Geologist Wants Utah
"Monument" Opened Up

SALT LAKE CITY — The secretly concocted Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument should be opened to mineral development with subsequent federal royalties placed in a national park trust, Utah state geologist M. Lee Allison says.

In a debate last week at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting, Allison said minerals could generate $16 billion for the proposed park fund.

State estimates on the value of the minerals in the 1.7 million-acre, southern Utah monument have been disputed by environmental activists. The activists have no geological expertise, but they argue that the minerals would have been exploited before if economically feasible.

Allison stressed he was expressing his personal opinion and not the position of Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt.

If immediate development is politically unacceptable, Allison said, the deposits should be placed in "strategic reserves" that could be opened with an emergency declaration by the president.

By creating the reserves, monument planners would be required to include the possibility of future mineral development.

George Davis, a geologist at the University of Arizona, said the area should be left alone.

"It should be renamed the Wide Open Spaces National Monument," said Davis, who contended there should be no mining, no visitor centers and no new paved roads in the monument.

Instead, he said, the site should be left as a natural classroom for people like himself who are interested in geology, biology, archaeology and other natural sciences.