Thanks for a wonderful balanced post.
We traveled across much of the area about a year ago.
I found BLM employees to be wonderfully helpful and most are not ‘anonymous Washington bureaucrats’ but local people proud of their state, heritage and natural features.
I might be wrong, but while the areas were National Monuments under the National Park Service, the actual people handling the majority of the area were BLM.
Talked to a lot of people in Utah, Arizona and Nevada about government lands. I found no one proposing moving actual ownership of the public lands to the states who did not have business interests in mind.
The people I met who talked about local control of land in those states were solidly against any recreational usage of the land. A great many complaints come from the mining industry, the rest from agricultural/ ranchers who want to ensure no one gets access to public land that they lease.
As near as I can tell, the ONLY thing the President’s decision changes is the protected status of the lands formerly within the monuments.
The lands can now be open to commercial usage - everything from lines to ranching to commercial recreation to home building. Any commercial usage of the land would normally require open bids, public comments and environmental impact studies.
Across the nation, the vast majority of public lands are available for commercial usage within the guidelines of the BLM and USFS programs. Even in Utah, more of the public land is available for commercial usage than is protected under National Monument/ National Park status.
