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Show a tiger by the tail The Utah State Road Commission has a tiger by the tail, and the commotion beginning to develop involves in-volves the cities and counties of Southeastern Utah to a great degree. Several months ago, members of the Commission along with the- Director, began calling on city and county officials in our isolated part of the State urging urg-ing their support, by resolution, for laws which would provide for road corridors through land withdrawn from multiple use and set aside for park preservation. Without those corridors, the officials said, tJhe State's future development would be severely handicapped clue to the problems of getting directly from one point iin rural- Utah to another. County and City officials agreed with the commission, com-mission, and one by one passed reams of resolutions supporting the position of the State agency. Two things subsequently happened: First, the Commission called on the Utah congressional delegation delega-tion urging that such assurances for road corridors be written into legislation withdrawing park land. Second, Senator Frank Moss was able to get his aging Canyonlands expansion bill on the Consent Calendar of the Senate but minus any specific language with deference to road corridors. Responding to the eariieir request from . State Road officials, Utah's other Senator, Wall-ace F. Ben-net, Ben-net, asked that the bill be held pending the drafting of an amendment to provide for the aforementioned corridors. The conflicting positions of Utah's two Senators : promptly knocked the bill off the Consent Calendar a calendar the Senate uses to quickly clear legislation legisla-tion which is supposedly non-controversia.l. Senator Moss said that since the committee report contained testimony referring to road conridors, it was unnecessary unnec-essary in the bill. Senator Bennett said that he was merely responding to a request from the State Road iCommission and emphasized that without specific language in the law itself, there would be no guarantees guaran-tees that roads could eventually be built across Southern South-ern Utah. much of which is targeted for withdrawal withdraw-al for parkland. It's impossible at this point to at--tempt to determine which philosophy stated above is correct, although Southeastern Uta'hns are constantly con-stantly reminded that initial development projections on Canyonlands National Park have not been followed follow-ed to any great degree. Now comes the kicker: In a formal meeting Fri-; Fri-; day, the State Road Commission switched their pos-; pos-; ition, saying that they didn't think the road corridor language really needed to be in the bill after all. i Obviously, a position- that was at one time based on area needs has been changed because of politics. The cities and counties, who have been left out on the end of a limber limb by the Commission's action Friday, are not very happy about it. Typical of the reaction of local officials was that of Commissionie-r Calvin Black of San Juan County who stated he couldn't believe be-lieve that the Utah agency had l-eversed themselves after the way they had actively solicited support from rural areas. The end result has been that the Canyonlands enlargement bill will probably -age some more before it gains passage. The fact that this is an election year has taken the issue right out of the realm of objectivity ob-jectivity and placed it in the realm of partisan politics. poli-tics. And the State Road Commission, we are sure, is bound to learn some lessons about grabbing the tail of a sleeping tiger. |