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Show THE CANYON By Liz Thomas & Herb COUNTRY McHarg of the Southern WATCHDOG Utah Wilderness protected lands for cash, royalties, and Alliance other parcels. However, many sections remain buried within or lie adjacent to wilderness lands. Thus, how these lands are managed, and for what purpose are critical to wilderness preservation, nearby communities (of people, plants, and animals), schoolchildren, and taxpayers alike. SITLA is an independent state agency with a seven-member Board of Trustees NOTES FROM CEDAR CITY Cedar City is enjoying the colors of fall. Stands of Rabbit Brush are displaying colossal clusters of yellow flowers. Red and gold leaves glow from the trees and bushes along city streets. Bright orange vests and hats glow from otherwise camouflage-attired hunters shopping for food and other supplies in local stores. I’ve never understood how the camo is effective when paired up with day-glow orange apparel in the same ensemble. established to manage these school and institutional trust lands and associated assets. The agency's stated mission is “To administer the trust assets prudently, profitably and exclusively for the trust beneficiaries.” Unfortunately, its fiduciary approach is anything but prudent, and it appears to have forgotten that its beneficiaries are supposed to be schoolchildren (and hence, taxpayers), not its own Board and a few wealthy developers. In fiscal year 2000, SITLA.will distribute 2.1 million dollars. Ten-percent of these funds are to be distributed equally among the school districts, while the remaining ninety-percent is divided on a per student basis. ; There are 40 districts and about 476,000 students in the state of Utah. That translates to $5,250 per district, and less than $4.00 per student, or the equivalent of a couple computers per district and a school-lunch per student. SITLA generated these funds by imprudently mining, drilling, clear-cutting and developing the lands it holds “in trust." That translates _to the arguably far higher costs to taxpayers and communities of increased property taxes, sprawling infrastructure, and lost open consequence to the five key SITLA employees who received $109,500 Payments" this year. The Director himself pocketed $32,500 as a dirty air and water, space. This is of no in “Incentive Award bonus. For sake of comparison, Grand school district and all of its 1,620 students will have to split about $11,000. Something here is frightfully wrong. Exhibit B: How SITLA Fried Fishlake Forest It is true that SITLA is charged with the responsibility to generate revenue for schoolchildren, but that mission should not result in the ruin of forest lands . . . especially those traded to the National Forest for the enjoyment of future generations of those same schoolchildren. SITLA recently clear-cut thousands of trees on 90 acres inside the Fishlake National Forest, and bulldozed logs and debris into piles over 15 feet high that paved the way for serious erosion, beetle infestation and catastrophic fire. Even the supervisor of Fishlake National Forest agreed that SITLA created a real mess, and a Forest Ranger told news reporters that this was the worst mess he had seen in his many years with the Forest Service, and that it made him ashamed to be a forester. Kevin Carter of SITLA disagreed, of course, and shamelessly stated, "we generated income from these lands. It’s a renewable GUZZLERS FROM HELL Fillmore BLM is preparing yet another Environmental Assessment to construct 38 more guzzlers (water developments) in Utah’s west desert. These guzzlers are proposed for _| | several units of the citizens’ wilderness proposal including San Francisco Mountains, Red Tops, Red Canyon, Black Hills, and. Cricket Mountains. The BLM has approved the construction of approximately 150 guzzlers in the west desert over the past three years, and several have been located within the citizens’ wilderness proposal. These guzzlers are proposed primarily to provide water to game species, including the non-native chukar partridge. It appears likely that BLM will determine that there are no cumulative impacts from all of these guzzlers. If so, we'll ask BLM to tell us just exactly what it would take for the agency to find cumulative impacts! resource, the trees will come back." It sounds like both he and SITLA need a harsh lesson in economics and ecology. The history of this parcel of SITLA land reveals the corruption and outrageous scam SITLA played upon the schoolchildren and taxpayers. In May of 98, Governor Leavitt and federal Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt agreed to a massive land swap, and as a small part of the deal, a square-mile state school section was acquired the National Forest. Subsequent to the swap, but prior to the official transfer of the state section to the Forest Service, the state sold 90 acres of trees to a sawmill. And on top of it, SITLA officials refused to follow federal logging practices. As a result, SITLA left an ecological war- zone for our schoolchildren to walk through that will cost taxpayers well over 15 thousand dollars to clean up. It’s a frightening prospect that logging on SITLA lands has rapidly increased, and many more timber sales are likely to be proposed in the future. FOREST SERVICE AND BULLDOZERS -- DANGEROUS MIX As part of the Pretty Tree Bench Aspen Harvest decision (for which SUWA filed an unsuccessful appeal), the Dixie National Forest determined that 500 feet of Road Draw Road would be “reconstructed” so that “wheel rutting” could be lessened, and “proper road drainage” could be provided. Unfortunately, the Forest Service bulldozer operator and other Dixie NF employees involved in the “reconstruction” on Boulder Mountain failed to bring a tape measure along when they fired up the bulldozer. The disastrous results add up to THREE MILES of heavy bulldozing work. The bulldozer completely rerouted the road in a few areas, constructed approximately 50 huge water bars along the route, dislodged and moved scores of large and small boulders, and uprooted many huge aspen trees. To put the icing on the cake, a huge pit was bulldozed right in the middle of a nice grassy meadow in order to get fill-dirt to use to build a bypass route to PROTECT the meadow. The huge pit effectively did away with the meadow that was supposed to be protected. Prior to the bulldozer, Road Draw Road offered a place for a quiet peaceful hike. The road was a winding little rocky trail through expansive groves of aspen and intermittent grassy meadows. Now it bears the scars of unauthorized heavy-duty construction. Dixie N.F. Supervisor Mary Wagner agreed that that the USFS had screwed up and had gone well beyond the actions authorized in the decision, and has consented to try to fix the road. It'll be a good trick to resurrect the broken and uprooted mature aspen trees. Is SITLA innocent and forthright in managing state parcels for the benefit of Utah's school children? Or is it guilty of corruption? Exhibit C: SITLA Proposes More Logging in the Book Cliffs In September, SITLA announced that it proposed to harvest 9.5 Million Board Feet (MMBF) of wood from roadless State Trust Lands in 5 timber sales within the Book Cliffs region of mid-eastern Utah. (9.5 MMBF is equal to approximately 1900 logging trucks full of wood). This is especially unnerving considering the Fishlake. SITLA’s justification for these five sales (Cherry Canyon, Cedar Camp, and Cherry Canyon) is to prevent a the economic value of the timber resource,” another scary damage it did to the forest in Mesa, Meadow Creek, Segundo catastrophic fire and to "recover prospect since its actions in the Fishlake set the stage for catastrophic fire. Further, this excuse is bogus, considering that a bipartisan report by the Congressional Research Service recently showed no link between reduced logging on national forests over the last decade and wildfires, and found that heavy logging from earlier years may have contributed more to the conditions that have made Western forests ripe for big fires (NY Times 9/1/200). Thus, wildfires are much more likely to occur in roaded, logged areas than they are in these primitive roadless areas. Further, although the state and the schoolchildren would most likely receive minimal economic gains from the sales (see exh. A), the logging would have devastating affects on wildlife habitat and wilderness lands in the Book Cliffs. The region has some of the highest The Schoolchildren of Utah vs. SITLA: Is the Utah State Institute for Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) innocent and forthright in managing state parcels for the benefit of Utah's school children, or is it guilty of corruption, more interested in lining the pockets of its operatives at.the expense of our public resource and the very children for whom they have a trust responsibility? A look at the evidence below will make the verdict clear: Exhibit A: Who is SITLA? On a map, the state of Utah is divided into townships that are six miles square, with each township further divided into 36 sections of one square mile each. When Utah was granted statehood, the federal government awarded section numbers 2, 16, 32, and 36 in each thirty-six section township to the state for the support of the common schools. On the “| ground, some of these lands have been traded out of National Parks, Monuments, and other wildlife values in the state and supports some of Utah’s largest big game herds. At its core is nearly a million acres of extremely rugged canyon country home to elk, deer, bighorn sheep, black bear and mountain lion, and is one of the largest unprotected wilderness areas in the West. Wilderness activists and hunters alike should be outraged since most of the areas proposed for logging are located within the Meadow Creek/Kelly Creek de facto wilderness comprised of roadless canyons adjacent to proposed wilderness, and one sale, Segundo Canyon, is in the middle of primitive hunting territory. SITLA has already started to gnaw away at northern rim of Meadow Creek. These latest sales would enter the main canyon for first time, constructing a road from a fading jeep trail that the Division of Wildlife Resources closed in the past to protect wildlife. Exhibit D: SITLA’s CloudRock...A Deal Where All But A Few Developers Lose Big SITLA is entertaining a deal with developers that would prostitute wilderness for the —_ sake of mesa-top mansions. The elite, gated community named “CloudRock" by its | |
