By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
A group of Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) enthusiasts in Mesquite and the Arizona Strip are making one last ditch effort to keep hundreds of miles of roads and trails from being closed to public access in the areas just east of Mesquite.
The new organization called the Trail Passion Coalition is wrangling with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over a Transportation Network Planning process which began in 2010. A final Record of Decision (ROD) was released on the plan in March of this year.
The Coalition has filed an official appeal of the ROD which is due by Monday, July 18. To strengthen this appeal, they are calling out to members of the public throughout the region to get involved and sign a petition that supports these actions of the Coalition.
A Transportation Network for the Littlefield Travel Sub-region, as the plan is called, deals with 427 miles of roads and trails existing in a huge swath of public land from the Arizona/Utah border to the north and spilling over into the Grand Canyon Parashant National Monument to the south. It’s western boundary is the Nevada/Arizona state line.
The plan would close or restrict more than 162 miles of existing roads and trails in this sub-region; nearly 40 percent of the currently open roads.
The Record of Decision (ROD), which is available online at https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/99358/570, details the process and the rationale behind the decision. It finds that the plan’s actions will have “no significant impact to the region.” It also claims that the BLM Arizona Strip Field Office had engaged with the public extensively throughout the planning process. Both of these assertions are being disputed by the Trail Passion Coalition.
According to Coalition founder Josh Wilson, the idea that the plan’s implementation would have no significant impact is “simply incorrect.” Wilson owns and operates the Polaris World OHV dealership in Littlefield, Arizona.
“They are saying that there are no significant impacts,” Wilson said. “But there is no doubt that an economic impact is going to be felt in our communities. We get a lot of OHV tourism here. It is a big deal for my business and many others. It will impact us all.”
The planning document claims that the roads marked for closure are redundant. In other words, in most of the routes being closed, there are several other routes leading to the same destination. So, the document claims, many of these routes are not needed.
But Bob Lopez of Kokopelli OHV Club in Mesquite contests that rationale. The Kokopelli Club is opposed to the BLM plan and is supporting the work of the Trail Passion Coalition. Lopez said that the experience of the route is almost always just as important as the final destination.
Members of the Club recently got together to ride the Snake Canyon Trail which is north and east of Mesquite. Knowing that it was slated to be closed, the club documented the full ride on a video feed which is posted to the club’s website at kokopelliatvclub.com/.
“In the case of Snake Canyon and a lot of others, it really isn’t about where the trail finally leads you to,” Lopez said. “Of course, there are other ways to get to the final destination. But that trail is a destination itself. It is really about exploring, and people have been exploring Snake Canyon for years. If that trail is closed, you just can’t do that anymore.”
Wilson said that the Coalition is also disputing the BLM claim that they involved the public sufficiently during the planning process. The only public input meeting held in Virgin Valley, that was directly referenced in the document, was in Beaver Dam, Arizona on April 18, 2011.
Wilson said that he was not in the area at that time. He opened his business the following year in 2012. But he said he has been in contact with people who did attend the meeting.
“People I talked to said that there were around 100 people there,” Wilson said. “The local folks apparently came out and expressed strong opposition to all of these closures. They said it got pretty heated. So much so that the BLM ended up closing down the meeting early. They said that they would be back later. That is the report I heard.”
Interestingly, though Wilson’s sources said that they had signed the register at the 2011 meeting, he can find no reference to the proceedings of that meeting in the full public records document published by the BLM.
“I haven’t been able to find anything in the record from that meeting,” Wilson said. “How many people were there? What was said? How long did the meeting go? I would like to know that for sure. But none of it is there in the record.”
A second meeting was reportedly held in 2013 at the Desert Springs fire station. But very few in town knew about that one, Wilson said.
“They said that they posted it, but I don’t know where it was posted,” Wilson said. “I mean, by that time, I was running an OHV business in the area. If it was posted in town somewhere, I would have heard about it.”
The record shows that only about a dozen people attended this meeting, Wilson said.
Wilson added that he has monitored the process fairly closely since then. He said that he has contacted BLM Arizona Strip Field Office personnel regularly to get updates on the process.
“They would say that they were still working on it, or that the Trump administration had shut it down or that it was being delayed,” Wilson said. “They promised that they would let us know when something was happening. Then all of a sudden we get a fully completed Record of Decision dropped on us.”
Wilson said that, at one point, he was offered an opportunity to give input at a public meeting held in St. George in 2018. He travelled to attend the meeting and made comments in opposition to closing the Littlefield subregion roads. But he was told that his comments weren’t relevant because the subject of that meeting was on the St. George Basin, not Littlefield.
“So basically it was a goose chase, I guess,” Wilson said. “It was a waste of my time. But they could have at least taken my comments and added them to the record. They aren’t there.”
Wilson has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the official record of both the 2011 and 2018 meetings. Those requests have still not been fulfilled.
“I doubt we will have those documents before the July 18 appeals deadline,” Wilson said. “It is hard to file a legal document to appeal when you can’t get your hands on all of the information. So one of the things that we are telling the judge is that there needs to be an extension on that deadline until we can get all the information that we are looking for.”
Wilson admits that making a change to the decision at this late stage of the game is a longshot. But he believes it is still worth doing.
“It is an uphill battle trying to reverse a decision by a federal agency,” Wilson said. “But I think we can paint a good picture that they didn’t follow a proper public process. So it is not hopeless. We are going to give them hell, all the same.”
Wilson also emphasized that it is not his aim to be adversarial to the BLM or its regional staff.
“Actually, I want to work with them to get a good solution for our communities and the local business sector,” Wilson said. “We don’t want to fight with them. But I think that the point needs to be made that their final decision doesn’t leave an ideal recreational OHV area here like it is supposed to. Ultimately, this plan doesn’t meet the OHV needs of our region. We would like to work with them so that it does.”
No matter which way the appeal process falls, building a coalition of local OHV enthusiasts, through the petition process, would be helpful in the future, Wilson added.
“At the very least, it puts the BLM on notice that there are a lot of people out here who care about this,” Wilson said. “We will have a lot of names and email addresses for them to put on a list and we will expect them to notify all of those people when input is needed in the future.”
To join the Trail Passion Coalition, to sign their petition and to learn more about the BLM decision for the Littlefield subregion, visit trailpassion.org.
