WASHINGTON, DC (July 27, 2006) -- Definitively closing the book on nine -years of legal wrangling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld the 1996 establishment of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The decision was a follow- up to the 2004 district court decision that confirmed the President’s use of the Antiquities Act to establish the Monument, which stated 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...” In this decision, the Court dismissed an appeal by the Mountain States Legal Foundation. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Faegre & Benson represented The Wilderness Society and its conservation partners.
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 1.9 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 is an important victory for all of our national monuments and other treasures throughout the West, and for the natural, historic, and cultural resources that these monuments protect,” said Leslie Jones, The Wilderness Society’s chief counsel.
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 this case: 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.” Only Mountain States Legal Foundation appealed the district court’s ruling and the Court of Appeals quickly ruled that Mountain States lacked legal standing to bring the appeal.
“Many of our most beloved National Parks, including Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Zion, Acadia, and Saguaro National Parks were initially established under the Antiquities Act as monuments,” said Jones. “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.”
This decision settles a controversial case that dates back to 1996, the year Grand Staircase-Escalante National 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.
Grand Staircase is a flagship part of the National Landscape Conservation System, which was established in 2000 to protect the best of the Bureau of Land Management’s 264 million acres. “The 10th Circuit’s decision is great news for BLM’s Conservation System,” said Wendy VanAsselt, who directs The Wilderness Society’s National Landscape Conservation System program. “BLM National Monuments like Grand Staircase are starting to receive the acclaim they deserve for providing wildlife habitat, clean water, and places to hike, hunt and research—all in spectacular historic landscapes unchanged since early explorers.”
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