Utah hosts invite-only meeting on national parks
Annie Knox
A high-ranking official from the U.S. Department of the Interior touched down in Salt Lake City this week to meet behind closed doors with leaders from the state, Utah’s national parks and their surrounding communities.
The group of 60 spoke Monday about the future of the parks with Karen Budd-Falen, the associate deputy interior secretary. They discussed how the state will help in any future government shutdowns, the timed entry reservation program at Arches National Park and the rollout of a new plan to charge higher fees from international visitors, among other issues, two state officials said.
They described the all-day session as a brainstorm, with no commitments made. Regardless of any immediate results, the discussion provided local and state leaders a direct line of communication to top brass in the Trump administration overseeing much of the nation’s public lands. More than two-thirds of Utah is federally managed.
“Ultimately, it truly was a workshop just to get all of the partners in the room and talking about, ‘How do we improve our parks and how do we support them?’ Because they’re the lifeblood to our state,” said Natalie Randall, managing director of the Utah Office of Tourism.
The meeting follows a June Interior Department order recognizing gateway communities near national parks as “key stakeholders” in management and planning.
It also comes as one such community, Grand County, is pitching a plan to add more parking and other changes to accommodate more visitors at Arches National Park – changes that critics say go against the National Park Service mission of preservation.
Those not invited to the meeting, including a Utah News Dispatch journalist, were not permitted to enter. The closed doors raised suspicion for conservation groups opposing the state’s efforts to wrest control of public lands and pushing back against arguments the parks should work to allow more visitors inside at a single time.
“It was pretty secretive as to what the purpose was going into it,” said Neal Clark with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “The way that that meeting came together looks to be the state really trying to push its way into dictating management direction for parks.”
The event was designed as a “government-to-government meeting,” said Redge Johnson, director of the Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office and the host of the event. Johnson recalled telling some state lawmakers and others they couldn’t attend as he tried to keep attendance from growing too unwieldy for productive conversation and debate.
“It’s not like we were there saying, ‘Thou shalt not,’ because that’s not what the meeting was,” Johnson said. “It was just, ‘Hey, here are some concerns, and we just have an open discussion about it.’”
He said the group debated timed entry programs, which Utah’s congressional representatives have criticized.
In August, the state’s congressional delegation urged Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to say no to reservation systems designed to limit traffic to parks, like the timed entry program in Arches National Park and a similar proposed setup for Zion National Park, arguing it corresponded with a dip in visitor spending.
But Clark said the program ensures visitors can access the trails and sites they came for, instead of spending much of their time stopped in traffic along the way.
“The superintendents, the management, the staff at these parks, have all thought through a lot of alternatives on how to do this,” Clark said. “And they’ve landed at these pretty sensible management decisions.”