAX each month.

There’s much to be learned from TRAX, including what not to do in the development of a light rail system, as the story points out. But, what’s really interesting about the tale of TRAX is how it’s shaping development along the Wasatch Front.

From Envision Utah’s planning director Gabe Epperson: “The suburbs are trying to serve residents wanting to get access. A lot of communities are changing city plans around existing or future TRAX stops. They’ve changed their zoning and created transit-oriented development zones around their stops.”

Read the whole story here.

News Nugget

In case you missed it: The New York Times this weekend looked at how the West’s forests are being managed as potential “carbon sinks,” specifically the fir forests of the Pacific Northwest.

From William Yardley’s piece:

Over the next 50 years or so, experts say, some forests could be cultivated to grow bigger, more resilient trees, potentially increasing their carbon storage by 50 percent and providing an important “bridge” to a time when the nation will theoretically have shifted away from greenhouse-gas producing fossil fuels.

But, some say all that carbon those forests sequester could be for naught if they all burn up, and how to manage forests with that in mind is a sticky issue. The piece sheds some light on the tricky balance that forest managers will have to strike in the next few decades to use the forests as “carbon sinks” while working with wildfire and while still providing wood products for a growing population. 

It’s an interesting piece. Read it here.

News Nugget

Once hailed as the Utah version of the posh Yellowstone Club, the Elk Meadows development near Beaver has followed a similar fate and is now on the auction block.

As the Salt Lake Tribune reported earlier this week, the development near Beaver, which was supposed to have all the amenities of the high-end resort market of earlier this decade: Jack Nicklaus golf course, private ski runs and extravagant second homes, was once worth $3.5 billion, but is now in an online auction with a suggested value of $5.15 million. But, the starting bid is $1 million. As Jodi Peterson notes on the High Country News Goat blog, (HCN, by the way, did a good story on the resort in 2008, which you can read here) in May, the Yellowstone Club was sold for $115 million.

The original developers, the Mount Holly Partners, filed for bankruptcy this summer, but in the face of objections from one of the resort’s investors, MHU Holdings of New York City, the bankruptcy was rejected and Mount Holly turned the property over in foreclosure proceedings.