President gains local support for smaller monument

President’s Trump’s push to abolish or shrink some of the country’s national monuments won support this week in a small section of the southern Sierra Nevada, where the Giant Sequoia National Monument is one of several California sites in the crosshairs.

The Tulare County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to send a letter to the Trump administration urging it to reduce the 328,000-acre Giant Sequoia monument to 90,000 acres.

A similar request before the Kern County Board of Supervisors fell short. The board decided Tuesday to take no position on the monument amid a groundswell of public opposition to any changes.

While there is overwhelming statewide support for Giant Sequoia and six other California monuments targeted by Trump, the administration has said it will give more weight to the views of communities neighboring the sites.

The Giant Sequoia monument sprawls across Tulare and Kern counties, establishing special protections for nearly three dozen groves of sequoias — some of the world’s tallest and oldest trees — while limiting logging and recreation activities, such as driving off-road vehicles. Some residents have been critical of the restrictions.

The letter Tulare County is sending to the Department of the Interior emphasizes the need for tree removal at the site as a precaution against forest fires. As originally proposed, the letter requested only looser timber regulations, but it was revised Tuesday to include a call for shaving the monument by more than two-thirds.

While tree removal has always been permitted for fire safety purposes, getting logging companies to do the work can be more difficult if broader timber harvesting isn’t allowed. Only the U.S. Forest Service is currently removing hazardous trees within the monument.

Critics of the supervisors called the letter a transparent attempt to do the bidding of the logging industry and open the area to more cutting. Tulare County Supervisor Mike Ennis, who represents the region around the monument, did not return several phone calls seeking comment on why he wants the protections lifted. He was among three supervisors who voted to draft the letter.

The Department of the Interior said last week that it had not made a decision on any of the California monuments. A public comment period closes July 10.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is reviewing whether 27 monuments across the country were properly designated under the 1906 Antiquities Act, whether the federal government has the resources to continue enforcing protections, and whether local and state residents want them.

The California attorney general’s office has vowed to fight any effort to downsize the sites, arguing that while presidents have the power to make the designations, they can’t unilaterally undo them.