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Accidentally released emails show Trump officials dismissed benefits of protected public land
Washington Post
In a quest to shrink national monuments last year, senior Interior Department officials dismissed evidence these public lands boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries, according to documents the department released this month and retracted a day later.
The thousands of pages of email correspondence chart how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his aides instead tailored their survey of protected sites to emphasize the value of logging, ranching and energy development that would be unlocked if they were not designated as national monuments.
Comments the department’s Freedom of Information Act officers made in the documents show they sought to keep some of the references out of public view because they were “revealing [the] strategy” behind the review.
Presidents can establish national monuments in federal land or waters if they determine cultural, historical or natural resources are imperiled. In April, President Trump signed an executive order instructing Zinke to review 27 national monuments established over a period of 21 years, arguing his predecessors had overstepped their authority in placing these large sites off-limits to development.
The new documents show that as Zinke conducted his four-month review, Interior officials rejected material that would justify keeping protections in place and sought out evidence that could buttress the case for unraveling them.
On July 3, 2017, Bureau of Land Management official Nikki Moore wrote colleagues about five draft economic reports on sites under scrutiny, noting there is a paragraph within each on “our ability to estimate the value of energy and/or minerals forgone as a result of the designations.” That reference was redacted on the grounds it could “reveal strategy about the [national monument] review process.”
These redactions came to light because Interior’s FOIA office sent out a batch of documents to journalists and advocacy groups on July 16 it later removed online.
“It appears that we inadvertently posted an incorrect version of the files for the most recent National Monuments production,” officials wrote July 17. “We are requesting that if you downloaded the files already to please delete those versions.”
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The inadvertently released documents show department officials dismissed some evidence that contradicted the administration’s push to revise national monument designations, which are made under the 1906 American Antiquities Act. Estimates of increased tourism revenue, analyses that existing restrictions had not hurt fishing operators and agency reports that less vandalism occurred as a result of monument designations were all set aside.
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Department officials also redacted the BLM’s assessment that “it is unlikely” that the Obama administration’s establishment of the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument “has impacted timber production” because those activities were permitted to continue.
In response to questions about Grand Staircase-Escalante, BLM wrote that “less inventory” of cultural sites would have occurred without the 1996 monument designation, noting more than twice as many sites are now identified each year than before. “More vandalism would have occurred without Monument designation,” it states, noting four visitors centers were established to help protect the area.
P. David Polly, the president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and a professor of sedimentary geology at Indiana University, said in an interview “there’s specific funding that comes” with a monument designation, which BLM itself identified in its submission as one of the reasons behind the “increase” in archaeological finds.
Polly added the funding also accounts for why the number of paleontological finds in Grand Staircase-Escalante has risen from a few hundred before 1996 to “several thousand.”
“This funding will disappear for the areas that are no longer in the monument,” he said.
Agencies typically incorporate material submitted through public comments into their regulatory proposals, but documents released under the FOIA earlier this year show Bowman told colleagues in a May 2017 webcast “barring a surprise, there is no new information that’s going to be submitted” through the public comment process on the monuments review.
Polly said the new documents show how Interior officials disregarded the material they gathered during the comment period. “They knew all of these things and went ahead and cut them anyway,” he said.