Killing the golden goose

In Wayne County, Utah this week the decision was made to go ahead and put a gravel pit in the county's most desirable residential neighborhood. It is backward economically and an amoral thing to do and I am wondering how such a thing happens.

Double rainbow, and then some, in Wayne County

The gravel pit is on Utah School and Institutional Trust Land Administration (SITLA) land, one of the myriad checkerboard pieces of state land that is scattered geometrically but not politically across the state. SITLA had previously earmarked the parcel of land in Teasdale as best suited to sell for residential use. The land all around the parcel is zoned by Wayne County as residential and agricultural. The property values in the area are high and getting higher and are much greater than any other place within 100 miles. That is because the valley Teasdale and Torrey are situated in boasts of an unparalleled natural beauty. Torrey is the gateway community to Capitol Reef National Park and was considered at one point to be included in the Park given its environmental splendor. Many of the residents in the valley are so called "move-ins" and second home owners, people who are here for the scenery and outdoor recreation. I am one. As such, we pay full property taxes unlike most of our "local" neighbors who take 90% property tax greenbelt exemptions. Because of this, a minority of the property owners in the county pay a majority of the taxes. All the same, we are greatly resented.

I was told a story a couple of years ago about a public Wayne County Commission meeting held to review the county's bi-annual resource utilization plan. Most of  Capitol Reef National Park is in Wayne County and the Park superintendent was invited. The superintendent thumbed through the proposed plan and noticed that the National Park was not mentioned as a county resource. He asked the commissioners about the omission. The commissioners reportedly stared at him, stony faced, before one finally responded, "Son, you can't mine it, you cannot log it, you can't graze it, hell you cannot even get the water out of there. It ain't a resource." The superintendent, dumbfounded, walked out. Rural politicians are known to believe that all conservation is bad and all extraction is good. It is an archaic belief, one that is on the wrong side of history, and one that holds their counties back.

SITLA is about raising money for public schools. As good state residents their policy is to go along with county zoning and leadership wishes. For instance, when the Wayne County Commissioners objected to The Nature Conservancy buying a conservation easement from SITLA on lands within the county, an easement to protect the endangered sage grouse, SITLA relented and did not sell the easement. Never mind the imperiled sage grouse. If Wayne County were to say the Teasdale parcel is zoned residential and that a gravel pit would be absurd there, as it will be, SITLA would agree. That is until recently. When challenged by the Utah County Association, SITLA backed off and no longer pressed for a zoning variance from the county. And even though the county would make more money collecting property taxes from the parcel should SITLA sell it for residential use, the county insists on a gravel pit. Local residents have banded together with petitions, packed the meeting halls, sent in letters, filed lawsuits, and even offered to subsidize the gravel pit contractor to use another site, all to be stonewalled by Wayne County commissioners.

What is going on here? Is it a simple minded ideology that all conservation is bad and all extraction good? That is hard to believe, but it could be. Or are there backroom dealings? The politically connected gravel pit extraction company, Brown Brothers Construction (BBC), is said to want the gravel pit in Teasdale. Residents have noted that there are closer, more appropriate SITLA lands available for gravel that are not in a residential community and that would save Brown Brothers money, but BBC does not budge. It is said that the Utah County Association is Koch brothers supported. My guess is that BBC is just a small fish in an even smaller pond. My bet is that politicians at the level of U.S. Senator Hatch have passed down the word that all resistance to extraction is to be squashed and that SITLA and Wayne County are happily obeying, smiling on the way to the bank with their Koch gratuities in one hand and goose feathers in the other.

Moving back

I started this site to see if I could generate some traffic and to see what online ad revenue was about. In 10 days I made two cents. Thus I am moving back to my original Wordpress site where I will be eclectic once again in subject including conservation, New West, and astro and landscape photography galleries. See ya there:

Thots and Shots

NIMBY, better yet, nowhere

Red Rock gateway or "Gravel Pit Point?"

At the Bicknell Bottoms in Wayne County, southbound Utah Highway 24 turns west and passes through the Red Gate of the red rock Velvet Cliffs on the north and a toe of Boulder Mountain on the south. Here it enters the gorgeous Fremont River valley and the gateway communities to Capitol Reef National Park. I was at a gathering of friends and neighbors to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of the good man who built my home in the valley in Torrey. John came down from the city in the late 90's to build my home, fell in love with the surroundings, and never left.

It was there, talking about John and why he loved this place, and why we did too, that I learned that Wayne County is proposing to rezone nearby undisturbed land to allow the building of a gravel pit. Extractive industry like this is a good example of Old West thinking that is having a hard time going away. In the Old West the land was seen for the taking. Plunder and prosper. Mining, logging, grazing, drilling, road building, damming and stream draining, all were viewed as improvement and progress. In the New West we have learned, or are beginning to learn, that the land is often more valuable when left in its natural state. By value in this case I am speaking of economics. But there are other ethical and cultural values that are part of the New West way of seeing and being.

I changed my voting district years ago to go with my property in rural Wayne County primarily in order to vote against Mike Noel, a powerful political paragon of the Old West in Utah. If I told Mike I was against building a gravel pit in this gorgeous gateway valley he would ask me how I got here. Did I drive on a road? Where did I think the road came from? Mike talks in disingenuous ways like that but he is right, I drive here on a road. But does that mean we need another gravel pit, and a gravel pit in a paradise like this? When I point out to Noel that today in Utah all of agriculture, natural resources and mining, including oil and gas, add up to less than four percent of Utah's economy he simply denies the facts. He says something like, "Everybody has to eat." He is right, we all eat, but he is wrong on the state of the State. Extraction is a very small part of the modern economy. The woman on the bike in the tourist photo above is looking almost directly at where the gravel pit would be. She is very likely from somewhere in the other 96% of the economy that live and work and play in Utah because it is beautiful and she is not here to gaze at the destruction of extraction.

When I object to opening a nearby gravel pit am I just pushing the problem elsewhere by insisting "not in my backyard?" I don't think so. In economics there is a useful concept called comparative advantage. In this case it would say there are some places that are better for gravel pits and some places that are better as gateway communities to National Parks and that when each place is put to its highest use, and not to every possible use, the world is a better place. But the concept still assumes a gravel pit needs to be dug somewhere. But does it? Aren't there enough gravel pits? Are there better substitutes from existing resources, like the scrapings that come from existing road resurfacing? Building a gravel pit in the Fremont River Valley is a good Old West example of a private party, in this case a construction company and the politicians like Noel it supports, benefiting at the public's expense. It is a special interest wins, we lose proposition. A new gravel pit does not need to be here and in fact it does not need to be anywhere.

"War" on coal: moving assets the wrong way

Todd Wilkinson at the Jackson Hole News & Guide has a good piece out this week on Wyoming and their self-induced energy industry related wounds. Wilkinson identifies the strange "fist of defiance" the state Republicans raise when faced with the 21st century. It is a head scratcher for me until I accept that the politicians are wholly owned by the energy industry and behave like it. There is no other explanation.

High Speed Rail in the West: Bring in people instead of climate change

It is too bad. Wyoming citizens outside the Jackson Hole area might be inclined to believe that the only real industry is the extractive industry. It is one they can see, one their state has history in, and yet one that in the end has always treated the state badly. It is too bad because these folks could use some true statesmen to guide them out of the vicious cycle of boom and bust and and landscape laid to waste as a result.

Timothy Egan, a man of the West and astute observer and writer about the New West has an editorial in today's New York Times in which he wonders what is happening to his home town of Seattle. The West coast large cities from San Francisco north are boom towns. One result is real estate costs and congestion are spiraling up and out of control. What does Wyoming have? Plenty of real estate and very little congestion. In addition much of the state is still beautiful. If the right wing statesmen in charge of the place could look in a different direction, they might attract some of this business. But this would mean they need to protect the land instead of trying to graze, mine, damn, drill and log it. Old West is the wrong side of history. Wyoming, drop your energy extraction habit, quite trying to ship fossil fuel west to the coast. Try turning things the other way.

Instead of coal ports, how about, say, a high speed rail moving the real assets, people, in and out of your state?

Mining for failure

Last century? 19th century?

Yesterday Brian Maffly had another excellent piece in the Salt Lake Tribune about the costly flailing about of the coal industry in Utah and the resulting conflicts of interest engaged by that industry's captured legislators. This morning Torrey House Press author (for which we are grateful!) Terry Tempest Williams has an op-ed in the New York Times on an inspired move she and husband Brooke have made on the same subject.

I expect I will be highlighting Maffly's work frequently on this site. He has the legislator's number and does a good job exposing their antics. That said I am a little surprised how gentle Maffly's words are. He keeps the gloves on. It took me a second read of his article to see he was accusing the actors involved in a $53 million loan of public money to the state's private coal industry of working with a blatant conflict of interest and in bad faith. For example, Jeffrey Holt, who stands to gain up to $3 million of the loan as a personal incentive fee also chaired the Utah Transportation Commission, which prioritizes projects for public funding. Holt and his crew are working to get public funding for their private gain for two projects, one a new rail line to haul the coal and two, a new port in Oakland to load the coal on ships to send to China.

Coal is Old West. Bloomberg News reported a year ago that Beijing will close the last of its four major coal-fired power plants this year.

Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams are New West. The future belongs to clean energy and those who recognize this simple economic fact will be those who benefit most. It is unfortunate for Americans that virtually the only people on the planet who don't believe it are U.S. Republicans. The Republican legislators, particularly in Utah are funded by the energy industry. The industry knows the facts, but a basic failure of capitalism stems from what economists call an "externality." An externality is where someone else other than the producer bears the cost of production, in this case the cost of pollution. In order for the public to put up with the costs, the industry lavishly funds willing legislators to promote their business and, say, make them $53 million dollar loans with taxpayer funds. Brooke and Terry have a brilliant strategy to use the energy of New West thinkers to keep the Old West energy in the ground. #keepitintheground And Brooke and Terry are using their own money.

I want to say much more about this in future posts. For now, consider quickly the graph below. But before you look, given how much time and energy politicians like Utah Governor Herbert or Rep. Rob Bishop spend promoting extractive industry, what percentage would you think it makes up of Utah's economy? Are you surprised that all of agriculture, natural resources, and mining (which includes oil and gas) only add up to 3.8 percent? Extraction is Old West.

Last round-up for the Bundy clan

The party is over

I clearly remember reading about Cliven Bundy almost 20 years ago. The news report, I forget now from where, probably in the excellent New West newspaper, High Country News. It was one of those pieces of news that make you shake your head and wonder if you got it right. It might have been an example of false equivalency, where the reporter made it sound as if Bundy had a valid point. How was it possible that a guy was keeping federal authorities from doing their job by threatening violence? How was it possible that he was illegally grazing cattle on public land, threatening the desert tortoise, a protected endangered species, and getting away with it? What century were we talking about here?

Bundy continued to get away with making his own law at gunpoint. There were two subsequent federal court verdicts which he was able to somehow ignore with impunity. Tim DeChristopher technically broke the law in a no-harm no-foul no-guns way and spent 2 years in federal prison., but Bundy remained free. There was no arrest warrant, no lien on his property, no word from the Department of Justice, or FBI, or from Department of Interior that anything was going to be done. Clearly the code of the West was one of unequal justice. Environmentalists go to jail on any technicality. White males in cowboy hats go free.

In April 2014 the Bureau of Land Management finally tried to round up Bundy's federally trespassing cows. Astonishingly they were driven off by hundreds of armed ranchers and cowboys. This kind of conflict is an old story in the West that won't seem to go away. The best summary out there is by Christopher Ketcham, a modern Bernard DeVoto and writing in the same magazine as DeVoto did. The U.S. Government backed off, left the cows to the outlaw cowboys, and again did nothing.

The law seems to be different in the Intermountain West, as are the politics. When the Bundy clan moved their sedition movement to Oregon they moved a little too close to a place of rational politics and politicians. Oregon governor Kate Brown was apparently asked by the feds to remain silent on the Malheur occupation. But after almost a month of the now usual no federal response, she could not stand it and came out publicly demanding law enforcement. Immediately the action on the ground by law enforcement began to change. A week later the first Bundys were arrested. Almost certainly the word had come down from the administration to finally enforce the law. As I have posted earlier, political logrolling finally gave way to the law of the land.

It takes time, and it is usually messy, but this country seems to muddle through. Cliven Bundy is in jail and the book is being thrown at him. The laws he broke remain the same, but they are finally being enforced. The rest of the country has now had a glimpse of the backwards, backroom dealings of politics and law in the West, the Old West, but we are being dragged into the current century. And even Bundy's trespassing cows are finally, over 20 years later, going to be removed from protected public land.

A robust response was called for at Malheur

Equal justice under law

U.S. Supreme Court

The immense damage I see to public lands in southern Utah caused by private livestock grazing motivated me to start Torrey House Press. The public would not put up with current land management practices if they knew about them and I want to get the word out in literature.  The land practices are absurd, and I will get to that, but what concerns me even more about the Bundys taking siege to the public buildings at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge is how it makes a mockery of the American principle of equal justice under law. Cliven Bundy has twice been convicted in federal court for illegal livestock grazing and for failure to pay grazing fees. In April 2014, after 20 years of illegal grazing, Bundy and his sons, along with numerous heavily armed protesters in cowboy hats, held the federal government off at gunpoint from rounding up the trespassing cows. Yet Bundy and his sons remain free, free to continue illegal grazing, free from paying grazing fees, free from paying court fines, free to take siege of the public visitor center at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge where, as of this writing, these gunmen remain free to come and go as these please. In the meanwhile, public schools in the surrounding county are closed in terror.
In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher was arrested for interrupting an energy auction of public land located in Utah's red-rock country. DeChristopher was armed not with guns but with a bidding paddle. He was an out of state, non-LDS, college student at the time of the auction. Even though the auction was later ruled to be illegal because of insufficient environmental and scientific review, which was DeChristopher's point, that fact was not allowed to be heard in court by ruling judge Dee Benson and DeChristopher was convicted, sentenced and served two years in federal prison.
At Ferguson and Baltimore the national guard was called out to thwart and suppress protesters. Protesters who were mostly black. At Malheur the Bundys come and go as they please.
The principle of equal justice was once thought important enough to be carved in stone in the highest court in the land. In the West, the notion is being made a joke by the Bundys. What is apparent is that if you are white, wear a cowboy hat, and go the right church in the West, equal justice is a double standard. Allowing a precedent like this to stand is well down the pathway to fascism.

Welfare ranching

Destruction by Grazing

The ecological costs of public land livestock grazing exceed that of any other western land use. Grazing is the most widespread cause of species endangerment. By destroying vegetation, damaging wildlife habitats and disrupting natural processes, livestock grazing wreaks havoc on riparian areas, rivers, deserts, grasslands and forests alike. Yet we subsidize it. Ranchers pay $1.35 per month per two cows to graze on public lands, about 15% of the current private market rate. Ranchers get greenbelt exemptions and pay effectively no property tax. The federal government pays for fences, gates, cattle guards and water works to manage the cows on public land while extending deeply discounted agricultural loans. Finally, and most abhorant, through the euphemistically named Wildlife Services the government extirpates natural predators on behalf of ranchers, wiping out ecologically critical wildlife including wolves, bears, mountain lions, bobcats, foxes and coyotes.
You cannot feed two hamsters for $1.35 per month. And the taxpayer for you, unlike for ranchers, will not provide the cage and water. Why are these whining, coddled, subsidized, gun-wielding ranchers being tolerated?

A fish rots from the head down

There is a thing know in western conservation circles as "the Hatch effect." If a government employee of the BLM or Forest Service does something to upset a rancher, something to protect our land from cow created havoc, the rancher puts on his boots, big belt buckle and cowboy hat and goes whining to Hatch. The government agent then gets demoted and transferred and the rancher's problem disappears. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Cliven Bundy is walking around free while his boys hold a siege of terror on public property without consequence. All I got to offer is the Hatch effect.

We the people

In the end, the power lies with we the people. We need to elect different representatives. Soon would be good.