Walker to unveil wilderness plan

Scott Groene, director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, is cautious, if not skeptical, about Gov. Olene Walker's plan to resolve a three-decade-old wilderness dispute that has left much of rural Utah in limbo.

After all, Groene has seen it all before: former Gov. Mike Leavitt announcing time and again he would resolve the wilderness issue, only to watch it all come unraveled.

Walker said she will unveil her own wilderness proposal at 10 a.m. Monday and that it will consist of a diverse working group that will include rural county commissioners, environmentalists, off-road vehicle users and ranchers.

"I think we're approaching it from a whole different point of view," Walker said during the governor's monthly news conference Thursday on KUED. "Always before we've had a plan, either at the federal level or at the state level, that has been imposed on the counties. And generally it hasn't worked because they haven't accepted it. What we've done . . . we have worked from ground up. And that's the difference. We decided that if it's ever going to be done, we're going to have to work from the bottom up."

The goal is to work on a regional or county basis, starting with fast-growing southwestern Utah's Washington County, to come up with a wilderness proposal that ultimately can be submitted to Congress.

But the group's success hinges on who becomes Utah's governor. Walker, who became governor after Leavitt left office to head the Environmental Protection Agency, is one of eight candidates vying for the GOP gubernatorial nomination at the statewide convention May 8.

"The first hurdle is May 8," said Groene. "There is a primary coming up that could weaken the process. It's an election year, so no legislation would happen immediately even if we all agreed after the first meeting. That's the political realities."

For 30 years, rural counties and environmentalists have been locked in battle over how much of Utah's landscape should be designated as federal wilderness. Only Congress can designate wilderness, which by definition means vast areas that must be pristine lands without roads and "untrammeled by man." Such a designation would mean no oil and gas development, no motorized traffic, no mining, no cutting of timber.

A wilderness compromise remained elusive for Leavitt, who advocated a wilderness bill he hoped would address those areas where the various sides were in agreement and then address the disputed areas later. He even went so far as to send certain proposals to Congress (he told the Deseret Morning News last year that those bills were thwarted by former U.S. Rep. Jim Hansen).