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Show GUEST EDITORIAL Local Elected Officials: Heroes or Criminals? By Toni Thayer Kane County officials continue contin-ue to push for truth, honesty, and fair reporting on their recent actions of removing Federal restrictive signs from county roads, and Garfield County is backing Kane County to the hilt. They say it's time to finally decide who owns these roads that the counties' residents have been paying to maintain, and they want the "higher than thou" attitude coming from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) management manage-ment staff to stop. In fact, they want the GSENM downsized to the same levels of operation used by other national monuments and using the same policies and procedures proce-dures applied by monument management teams throughout the nation. Since the Garfield County News' original report on this matter, "Kane County Utah Uses State Law to Reclaim Roads From GSENM," published pub-lished on Aug. 28, numerous articles have been published in other Utah newspapers. Local elected county officials have been called criminals, casting cast-ing "aside the laws", by the St. George-based newspaper, The Spectrum. Their editorial says that "they overstepped their bounds by working outside of the system." The Salt Lake Tribune, published pub-lished in metropolitan Salt Lake City,' where little that happens in southern Utah apart from environmental envi-ronmental issues is generally reported, has focused heavily on this particular southern Utah news item, publishing numerous articles on it. They accuse local officials of "road rage", "provocation", "provo-cation", "retaliation-like vandalism", vandal-ism", "secret" meetings, and they say officials "may have acted illegally." The Salt Lake Tribune seems to be trying to re-ignite the road war, just as their headline accuses accus-es county officials of doing. They were the first to shout that "a criminal investigation of two elected Kane County leaders" was underway by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Research by the Garfield County News in August revealed that this was not true. Kane County's local newspaper, newspa-per, the Southern Utah News (SUN) supports the "top heavy" GSENM management with their substantial increase in staff, apparently due to the new employee salaries flowing into the local Kanab economy. The Southern Utah News fails to consider what the local economy econo-my might be without the heavy Federal influence on local public pub-lic lands. And the SUN fails to recognize that increased tourism in southern Utah was supposed to add to the established resource-based economy not destroy it. The SUN also fails to look to the past and other communities that became "government "gov-ernment towns". In short, none of the substantial news coverage from around the state of Utah has covered the facts brought forward by both counties, Kane and Garfield, in their numerous letters to the GSENM managers and Utah State BLM officials. Editor's Note: These issues as they have been brought forth by the counties will be published in our continuing coverage next week |