{"id":98574,"date":"2018-07-28T14:46:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-28T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/officials-muffled-monument-benefits\/"},"modified":"2018-07-28T14:46:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-28T20:46:00","slug":"officials-muffled-monument-benefits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/officials-muffled-monument-benefits\/","title":{"rendered":"Officials muffled monument benefits"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The sun sets over Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah. The Trump administration reduced the size of the monument by 85 percent in December 2017.<\/span>Katherine Frey\/Washington Post<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

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

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.<\/p>\n

Comments that the department\u2019s 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 \u201crevealing (the) strategy\u201d behind the review.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Trump has already massively reduced two of Utah\u2019s largest national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, and he has not ruled out altering others.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cour ability to estimate the value of energy and\/or minerals forgone as a result of the designations.\u201d That reference was redacted on the grounds it could \u201creveal strategy about the (national monument) review process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officials also singled out BLM Acting Deputy Director John Ruhs\u2019 July 28 response to questions from Katherine MacGregor, acting assistant secretary of lands and minerals management, as eligible to be redacted. MacGregor had asked about the logging potential of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument if Trump reversed the expansion that President Barack Obama carried out at the end of his second term.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrevious timber sale planning and development in the (expansion area) can be immediately resumed,\u201d Ruhs wrote.<\/p>\n

Zinke proposed removing some of the forested areas within Cascade-Siskiyou, where three mountain ranges and several distinct ecosystems intersect, to \u201callow sustained-yield timber production.\u201d Trump has yet to alter the site, which was established by Bill Clinton as a 65,000-acre monument and then enlarged by nearly 48,000 acres days before Obama left office.<\/p>\n

These redactions came to light because Interior\u2019s FOIA office sent out a batch of documents to journalists and advocacy groups July 16 that they later removed online.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt appears that we inadvertently posted an incorrect version of the files for the most recent national monuments production,\u201d officials wrote July 17. \u201cWe are requesting that if you downloaded the files already to please delete those versions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Interior
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke arrives at the Blanding, Utah, airport May 8, 2017, for an aerial tour of Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah.<\/span>Francisco Kjolseth\/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Aaron Weiss, a spokesperson for the advocacy group Center for Western Priorities, said in an email that the \u201cbotched document dump reveals what we\u2019ve suspected all along: Secretary Zinke ignored clear warnings from his own staff that shrinking national monuments would put sacred archaeological and cultural sites at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTrying to hide those warnings from the public months later is disgraceful and possibly illegal,\u201d Weiss said.<\/p>\n

Asked for comment, Interior Department officials said they were looking into the matter.<\/p>\n

The inadvertently released documents show that department officials dismissed some evidence that contradicted the administration\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 11, 2017, Randal Bowman, the lead staffer for the review, suggested deleting language that most fishing vessels near the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument \u201cgenerated 5 percent or less of their annual landings from within the monument\u201d because it \u201cundercuts the case for the ban being harmful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Vanasse, who represents groups that have lobbied to allow commercial fishing in national marine monuments in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, said Trump administration officials have been more open to outside input than their predecessors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey had a lot of meetings with our folks but didn\u2019t listen,\u201d he said of Obama officials, adding that even some Massachusetts Democratic lawmakers objected to the New England marine monument.<\/p>\n

Department officials also redacted the BLM\u2019s assessment<\/a> that \u201cit is unlikely\u201d that the Obama administration\u2019s establishment of the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument \u201chas impacted timber production\u201d because those activities were permitted to continue.<\/p>\n

In response to questions about Grand Staircase-Escalante, BLM wrote that \u201cless inventory\u201d 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. \u201cMore vandalism would have occurred without monument designation,\u201d it states, noting that four visitors centers were established to help protect the area.<\/p>\n

P. David Polly, the president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and a professor of sedimentary geology at Indiana University, said in an interview \u201cthere\u2019s specific funding that comes\u201d with a monument designation, which BLM itself identified in its submission as one of the reasons behind the \u201cincrease\u201d in archaeological finds.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cseveral thousand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis funding will disappear for the areas that are no longer in the monument,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Agencies typically incorporate material submitted through public comments into their regulatory proposals, but documents<\/a> released under the FOIA earlier this year show that Bowman told colleagues in a May 2017 webcast that \u201cbarring a surprise, there is no new information that\u2019s going to be submitted\u201d through the public comment process on the monuments review.<\/p>\n

Polly said the new documents show how Interior officials disregarded the material they gathered during the comment period. \u201cThey knew all of these things, and went ahead and cut them anyway,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Some supporters of the rollbacks said while they appreciated having a chance to weigh in on the process, it does not appear to have made an impact. On May 11, 2017, for example, Oregon Farm Bureau officials wrote Zinke to thank him \u201cfor taking time out of your evening\u201d to meet with their delegation at the Trump International Hotel<\/a> and hear ranchers\u2019 objections to the Cascade-Siskiyou expansion.<\/p>\n

Sharon Waterman, the bureau\u2019s first vice president, said in an interview that while she was glad her group had \u201ca chance encounter\u201d with Zinke at the hotel, she was \u201cvery disappointed\u201d that the monument\u2019s boundaries remain unchanged.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem like what we have done has made an impact, but I don\u2019t know why,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s really sad that they continue this expansion because it\u2019s really important that (timberlands) stay in production.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost constituently vague as to what is deliberative and exempted,\u201d said Columbia Law School professor David Pozen, referring to FOIA Exemption 5. \u201cIt was meant to ensure open and frank deliberation before a decision is taken.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he added that if Interior officials were using the provision to withhold documentation on how it decided to weaken certain protections, that \u201cwould be substantially away from the heartland\u201d of the exemption.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe deliberative privilege wasn\u2019t meant to relieve the executive branch of explaining and justifying its decisions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Pozen and other experts said it was unlikely the redacted portions of the documents could be used as ammunition for lawsuits now challenging Trump\u2019s move to shrink the two Utah monuments.<\/p>\n

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

\u201cIt\u2019s not at all clear a court would admit this material in evidence in litigation challenging Trump\u2019s actions,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause the rules about reviewing presidential actions, in general, are fuzzy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interior\u2019s emails reveal federal plan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[781,759,5698,121],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-98574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-environmental-politics","tag-interior-policy","tag-ryan-zinke","tag-utah"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98574","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=98574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98574"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=98574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}