Lawsuit seeking to reopen roads

An off-road-vehicle advocacy group is taking Emery County commissioners to court, hoping to force them to reopen roads closed by the Bureau of Land Management.

Members of Utah Shared Access Alliance (USA-ALL) said Wednesday they had filed a suit in 7th District Court in Castle Dale regarding the confrontation over 468 miles of county and state roads in the San Rafael Swell area of Emery County. The roads, known by their original Civil War-era designation "R.S. 2477," were closed by the BLM in 2003.

The R.S. 2477 law, passed in 1866, gave anyone the right to build roads over any federal lands not reserved for other purposes. That law was repealed in 1976, but roads that came into being before that date continued valid. Since then, environmentalists have argued that even small paths and trails are being grandfathered as R.S. 2477 roads, while groups like USA-ALL have argued that R.S. 2477 applies to all "rights of way" in use before 1976.

"They're a property right and the BLM is just choosing to ignore them," said Rainer Huck, USA-ALL president. "This lawsuit is asking the county to defend these rights of way or publicly abandon them. We want to bring the issue to a resolution instead of just festering."

The Emery County Commission is "between a rock and a hard place," said Commissioner Gary Kofford. "If we do what they (USA-ALL) want us to do we'd end up in jail. That's what you get for being a public servant."

Most of the residents of Emery County, including the commissioners, want to keep the roads open, Kofford said. "We're being sued by them, but we're fighting for the same thing."

Kofford estimates that the BLM has closed 40 or 50 roads, many of them "two-tracks" that the county has not maintained but that it still contends are roads.

The county must follow federal procedure, he said, asking the BLM to examine the R.S. 2477 claims. Only then, if the county feels that the BLM's decision to close a road is not in the county's best interest, can it file a suit against the BLM.

To "willfully" use the roads in the meantime would be breaking the law, Kofford said.

But the BLM is proceeding "very slowly" to examine those claims, argues Huck. In the meantime "natural processes are at work" that may make the dirt roads disappear. "Then the environmentalists will say 'There's nothing there. It's wilderness now.' "

"Utah officials have a duty to keep highways open, not to arrest people simply for driving on them."

The lawsuit also aims "to compel the commissioners and Utah Governor Olene Walker to affirmatively act to prevent additional road closures" under pending BLM land use planning, according to a USA-ALL press release.

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