Activists ratchet up fight over Kane roads

Routes the county says are open include a hiking trail in Zion National Park and hundreds of miles of routes in other areas, including the world-famous Coyote Gulch, he said.

Zukoski charged Kane County has acted "like a schoolyard bully." He called its ordinance unconstitutional.

Jana Smith, a resident of Kane County who is a retired outfitter and who has a grazing permit in the county, said commissioners try to represent that all county residents are united behind them in their road actions. That is not true, she said.

"Many of us are very distressed that public lands are being seriously abused" by ORV users, she said.

"They truly are some of the most spectacular and unique places in the country," said Heidi McIntosh of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "They are also ecologically fragile places," where roads can erode quickly and cause lasting damage, she added.

Ray Spencer, a Kane County commissioner, said he doesn't know where the environmentalists are getting their information.

"We've not done any more than we have traditionally done," he said in a telephone interview. "We just maintain our transportation system. We continue to do that."

The routes in question are Class D roads, he indicated. "We passed an ordinance recently regulating the use of ORVs within the county," said Spencer.

In his opinion, the ordinance "does more to help their (environmentalists') cause than anything else." It can help regulate abuses to the land, he said. The rule declared all the county's routes open to ORV use until designated otherwise, he said.

Kane County officials have been carrying out dialogues with their federal counterparts for 30 years on such issues, he said.

What if the federal government has closed an area to ORVs?

"If a traditional right-of-way was within it," Spencer said, "then they closed it illegally."

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