New BLM director sees positive future for Utah land issues

SALT LAKE CITY — With the taste of gritty dust in his mouth and the smell of a harvest on the wind, Juan Palma was just a little boy when he worked in the fields from south Texas to Yakima Valley, Wash.

Tomatoes and peppers in one state, grapes on the vine in another and hops and sugar beets all awaited the hands of Palma's migrant farm family.

It was during this formative time in his youth that the new Utah director of the Bureau of Land Management says his love of the land was planted, even as he plucked its bounty.

"Seeing those beautiful scenic vistas from the back of the truck, peering out through the slats … I thought this has got to be like heaven, those beautiful mountains," Palma said.

Little did he know, as he witnessed the grandeur of the snow-capped Sierras from the floors of the Sacramento Valley, that he would one day go on to manage those lands.

"That is the wonder and acknowledgment — that in America, anything is possible," he said.

A business management major from BYU, Palma may have had his nose stuck in finance and sales at one point, but he was never far from the dirt he grew up with.

Settling in the little town of Vale, Ore., Palma was atop a tractor one day when a farmer who knew his university background asked him why he was still getting his hands dirty.

The question and some soul searching led him to the U.S. Forest Service, where he landed a job.

"I was fascinated that there was an agency like this," Palma said. "The concept of public lands was a foreign idea to me."

He later wound up at the Bureau of Land Management in the eastern Oregon district based in Vale, managing a "big building" he'd watched rise from the ground during the days he drove the tractor.

By 2000, he left the federal agency to take on the responsibility of executive director of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a unique two-state compact between Nevada and California established to oversee all planning and development in the Tahoe Region.

It was a déj?vu moment for Palma, who as a boy had stared in awe at the Sierras.

Like so many of the paths in Palma's life, his newest post has him circling back to the time when he was raising his family in Utah and watching his children graduate from high school and go on to college.

He's returned to a sentinel moment in his past this summer and has undertaken management of the Utah BLM, which has been the fulcrum of controversy the past two years — from resource management plans under legal challenge to pulled oil and gas leases once secured at auction.