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The Truth About BLM’s Decision to Open Factory Butte to ORV Destruction

May 31st, 2019 Written by suwa

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Stephen Bloch, Legal Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 801-428-3981 steve@suwa.org

Salt Lake City, UT (May 31, 2019) – This weekend is the second since the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued its controversial decision to authorize destructive cross-country off-road vehicle (ORV) use across 5,400 acres of public lands ringing Factory Butte in southern Utah. The BLM’s decision reverses a 13-year long closure order that prohibited such activity.

Although the BLM lifted the closure ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, on Wednesday, May 22, 2019, it didn’t set forth its rationale for doing so until Richfield field office manager Joelle McCarthy wrote a brief “memo to file” two days later, on May 24.

The BLM didn’t make the memo available to the public until the following Tuesday, May 28.

“We closely reviewed Manager McCarthy’s memo and found several misleading statements and significant omissions,” said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.  “Our annotated version of the memo – ‘The Truth about BLM’s Decision to Open Factory Butte to ORV Destruction’ – puts BLM’s wrong-headed decision to lift the closure around Factory Butte into context and makes clear that this was an outrageous reversal.”

Click here to read the annotated BLM memo.