Lawmakers Decry Utah Monument Clinton Closes Canyons To Coal Mining For Good

President Clinton on Wednesday conceded a pawn in his electoral contest with Bob Dole: Utah.

Not even deigning to stand in the state while he defied its Republican leaders, Clinton declared a vast expanse of Utah land rich in coal reserves a national monument, making a stark display of the powers of incumbency.

The land affected by Clinton’s order, 1.7 million acres, had been the subject of one of the longest simmering disputes between commercial and government interests over the use of what is essentially wilderness. The red rock landscape will be named the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument.

It covers federal land to the west of the Colorado River and to the east of Bryce Canyon National Park, including the coal-rich Kaiparowits Plateau, the Escalante River Canyons and the Grand Staircase.

“Today, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument becomes a great pillar in our bridge to the future,” the president said.

“We are saying very simply, our parents and grandparents saved the Grand Canyon for us, today we will save the Grand Escalante Canyons and the Kaiparowits Plateaus of Utah for our children.”

Nearly all the elected officials in Utah, the most Republican state in the nation, had objected loudly to the president’s use of a 90-year-old law to do by executive order what a GOP-controlled Congress almost certainly would have blocked.

The creation of the monument is “the worst example of election-year grandstanding I have ever witnessed,” said Rep. Wayne Allard, R-Colo.

Trying to swipe some of the headlines from Clinton’s announcement, Republicans organized news conferences in Phoenix and in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

They accused the president of pandering to environmental groups and of failing to consult Utah’s predominantly Republican congressional delegation in advance.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called it “the mother of all land grabs.”

Republicans at the two news conferences sympathized with the mining industry, which will now and forever be blocked from mining the richest untapped coal fields in the nation.

Clinton “may be locking up as much as 62 billion tons of clean, low-sulphur coal, which is found only in the Western region,” said a statement by the Republican-controlled Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

“As the result, because such coal is in relatively short supply, utilities may be forced to burn dirtier coal, causing worse air-pollution problems,” the committee said.

Republicans didn’t deny that Clinton had authority to designate the area as a monument. But they said he bypassed environmental studies that should have been performed to justify the move.

At the Phoenix news conference, Arizona House Speaker Mark Killian accused Clinton of “executive arrogance.”

The Mesa Republican, flanked by a half-dozen other GOP members at the state Capitol, said the group doesn’t oppose conservation measures.

However, Clinton has failed to get public comment on the potential impact of his decision, and it’s unclear exactly how much land, including private acreage, is involved, Killian said.

But Clinton is not without supporters in Utah.

Dan Spomer, 32, who owns a restaurant in Bluff, Utah, near Four Corners, said the president’s move will benefit his and other tourism-related businesses in the Southwest.

Spomer, one of the 22,000 members of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, criticized Utah’s congressional delegation for opposing creation of the monument.

“They don’t represent the people of Utah anymore,” he said.

The following fields overflowed: DATELINE = GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, ARIZ.