Salt Lake County Highway Claims Assault Wasatch Range
Early in 2000 Governor Mike Leavitt announced that the state would sue the federal government to settle the thousands of road claims that have been made by Utah counties. In preparation for the lawsuit he asked each county to suggest which roads should be considered as candidates for Revised Statute (RS) 2477 claim status. As part of the Mining Act of 1866, RS 2477 allowed for the construction of a highway across public lands that had not been reserved for other uses. In 1976, this statute was repealed with the passing of the Federal Land Management and Planning Act. However, the rights-of-way for roads constructed prior to this date were grandfathered in.
At the request of Gov. Leavitt, the Salt Lake County Commission and County Mayor Nancy Workman approved a list of 15 roads to be included among those submitted by the other Utah Counties. Two years later, in 2002, 8 additional claims mysteriously appeared on the list of claims that had originally been approved by Workman and the County Commission. (While it has never been determined how these 8 claims came to be included in the list, it is interesting to note that, coincidentally, the County Surveyor had purchased a parcel of land that lies along one of these routes shortly before the appearance of these additional routes on the list.) After several news articles describing the lack of justification for these claims, and pressure from environmental groups and Salt Lake City officials, Mayor Workman and the County Commission withdrew the 8 claims and reverted to the original list of 15 claims. Workman claimed that her decision to withdraw the claims was not due to lobbying by any groups, but because she could not give an answer to state officials when asked why these claims were picked. Even though the claims are no longer on the list, the wording of the withdrawal was such that the county could, at some point in the future, go after these routes again.
Throughout this process the public has been kept in the dark. Requests for information by the media, as well as Save Our Canyons, under the Government Records Access and Management Act and the Freedom of Information Act, were repeatedly denied. The requests were denied on the grounds, among others, that the state had not yet made any “claims.” When asked by the Salt Lake County Council if they could make their list of 15 roads public, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff denied their request. Because the Counties’ work is to be used in future litigation, Shurtleff told the council their work is protected and county officials were forbidden to publicly discuss the claims.
Despite these obstacles Save Our Canyons, the Sierra Club and the Wasatch Mountain Club have been hard at work on this issue. We are currently working to develop a campaign to convince Salt Lake County that other less costly and less contentious methods exist to obtain needed rights-of-way and that it is in the County’s best interest to withdraw itself from the State’s lawsuit and relinquish the use of RS 2477.