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Show 4 Confident They Have Been Heard w -. i Commissioners Return From Washington Meeting H Two Garfield County com-t com-t missioners have returned from a trip to Washington D.C. to meet with National Park Service officials X about details of the agreement on the Burr Trail. They are confident if their efforts will be successful. Commissioners Tom Hatch and J Dell LeFevre met Thursday with K Dennis Gavin, deputy director of the j 2 National Park Service in a five-hour session "where tempers flared on occasion" in what Hatch called a i "bureaucratic nightmare that really I breaks down into each side simply 'rying to do its job." Accompanying the eomm-nussioners eomm-nussioners was Steve Creamer of n I Creamer and Noble Engineers, St. ' George. Paramount to their trip, said ' Hatch, was their effort to protect the historical use of the trail with respect to mineral exploration leases and grazing uses. He said 1 they were successful in assuring all historical uses. Some "vague terminology" he said, had to be more clearly defined to the mutual satisfaction of the NPS and the county. The term "scenic foreground" in the original agreement, for example, was spelled out to a limit of 100 acres per mile, an average width of 200 feet. Commissioners felt this would give the NPS sufficient latitude to protect certain significant bits of scenery without jeopardizing practical use of the road. They had also felt that the reversion clause in the original agreement was too vague and sought clarification defining the maintenance required of the NPS which terms, if breached, would cause the road to revert back to the county. Commissioners were also adamant that the reversion clause also states that the entire road, including in-cluding the portion that crosses NPS property, revert to the county. The county presently owns the entire length, since the road was in place and in use before creation of the park. Commissioners and the NPS agreed to use the Utah Department of Transportation criteria for maintenance of such roads with final details still pending. The road would be deeded to the state which in turn would deed it to the Department of the Interior requiring final signatures only of the state and the DOI. The agreement reached Thursday was the fourth revision of the original, Hatch said. The agreement must now be approved by Senate and House sub- if,. committees with funds already approved by Congress pending final approval by the two subcommittees. sub-committees. Hatch expects the revised agreement to reach the two subcommittees sub-committees within a week of each other near the end of April. He said they feel fairly comfortable about the agreement's outcome with the Senate sub-committee, since im-ovements im-ovements on the Burr Trail have received considerable support in the Senate. "The House sub-committee will be tougher," he expects, and said that he hopes to have a large group of people from Utah present before the sub-committee when it comes up. "We had good local input," he said, "at hearings held locally. I'd like to get some of those same people before that sub-committee." Hatch said that 10 or 11 southern Utah counties were represented at local hearings, with support of improving the Burr overwhelming. Hatch said the five-hour discussion in Washington D.C. was surprisingly frank and open and that he felt that opposition which had been so strong in earlier meetings had appeared to lessen. In addition to Gavin, Hatch said there were two NPS staff persons, two NPS attorneys, at-torneys, Bob Widener representing Senator Jake Garn, Kelly Murdock representing Governor Norman Bangerter, a staff representative from Congressman Jim Hansen's office and engineer fro the Denver NPS office. Hatch says he has high expectations ex-pectations for work getting underway un-derway by early fall, with completion com-pletion coming as early as three years on the 66-mile link between Boulder and Lake Powell. |