Utah Sues to Challenge Federal Control of Unappropriated Public Lands

A bison grazes on federal public land on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, about 50 miles north of Salt Lake City, in a file photo. Rick Bowmer/AP Photo

The state of Utah filed a federal lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday seeking to challenge the federal Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) control over millions of acres of unappropriated public lands.

In its suit, the GOP-led state asked the Supreme Court to decide whether the U.S. government can indefinitely hold public lands that have not been reserved for any designated purpose.

These unappropriated lands, totaling about 18.5 million acres, have not been designated as national parks, national monuments, wilderness areas, national forests, tribal lands, or for military use, the complaint states.

The suit argued that the federal government’s continued possession of unappropriated public lands deprives Utah of basic and fundamental sovereign powers over more than a third of its territory.

It said the state cannot tax the federal government’s land holdings, use eminent domain to build critical infrastructure like public roads and transportation, or exercise legislative authority over the land’s use.

According to the suit, state elected leaders have repeatedly urged the U.S. government to relinquish ownership of its unappropriated lands, but these efforts have been unsuccessful.

“Nothing in the text of the Constitution authorizes such an inequitable practice. In fact, the Framers of the Constitution carefully limited federal power to hold land within states,” Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said in a statement about the suit.

“Current federal land policy violates state sovereignty and offends the original and most fundamental notions of federalism,” Reyes added.

The federal government holds nearly 70 percent of the state’s total lands.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said in a statement that the BLM had failed to keep the lands accessible.

“It is not a secret that we live in the most beautiful state in the nation,” Cox stated. “But, when the federal government controls two-thirds of Utah, we are extremely limited in what we can do to actively manage and protect our natural resources.”

A BLM spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the agency will not comment on pending litigation.

Stephen Bloch, legal director of the nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, has expressed strong opposition to the lawsuit, citing concerns over the risk of destruction to Utah’s landscape.

“Utahns and visitors travel to our state to experience stunning redrock canyons, spires, and mesas; public lands that are owned by all Americans and managed on their behalf by the federal government and its expert agencies,” Bloch said in a statement shared on social media.

“All of that is at risk with Utah’s saber rattling and insistence that many of these remarkable landscapes are instead ’state lands’ that should be developed and ultimately destroyed by short-sighted state politicians,” he added.