The state Legislature’s Management Committee voted Tuesday to file a friend of the court brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the Utah Attorney General’s lawsuit filed in August over 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” public lands under federal ownership.
A tie vote of 4-4 was broken by leadership, as per rules, when House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, and Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, voted once again in favor of supporting the unique lawsuit.
Both Schultz and Adams said it is well past time that Utah do something about the vast amount of land controlled by the federal government that they say is often left in disarray and neglected.
“I’ve had the opportunity to watch Utah’s public lands over the last almost 40 or almost 50 years,” Schultz said. “And what is happening to our public lands kills me. As a conservationist at heart, who spends a lot of his own money, a lot of my own money, on improving land and making it better — to see the mismanagement that’s happening on our Forest Service lands, on our BLM lands, on all of the federally managed lands, is sickening, and we should all be ashamed of it. It’s going backwards.”