Utah National Monument Review - Gov't Documents Show Bias

I know this will have limited interest here, but since I posted a lot about it previously, and many on the Zone chimed in and commented in support, I thought I'd post this for those who might be interested. 

Not that it would surprise anyone interested in these egregious decisions about protecting YOUR public lands, but the Washington Post discovered documents "accidently" released to the public that show how the Interior Dept hid documents and opinions supporting monument designation and the positive results that resulted. They released the documents, then told people to redact then from their computers. Sadly, the end of these excerpts show how the evidence may not help the appeals currently in the courts.

Zinke's in town tonight for a rodeo. Maybe I'll go try to say hello.  

It's a holiday in Utah today - Pioneer Day, or as some call it Pie and Beer Day.  

It commemorates the mormon pioneers arriving in Utah in 1847, centuries after the present-day Navajos in the Bears Ears region.

I've heard it's also a holiday in California - because the mormons didn't make it there and stopped their trek in Utah. Have a fun one, whatever you do.

From the Washington Post story:

In a quest to shrink national monuments last year, senior Interior Department officials dismissed evidence that these public lands boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries, according to documents the department released this month and retracted a day later.

The thousands of pages of email correspondence chart how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his aides instead tailored their survey of protected sites to emphasize the value of logging, ranching and energy development that would be unlocked if they were not designated as national monuments.

Comments that the department's Freedom of Information Act officers made in the documents show that they sought to keep some of the references out of public view because they were "revealing [the] strategy" behind the review.

The new documents show that as Zinke conducted his four-month review, Interior officials rejected material that would justify keeping protections in place and sought out evidence that could buttress the case for unraveling them.

On July 3, 2017, Bureau of Land Management official Nikki Moore wrote colleagues about five draft economic reports on sites under scrutiny, noting that there is a paragraph within each on “our ability to estimate the value of energy and/or minerals forgone as a result of the designations.” That reference was redacted on the grounds it could “reveal strategy about the [national monument] review process.”

Presidents can establish national monuments in federal land or waters if they determine that cultural, historical or natural resources are imperiled. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing Zinke to review 27 national monuments established over a period of 21 years, arguing that his predecessors had overstepped their authority in placing these large sites off-limits to development.

Trump has already massively reduced two of Utah’s largest national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, and has not ruled out altering others. Previously released documents indicate that oil and coal played a big part in the decision to shrink these monuments.

These redactions came to light because Interior’s FOIA office sent out a batch of documents to journalists and advocacy groups July 16 that they later removed online.

“It appears that we inadvertently posted an incorrect version of the files for the most recent National Monuments production,” officials wrote July 17. “We are requesting that if you downloaded the files already to please delete those versions.” 

The inadvertently released documents show that department officials dismissed some evidence that contradicted the administration’s push to revise national monument designations, which are made under the 1906 American Antiquities Act. Estimates of increased tourism revenue, analyses that existing restrictions had not hurt fishing operators and agency reports that less vandalism occurred as a result of monument designations were all set aside.

In response to questions about Grand Staircase-Escalante, the BLM wrote that “less inventory” of cultural sites would have occurred without the 1996 monument designation, noting that more than twice as many sites are now identified each year than before. “More vandalism would have occurred without Monument designation,” it states, noting that four visitors centers were established to help protect the area.

P. David Polly, the president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and a professor of sedimentary geology at Indiana University, said in an interview that “there’s specific funding that comes” with a monument designation, which the BLM itself identified in its submission as one of the reasons behind the “increase” in archaeological finds.

Polly added that the funding also accounts for why the number of paleontological finds in Grand Staircase-Escalante has risen from a few hundred before 1996 to “several thousand.”

“This funding will disappear for the areas that are no longer in the monument,” he said.

Agencies typically incorporate material submitted through public comments into their regulatory proposals, but documents released under the FOIA earlier this year show that Bowman told colleagues in a May 2017 webcast that “barring a surprise, there is no new information that’s going to be submitted” through the public comment process on the monuments review.

Polly said the new documents show how Interior officials disregarded the material they gathered during the comment period. “They knew all of these things, and went ahead and cut them anyway,” he said.

And while critics questioned why Interior officials intended to withhold so much material from public view, legal experts said they can probably justify it under the exemption covering internal executive branch communications.

“It’s almost constituently vague as to what is deliberative and exempted,” said Columbia Law School professor David Pozen, referring to FOIA Exemption 5. “It was meant to ensure open and frank deliberation before a decision is taken.”

But he added that if Interior officials were using the provision to withhold documentation on how it decided to weaken certain protections, that “would be substantially away from the heartland” of the exemption.

“The deliberative privilege wasn’t meant to relieve the executive branch of explaining and justifying its decisions,” he said.

Pozen and other experts said it was unlikely that the redacted portions of the documents could be used as ammunition for lawsuits now challenging Trump’s move to shrink the two Utah monuments.

John Leshy, who served as Interior solicitor during the Clinton administration, said that because the president initiated this review by issuing an executive order last year, administration officials could assert the redacted sections are privileged.

“It’s not at all clear a court would admit this material in evidence in litigation challenging Trump’s actions,” he said, “because the rules about reviewing presidential actions, in general, are fuzzy.”