On Thursday, Utah’s First Congressional District Republican Rep. Rob Bishop unveiled changes to his Public Lands Initiative. The updated plan would grant protected status to over a million acres of the Bears Ears region. The PLI also seeks to add limitations to the Antiquities Act, the federal law that allows the President to unilaterally declare national monuments.
Speaking to Behind the Headlines Friday morning, Salt Lake Tribune Washington correspondent Thomas Burr said that the PLI was an attempt to bring together all parties with an interest in public lands.
“The Public Lands Initiative is this three year long process where Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz, two Utah Republicans, tried to bring in all the stakeholders—environmentalists, developers, cattlemen, county commissioners, everyone with interest in what to do with public lands in Utah—and tried to come up with some compromise legislation,” Burr said.
The proposed legislation would increase state government involvement in permitting oil and gas projects. The updated PLI even lays out certain concessions to Native American tribes, including giving the Uintah and Ouray Reservation ownership over minerals there. Burr said that the new plan still faces opposition from conservation groups.
“Environmental groups praised the process, that it was a good idea to try to do this but they almost universally said that the resulting legislation has a couple of poison pills, doesn’t go far enough,” he said. “This is legislation, though. The House [of Representatives] is controlled by Republicans, so they’re going to have hearings and they’ll probably pass it out of committee and maybe even pass it out of the House this year.”
A statement from the Grand Canyon Trust gave the PLI’s chances of passing as “slim to none.”
