{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/the-chairman-s-note?ContentRecord_id=4BE2473B-B8F4-47AD-ADF4-965AFAE2F39B", "A Big Win for Utahs Rural Communities", "2017-12-08", "2017", "2017-12", "Republican", "House", "UT", "Mike Lee", "L000577", "www.lee.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "President Trump won the White House for many reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason is that rural Americans are sick and tired of rich coastal elites telling them how to live their lives. President Trump may not be able to fulfill all of his campaign promises, but he has already delivered for Utah\u2019s rural communities by coming to our state and limiting President Obama\u2019s Bears Ears National Monument and President Clinton\u2019s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Make no mistake: President Obama\u2019s Bears Ears monument was a project pushed and funded by wealthy East and West Coast liberals. The Hewlett and Packard foundations, as well as the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, gave tens of millions of dollars to supposedly \u201cgrassroots\u201d Native American groups to campaign for a new monument. But local Native Americans\u2014the people who actually live near Bears Ears and use the land\u2014did not take the money. \u201cThe whole tone of it seems like the tribes are generally being used as pawns for the environmental groups to get what they really want,\u201d Blue Mountain Dine\u2019 Vice President Byron Clarke told the Deseret News. \u201cThey are being played. It is somewhat insulting.\u201d \u201cIt seems pretty clear that the federal government over time tends to close down access,\u201d Clarke later told me. \u201cSo just as a local user of the land, I have to ask myself what\u2019s wrong with how we are using it right now? We can go hunt now, we can go fishing and cut wood now and it\u2019s pristine.\u201d  Clarke is right. The federal government does restrict access to land where a national monument has been declared. That is the entire point of the Antiquities Act: to preserve cultural treasures on federal public land by restricting access to the land. That is also why the Antiquities Act requires that monument designations be \u201cconfined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and maintenance of the objects to be protected.\u201d Neither President Clinton nor President Obama respected that limitation. Instead of responsibly working with local communities to identify just the protections needed to preserve cultural sites in San Juan and Garfield counties, they made million acre designations that were designed to transform the economic life of surrounding residents. \u201cCreation of jobs for tourism will be a benefit to the community versus those that could be lost by some of the mineral and energy jobs,\u201d Clarke told me. \u201cI think for a lot of Navajos we are skilled people, we have skills other than restaurant workers and gas station attendants. We are engineers. We are heavy equipment operators. We are welders. Those are good jobs rather than the tourism type jobs which tend to be seasonal.\u201d Ranching families also are hit hard by the restrictions that come with monument designations. After land-use restrictions at the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument kicked in, Garfield County ranchers could no longer bring water in to their cattle. Their ability to fence in water resources and maintain roads was also limited. Many families were forced to signigicantly reduce their herds, sometimes by half. The corporations pushing for monument land-use restrictions, like Patagonia and REI, claim that the monuments will create tourism jobs for the residents of Garfield and San Juan county. And they are right: the monuments do create tourism jobs. But at what cost? Moab resident Jon Kovash warns in the High Country Times that \u201cTourism also brings sprawling growth, crappy jobs, even-higher rents and home prices, and an increasingly unmanageable crush of visitors and traffic.\u201d Maybe the rich coastal liberals and their corporate pals are right. Maybe tourism is the answer for economic development in rural America. But shouldn\u2019t that choice be made by the residents who live there? Shouldn\u2019t the people who actually live near the land decide how best to use it? And maybe, just maybe, the same people who used land restrictions in their own cities to create sky-high housing prices and crushing inequality shouldn\u2019t be in the business of telling other people how to use their land. More needs to be done to protect Utah\u2019s rural communities from future Democratic presidents. We need Congress to give Utah the same Antiquities Act protections that Alaska and Wyoming have. But until then, President Trump\u2019s monument reductions are a good first step. Utah thanks him.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/the-chairman-s-note?ContentRecord_id=4BE2473B-B8F4-47AD-ADF4-965AFAE2F39B"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.1639529839158058, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}