October 19, 2023 |
PHOTO – Senator John Barrasso – Bigfoot99 file photo
U.S. Senator John Barrasso has asked the Bureau of Land Management to withdraw its draft resource management plan for Sweetwater County that would take nearly 2 million acres of land out of multiple use.
Barrasso was joined in the letter by Wyoming’s other senator, Cynthia Lummis, as well as Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, the Republican senators from Utah. The letter to BLM director Tracy Stone-Manning asks that the BLM’s preferred Alternative B, which calls for designating 1.8 million acres of federal land as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, “will have a negative impact on those who live, work and recreate here.”
The senators also said the BLM’s preferred alternative will have negative impacts across the West, leading to the end of grazing, critical transmission line improvements and gas production that powers the region.
“Over a decade’s worth of Wyoming input should not be scrapped for a broad Washington mandate,” the senators say to Stone-Manning in their letter.
The senators ask that the BLM completely withdraw the agency’s first preference, Alternative B, from all consideration.
The agency’s plan, the senators wrote in their letter, would reduce 1.8 million acres of federal land to a single use, a move conflicts with the agency’s directive of multiple use.
The senators urge the agency draft a new proposal that “takes into consideration stakeholders and local partners in Wyoming and Utah.”
