Republican Rep. John Curtis, who represents Park City and Heber City in the House of Representatives, sees a cycle emerging.
“The current process of a Democrat president extending the monument, a Republican president reducing it, and a Democratic president extending it—doing this back and forth—is really not in the best interest of anybody,” Curtis told KPCW.
President Barack Obama created the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah, shortly before leaving office in 2016.
The next year, President Donald Trump reduced its size by 85% to about 228,000 acres. He cut the size of the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half too.
Five Native American tribes sued the Trump administration for shrinking the monuments. And when President Joe Biden restored the borders Obama created in 2021, the state of Utah sued his administration.
Curtis is proposing what he calls a “legislative solution.”
He and Utah Sen. Mike Lee have introduced identical bills in the House and Senate, proposing a land swap with the Bureau of Land Management. The rest of Utah’s congressional delegation is co-sponsoring those bills.
Additionally, leaders of the same five tribes that sued Trump for shrinking Bears Ears have penned a letter in support of Curtis’ bill, H.R. 3049, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration Exchange Act of 2023.
When Utah became a state in 1896, Congress divided and subdivided Utah into numerous square-mile parcels. Congress gave some of those squares, scattered around the state, back to the state as trust lands.
Those squares are now managed by the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, or SITLA.
SITLA’s mandate is to use its square parcels of land to generate revenue for public institutions, especially education.
120,000 acres of SITLA squares fall within the boundaries of Bears Ears. That’s the land Curtis proposes swapping with BLM.
“If you imagine a checkerboard, and then mixed up all the checks, that's what this land looks like,” the congressman said. “And we're proposing that we take those out and put them in other places in the state. It's far better for SITLA, and, obviously, much better for the area down there.”
Many revenue streams—mining, development, recreation, renewable or nonrenewable energy production—would be difficult to establish when surrounded by protected land.
“You can imagine if you had a square piece of land, surrounded by a monument, that's not going to generate much revenue,” Curtis said.
Since he introduced it in May, Curtis’ bill has moved on to the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands for hearings.
If the subcommittee approves, H.R. 3049 will move on to the full Natural Resources Committee and likely the Rules Committee before it can go to a vote on the House floor.
If passed, the bill would not affect how Utah’s lawsuit plays out against the Biden administration over the restoration of Bears Ears’ border.
