Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show
WASHINGTON — Even before President Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil
and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.
One memo, for example, asked Interior staff to prepare a report on each national monument, with a yellow highlighter on the documents emphasizing the need to examine in detail “annual production of coal, oil, gas
and renewables (if any) on site; amount of energy transmission infrastructure on site (if any).” It was followed up by a reminder to staff in June to also look at how the decision to create new National Monuments in Utah might have hurt area mines.
The debate over oil and gas reserves below the ground in Bears Ears started during the Obama administration, the documents show, with officials
from Utah State Board of Education writing to the Interior Department objecting to the plan to designate the area as a national monument.
From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil
and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.
In another email exchange, in May, two Bureau of Land Management officials said
that Mr. Zinke’s chief of staff for policy, Downey Magallanes, had phoned to ask for information on a uranium mill in or near the Bears Ears monument.
The bulk of the documents made public by the Interior Department — about 20,000 pages of them — detail the yearslong effort during the Obama
administration to create new monuments, including input from environmental groups, Indian tribes, state officials and members of Congress.
