Tuesday morning, the Emery County Public Lands Council meeting opened with Mrs. Meccarielo’s fifth grade class from Ferron Elementary singing their rendition of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Chairman Misti Christiansen asked her son’s class to perform their musical number in place of her comment period.
The meeting then moved into agency reports and council member comments. Kim Christy, deputy director of School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), discussed the lawsuit between SITLA and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to protect its lands from the wild horse populations. He went on to discuss proposed grazing policies and rules that the board has been looking at over the past year. One of the issues they looked into was, in the event of a land exchange, lands that were formerly BLM land or vice versa, and the situation on land tenure for grazers.
He stated that in the event of an exchange, the permits are allowed to continue their course. The BLM has a 10-year term and once the term expires, the lands move into the SITLA portfolio of administrator oversight, at which time SITLA is granted a two-term non-compete clause with each term being 15 years. That was adopted as policy in 2013. As part of that policy, there was a disparity between federal grazing fees. The BLM Animal Unit Months (AUM) was moved from $1.35 to $1.69 and SITLA fees for scattered sections are $5.03 in AUM with some of its higher value land blocks going up to $8.76 in the coming years.
Because of the disparity, SITLA is proposing in the policy and rules to implement an incremental increase to those adjustments by increasing from $1.69 to $5.03 over a three-year transition process and for higher land blocks it would increase over a five-year period.
Ron Torgerson, resource specialist for SITLA, discussed a proposal for the BLM to lease land that is used for recreational purposes in Joes Valley by rock climbers and bouldering. The lease will create a single management strategy and would not allow the BLM to interfere with SITLA’s ability to develop its coal, oil and gas resources associated with those properties.