Just over two weeks into his tenure as Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar announced on Feb. 4 that the department is withdrawing 77 oil and gas leases on parcels near national parks and other wild areas in southeastern Utah. Those are the same 77 parcels the Bureau of Land Management is prevented from leasing by a temporary restraining order issued last month by a U.S. District Court judge.

The decision to offer the parcels for leasing last December came directly on the heels of the release of the resource management plans for several Utah BLM field offices, including Moab. The BLM had deferred a number of parcels in anticipation of approval of the RMP, which was supposed to provide sufficient regulatory framework to address potential environmental problems. With the Bush Administration pushing the agency to accommodate oil and gas exploration in the name of national security, critics said the BLM sped the leases through the process.

While the specific decisions on individual parcels are made at the state and field office levels, Salazar placed the ultimate responsibility much higher.

“In its last weeks in office, the Bush Administration rushed ahead to sell oil and gas leases at the doorstep of some of our nation’s most treasured landscapes in Utah,” Salazar said in a news release. “We need to responsibly develop our oil and gas supplies to help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but we must do so in a thoughtful and balanced way that allows us to protect our signature landscapes and cultural resources in places like Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Dinosaur National Monument, and Nine Mile Canyon, for future generations.”

Although the parcels will be withdrawn from the December 2008 lease sale, that’s not to say they couldn’t be offered again. Salazar said the BLM is going to reconsider the process to determine if the leases were appropriate.

“We will take a fresh look at these 77 parcels and at the adequacy of the environmental review and analysis that led to their being offered for oil and gas development. I am also concerned that there was inadequate consultation with other agencies, including the National Park Service,” he said.

The local BLM field offices will likely be called on to answer some of those questions. “I’m sure a lot of those questions will come down to us,” said Moab district manager Shelley Smith. “When you get down to specifics on the ground, where things are and what other resources are there, I’m sure they’ll rely on our expertise.”

Smith also said the issues with the National Park Service were an oversight. “It was just an administrative error at the state office,” she said. “It wasn’t a deliberate attempt to short-circuit anything that had been working before. It was a terrible stumble, and it’s unfortunate that it turned out that way.”

What had been working before was a simple agreement between the agencies whereby the BLM agreed to provide notice to the Park Service any time a lease might have impacts on a park.

“The agreement was done in 1993, and one of the outcomes of this was making sure it’s still relevant to how we operate,” Smith said. “[NPS Southeast Utah Group Superintendent] Kate Cannon and I have actually drafted a revised version of it that’s being reviewed internally now. It pretty much preserves the same commitment to communication we’ve always had.”

The U.S. District Court hasn’t reviewed the case brought by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in light of the withdrawal of the parcels, but it’s possible that aspect of the case could be declared moot. SUWA has said the lawsuit will still go forward, challenging the underlying justification for the lease offerings, the review process guided by the new RMP. If successful, the suit could keep the parcels from being considered again.

In the meantime, the BLM is going forward with their next lease sale, which includes 109 parcels statewide, and 30 within the purview of the Moab Field Office. While the map recently released by the BLM once again fails to correlate the parcels to the list of stipulations they’ve also provided, or to offer any reference points such as towns or highways, it does show the boundaries of the national parks. The parcels are all far from park boundaries. In Grand County they’re clustered to the northeast, between the Colorado River and the Book Cliffs.

The withdrawal also won’t let protestor Tim DeChristopher off the hook. In what he describes as an act of civil disobedience, DeChristopher went to the auction and bid on a number of parcels, winning some and disrupting the auction in the process. His case has already been forwarded to the United States Attorney in Salt Lake City, who issued a terse statement following Salazar’s announcement:

“Today’s decision by the Interior Department to withdraw the BLM oil and gas leases in Utah does not impact our obligation to analyze the facts and law at the time of the alleged conduct in the DeChristopher case,” U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman said. “The decision to withdraw the leases does not wipe the slate clean. We are obligated to enforce the law, a responsibility we take very seriously. As we do with every case referred to our office, we will continue to carefully review the facts in this case and, if appropriate, present it to a grand jury.”