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Show HOLIDAY /JANUARY 1997 this is the place by John Helton SCORECARD Bogey Summit County Commissioner Tom Flinders has flown the coup. And frankly, everyone on the Park City side of Summit couldn't be happier. County Flinders had become an embarrassment by publicly calling concertgoers dirty names and then by firing Connie Turkington, the county animal control director, among other things. Flinders, who was spending most of his time at his Idaho home, couldn't take the heat over the Turkington affair, he said. But rumors persist. Our question is: why did you run for office in the first place, Tom? Birdie The federal Environmental Protection Agency has toughened its air pollution standards — meaning that someday air will be cleaner. Along the Wasatch, clean air is a bugaboo for industry and state officials. The air along the Wasatch Front is filthy and if Utah can’t comply with the new standards, we may loose out on federal highway funds. But being forced into cleaner air means the very young and the very old will have fewer respiratory problems. And who knows, maybe we'll even be able to see the mountains. Bogey Goy. Mike Leavitt still can’t make up his mind about raising the gasoline tax to pay for transportation needs, like the much-ballyhooed 1-15 expansion. The governor now insists that good leadership sometimes means doing nothing. Right. From here it looks as if the governor wants the Legislature to take the lead on raising taxes so he won't have to endure any political fallout. Come on Mike, the election is four long years away. Fix the roads, already! oO Birdie Let it snow! Utah is off to a good water year and an even better skiing year. That can’t hurt. But hey, where are all the snowplows? Seems like every time it snows, the plows are no where to be found. Is it from all the snow or < have we've been cheaping it on the plows? Maybe some of that gas tax money can go for new plows. @ We've decided +o look closer into Your activities ac Summit County Commissio ®e6 Citizens For 0 Representation EDITORIAL Halting the Wilderness Survey Was a Bad Call Fo Judge Dee Benson has ordered a temporary halt to the Interior Department's quest to survey 2.5 million acres of publicly-owned BLM land to determine if it is suitable for federal wilderness designation. The ruling is strange for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is how could an inventory of potential wild lands possibly be harmful? To inventory, Interior officials simply survey lands to see if they might meet qualification for federally protected wilderness. The inventory, in and of itself, doesn’t decide anything, but is a simple fact-finding mission. Conversely, however, if the lands are not inventoried they can not possibly be considered for federal wilderness designation. Voila. That is what this is really all about. The Utah Association of Counties filed the suit to stop Interior from making the inventory, claiming there was no mechanism for public input. Legally, the association argued, the federal law allowing for such inventories had expired. That argument is wrong on both counts but may have little to do with what is really at hand here. The backdrop for all this, of course, is the firestorm in Utah over 5.7 million acres of wilderness. But the governor's office, for rea- Christopher Smart friends in the Salt Lake City news media, were able to ignite, once again, the Sagebrush Rebellion. The state of Utah joined the lawsuit and Judge Benson, once the chief of staff for Sen. Orrin Hatch, put forth his temporary restraining order. Not oddly, Judge Benson was appointed to the bench by Hatch. And Utah’s senior senator was perhaps the most vociferous critic of the monument and the failing of an earlier minimal Utah wilderness bill — dubbed the “Antiwilderness Bill” — in Congress. The casual observer would expect Benson to recuse himself on this mat- sons that still remain incomprehensible, did. not take into consideration comments, written or otherwise, which endorsed the larger designation. Rather, county governments from rural Utah set the stage for the bill that outlined 2 million acres of wilderness, while allowing roads and dams and communications towers and pipelines in that so-called wilderness. The now-defunct bill also said that any lands not designated as wilderness could never again be considered for that designation. What is really at play here is the belief held by Utah Republicans that public land belongs mostly to the people in Southern Utah and everyone else in the nation should — to put it bluntly — butt out. And that is simply ridiculous, although it is at the heart of the Sagebrush Rebellion. The same people who complain loudly about urban forms of welfare, think nothing of graz- ter, because the appearance of conflict ing welfare, timber welfare and mining is there. But when it comes to the Sagebrush Rebellion, many conservative Utahns just can’t think straight. For example, Goy. Leavitt's proposal that led to the “Anti-Wilderness” bill, welfare — ripoffs of the taxpaying public on the lands owned by all of us. President Clinton’s establishment of the that failed after Americans everywhere new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Utah’s Republican governor and Congressional delegation, along with a lot of help from their called tion if these areas should be considered for wilderness protection. To say otherwise is to give carte blanche to special interests who would use public land as their Congressmen in outrage, didn’t count public input. If it had, the bill presented by Rep. Jim Hansen and Sen. Orrin Hatch, would have called for PAGE 2 to Interior and survey federally-owned begin to make BLM have an educated every right lands to determina- they wish, answerable to no one. @ |