Utahns’ memories not that short

By Christian Probasco, 6-02-10

Rural Utahns are awaiting the results from a second request for records from the Obama Administration regarding an inventory of 13 million acres of public and private lands in 11 Western states. The inventory’s purpose was to determine the studied lands’ qualifications as future national monuments.

Representatives Doc Hastings (R-Wash) and Rob Bishop (R-Utah) introduced a second resolution calling on the Department of Interior (DOI) to release the whole text of a secret internal memo regarding the inventory. Pages 15-21 were leaked to Bishop, but the DOI has continued to withhold pages 1-14 and all pages beyond 21.

Hastings and Bishop also asked Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to bring the entire memo to a Natural Resources Committee hearing on May 26. Not surprisingly, Salazar refused. Actually, he had his deputy secretary, David Hayes, refuse.

Hastings was undeterred. “I promised that defeat of the first resolution would not end our push to hold the Obama Administration to their repeated pledges of openness and transparency,” he told the committee. “The public deserves to see all the missing pages of this document, as well as the over 2,000 pages of accumulated documents that the Interior Department has refused to deliver to Congress.”

The first resolution of which Hastings spoke was sent to the House floor without a recommendation in April. That means it will sit until Speaker Nancy Pelosi decides to bring it up for a vote, which will likely be soon—as in “soon after the Second Coming.”

Bishop and many others in the West were apparently not satisfied with Salazar’s assurances during his trip to Utah in April that President Barack Obama does not plan to designate any Utah lands as national monuments without first consulting state leaders.

Their distrust may have arisen from the now-hilarious promises by Kathleen A. McGinty, Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) during the Clinton Administration, that her superiors were committed to “working in partnership” with local governments on environmental issues—while in fact the administration was secretly working out the details of the new 1.7 million acre Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument in Utah.

McGinty’s own records show that Clinton misused the Antiquities Act to bypass Congress and sidestep the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and its provisions for public involvement, which she was supposed to be promoting within the White House. They also clearly show that the monument was declared to shore up Clinton’s support among environmentalists by killing a NEPA-compliant mining project that his own administration had determined would not cause significant environmental damage, and to secure funding for his reelection campaign.

McGinty and the Clinton Administration even took the extraordinary, and illegal, step of generating paperwork that would make it appear the initiative for creating the monument originated with the president rather than the CEQ.

Western legislators and governors may also have been put off by other details of the monument’s establishment, such as denials by McGinty and then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt to Utah Senators Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch, just days before the monument was declared, that any decision had been made on the subject.

Before his trip to Utah, Salazar told a Senate subcommittee that there was “no hidden agenda” on the part of his department to establish new monuments in the West. He told Bennett that there “was no direction from the White House on any of this to the Department of Interior—zero.”

But that’s how it played out last time. In fact, the administration had to fabricate the “direction” of the initiative to create the Grand Staircase monument, which originated with the DEQ. And back then the Secretary of the Interior lied about the administration’s plans. Why should anyone believe the Secretary of the Interior now?

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