Washington – Moffat County officials asked the U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday to back their claims to roads that cut across wild federal land in northwest Colorado – a step that environmentalists call a tactic to block wilderness designation of the area.
The request on five roads is a test of a new policy laid down by former Interior Secretary Gale Norton shortly before she left office in March. Norton signed a “secretarial order” telling federal land managers that if they determine such claims are valid, they can allow county governments that claim them to send crews out to maintain the roads.
Environmental groups say the Norton policy carves up public lands, opens them to off-road vehicles and allows local governments to prevent land from being considered for formal wilderness designation.
“Some of them go into very sensitive areas that have been closed to vehicles for a very long time,” said Kristen Brengel of the Wilderness Society. “We believe BLM has the authority to deny these claims.”
Moffat County officials say they’re simply preserving traditional access across public lands. They say they don’t intend to send bulldozers out to cut new roadbeds.
In most cases, they say the roads are twin tracks that have been used by county residents for generations.
“Philosophically, we don’t want to change them. We want to keep them open they way they’ve always been,” said Tom Gray, chairman of the county board of commissioners.
At the time she announced the policy, Norton and Interior Department officials said she was simply following a ruling handed down last year by a federal appeals court.
Two of the five requests cut through “wilderness study areas.” WSAs are lands BLM determined to have wilderness characteristics, though Congress never formally designated them with such protection.
Still, the lands are managed as wilderness, blocking many uses, such as oil and gas development, mining and vehicle access.
Moffat’s request for a “non-binding determination” on the roads came at a meeting Tuesday in Craig with BLM officials.
It’s the latest move in a long controversy about with what to do with roads claimed under a Civil War-era law called “R.S. 2477” that allowed local governments to create roads across federal lands.
Much of the controversy boils down to what proof there is of a road’s existence. Environmentalists have accused Western counties of making flimsy claims to assert greater control over federal land.
In recent years, counties have attempted to claim rights of way in Utah’s Canyonlands and Arches national parks as well as California’s Mojave National Preserve.
The Bush administration has been friendlier to such claims than was the Clinton administration. Under Norton, the Interior Department has worked with counties to advance the claims without violating a congressional moratorium on processing them.
Staff writer Mike Soraghan can be reached at 202-662-8730 or msoraghan@denverpost.com.
