Carbon takes aim at Nine Mile Canyon plan

Carbon County officials are vowing to go to "whatever lengths necessary" to prevent what they view as a too-big designation to protect the archaeological resources of Nine Mile Canyon.

An Area of Critical Environmental Concern designation for 60,539 acres in the canyon is to be part of a resource management plan issued by the Bureau of Land Management, county officials say. The BLM hasn't released the plan's final version, adds a county commissioner, but local officials have been shown proposed contents.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition supports ACEC designation for the canyon, which is world famous for its archaeological resources. The group seeks to protect the abundant examples of rock art and other evidence of the past.

But Michael S. Milovich, a Carbon County commissioner, responded, "I don't know why they need to do the whole canyon."

Nine Mile Canyon is actually far longer than nine miles. About a 24-mile section northeast of Price hosts hundreds of ancient Indian rock art panels. Milovich estimated that 60 percent of the canyon is private property. The area also figures prominently in oil production.

Carbon County planning officials are so upset over what they see as overreaching by the federal government that they fired off a letter to the state coordinator of public lands policy, Lynn Stevens.

Congress intended ACEC designations "to protect small defined areas around sensitive sites," says the letter, mailed to Stevens, who is also the chairman of the San Juan County Commission. The Dec. 16 letter is signed by members of the Carbon County Planning and Building departments.

"We are fearful that local BLM staff and the agency does not recognize the threat to BLM's management authority, the long term damage to the land, to small rural economies or the national implications caused by the reckless lawsuits which stream" from environmental groups, the letter states.

Carbon County planning officials fear that designating the canyon as an ACEC could "amount to total gridlock and allow extremists the ammunition needed to sue BLM and take away their management capabilities while letting a judge make land management decisions."

The letter also refers to "outside communitarian groups" exerting disproportionate influence on federal land decisions. An online dictionary defined a communitarian as a member of a collectivist community.

All that an ACEC designation would do, he said, is to indicate that the canyon "needs to have extra mitigation to avoid destroying the cultural resources," said Steven C. Hansen, coordinator of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition.