April 20, 2004 (Washington, DC) - In a decision with West-wide implications, a federal district court judge late yesterday upheld President Clinton’s establishment of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In particular, the decision confirmed President Clinton’s use of the Antiquities Act to establish the Monument, stating that “[i]t is evident from the language of the Proclamation that the President exercised the discretion lawfully delegated to him by Congress under the Antiquities Act...”
“The stunning public lands in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument are national treasures that deserve to be protected for future generations,” said Stephen Bloch, a staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “This decision is a long-awaited confirmation that President Clinton acted well within his authority to protect and preserve some of Utah’s wildest public lands for all Americans.”
The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument protects an array of natural and historic treasures in a broad expanse of arid wilderness in Utah’s canyon country. The Monument is known for its extraordinary natural beauty, unique fossils, and other irreplaceable evidence of prehistoric life. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument joins three distinct areas: the Grand Staircase, the Kaiparowits Plateau and the Canyons of the Escalante, and at 1.7 million acres is the second largest national monument in the lower 48 United States.
“Because the case was a direct challenge to Presidential authority to create national monuments under the Antiquities Act, the decision to uphold the Monument’s status has national implications for national monuments and other treasures throughout the West, and for the natural, historic, and cultural resources that these monuments were designed to protect,” said Pam Eaton of The Wilderness Society.
The Antiquities Act gives the President the power to grant national monument status to areas possessing significant historical, scenic, and/or scientific values. There have been a handful of legal challenges to Presidential monument designations made under the Antiquities Act, and every single challenge to date has been unsuccessful. There was no equivocating in yesterday’s decision: the district court rejected each and every single claim – ten in all – raised by the plaintiffs (Utah Association of Counties and Mountain States Legal Foundation), saying the claims were “without factual or legal support.”
“Monuments initially created under the Antiquities Act have eventually become some of our most beloved National Parks, including Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, Saguaro National parks. Americans cherish these places as icons of the American west,” said Bill Hedden, executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust. “And the Act has been used in a bi-partisan manner: The only three presidents since 1906 who have not used the Act are Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.”
Today’s decision settles a controversial case that dates back to 1996, the year the monument was designated by President Bill Clinton using the Antiquities Act of 1906. As the monument has become an increasingly popular travel destination, however, Utah residents and businesses are increasingly viewing the monument as an important part of the region’s economy. A new “friends of the monument” group recently formed in support of the monument.
