The Times-Independent

Grand County set to lobby on land swap

Changes at this point would be ‘minor’


After a major land swap cleared a key hurdle in the state Legislature earlier this month, Grand County will lobby federal agencies to amend the swap’s details before it reaches Congress.

The Grand County and northern San Juan County parcels SITLA currently seeks to acquire, labeled and circled.
Map courtesy of SITLA

At the same time, a spokesperson for one of the swap’s major players, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, said any changes to the map at this point would be minimal and dependent on on-the-ground inspections rather than local lobbying.

If the swap passes Congress, it would clear SITLA and the Bureau of Land Management to trade hundreds of thousands of acres of land throughout the state in an equal-value exchange.

While the Grand County Commission doesn’t oppose the idea of the swap — the aim of which is to transfer trust lands out of Bears Ears National Monument — the body has publicly opposed the extent and location of land the trust would acquire in Grand County, where it already owns 330,000 acres.

Now that the swap, which would be SITLA’s sixth, has cleared the state Legislative Management Committee, it needs congressional approval before becoming law.

“We’re hopeful a bill will be introduced during the current congress,” wrote Marla Kennedy, a spokesperson for SITLA, in an email.

Grand County Commissioner Kevin Walker said he couldn’t share many details of the commission’s upcoming lobbying effort for fear of hurting its chances. He did say that the commission will focus its efforts on the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BLM.

“We’re reviewing our options to see what we should do,” he said.

According to Kennedy, alterations to a land swap could still occur at this point, but would likely be minor and “made to ensure that equal value is received or to address parcel-specific issues that may arise, such as the presence of hazardous waste, cultural resources, encumbrances, or other resource issues.”

“It is fairly common,” she wrote in an email, “for various issues to be uncovered … that the parties were unaware of when the maps were first put together.”

Though Kennedy couldn’t speak to the specific acreages that could be changed at this point, she said it’s more likely lands would be dropped than added, and any changes would be small compared to the total swap size.

Additionally, those issues are generally discovered during detailed analysis and on-the-ground inspections conducted just before the lands are formally swapped, rather than through local lobbying, Kennedy wrote.

The county’s efforts have already resulted in extensive changes to the acres the trust seeks in Grand County. First aiming for 27,000 acres, the trust has dropped its ask by nearly 45% to 14,630 acres after the commission expressed concern over the acquisitions.

Specifically, commissioners decried SITLA acquisitions in areas the county is targeting for conservation status and loss of public lands; and blows to recreation access.

Despite these county victories, Walker said the land-swap process has been “very opaque” — the county only learned about the swap in the past few months, and local BLM leaders, he said, are in the dark.

“It’s definitely frustrating to me that the people who are going to be most affected by this trade … are just not part of it at all,” Walker said. “…We’re going to try to make our frustrations known.”