Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show<br />WASHINGTON — Even before President Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil<br />and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.<br />One memo, for example, asked Interior staff to prepare a report on each national monument, with a yellow highlighter on the documents emphasizing the need to examine in detail “annual production of coal, oil, gas<br />and renewables (if any) on site; amount of energy transmission infrastructure on site (if any).” It was followed up by a reminder to staff in June to also look at how the decision to create new National Monuments in Utah might have hurt area mines.<br />The debate over oil and gas reserves below the ground in Bears Ears started during the Obama administration, the documents show, with officials<br />from Utah State Board of Education writing to the Interior Department objecting to the plan to designate the area as a national monument.<br />From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil<br />and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.<br />In another email exchange, in May, two Bureau of Land Management officials said<br />that Mr. Zinke’s chief of staff for policy, Downey Magallanes, had phoned to ask for information on a uranium mill in or near the Bears Ears monument.<br />The bulk of the documents made public by the Interior Department — about 20,000 pages of them — detail the yearslong effort during the Obama<br />administration to create new monuments, including input from environmental groups, Indian tribes, state officials and members of Congress.
