It's certainly not a new idea: Take Dinosaur National Monument, change its name to Dinosaur National Park and sit back and watch tourist dollars pour into eastern Utah.
If one Utahn has his way, the on-again off-again proposal will be back on again. "I've put together a whole game plan on how we can make this park a success, perhaps as early as this year," said Robert Starr Waite, a geographer and self-styled crusader for new national parks.While folks in the Vernal area have not exactly jumped on Waite's bandwagon, "There's no question a lot of people here think a national park designation would be a good thing for the economy. But we've heard talk for so long, I'm not sure anyone really believes it will happen," said Marian Eason, executive director of the Dinosaurland Travel Board.
After a successful campaign that resulted in the designation of Great Basin National Park, Waite has spent the last four years putting together a proposal to get national park status for Dinosaur.
And his strategy is similar to the one used with Great Basin: Find a high-profile candidate for political office who will make it a campaign priority. "It's a good way to attract attention to a campaign," Waite said.
Park proponents in eastern Utah aren't about to discourage Waite. But they also recognize that the political climate has not changed since 1988-1989 - the last time the proposal was shot down by industrial and agricultural interests."There are still concerns over what it would do to air quality standards, to grazing rights, buffer zones, integral vistas, things like that," Eason said. "It's going to take unified local support to get park approval, and right now we haven't got it."
Things haven't changed much since former Rep. Howard Nielsen, R-Utah, pledged to support park designation if the Uintah County Commission, the Vernal City Council and the local Chamber of Commerce all agreed. The City Council and Chamber supported the proposal, but the County Commission opposed park designation, as it continues to do today.
"Support for it (park designation) is still an underground movement," Eason said. "The opposition is well rooted and very firm. And no one on either side really believes Dinosaur will become a national park any time soon."
Dinosaur National Monument was originally established around an unusually rich quarry of dinosaur bones near the Uintah County town of Jensen. The site was later expanded to include the river corridors of the Green and Yampa rivers, including an area in both Utah and Colorado that makes it larger than most national parks.
Many believe the monument is as scenic as any in the world. "We face a perception problem," Eason said. "A lot of people view a monument as a monolith or single feature. And as we market to group tours, we find that people are not so interested in national monuments, that the monument designation doesn't carry the same influence as a park."
Ironically, Dinosaur has the size (it's currently as big as Bryce Canyon and Zion national parks combined), quality and diverse experiences offered by any national park, and it's already being managed under national park standards. It just doesn't have the designation.
Waite believes a national park designation would double or triple visitation from the current half million visitors a year. And it would also draw attention to the world's first national park centered on fossils.
"In terms of national parks, it's totally unique," he said. "People the world over love dinosaurs, and a park would tell the world dinosaur story from a single location, as well as explain continental drift, the disappearance of dinosaurs and the rise of mammals."
Waite predicts local opposition to park designation will shift "once the ball gets rolling and they get overwhelmed by the national wave of support," just as it did in eastern Nevada when the Great Basin proposal was being debated.
"We've heard it before and we'll hear it again. But it just isn't going to happen any time soon," said Jack Wallace, publisher of the Vernal Express. "The politics just aren't right."
"It succeeded with Great Basin and Dinosaur will succeed, too," Waite said. "We will superimpose the Great Basin model on Dinosaur. It will work."
Waite says he will be working with University of Utah student volunteers in pushing the proposal throughout 1992. He has made public presentations of his proposal in Vernal, Roosevelt and Craig, Colo., and is banking on a ground-swell of public support to get the measure through Congress.