Brandon Loomis

USA Today Network

A proposal to give Grand Canyon National Park a protective buffer bigger than the park itself is spurring a struggle over the land and resources beyond the canyon rims.

An Arizona congressman has proposed a Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument covering 1.7 million acres of high desert and forest north and south of the national park.

Environmentalists hope that President Barack Obama will treat them to such a parting gift before he leaves office next year even if Congress won't approve it.

At the heart of the proposal is a permanent ban on new uranium mining claims near America's second-most-popular national park, which sits astride the Colorado River on 1.2 million acres.

Some Arizona officials, though, reject the plan as a threat to jobs, timber management, public access and state control over hunting.

This month, 15 current and former Arizona Game and Fish Commission members wrote to the president asking him to leave the land alone. The signers included all five current members of the governor-appointed commission.

They asked Obama to leave the land’s management to the state, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

“That partnership is not broken,” they wrote, “and we do not believe another layer of bureaucracy is needed to conserve or ‘protect’ 1.7 million more acres on the Arizona Strip or Kaibab National Forest.”

The monument proposed by Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., would cover the Kaibab Plateau north of the park, including both federal forest and range lands. It would include the Kaibab National Forest both on the plateau and in the section surrounding Tusayan south of the park.

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., harshly criticized the plan in a written statement that said it would "kill jobs, stifle development, permanently prevent mining and future grazing leases, impose significant (off-roading) closures and significantly restrict hunting, timber harvesting and commercial recreational activities."

With the exception of mining, monument backers have denied the monument would do those things. They say a new monument would require a management plan written with public participation, but that access, hunting, grazing and timber management are guaranteed to continue in Grijalva's proposal.

White House and Interior Department officials declined to comment on whether the president or Interior secretary were weighing use of the Antiquities Act to designate a monument.

Presidents have used the act to protect unique resources without congressional action since Theodore Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon monument that would become the national park, but some have proved highly divisive.

Bill Clinton's creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument directly north of the new Greater Grand Canyon monument proposal provoked a continuing outcry from Utah officials who were not consulted on the plan.

The "evil specter of Grand Staircase" is often raised to scare off new monument proposals, said Dan McCool, a University of Utah political scientist who has studied the Utah monument's effects.

The Clinton administration's process created "sort of a worst-case scenario" politically, McCool said, but "the predictions of dire economic gloom and doom didn't happen."

In fact, McCool said, the designation raised visitor interest and a tourism economy without shutting down access or having much effect on the limited grazing that occurred pre-1996.

The real change, he said, was the permanent ban on tapping coal reserves on the Grand Staircase's Kaiparowits Plateau: a prime motivator for creating the monument, just as uranium would be on the Kaibab Plateau.

"In these local (Utah) communities," McCool said, "they still had this dream that someday the Kaiparowits Plateau would become a massive coal mine and they'd all have good coal-mining jobs and that was going to be their salvation."

Since then, it has become increasingly clear nationwide that most national park boundaries are just political lines on maps and rarely adequate to protect the land, water, wildlife or other features they celebrate, he said.

There are growing movements to create protective buffers around Yellowstone and Canylonlands national parks, to name just two.

"If you don't have some kind of buffer around (national parks) it dramatically impacts the purpose for which the parks were created," McCool said.

In Arizona's case, it's critical to protect springs and aquifers around the Colorado River, said Roger Clark, program director for the Grand Canyon Trust. Several mine claims approved before federal officials imposed a moratorium have raised fears of contamination, most recently with findings of radioactive soils outside one north of the park.

"The evidence continues to accumulate regarding the adverse effects of uranium mining around the Grand Canyon," Clark said. "We can prevent it by putting a permanent stop to new claims."

State game managers see the proposal as a threat to their authority.

New rules on lands that have previously been managed for multiple uses could hinder the state’s ability to manage game species and other wildlife, Game and Fish Commission Chairman Kurt Davis said. He especially objected to the potential for restrictions on logging, which he said could allow continued build-up of combustible wood.

He raised the prospect of a destructive fire like the 2011 Wallow Fire, the largest state wildfire on record that engulfed about a half-million acres in eastern Arizona.

“That forest will burn down,” Davis said of the Kaibab. “I don’t know how many Wallow Fires we need to have in Arizona before people realize these cataclysmic fires are hazardous to all of our species, endangered or not.”

Davis said hunters may lose some access in a monument, which is a prospect the commissioners’ letter called unnecessary given previous road closures by the land’s federal managers. They added that responsible public-land ranchers should not be turned away.

Grijalva called these fears “myths.”

His bill would make permanent a 20-year halt to new uranium claims that the administration declared in 2012. The proposal is widely expected to languish in the Republican-controlled Congress, which is why attention has turned to the president.

The bill specifically grandfathers existing uses including hunting, ranching and timber management, Grijalva said. The purpose for the proposal is to protect the watershed from uranium contamination or other harms, and to preserve areas that are culturally significant to several Southwest tribes.

The broad statement that hunting and other uses could continue doesn’t reassure Davis.

“Everybody always says nothing is going to change (with new monuments),” Davis said. “If that’s true, there would be no need to designate a monument.”

The region in question is home to both a trophy mule deer herd and endangered California condors that scavenge carcasses and gut piles, exposing them to lead fragments and potentially fatal poisoning. Arizona Game and Fish encourages non-lead ammunition.

The commissioners’ letter says state management has been good for both the condors and the endangered black-footed ferret, both of which were reintroduced in the region.

When drafting his legislation, Grijalva consulted tribal leaders including Havasupai Tribal Councilwoman Carletta Tilousi. Her constituents fear uranium contamination in the Grand Canyon springs that they use, she said, and the cancers and other illnesses that Navajos have associated with lingering uranium contamination on their reservation.

Energy Fuels Resources, the company drilling at its Canyon Mine south of Tusayan, has said its work is less likely to contaminate Grand Canyon springs than naturally occurring uranium nearer the rim.

Environmentalists dispute that, saying the aquifer can transport loosened contaminants to the canyon.

Tribal members are also upset by new mining activity south of the Grand Canyon and within sight of Red Butte, a sacred site where mine trucks and lights disrupt ceremonies.

“Everybody has a right to go to their church and enjoy peace and quiet and not be disrupted by truck hauling uranium, and not be contaminated,” Tilousi said.