click to enlarge Enrique Limón

A protester outside the Salt Palace Convention Center gives a warm welcome to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke during his Feb. 9 visit.

Last month, Sen. Orrin Hatch said of former President Barack Obama and the newly designated Bears Ears National Monument: "In making this unilateral decision, our former president either failed to heed the concerns of San Juan County residents, or ignored them completely."

If Hatch were an honest man, he would say exactly the same about President Donald Trump's drastic shrinkage of the monument late last year. Documents recently released by the Department of Interior show that when drawing the new boundaries, Trump and his Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, ignored not only the pleas of five Native American tribal nations, but also proposals from local county commissioners and the state of Utah.

That's just one of the takeaways from a trove of documents regarding the Trump administration's multi-monument review that the Interior Department coughed up to The New York Times. Here are the top eight nuggets so far from the tens of thousands of documents:

1. The shrinkage of Bears Ears hurt Utah schools more than it helped.

Hatch has argued that the monument took needed cash from Utah school children because it "captured" more than 100,000 acres of Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands (SITLA), which are leased out or sold to help fund schools. But SITLA itself has never outright opposed the monument designation. Why? Because with designation came the promise of a lucrative land exchange with the feds.

When the monument was designated, SITLA officials said they were "disappointed" in the way it was done, but went on to ask Obama "to promptly address the issue by making Utah's school children whole through an exchange of comparable lands." In fact, some six months before Obama designated the monument, SITLA already had the details of a swap in mind. The state would give up the land within the proposed monument, most of which had only marginal potential for development, and in exchange would receive oil- and gas-rich federal land, much of it in other counties.

A decade earlier, after the designation of Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, a similar swap proved quite profitable, according to an email in the document dump from SITLA Associate Director John Andrews. Andrews wrote that the exchange netted SITLA $135.2 million in mineral leases alone, plus $50 million in cash from the federal government as part of the deal. Adding in investment earnings and other lease revenues, Andrews concluded that a total haul of $500 million from the exchange would be a "conservative guesstimate."

So, when Trump set out to shrink the monument, SITLA asked only that a sliver of the monument's southeast corner be removed so as to keep a block of land near Bluff, Utah, in SITLA hands. A representative from Hatch's office sent a map showing this change and a message to Interior: "The new boundary depicted on the map would resolve all known mineral conflicts for SITLA within the Bears Ears."

In the end, Zinke granted this part of SITLA's wish. Unfortunately for the state's school children, he did a lot more than that, cutting most of the state lands out of the monument, thus shutting down any hopes for a large-scale land exchange. That leaves the state holding on to more than 80,000 acres of isolated parcels that are unlikely to generate much revenue.

2. Zinke ignored local county commissioners.

Trump ordered the monument review amid claims that local voices had been steamrolled by Obama's unilateral designation. So when, in March 2017, the San Juan County Commission sent maps to Interior showing their proposed boundaries, they might have expected that it would influence Zinke's recommended boundaries. It did not.

The commission's proposed boundaries would have covered 422,600 acres across Cedar Mesa. Cut by spectacular canyons and with a high density of archaeological resources, Cedar Mesa was at the heart of Obama's Bears Ears designation. Under the commissioners' plans, the eastern boundary would have been Comb Wash, leaving out the sandstone wave known as Comb Ridge, as well as a motorized route up Arch Canyon. Zinke's boundaries contain only half as much land. They leave Cedar Mesa out entirely, unlike the county commissioners' plans, but they include as part of the monument Comb Ridge and Arch Canyon. It's almost as if the new boundaries were drawn in defiance of the county commission's proposal. So much for local voices.

3. The voice of Energy Fuels, the most active uranium company in the Bears Ears region, appears to have been heard.

Representatives of the Canadian company met with Obama administration officials during the lead-up to designation, and the administration ultimately excluded Energy Fuels' Daneros uranium mine from the monument. However, the company lamented the fact that seven miles of the mine's one access road still fell within the boundaries, and that its White Mesa mill property abutted the eastern monument boundary.

Energy Fuels lobbyists, including former U.S. Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif., met with Trump administration officials in July 2017, and the company's official comment on the monument review stated: "There are also many other known uranium and vanadium deposits located within the newly created [Bears Ears National Monument] that could provide valuable energy and mineral resources in the future. ... EFR respectfully requests that DOI reduce the size of the [Bears Ears National Monument] to only those specific resource areas or sites, if any, deemed to need additional protection beyond what is already available to Federal land management agencies."

Trump's shrinkage removed the entire White Canyon uranium district and other known deposits from the monument.

4. The new boundaries correlate closely with known oil, gas, uranium and potash deposits.

During his review last year, Zinke specifically asked for information on mineral extraction potential within the monuments. Uranium mining has long been dormant in the Bears Ears monument due to low prices, and only three of the 250 oil and gas wells drilled within the monument have yielded significant quantities of oil or gas. Nevertheless, industry has nominated some 63,657 acres within the national monument for oil and gas leases since 2014. With the new boundaries drawn to exclude even areas with only marginal potential for oil, gas or uranium, those leases could now go forward.

5. At Grand Staircase-Escalante, the new boundaries are mostly about coal.

When the monument was designated, Andalex, a Swiss company, was looking to mine a 23,800-acre swath of the Kaiparowits Plateau, which contains one of the biggest coal deposits in the United States. Clinton's monument designation didn't kill those plans, though it did make access and transportation to the deposits more difficult, so the feds used $19 million from the Land and Water Conservation Funds to buy out Andalex's leases. Now, some 11 billion or more tons of coal are once again accessible. Also freed up with Trump's monument shrinkage: Up to 10.5 trillion cubic feet of coalbed methane and 550 million barrels of oil from tar sands.

6. Visitation at Bears Ears area ratcheted up during debate.

Since there are no monument headquarters, the best indicator is the number of visitors at Kane Gulch Ranger Station on Cedar Mesa, which nearly doubled between 2013 and 2017.

Visits per year:

2013: 3,484

2014: 3,730

2015: 4,344

2016: 4,844

2017: 6,535

The jump in visitation in 2017 will be used by both anti- and pro-monument advocates. The former will argue that extra visitors mean extra impacts, the latter that more visitors add up to greater economic benefits for neighboring communities.

7. Grazing at Grand Staircase-Escalate not significantly impacted.

There were 77,400 active AUMs, or Animal Unit Months, the bureaucrat's way of counting livestock on public lands, when the monument was designated in 1996. As of 2017, the number had only slightly dropped to 76,957 active AUMs. "Although grazing use levels have varied considerably from year to year due to factors like drought," an Interior staff report says, "no reductions in permitted livestock grazing use have been made as a result of the Monument designation." Claims to the contrary have long been used to argue for the monument's reduction.

8. Obama's staffers were in constant contact with Utah congressional staffers for months.

And they often went out of their way to accommodate them. In fact, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell's deputy chief of staff, Nicole Buffa, became quite chummy with Fred Ferguson, the chief of staff for former Rep. Jason Chaffetz, and Cody Stewart, policy director for Gov. Gary Herbert.

After Jewell's visit to southeastern Utah, Buffa wrote to Ferguson, Stewart and others: "I'm looking forward to many more conversations about Utah with each of you, but in far less pretty places."

As the debate on the ground heated up, Ferguson wrote to Buffa: "I grow more and more frustrated by the day regarding the situation in San Juan County. You and I ... have been thrust into this umpire-type-role where we are supposed to determine which group is most sincere, most legit, and most deserving of 'winning.' We're witnessing a race to the bottom by all involved as the monument threat heats up and groups are positioning themselves for success. My ultimate thoughts are to do nothing and force all of these players to work together and resolve these issues amongst themselves in the new year when there isn't an arbitrary deadline driving action."

Buffa responded: "We can't get bogged down by the sideshows, and that is what some of this is."



A version of this article appeared in High Country News.