President Trump’s decision to reduce the size of the Bears Ears and Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, announced Monday on his visit to the state, is a good one and an example of his policies that will benefit every American who enjoys national parks and monuments.
We should all thank the president for his administration’s efforts to look at the facts, listen to the people, and act to roll back restrictive and unnecessary national monument designations that provide few advantages to the American people.
While such designations may sound good on the surface, in reality they have strained land management budgets and limited public access to beautiful places.
The Trump administration has been on the ground listening to those who bear the burden of these decisions – unlike the Clinton and Obama administrations, which showed little interest in talking to local people before locking up millions of acres of land around them.
The Trump administration has seen firsthand what I saw when I represented some of these areas in Congress – that the consequences of locking down the West have been severe.
I applaud the president for having the courtesy to do what his predecessors never did – visiting Utah personally to deliver the news that will positively impact those who love and care for these lands. His attention is a far cry from President Clinton making his Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument announcement from another state and President Obama issuing a press release with the wrong photo of Bears Ears.
The notion that our only option for managing public land is a restrictive monument designation is false. In truth, we can build bathrooms and fire pits, and accommodate hunting, fishing, grazing, and permit accessibility without destroying the land. In places where restrictive conservation rules are less justified, we can even authorize responsible resource extraction.
Each time the federal government levies new land designations, that new designation and management plan competes with existing parks and monuments for funding.
The National Park Service suffers from a $12 billion maintenance backlog – meaning crumbling buildings, roads, and bridges cannot be repaired or replaced. Overly expansive monument designations – like the two multimillion-acre monuments in Utah – could have been spent on existing park treasures.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/12/04/national-park-lovers-should-applaud-trumps-monument-decision.html
