Recently, Utah lawmakers approved a potential Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) land exchange, which would transfer the vast majority of state-owned lands currently within Bears Ears into federal ownership to become a part of the Monument.
Bears Ears Partnership (BEP) has been tracking this land swap closely and commends Utah lawmakers for this decision. A trade would expand the Monument by over 150,000 acres, protecting culturally and ecologically sensitive lands for years to come while providing the Trust’s beneficiaries (the school kids of Utah) with more developable and economically valuable land elsewhere in the state.
Learn more about the SITLA land exchange here.
Despite this progress, there’s still something missing. The Bluff Bench is the only remaining SITLA parcel that is not currently planned to be traded out of the Monument.
The Bluff Bench parcel – approximately 4,300 acres, just north of Bluff – currently encompasses part of an active gravel mine and is the location of a proposed solar farm. The solar farm could be moved outside of the Monument along an existing powerline corridor onto adjacent state lands, and the lands including the gravel pit could be transferred while still honoring the existing lease.
The aquifer that supplies Bluff’s drinking water runs directly below these lands. As such, excluding the Bluff Bench parcel from this land exchange leaves the town of Bluff’s watershed open to industrial scale development. Leaving these lands out of the Monument would also make it more difficult to protect the region’s connected cultural landscape. In short, we believe industrial development is inappropriate in any part of the Monument.
To learn more about how you can support this campaign, contact BEP Executive Director, Joe Neuhof at