They changed the title;
we still don’t like it

By  Steve Bonowski

A year ago, “Wild Colorado” carried an article on Moffat County’s proposed assumption of management authority of all federal lands there. This takeover was called the Northwest Colorado Working Landscape Trust. The article detailed the serious drawbacks of the proposal and noted that the club’s conservation department staff had made both oral and written comments to county government opposing the Trust proposal.

Little action occurred until late in 2002. Moffat County government was not able to interest the state’s congressional delegation in the proposal, and federal land managers at the seemed less than enthusiastic about the proposal.

In September, a new version of the Trust proposal was unveiled by county government. The proposal was much less encompassing and was referred to as a “Pilot Project,” or as we call it, “Trust Lite” for short. The proposal had been reworded in an apparent attempt to make it more palatable. It seems to have generated more interest this time around. In October, 2002, Kathleen Clarke, the national director of the Bureau of Land Management, paid a visit to Moffat County to tour BLM lands in the county with county elected officials. The Colorado Mountain Club asked to be included in this field trip, but the county rejected the request, as it did requests from all other conservation and recreationist groups except for The Nature Conservancy.

“Trust Lite” contains most of the problems of the original Landscape Trust proposal. The new proposal was temporarily downsized to take in only a small portion of the federal land in the county. However, it is apparent from close reading of the Pilot Project’s fifteen pages that the Moffat County’s ultimate goal is still to move all federal land into its control. In a disingenuous move, the amount of land to come under county control is portrayed as a portion of the national land managed by the Park Service, Forest Service, BLM, and Fish & Wildlife Service. At first glance, the county’s request appears reasonable, since it is only a minuscule portion of the land managed nationally by the four federal agencies. However, careful review of “Trust Lite” shows the intent is still to grab control of all federal land in the county.

“Trust Lite” has other problems. It advocates for county oversight of all RS 2477 rights of way in Moffat County. RS 2477 is an obscure 1866 law that allowed local governments to retain rights of way across federal lands. 2477 was repealed by the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976, but existing 2477 claims were grandfathered into the new law. Rural county governments in Utah and other Western states have occasionally used RS 2477 to try and prevent wilderness designation of areas worthy of protection. Consequently, a person might visit a special place and find the county had bulldozed a road where only a seldom used cow path used to exist. County claims to rights of way should be con-sidered, but only as part of a management process fully open to public participation. 

The club’s case against “Trust Lite” remains the same. Moffat County government has never conclusively proven that the present system of land management decisions and public involvement  directed by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is irretrievably broken and thus in need of replacement. The thrust of the proposal is still to place emphasis on land management decisions with local citizens with input opportunities for other citizens and interests being  minimized. The club continues to commend Moffat County citizens for being interested in protection of special places in the county. However, in a thinly disguised desire to maintain a status quo economy  based on the extractive industries, county officials ignore the classic “boom-bust” economic cycle that has bedeviled the west for over a century. They also ignore modern trends in developing broad-based and sustainable economies elsewhere in the rural west. The Colorado Mountain Club has participated in land management decisions in Moffat County since at least the 1930s, beginning with advocacy on behalf of Dinosaur National Monument. Further, the club has at least a 66 year history of engaging in recreation activities in the county. The conservation department believes that it is in the interest of the Club and its members to continue to advocate against “Trust Lite” and other, “sagebrush rebellion” style, proposals.