The Northern Corridor Highway near St. George has gotten a green light — again.
The Bureau of Land Management approved the right-of-way for the long-debated highway on Jan. 21. The latest move by the Trump administration reverses the federal government’s previous 2024 decision under President Joe Biden.
That decision endorsed a plan to expand the existing Red Hills Parkway in St. George, rather than a new road through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, home to threatened Mojave Desert tortoises. At the time, it cited concerns that the highway could increase wildfire risk and spread invasive plants by bringing more vehicles into protected land.
Before that, the BLM approved the highway plan during President Donald Trump’s first term in 2021.
“I’m very excited,” Washington County Commissioner Adam Snow said of the latest news. “So grateful for the Trump administration to see the wisdom in what we tried to do before to balance conservation with the needs of our transportation.”
Local leaders have long asserted that the four-lane, 4.5-mile highway is necessary to prepare for expected growth in southwest Utah, especially given its tricky topography.
“It's critically important,” Snow said. “It's the only way to get people around the pinchpoint of the cut in the hill through I-15, which is already wall-to-wall asphalt.”
Conservationists, on the other hand, argue growth shouldn’t have to come at the expense of wildlife habitat and open space. Stacey Wittek is executive director of local environmental group Conserve Southwest Utah, one of the organizations that has sued to stop the highway in years past.
“Obviously, we're disappointed by it,” she said of the BLM’s decision. “It runs counter to all the thousands of community members that have expressed their concern over it, and it is against our organizational mission to protect the Red Cliffs.”
Building a highway through the conservation area would harm southwest Utah’s quality of life, she said, by disrupting a beloved outdoor recreation area that draws visitors and residents to Washington County. It could also set a dangerous national precedent that federally protected lands can be developed.
“Not only is it an economic question, it is an emotional, moral and spiritual question for us,” Wittek said. “How do we build and make places that are preserved in perpetuity?”
The decision also complicates another layer of the Northern Corridor saga: a piece of land known as Zone 6. It’s southwest of St. George and joined the conservation area when the highway was initially approved in 2021. The protection of 6,813 acres was essentially meant to offset the loss of up to 275 acres of tortoise habitat for the highway.
When the BLM reversed course in 2024, however, Zone 6 got caught in a tough spot.
Much of it is owned by the Utah Trust Lands Administration, which has a mandate to sell or lease land for the benefit of the state’s education system. So with Zone 6’s protections suddenly in question, the state began the process of selling its land to developers. That worried residents who flock to the area for rock climbing and mountain biking.
Considering how the highway site would change, Snow acknowledged that grass is a better habitat than asphalt. But he said it would be short-sighted to protect a relatively small number of acres there if that meant losing more land in Zone 6.
Citing the agency’s 2024 environmental study, the BLM’s decision says the highway would directly impact 31 adult tortoises and indirectly impact 275 more because of noise, vibration, habitat fragmentation and other factors. It also says that Zone 6 is home to 736 tortoises, at a higher density than where the highway would be built in Red Cliffs.
“When you look at the entirety, nobody can argue that this was a bad deal for anything — recreation, open space, habitat, transportation,” Snow said. “It was the only way to accomplish a win-win-win for everybody.”
Not everyone agrees with that assessment, though. Wittek with Conserve Southwest Utah said that her group will continue to look for ways to maintain the landscapes at both Zone 6 and the proposed highway site.
“If there is a will to protect both, then there is a way,” she said.
The BLM’s new decision says that the 2024 Red Hills Parkway endorsement that would have routed traffic through St. George was based on a faulty premise and that expanding the parkway is not a feasible alternative.
It also includes a few stipulations if the highway goes forward. The state of Utah would have to pay back the value of the land it acquired with Endangered Species Act funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — land that would now be developed for the highway. Federal and state agencies would also need to improve tortoise habitat elsewhere in the conservation area.
As long as conservation groups don’t file a lawsuit and get an injunction, Snow said, local leaders will “move at warp speed” with the highway and with restoring fences and signs around Zone 6. If Utah tried to sell Zone 6 after the highway is built, he said the county would sue the state for breach of contract.
Conserve Southwest Utah is examining the details within the BLM’s decision documents, Wittek said, and exploring potential ways to push back. That could include legal action, but she said that may not be the first strategy her group wants to lead with.
“What we would like to do is to continue the fight on in the ways that we know best, which is gathering opinions and making our voice heard, making the voice of the community heard,” she said, and put pressure on local leaders to listen to voters who oppose the highway.
Another lawsuit, however, may be a possibility if her legal team decides that it is their only course.
