Lack of grazing in Grand Staircase irks some locals

By Joe Baird
The Salt Lake Tribune

KANAB - County officials here and some ranchers have cried foul over a conservation group's acquisition of grazing permits in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and have sued to reverse the transaction.

But the Grand Canyon Trust says it played by the rules in gaining the permits, and is confident the law is on its side.

In a suit that has already spawned multiple hearings and probably won't be resolved until the end of the year, Kane County has argued that because the Trust, based in Flagstaff, Ariz., bought the permits with the intention of retiring them from grazing, it is not a qualified buyer of the tracts under the requirements of the Taylor Grazing Act.

"The very purpose of a grazing allotment is to make substantial use of it for grazing purposes," says Kane County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw. "To acquire the allotment for conservation purposes, we think, violates the grazing act."

Those opposed to the Grand Canyon Trust's purchase of the monument permits also are vexed by what they call the supportive roles the Interior Department and Utah Congressman Chris Cannon played in moving the deal along.

"They seemed more interested in preserving the money the Grand Canyon Trust has spent on this than stripping grazing rights away from ranchers," says Richard Nicholas, a former Utah Cattleman's Association official who testified on behalf of Kane County. "This has all been a shell game to retire the permits. And the most unbelievable thing is that it has happened under the Bush administration."

But Grand Canyon Trust officials say their purchase of the permits has been on the up-and-up from the start, when they were approached by a local rancher about buying them, and are in line with a recent Supreme Court decision allowing those not in the livestock business to purchase grazing permits.

After making the initial deal to begin purchasing the permits in 1999 - a series of transactions were made through 2002 - the conservation group informed the Bureau of Land Management it wished to close them to grazing, and requested a study examining the request. Monument officials acquiesced on orders from Washington, and later ordered temporary allotment closures because of the ongoing drought.

But the BLM also made it clear that the long-term future of the allotments would be determined by an ongoing, monument-wide environmental impact statement. By that point, other ranchers had applied for the permits. But the Trust withdrew its closure proposal, purchased 20 head of cattle and began grazing them on their portion of the allotment in compliance with BLM requirements after the drought restrictions were lifted.

"We know these folks are furious about the support we've had [from Interior and Cannon], but we've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with willing sellers in an open public process to resolve these grazing disputes," says Grand Canyon Trust Executive Director Bill Hedden. "They have no investment, no real stake in this. Yet, they want everybody to pretend that they're the injured party here."

The Grand Staircase grazing suit has already spun out beyond the Kane County; national BLM Director Kathleen Clarke, a former Utah Department of Natural Resources director, is under investigation by the Interior Department's inspector general for what the environmental watchdog group PEER calls an ethics breach.

According to Nicholas' court testimony, Clarke told the Fremont rancher that she had exhausted her options in persuading Interior to halt the Grand Canyon Trust permit transactions, telling him she got "rolled" for her troubles. When Nicholas told her they would probably file suit over the matter, Clarke told Nicholas: "Go get them."

Nicholas says Clarke wasn't supporting a lawsuit against her agency. Rather, he says, "what Kathleen said was do what you have to do."

Hedden declined comment on the matter, citing the ongoing litigation over the grazing dispute.

But on the ground, monument officials say that nothing has really changed.

"During this whole process of review and study, there have been no decisions made to close the allotment, no relinquishments accepted," says Dave Wolf, the monument's manager for planning and support services. "Some of our permittees are [voluntarily] taking non-use due to the drought or a change in business practices. But the final decisions have yet to be made."

jbaird@sltrib.com