President Returns 'Public' Land...

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SlugSlinger

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Sorry for the choppy cut and paste, but those UK sites have a lot of pictures and strangely enough, I can’t find this in any US rags at this point without digging deep.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...lly-abolish-Bears-Ears-National-Monument.html
Trump dramatically SHRINKS Bears Ears National Monument and slashes another by half in the name of states' rights' as he says 'public lands will once again be for public use'

President announced plans Monday in Utah to shrink two sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds after Obama expanded them

Trump plans to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by nearly 85 percent and reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half

Move is being called illegal by environmental groups and will be opposed by some, but not all, Native American groups

Trump said on his way out of Washington that his decision is a victory for 'state's rights'

A Navajo Democratic county commissioner told Trump's audience that expanding the monuments had put her ancestral lands off-limits

Riot police dispersed protesters outside a Mormon charity food-distribution center as Trump spoke to church leaders inside

By David Martosko, Us Political Editor For Dailymail.com In Salt Lake City, Utah and Associated Press

PUBLISHED: 10:20 EST, 4 December 2017 | UPDATED: 14:59 EST, 4 December 2017

President Donald Trump unveiled a plan Monday in Utah to dramatically scale back two national monuments – calling it an important move for 'states' rights.'

'Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They're wrong,' he said in the cavernous Utah Capitol Rotunda in Salt Lake City.

'The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best. And you know the best how to take care of your land. You know how to protect it, and you know best how to conserve this land for many, many generations to come,' he said.

'Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away. They don't know your land, and truly they don't care for your land like you do.'

The Bears Ears and the Grand-Staircase Escalante national monuments span millions of acres in Utah and are among 27 national monuments that Trump ordered his Interior Secretary to review earlier this year.

The result, he said, is that 'public lands will once again be for public use.'

As Trump signed a proclamation rolling back the Obama- and Clinton-era national monument designations, his audience briefly broke into a chant of 'Four more years!'

President Donald Trump announced plans Monday in Utah to shrink two sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds after Barack Obama and Bill Clinton expanded them.

'Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They're wrong,' Trump said

Trump's audience broke out into a brief chant of 'Four more years!' after he signed the national monument proclamation

President Donald Trump announced plans Monday in Utah to shrink two sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds after Barack Obama and Bill Clinton expanded them

'Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away,' Trump said in the Utah state capitol's rotunda

Bears Ears, a more than 1.3 million-acre site in southeastern Utah that features thousands of Native American artifacts, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs, is to be slashed by 85 per cent

'We're going to be doing something that the state of Utah and others have wanted to be done for many, many years,' the president said as he left the White House.

'It will be one of the great, really, events in this country in a long time. So important for states' rights and so important for the people of Utah.'

Trump commented Monday as he left the White House for a trip to Salt Lake City.

Trump previously had condemned the act of creating the Utah monuments as a 'massive federal land grab.'

Utah Republican leaders had complained that the monuments locked up too much federal land.

And Trump said 'this tragic federal overreach' had resulted in 'harmful restrictions on hunting, ranching and responsible economic development.'

President Trump arrived in Utah on Monday, greeting well-wishers ahead of a speech where he will declare a rollback of multimillion-acre plots of federally protected lands

Trump said Monday on his way to Utah that dramatically scaling back the size of two national monuments would be a win for 'state's rights’

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told a crowd in the Utah Capitol Rotunda that the Antiquities Act, an obscure law that Barack Obama used to broaden federal monuments in Utah, 'was never meant to prevent. It was meant to protect.'

'Our public land is for the public to use,' Zinke said.

During his short Utah visit, the president also met with leaders from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and toured the Mormon 'Welfare Square,' a facility that provides aid – and jobs – to poor families.

He complimented the LDS leaders for 'the respect you have all over the world' for taking care of people.

But outside, riot police had to disperse a crowd of people jeering the president with shouts of 'Shame on you!'

Trump pushed a shopping cart through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' food distribution center at LDS Welfare Square in Salt Lake City on Monday, accompanied by LDS President Henry B. Eyring

Protesters yelled 'Shame on You!' and 'F**k you Trump!' on Monday in front of the Utah state capitol; a different group of activists were dispersed by riot police outside the LDS Welfare Square facility +15

Other protesters outside the state capitol yelled 'F**k you Trump!' as the president's motorcade sped by

Trump traveled to Utah with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utahan who has been in office since 1977 and faces a decision soon about whether to run for an eighth term.

Asked Monday if he was encouraging Hatch to run again, Trump gave reporters a clear 'yes.'

That's seen as a move to block Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee – who has been openly hostile to Trump – from running.

Asked if he was sending a message to Romney, Trump would only say: 'He's a good man. Mitt's a good man.'

Hatch introduced Trump on Monday, saying he had the 'redundant task' of introducing the most famous man in the world.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch traveled with Trump aboard Air Force One to Salt Lake City

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke rode in the Bears Ears National Monument in Blanding, Utah earlier this year while plans were being drawn up to shrink their scale

Trump's move to shrink the sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds overall has drawn howls from environmentalists and some tribal leaders, who call the move illegal and another affront to Native Americans.

San Juan County, Utah Commissioner Rebecca Benally, a Navajo native, spoke Monday before Trump and said she was outraged by the establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument 'in our own backyard.'

Benally, a Democrat, said her people had been denied access to 'an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware' where they had harvested medicinal plants and harvested wood for centuries.

She cast the battle over Bears Ears as a struggle between natives who want to stay connected to their ancestral lands and bureaucrats who want to control them.

Trump plans to shrink Bears Ears by nearly 85 percent and reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half.

The plan would cut the total amount of land in the state's red rock country protected under monument status from more than 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles) to about 1.2 million acres (1,875 square miles).

How it's expected to happen: The reduced scale of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was revealed in leaked documents.

The proposals prompted an outcry from environmental groups, tribal leaders and others who say Trump's actions threaten important archaeological and cultural resources, especially Bears Ears, a more than 1.3 million-acre site in southeastern Utah that features thousands of Native American artifacts, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.

Trump has told Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and other Utah officials that he will follow the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink both monuments, but the White House and Zinke's office have not offered details about how they'd redraw the monument boundaries.

The proposed changes would be the most significant reductions by any president to monument designations made under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president wide authority to protect federal sites considered historic or geographically or culturally significant.

Trump ordered Zinke to review 27 monuments created in the past two decades, with Bears Ears the top priority. Trump called some monument designations by his Democratic predecessors a 'massive federal land grab' that 'should never have happened.'

President Barack Obama created the Bears Ears monument last year after tribal leaders and environmental groups clamored for protection of land considered sacred by Native Americans.

Grand Staircase-Escalante was created by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Supporters of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments gathered during a rally on Saturday in Salt Lake City

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department said the newspaper 'has very old, outdated and inaccurate information.'

The spokeswoman, Heather Swift, declined to offer any other details.

Utah's Republican leaders, including Hatch, have said the monuments declared by Obama and Clinton unnecessarily locked up too much land and asked Trump to shrink or rescind them.

Hatch said in a statement Thursday that 'details of the president's announcement are his and his alone to share,' but added: 'I appreciate his willingness to listen to my advice and even more importantly, to give the people of Utah a voice in this process.'

Trump's action, 'following Secretary Zinke's fair, thorough and inclusive review, will represent a balanced solution and a win for everyone on all sides of this issue,' Hatch said.

Natalie Landreth, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said her group has already drafted a lawsuit to challenge Trump's action, which she called unprecedented and illegal.

'He will not be able to bask in one day of applause at the Salt Lake City airport' before being sued, she said.

Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, called Trump's actions a disgrace. 'He wants to turn public lands over to corporations to mine, frack, bulldoze and clear-cut until there's nothing left,' she said.
 

Glocktogo

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I'm confused. When Democrats established these "monuments", what effect did that have on land access? Did it restrict access to the land for everyone, or just everyone who wasn't a tribal member? Were the monuments controlled by the DoI, BLM or the tribe(s)?

These two comments:

A Navajo Democratic county commissioner told Trump's audience that expanding the monuments had put her ancestral lands off-limits

San Juan County, Utah Commissioner Rebecca Benally, a Navajo native, spoke Monday before Trump and said she was outraged by the establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument 'in our own backyard.'

Seem to be in direct contradiction to these two comments:

President Barack Obama created the Bears Ears monument last year after tribal leaders and environmental groups clamored for protection of land considered sacred by Native Americans.

Natalie Landreth, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said her group has already drafted a lawsuit to challenge Trump's action, which she called unprecedented and illegal.

So what's the real scoop?
 

SlugSlinger

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Trump’s Plan To Overhaul National Monuments Law Is All About ‘Righting Past Overreach’
When President Donald Trump speaks in Utah on Monday, he will not only be resizing two controversial national monuments, his administration will also be making major changes to how federal lands are managed.

Trump will sign orders to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments as recommended by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. However, that’s only the first step in the administration’s plan for the Antiquities Act.

In the coming months, the Department of the Interior (DOI) will begin a larger conversation about how the Antiquities Act of 1906 is implemented once the president designates a national monument, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

The Interior Department will focus on “righting past overreach,” according to an official, by protecting national monuments in a manner that’s “consistent with the law.” The agency will also ensure lands properly cared for, and that critical infrastructure, like roads, bridges and trails, don’t fall into disrepair.

“Public lands should be for the enjoyment of everyone, not just special interests,” will be the Trump administration’s message in this effort. Going forward, Interior will make sure local voices are not drowned out by “large, well-funded NGOs and special interests,” the official said.

Trump officials have also been in contact with Congress about potential legislative fixes to problems identified in their months-long Antiquities Act review. Republicans have put forward legislation on the matter, but DOI has not made any specific recommendations to lawmakers.

Trump ordered Zinke to begin reviewing national monuments in April to look for abuses in past administrations’ implementation of the Antiquities Act. Most of the media coverage, however, has focused on the fate of the Bear Ears monument, which President Barack Obama designated shortly before leaving office in 2016.

The agency’s plan for national monuments will focus on six priorities: preserving traditional uses, public access, infrastructure, local consultation, tribal rights and protecting hunting and fishing rights.

The Antiquities Act allows the president to designate areas of federal lands as monuments, which changes how the lands are managed. The changes make it harder to do activities to conduct grazing, logging, mining, hunting, fishing, and other land uses.

Even if traditional uses are protected, those rights may erode over time as more permits are added to protect “objects of significance” under the Antiquities Act.

Bears Ears, for example, encompasses more than 1.3 million acres to protect Native American history sites and two buttes that look like the ears of a bear. It’s stunningly beautiful, but many Utah locals felt the process was driven by outside environmental activists and high-level tribal officials.

“This community would support a smaller monument,” Jami Bayless, president of the Stewards of San Juan County, toldTheDCNF in 2016. “However, the proposed monument is bigger than the State of Delaware. Any visitor here can see that this a beautiful area that is already protected by numerous laws and by locals who love this area.”

Obama’s Bears Ears designation did allow for tribal members to continue to gather herbs and dead wood, but the Navajo living around the monument are skeptical this will last. President Bill Clinton designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument in 1996 and wood-collecting and grazing rights were limited.

Obama also designated some state lands as part of the Bears Ears monument, which conservatives further contend violates the Antiquities Act. Republicans claimed the designation eroded local access and will hurt rural Utah’s economy by limiting development.

“Utah has become ground zero for politically motivated national monument designations that are excessive in size and contemptuous of peoples’ livelihoods,” Utah Rep. Rob Bishop said in a statement issued on the news Trump would visit Utah.

“The President has stood against prior abuses of executive power and his administration has demonstrated a commitment to work in concert with local communities to protect unique public antiquities and objects the right way,” said Bishop, chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources.
 

TerryMiller

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I kind of have mixed feelings about these actions, but to put things into some kind of perspective, the federal government, with mostly Democratic Party presidents, has "controlled" a lot of land, especially so in the West. Here is a link to a story that gives a perspective of how little the locals and state control the land within their borders.

Federal Lands in the U.S.

As you can see, Nevada, Utah, and Alaska have had a lot of land "protected" by the government. As such, I think that all of that land is non-taxable for the states and counties in which that land "resides." In essence, the federal government is seriously hampering the tax collection for local schools.
 

Riley

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Here's a bit of the back story on Clinton's designation of the escalante site. Funny, not really, that it has all the classic earmarks of corruption seen from him and his detestable spouse....

Cliff notes - 1.2 trillion (1000 1,000,000,000) in clean burning coal kept from development.

"Bill Clinton's unilateral land grab in Utah declaring 1.7 million acres a national monument and placing off-limits to an energy starved United States up to 62 billion tons of environmentally safe low sulfur coal worth $1.2 trillion that could have been mined with minimal surface impact was in fact a political payoff to the family of James Riady.

James Riady was the son of Lippo Group owner Mochtar Riady. Young James was found guilty of and paid a multi-million dollar fine for funneling more than $1 million in illegal political contributions through Lippo Bank into various American political campaigns, including Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential run. Connect the dots. Riady’s relationship between the Clintons, would be long and corrupt, even extending to donations to the Clinton Foundation."
.....
"The Utah reserve contains the kind of low-sulfur, low-ash, and therefore low-polluting coal the likes of which can be found in only a couple of places in the world. It burns so cleanly that it meets the requirements of the Clean Air Act without additional technology."

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/12/utah_monument_was_a_reward_to_a_clinton_donor.html
 

SMS

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The thing I’m missing is who will control the land taken out of federal control?

Is it going back to the states? Tribes? Being sold to corporations? What?
 

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