WASHINGTON — Environmentalists complained Tuesday that Utah now might be able to build new roads in national parks and wilderness areas because of language just stripped from the annual Interior appropriations bill by House and Senate negotiators.

However, Utah officials say the language removed from the bill was unnecessary because roads in such pristine areas are already banned by a recent deal struck between Utah and the Department of Interior.

Environmentalists are skeptical.

"By removing the language, Congress lets the Bush administration give away America's treasured wild lands to profiteering developers," said Mike Matz, executive director of the Campaign for America's Wilderness.

"Although the language wasn't perfect because it left tens of millions of acres of lands the public owns open to destruction, keeping the provision in the bill would have been a critical first step in preserving wilderness for future generations."

What negotiators stripped from the bill late Monday was wording given essentially as a consolation prize last July to environmental groups, after they failed to block federal funding to clear any local claims to roads, paths and trails that crisscross federal lands in Utah.

Utah's members of the House were able to water that down by instead pushing an amendment to merely ban funds to process claims for roads in "national parks, fish and wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and wilderness study areas."

They said that gave up nothing, because roads in those areas were already banned by a memorandum of understanding between Gov. Mike Leavitt and Interior Secretary Gale Norton on how to process claims to roads by states.

That had environmental groups wondering aloud Tuesday why Westerners would strip the compromise language from the Interior appropriations bill if it truly were innocuous and merely duplicative.

"Congress is letting the Bush administration give away public lands to special interests," said Amy Mall with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The administration's sneaky, underhanded move could eventually unleash bulldozers and off-road vehicles on millions of acres of federally protected wild lands."

The claims to federal land are made through an 1866 law called "R.S. 2477," which allowed local governments to make roads on federal lands not otherwise reserved by Congress. It was repealed in 1976, but allowed existing R.S. 2477 roads to remain in local hands. The trouble is, no inventory of the roads existed.

Environmentalists contend that counties have since claimed everything from cow paths to streambeds as old R.S. 2477 roads to try to block proposed wilderness areas, which are supposed to be roadless.