Emails show oil was central in decision to shrink Utah’s Bears Ears Monument
WASHINGTON — Even before President Donald Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.
The debate started as early as March 2017, when an aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, asked a senior Interior Department official to consider shrinking Bears Ears National Monument in the southeastern corner of the state. Under a long-standing program in Utah, oil and natural gas deposits within the boundaries of the monument could have been used to raise revenue for public schools.
“Please see attached for a shapefile and pdf of a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument,” said the March 15 email from Hatch’s office. Adopting this map would “resolve all known mineral conflicts,” the email said, referring to oil and gas sites on the land that the state’s public schools wanted to lease out to bolster funds.
The map Hatch’s office provided, which was transmitted about a month before Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke publicly initiated his review of national monuments, was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions Trump announced in December.
Since taking office, Trump has been focused on expanding oil, gas and coal development and sweeping away Obama-era environmental initiatives that the administration contends hurt America’s energy industry. The debate over shrinking national monuments sparked a fierce political battle, now being fought in the courts, over how much land needs federal protection.
Zinke has said that the agency review process made no presumptions about the outcomes. “We want to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard,” Zinke said at a news conference in May during a visit to Bears Ears. He has also disputed that the review of Bears Ears was related to the potential for energy production, suggesting that the agency’s own surveys showed there was not a great deal of potential there.
“We also have a pretty good idea of, certainly, the oil and gas potential — not much!” Zinke said.
Most of the deliberations took place behind closed doors. The internal Interior Department emails — more than 25,000 pages in total — were obtained by The New York Times after it sued the agency in federal court with the assistance of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale University Law School.
The bulk of the documents made public by the Interior Department detail the yearslong effort during the Obama administration to create new monuments, including input from environmental groups, Indian tribes, state officials and members of Congress. The remaining pages, a total of about 4,500 files, relate to the Trump administration’s reconsideration of these actions by Obama and other presidents.
The internal Interior Department emails and memos show the central role that concerns over gaining access to coal reserves played in the decision by the Trump administration to shrink the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 47 percent, to just over 1 million acres.
Zinke’s staff developed a series of estimates on the value of coal that could potentially be mined from a section of Grand Staircase called the Kaiparowits plateau. As a result of Trump’s action, major parts of the area are no longer a part of the national monument.
From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.
In another email exchange, in May, two Bureau of Land Management officials said Zinke’s chief of staff for policy, Downey Magallanes, had phoned to ask for information on a uranium mill in or near the Bears Ears monument. The request sought “economic data to the extent available,” as well as grazing and hunting maps.
And on July 17, Magallanes and Zinke’s counselor for energy policy, Vincent DeVito, met with representatives of a uranium mining company. The company, Energy Fuels Resources Inc., said its representatives hoped to discuss its White Mesa uranium mill as well as the Daneros uranium mine, both adjacent to the Bears Ears monument.