Today, Interior’s Office of Inspector General issued a full report of its findings in an investigation of the Trump administration’s illegal reduction and modification of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM). Western Values Project (WVP) requested the investigation after discovering that influential former Utah State Representative Mike Noel’s company had an undisclosed land inholding within the original monument boundaries carved out. Noel retired from the Utah State Legislature after coming under fire for failing to disclose his significant land holdings.
View WVP’s original report here, WVP’s rebuttal to Utah State Representative Noel’s false claims here, and WVP’s request to the Interior Inspector General to investigate the monument reductions here.
Statement by Western Values Project Executive Director Chris Saeger:
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It’s hard to find fault when there is no legal rationale to explain how the president chose to shrink and modify national monument boundaries: President Trump’s reduction of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument violated the Antiquities Act and bypassed congressional authority.
This report is incomplete and raises more questions than it provides answers. It really highlights the haphazard process this administration used to slash protections for some of our most treasured public lands, a process that failed to adequately listen to all public and stakeholder voices. The only way to get to the bottom of the largest reduction of public land protections in U.S. history is for Interior to make public all supporting information and documentation they used in this catastrophic decision.”
The report concluded in part that:
- Interior had no existing processes in place for modifying national monument boundaries;
- Private properties in and surrounding the monument were marked on the maps they reviewed without ownership;
- Interior made an overall effort to exclude private property from the redrawn boundaries because this would enable them to remove more acreage from GSENM;
- According to Noel, an official from Kane County and an official from Garfield County each provided former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke a map showing their proposals for the GSENM boundary changes;
- A lone Kane County official had his staff create a map and gave a presentation to former Secretary Zinke that was not officially sanctioned.
House Natural Resources Chairman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) told Roll Call that he planned on bringing former Secretary Zinke before the committee to testify ‘specifically about the department’s role in shrinking of national monuments.’
Previously, former Secretary Zinke repeatedly claimed that the motivation behind slashing Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent was ‘not about oil and gas’ development, but a New York Times analysis of public documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request later found that oil was central in the decision to shrink Bears Ears.