Carping over river deal is sour grapes

The phrase "no good deed goes unpunished" came to mind after reading SUWA's criticism ("Three Rivers deal a sorry greenwash," Sept. 16) of Interior Secretary Gale Norton's ban on new hard rock mining claims along 200 miles of Utah's recreational riverways. At best this carping was sour grapes, at worst it was yet another distortion of the facts aimed at misleading the public.

After years of study and engaging stakeholders on this issue, BLM Utah recommended to Norton that she use her authority to withdraw 112,000 acres of public lands along the Colorado, Green and Dolores river corridors. Our purpose was to celebrate the outdoor recreation and natural values of these rivers as well as solve some potential problems associated with so-called nuisance mining claims. Readers may recall that it wasn't too long ago that the BLM was forced to spend hundreds of thousand of dollars in a lengthy legal challenge to stop "recreational bulldozing" in the Westwater Canyon wilderness study area and get the shoreline along this popular stretch of whitewater cleaned up. The ban on new mining claims is designed to reduce the likelihood of this problem from repeating in the future. Perhaps even more pressing, we advocated the withdrawal as a precaution to prevent someone from filing a mining claim on a boat ramp or one of the many other recreational sites BLM has constructed along the Colorado River in recent years. Problems such as these are rare, but they happen, and when they do it is an expensive proposition for the taxpayer. So I was very appreciative of the secretary's decision to move ahead with the withdrawal. As one who has lived through the fallout stemming from where the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument announcement was made, I also applaud Norton's insistence on waiting until her travel schedule permitted a trip to the state so that she could make the withdrawal announcement on Utah soil.

Even more than the personal attacks, it's disappointing that SUWA is using this conservation measure to twist the facts on oil and gas leasing. The fact is, the federal portion of the river corridors now withdrawn from mining is already protected from the other types of development. About one-third of the 192 river miles are closed to leasing because they are inside a wilderness study area or other type of conservation area. All of the lands that are available for leasing under the existing land use plans have built-in protections, most with setback stipulations that specifically prohibit oil rigs, tanks, roads and other development in the river canyons.