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Show Sierra Club No On "Giveaway" Having read the recent letter of Garfield County Commissioner Louise Liston regarding: wilderness issues and state school trust lands, I feel a need to set the record straight. Commissioner Liston states that the passage of America's Redrock Wilderness Act, H.R. 1500, would harm prospects for funding Utah schools. But surely she is aware that many of the same environmental environmen-tal groups which support H.R. 1500 (including the Sierra Club) also worked for the passage of legislation leg-islation in the 103rd Congress which allowed for the exchange of school trust lands in national parks and forests in Utah for valuable federal fed-eral assets elsewhere in the state. In fact, it is accurate to state that the legislation would not have passed without the support of these groups. The assets available to the school trust include coal leases on the Wasatch Plateau. In addition, the past two desert wilderness bills passed by Congress have set forth in detail how school trust lands surrounded by the new wilderness areas would be traded for other federal assets of equal value. The only reason H.R. 1500 doesn't yet include such language is that it has not yet reached the stage of Congressional consideration where management and other provisions have been added to the bill. Commissioner Liston and your readers should be assured that the Sierra Club supports the addition of such language to America's Redrock Wilderness Act What the Sierra Club will not support is the giveaway of over 30,000 acres of land in the heart of the Kaiparowits Plateau in the Smoky Hollow area, as proposed in the Utah delegation's regrettable wilderness elimination legislation. These lands should be wilderness. They should not be part of the scheme of Dutch-owned coal company com-pany (Andalex Resources) to turn this wild country into an industrial zone. There arc hundreds of years worth of coal outside the Citizen's Wilderness Proposal which are available to be mined. We don't need the coal on the Kaiparowits. Lawson LcGate Southwest Regional Representative Sierra Club |