How does the rapidly expanding population of Washington County coexist with the natural landscapes surrounding its communities?
It’s a long-running debate that has been playing out for years around a proposed four-lane, 50 mph divided highway and the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area — a 45,600-acre red rock expanse that’s home to hiking trails, dinosaur tracks and the threatened Mojave desert tortoise.
In early 2021, the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally authorized the plan to connect the northeast and northwest sides of St. George, granting the right-of-way to build the 4.5-mile road through part of Red Cliffs.
Now the plan is again on hold.
The federal agencies announced in November they will revisit their formal analysis of the project’s environmental impact. It’s part of the settlement the agencies agreed to after negotiating with a group of conservation organizations that sued to stop the highway.
The lawsuit said the agencies’ study didn’t capture the highway’s full impact and the project’s approval violated federal law, including the Endangered Species Act. A federal judge ruled partially in favor of the conservation groups, putting the previous right-of-way authorization on hold while federal agencies take another look at the highway’s impacts.
Isabel Adler, the Red Cliffs campaign director with local environmental group Conserve Southwest Utah, credits not only the work of organizations like hers that brought the lawsuit but also the 35,000-plus people nationwide who signed the groups’ petition opposing the highway.
“It is always so wonderful to see that people standing up for what they want, what they believe in [and] what they think is right has actually caused real change or the potential for real change,” Adler said.
Bringing more vehicles into this landscape would do more than fragment the habitat of the desert tortoise, she said. It would also add litter to the roadsides and noise pollution to neighborhoods near the highway entrance and the route would roll across some popular hiking trails.
In the bigger picture, she said, building a highway across land that’s already protected like Red Cliffs could undermine the whole idea of what it means to be designated as a conservation area.
“If this happens, it's going to set an extremely dangerous national precedent,” Adler said. “So it's not only Red Cliffs that's at stake here. It's the entire national conservation land system.”
“Suddenly the finish line is a mile further”
For county leaders this step back feels like a gut punch.
Commissioner Gil Almquist said Washington County has already jumped through hoops for years trying to check off enough environmental boxes to get this project off the ground. Now it seems like none of that mattered.
“I'm pretty ticked about it. … We've been doing every possible thing to make this happen in an environmentally safe way,” Almquist said. “And this bureaucracy has shown a deaf ear to everything that we have proposed.”
The county had been working with the Utah Department of Transportation on preliminary design plans. Almquist said it had been purchasing land and gathering funding for the project, too, under the assumption that the BLM’s previous decision would be final.
“It's kind of like a nightmare,” Almquist said. “You think you're about ready to cross the finish line and suddenly the finish line is a mile further. And then you get there and then they say, ‘Nope, it's another mile.’”
Without this highway, he said, other roads through and around St. George will get more and more congested as the area grows. Projections from The University of Utah say the number of people living in Washington County could double in the next three decades.
The mesas and ridges around town naturally bottleneck the options for driving. Currently, the most direct east-west route is St. George Boulevard through downtown, which isn’t set up to handle high levels of traffic.
As it becomes increasingly clogged, Almquist said, that could hurt businesses because potential shoppers may avoid the congestion altogether. When drivers are either idling in traffic on St. George Boulevard or choosing to go the long way around downtown, he said, that pumps more fumes into the air, too.
“Highways have no place in national conservation areas”
This new federal supplemental environmental impact statement will focus on two things. First, it’ll look at how wildfires, like the ones that consumed parts of the conservation area in 2020, have changed and could change the quality and quantity of tortoise habitat. Gloria Tibbetts, southwest Utah’s BLM district manager, said when a piece of land recovers from a fire, native plants can be replaced by invasive species.
“As a result of that, it often degrades the native habitat of some of the sensitive species in the area, particularly Mojave desert tortoise.”
Second, the new analysis will look into cultural sites, such as historic artifacts belonging to the region’s Indigenous tribes, that might lie in the path of the proposed road.
After the new study concludes, the agency will make another decision on the highway — authorizing it again, choosing some alternative plan or rejecting it altogether.
“All options will be on the table. This is an objective review of the application,” Tibbetts said.
Conservation groups believe alternative road projects could accomplish many of the same goals as a new highway while avoiding the tortoise habitat.
The BLM’s 2021 decision examined a few of those alternatives. One would turn St. George Boulevard and 100 South into a pair of parallel one-way streets with one heading east and the other west. The estimated cost would be $22-$33 million. Another alternative involved expanding the Red Hills Parkway north of downtown and connecting it with I-15 to provide easier access at an estimated cost of $97-$146 million. That’s compared to an estimated cost of $81-$123 million for the Northern Corridor route.
While the 2021 decision acknowledged that the Red Hills Parkway alternative would have less impact on the area’s ecosystems, it still chose one of the Northern Corridor Highway options as its “environmentally preferable alternative.”
That doesn’t line up with the mission of the conservation area, Adler said.
“People come here to be in the desert. They love it. And so to look at a project that will negatively impact that and select an alternative that would harm the values that St. George holds dear just never really made sense to us.”
Her team supports addressing St. George’s growing traffic concerns, she said, but they don’t want that to come at the expense of sensitive public land. If there’s a way to potentially ease traffic without cutting into tortoise habitat, she said, that should be the priority.
“The bottom line is that this is a conservation area, and highways have no place in national conservation areas,” Adler said.
“If we don't get the road, you don't get the land”
County commissioner Almquist counters that the alternatives wouldn’t end up accomplishing what a new highway could.
“Instead of just saying no to the road, why don't we say how we can make it work in compatibility with the tortoise,” he said.
Local leaders point to the Congressional legislation that set up the conservation area in 2009, believing it left the door open for a road to be built as the city grows. Specifically, Almquist said, it directed the Department of the Interior to create a travel management plan within three years that would outline a preferred path for a potential future “northern transportation route” through Red Cliffs, but that didn’t happen.
The county also points to a land swap it says is a good deal for the tortoise. In 2021, 6,813 acres of critical habitat known as Zone 6 were added to Red Cliffs in exchange for the land that would be lost to the highway. A 2022 report from the Washington County Habitat Conservation Plan said that Zone 6 has higher density tortoise populations than most other parts of Red Cliffs.
But if the highway project isn’t approved, Almquist said, the deal would be off.
“If we don't get the road, you don't get the land,” he said.
Adler of Conserve Southwest Utah argues that adding a disconnected piece of land in a separate area doesn’t benefit the tortoises where the highway would be placed. But she said any additional protected land in tortoise habitat is good news.
So she encourages the county to choose to keep Zone 6 protected, no matter what happens with the highway.
“They are creating a false binary that if the highway doesn't happen, Zone 6 simply cannot happen, which is absolutely not true. It's up to the county,” Adler said.
County officials, on the other hand, said this is the deal everyone signed up for. The BLM’s previous authorization from 2021 specifies that approving the highway triggers the conservation area’s expansion into Zone 6, but going with alternative traffic-calming options such as expanding the Red Hills Parkway would not involve those added protections.
BLM district manager Tibbetts expects the agencies to publish the new supplemental environmental impact statement in the spring of 2024, after which there will be another 45-day public comment period. Then the BLM would issue the final impact statement in the fall of 2024 and make a decision on the highway project that winter.
Between now and then, she said, they are counting on the public to let them know what they think of the project, any potential alternatives and any dynamics that may have changed in the years since the previous study.
“We certainly anticipate there are several things that have changed, and that's what our public scoping period is helping us to determine,” she said. “It's essential for us to understand the true impact of any decisions that we make before they're issued.”
The BLM is accepting public comments online about the Northern Corridor plan through Dec. 21, 2023. It will also hold a public meeting where residents can ask questions or offer their thoughts on Dec. 6, 2023, at the Dixie Convention Center in St. George from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
