After the Biden administration enforced road closures in Moab, restored two national monuments and published a rule balancing conservation and commercial use on public lands, a Republican lawmaker wants the state to have more control over federal land within its border.
A proposed bill for the 2025 legislative session, titled “Presumption of State Jurisdiction Amendments,” says that Utah has authority over matters not exclusively given to the federal government in the Constitution.
“If it’s not actually in the Constitution,” bill sponsor Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan told lawmakers at an interim committee hearing Monday, then state agencies and local governments have the authority to make their own decisions.
“The presumption is that the jurisdiction remains with the state,” he continued.
Kael Weston, a Utah Democrat who has run for federal office, voiced doubts about the proposal.
“It is a very presumptive approach that you’re considering taking full of a lot of assumptions that I think would wind up in very expensive court cases,” Weston said during an opportunity for public comment.
Gov. Spencer Cox said in a news release Monday there would be a news conference Tuesday at 11 a.m. “to announce state action for Utah public lands.” The governor, who is up for reelection this year, will be joined by Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, Senate President Stuart Adams and Sean Reyes, the outgoing attorney general.
Utah is already fighting the federal government on a slough of public lands issues.
Utah challenged the Bureau of Land Management for closing 317 miles of routes to motorized vehicles in the Labyrinth Rims/Gemini Bridges Travel Management Area near Moab. The federal agency said the road closures were necessary to protect sensitive habitats, riparian vegetation and cultural sites.
The state claims it has the right to govern roads on public lands established under a 19th-century law called R.S. 2477, and that the BLM infringed on the state’s power.
“It’s time and money well spent in order to keep access open to our public lands,” said Redge Johnson, executive director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, during the Federalism Commission hearing on Monday.
The state has also fought national monument designations in southern Utah and other examples of perceived federal overreach.
After former President Donald Trump, citing federal overreach and local opposition, reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments in 2017, President Joe Biden used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to restore them to their original acreage in 2021.
Arguing that Biden overstepped his authority, Utah filed a lawsuit in 2022. The state wants the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to declare the monument designations unlawful, which would remove over 2 million acres from federal protection.
Cox has indicated that Utah wants that case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Utah also joined Wyoming in a lawsuit against the BLM over the agency’s recently published “Public Lands Rule,” which would bolster conservation on public lands. Plaintiffs argue that the rule “represents a sea change in how the agency will carry out its mission moving forward.”
And last session, legislators passed SB57, the Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act, which creates a process through which Utah can ignore federal regulations it considers unconstitutional.