Late on Election Day, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a Dec. 19 auction of more than 50,000 acres of oil and gas parcels alongside or within view of Arches National Park and two other redrock national parks in Utah: Dinosaur and Canyonlands.
The National Park Service’s top official in the state calls it “shocking and disturbing” and says his agency wasn’t properly notified. Environmentalists call it a “fire sale” for the oil and gas industry by a departing administration.
Officials of the BLM, which oversees millions of acres of public land in the West, say the sale is nothing unusual, and one is “puzzled” that the Park Service is upset.
“We find it shocking and disturbing,” said Cordell Roy, the chief Park Service administrator in Utah. “They added 51,000 acres of tracts near Arches, Dinosaur and Canyonlands without telling us about it. That’s 40 tracts within four miles of these parks.”
The Interior Department stepped in, ordering the sister agencies to make amends.
A compromise ordered by the Interior Department requires the BLM to “take quite seriously” the Park Service’s objections.
However, the BLM didn’t promise to pull any parcels from the sale.
“I’m puzzled the Park Service has been as upset as they are,” BLM state director Selma Sierra said.
Roy and conservation groups dispute that, saying never before has the bureau bunched drilling parcels on the fence lines of national parks.
“This is the fire sale, the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry,” said Stephen Bloch, a staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
“The tracts of land offered here, next to Arches National Park or above Desolation Canyon, these are the crown jewels of America’s lands that the BLM is offering to the highest bidder,” he said.
In all, the BLM is moving to open 359,000 more acres in Utah to drilling.
Sierra said the Park Service was consulted on the broad management plans, not specific leases. She apologized for that omission but said notice wasn’t legally required.
She said national parks want to keep oil and gas wells five to 10 miles away “but that policy doesn’t exist.”
