Utah criticized for selling oil and gas leases in the original Bears Ears monument

Bluff • Weeks before the November election, a Utah agency leased 33 units of land to mineral and hydrocarbon companies.

The offerings are a routine practice for the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), which uses the money raised to help fund public schools. But environmentalists criticized the October sale’s inclusion of four oil-gas leases in San Juan County that overlap with the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, as they were designated by President Barack Obama in 2016, and could potentially complicate a future land exchange.

Obama’s 1.3 million-acre national monument was created at the request of five Native American tribes with ties to the region, and it included hundreds of thousands of cultural sites dating back 10,000 years. Proponents of the monument, including the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, have argued that the area’s rich natural and cultural resources make it incompatible with oil and gas development and the monument designation included a mineral withdrawal.

But the monument also encompassed 109,000 SITLA acres, which are not subject to federal national monument designations. The presidential proclamation establishing the monument directed the secretary of the Interior to explore a land swap with Utah. That would mean the feds would give SITLA valuable federal lands elsewhere in exchange for taking over the state parcels in the monument.

Read more: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/12/26/utah-criticized-selling/
(Salt Lake Tribune)