{"id":76607,"date":"2018-03-02T12:35:57","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T19:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/oil-was-central-in-decision-to-shrink-bears-ears-monument-emails-show\/"},"modified":"2018-03-02T19:35:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T19:35:57","slug":"oil-was-central-in-decision-to-shrink-bears-ears-monument-emails-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/oil-was-central-in-decision-to-shrink-bears-ears-monument-emails-show\/","title":{"rendered":"Oil was central in decision to shrink Bears Ears monument, emails show"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\u201cHouse
\u201cHouse on Fire\u201d ruins is one of the ancient sites in the Bears Ears region near Blanding, Utah.<\/span>Rick Bowmer\/Associated Press file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

By Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman<\/p>\n

New York Times<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2013 Even before President Donald Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as National Monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.<\/p>\n

The debate started as early as March 2017, when an aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, asked a senior Interior Department official to consider reduced boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah to remove land that contained oil and natural gas deposits that had been set aside to help fund area public schools.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlease see attached for a shapefile and pdf of a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument,\u201d said the March 15 email from Hatch\u2019s office. Adopting this map would \u201cresolve all known mineral conflicts,\u201d the email said, referring to oil and gas sites on the land that the state\u2019s public schools wanted to lease out to bolster state funds.<\/p>\n

The map Hatch\u2019s office provided, which was transmitted about a month before Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke publicly initiated his review of national monuments, was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions Trump announced in December, shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent.<\/p>\n

Since taking office, Trump has been focused on expanding oil, gas and coal development and sweeping away Obama-era environmental initiatives that the administration contends hurt America\u2019s energy industry. The debate over shrinking national monuments sparked a fierce political battle over how much land needs federal protection that is now being fought in the courts.<\/p>\n

Zinke has said the agency review process made no presumptions about the outcomes. \u201cWe want to make sure that everyone\u2019s voice is heard,\u201d Zinke said in May.<\/p>\n

Most of the deliberations took place behind closed doors. The internal Interior Department emails \u2013 more than 25,000 pages in total \u2013 were obtained by The New York Times after it sued the agency with the assistance of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale University Law School. The lawsuit cited the agency\u2019s failure to respond to an open-records request.<\/p>\n

Heather Swift, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, did not reply to a request for a comment on the emails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

25,000 pages of Interior emails obtained after newspaper sued to get them<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,759,5698],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-76607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-interior-policy","tag-ryan-zinke"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76607"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=76607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}