Utah has escalated its ongoing fight over the control of public lands. This time they’re petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court directly to weigh in.
The Utah Attorney General’s Office has filed a landmark lawsuit against the federal government over “unappropriated land” in the state. The lawsuit, Gov. Spencer Cox said, asks whether it is constitutional for the federal government to “simply hold unappropriated lands within a state indefinitely.”
“Utah deserves priority when it comes to managing its land,” he said at an Aug. 20 press conference.
While federal land makes up roughly 70% of Utah, half of that land, Cox said, is “unappropriated” — which in this case is land administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
Other federal lands, which Utah considers “appropriated,” such as national parks, monuments, forests, wilderness areas, and recreation areas, along with military and tribal lands are not included in the lawsuit.
The BLM lands targeted make up around 18.5 million acres, or 34% of the state. The BLM controls nearly 22.8 million acres overall, concentrated in the west and southeastern sides of Utah. The land is managed for multiple uses such as energy development, grazing, mining, conservation and recreation.
The state is “not trying to privatize this land,” Cox said, but rather “manage it in a way that will better help the environment, that will help the people of Utah.”
Part of the fight is over the BLM limiting access to certain public lands, like the decision to restrict 317 miles of land in Moab to off-road vehicles. The agency said the closure was to protect wildlife and the natural environment and Utah petitioned to stop it in 2023. Utah, along with Wyoming, is also suing over the new public lands rule that places conservation on equal footing with other uses.
“I can tell you, as somebody who grew up as a child recreating on this land with my family … it's been a tragedy to see what this administration and past administrations have done to our land,” the governor said. “Closing down roads [that] have been open for generations, places where people went to recreate, to spend time with their families, are no longer accessible.”
Attorney General Sean Reyes believes the federal government is “depriving us of significant rights, resources and opportunities,” on that land, like cattle grazing and mineral mining.
“Nothing in the text of the Constitution authorizes such an inequitable practice or relationship,” Reyes said. “But current federal land policy violates state sovereignty and offends the most fundamental notions of federalism.”
While the state has been working on a suit for years, it was now time to act, according to Cox, because they have established “the right legal team,” and ”the right circumstances.”
“This is the right time to bring this lawsuit and determine once and for all, what does the Constitution say, what we think it says, or does it not,” Cox said.
When asked if the makeup of the Supreme Court played a role in the timing, Reyes said his team “couldn’t plan on that,” while working on the case but they “like the Supreme Court in terms of their interest in states' rights issues.”
The Attorney General added he didn’t have a number on how much the suit would cost the state.
Kate Groetzinger of the Center for Western Priorities, a public lands advocacy group, called the lawsuit “a threat to federal public lands” in Utah.
If the state were to assume control, Groetzinger said, “it will manage these lands for extraction and for profit, because it will have to.”
“The state cannot afford to manage these lands the way that the federal government does, which is a more balanced approach. They'll manage them for profit, by leasing them out for oil and gas, for mining and by selling them off for private development.”
Rep. John Curtis, the former chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus and candidate for Senate, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he is “pleased to see this effort” by state and local leaders to “find solutions that benefit our communities and our land.”
“We know Utahns understand best how to manage and protect the land they have been connected to for generations. In my district, about 80% of the land is public, which makes it challenging for the local gov to raise taxes to pay for essential services.”
The state has petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case. If the court denies the request, Cox said they “probably go back and start at the federal district court level.”
