Sure, President Clinton won his second term in a landslide. But he lost to Bob Dole by 57 percentage points in Kane County, population 5,169.
Clinton got creamed in Garfield County, too, where he did even worse, garnering only 13 percent of the vote, or 298 ballots to Dole's 1,653.To say the president is unpopular in these places is to understate it - statewide, he managed to pull a relatively whopping 33 percent.
Here - as in the rest of Utah - Republicans rule the roost, and Clinton wouldn't have won under any circumstances, certainly not after a September executive edict in which he declared almost 2,700 square miles in the two counties a new federal preserve.
On the day the president stood across the state line in Arizona and proclaimed the birth of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, they cursed him in Kanab and burned his effigy in Escalante.
"He took too much," said Jack Greenhalgh, a resident of the small town of Tropic just outside Bryce Canyon National Park and a retail sales clerk at Ruby's Inn, the single biggest private-sector employer in Garfield County.
Greenhalgh's sentiments seem widely, if not completely, shared across the region, where people took umbrage at not just the deed but the method by which it was delivered.
"We had Japanese tourists in here telling us it would be a national monument before we knew about it from anybody else," said Greenhalgh.
Clinton, with little or no public input, on Sept. 18 made the announcement, and his administration has never explained how it reached its election-year decision, which was preceded only by murky news leaks that had surfaced a few days earlier.
It caught almost everyone off guard and angered the populace in the small towns along the new monument's borders.
"Kane County is a poor county because of our service economy," explained Joe Judd, a Kane County commissioner and one of the monument's most vocal critics.
Judd was among local officials leading the push for federal permission for Andalex Resources Inc. to proceed with a coal mine 70 miles east of Kanab. The project, which has since been abandoned by the British-owned company, would've been run from an out-of-the-way box canyon, its shafts funneling beneath an unpeopled desert owned by the Bureau of Land Management and leased by Andalex.
Andalex will likely do what the Clinton administration has asked by trading its Escalante leases for ones somewhere else on federal property.
According to proponents, the project would've created 900 new jobs in an area where good employment has all but vanished after Kaibab Industries closed nearby lumber mills in recent years, laying off more than 300 local residents in a move that devastated hundreds of families.
Locals blamed environmentalists and the federal government for that loss. They pointed out that the U.S. Forest Service had mandated curbs in timber harvesting in order to save the habitat of the threatened Mexican Spotted Owl.
But they were irked by other issues as well:
- With little success, local forces for years had fought a still-advancing environmental movement to set aside more than one million acres as federally protected wilderness in the two counties.
- In another struggle, both counties clashed again this year with the BLM on jurisdiction over any number of rural roads that cross hundreds of miles of BLM land but fall under local control because they are locally maintained, argue the counties.
- And in December, over local and vocal opposition, six California Condors were released in a recovery program in the nearby Vermillion Cliffs of Arizona, even though ranchers in the area had argued the birds are predators that pose a danger to livestock.
Federal motives questioned
Such conflict has only deepened already well-entrenched skepticism about federal motives in the area, said Judd.
"When the government says, `Good morning, I'm here to help you,' well, you just kind of get that smile on your face," he said.
Even those who say they strive to understand both sides of the debate insist monument opponents have legitimate grievances.
"Sometimes the government could use a lesson in public relations," said Charlie Neumann, owner of an espresso shop and bookstore that caters to tourists who ply U.S. 89 through Kanab.
"People feel like they've been stepped on because they weren't consulted about it, and my feeling is there's a lot of truth to that," Neumann said.
While he conceded his livelihood is made off those attracted to the area for its natural beauty, he said other longtime residents don't benefit so directly from tourism.
"People have a way of life down here they see going down the toilet," said Neumann. "They're fearful because of what's happened to their logging rights, they're fearful for their grazing rights."
A lonely place
Some are also fearful about an expected increase in traffic through quiet communities that are about as far off the beaten path as you can get. The closest city of any size is 200 miles away, and the Kaiparowits Plateau - where Andalex wanted to mine coal - was named the loneliest spot in America by Car & Driver magazine this year.
"There's going to be an influx I think beyond our wildest dreams," said Sandy Hitchcock, the one-woman police force in Escalante, a community of 800 that seems ill-prepared for any such flood.
"When you bring in more people, you bring in more problems," said Hitchcock, repeating a refrain more apt to be heard in recent years from police chiefs in northern Utah, where a population boom has been ongoing for years.
While average statewide population density has grown from 6.7 people per square mile in 1945 to 23.8 people per square mile in 1995, the statistics for Kane and Garfield counties are hardly as dramatic. In Kane County, population density per square mile changed between 1940 and 1995 from 0.6 to 1.5; in Garfield County, it actually dropped, from 1.0 to 0.8.
Escalante is so remotely situated that it's no stretch to say it isn't on the way to or from anyplace else. This despite - or perhaps because of - its location on U-12, a serpentine highway famed worldwide for its scenery.
Hitchcock's challenge presents a microcosm of what difficulties the new monument might create for local governments. A former police officer in Utah County, Hitchcock took the small-town police chief post last year after her husband got a job as the local high-school principal.
She found a tiny police department that was already having budget troubles, and when she was interviewed for this story in November, Hitchcock was driving her own vehicle on traffic patrol because the city police car was broken down. She noted, too, that local law enforcement has special, additional problems related to geography: Hitchcock's closest backup is probably 50 miles away most of the time, and the county jail is an hour to the west in Panguitch.
Silver lining?
Still, she said Grand Staircase-Escalante may have a silver lining.
"President Clinton made this monument, so I think he needs to help this city out," said Hitchcock, explaining that a federal grant would go a long way toward modernizing the Escalante Police Department.
"I wouldn't take his money," countered Mayor Wade Barney, echoing an angry Garfield County stand taken in October when county commissioners voted to refuse a $100,000 federal gift that was supposed to help the county plan for the monument's impacts.
Barney said the preserve will bring zero gains and likely ensure Escalante a one-note service economy forever. He said, too, that the monument only widens an already apparent split between longtime residents and newcomers.
"People with pride are moving out, and people are moving in who have no pride and don't mind being servants to tourists," said Barney, who wonders what the point of creating a monument was.
"Why do these people feel they have to protect it from us when we're the ones who have taken care of it?" said Barney, who argues that the sheer size of the land in question would let mining and logging be done in a fashion that would benefit many but be noticed by few.
Few answers
Environmentalists, said the mayor, are "exclusionists" bent on keeping out everybody except themselves, and Barney said he wants to know whether any substantial portion of the land will be open to everybody.
"Is this going to be managed so a guy in a wheelchair can go see this place or is it just for the unmarried 30-year-old `earthchickens' who want it for their own private pleasure?"
Answers are scarce.
"Nobody really knows yet," responds Jerry Meredith, the Cedar City-based manager of the monument who has fielded any number of angry queries like Barney's, though he said most calls have been in favor of Clinton's action.
Meredith pointed out that the presidential proclamation gives the BLM until 1999 to come up with rules by which the monument will be managed, and the agency has indicated it will reach out to local communities for their involvement.
The mere appointment of Meredith was an olive branch of sorts.
When BLM state director Bill Lamb announced it, he seized the occasion to speak in conciliatory tones to those who opposed the preserve, suggesting long-established land uses such as grazing and hunting will continue beside "various types of recreation" in the area.
"We have an opportunity, if not the obligation, to try to build something completely new and fresh here - something that adds diversity to the forms of land management heretofore found on the federal lands of the West," said Lamb.
"If we do it right," he said, "(the monument will) protect some of the most remarkable land on Earth while sustaining the cultural identity that makes the region so special and rare. We just need to work together."
Meredith said grazing will likely continue in the area, where it has long been practiced on leases owned by ranchers who run cattle across thousands of acres.
He is also quick to note this is the first national monument that falls under the jurisdiction of the BLM, not the National Park Service, a distinction with important implications.
"It's not going to be managed as a national park would be," said Meredith, pointing out that the BLM's congressional mandate for its land management stresses multiple use.
This is not to say the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will be handled as the BLM manages its other vast holdings, where everything from oil-drilling to hard-rock mining can be allow-ed.
"We're very concerned about mineral development (in the monument)," said Meredith, noting that - in addition to the Andalex claim - 89 oil and gas leases inside the new monument have been paid for by various interests.
"If you own a gas or oil lease - or a coal lease - you own it," Meredith said, though he said land managers have yet to decide whether to let development on such leases proceed or insist on a trade-out for other locations, the option Andalex apparently has chosen.
Development considered moot
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, based in Salt Lake City, considers the issue moot.
"We're not going to see oil and gas developed there; we're not going to see additional coal leases," said Ken Rait, issues director for SUWA, which through a wilderness campaign that still continues was probably the single strongest influence in bringing about the monument's creation.
"It seems impossible the BLM could issue dozens of rights-of-way across a national monument," said Rait, who has argued for years that mineral development in the area would be predicated on building a web of new roads.
SUWA celebrated September's event with glee, calling it a step in the right direction toward the more stringent wilderness designation it wants for 70 percent of the area.
Whether there exists public support for closing most of the monument to motorized vehicles, as wilderness designation would do, is questionable, however.
One day after Clinton's announcement, a Deseret News poll found 49 percent of Utahns opposed it, and 61 percent thought the overnight edict was unfair. A month later, another poll by the newspaper found 52 percent opposed the monument's creation.
Hostile Western response
The response was hardly surprising, said Ted Wilson, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics.
Wilson said history has shown that whenever Washington creates new preserves in the West, local reaction is typically hostile.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt set the Grand Tetons of Wyoming aside as a national monument in 1942, the governor of that state complained it was "as bad as a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor."
Acceptance set in, however, and grew as the monument became a national park and sparked a tourism-based boom through the area - in time.
"The same thing is likely to happen here," said Wilson, and - indeed - while jubilation is hard to find locally, signs of resignation have appeared already.
"No one can do anything about what they're doing, is what's scary," said Judd, the Kane County commissioner. "Reality has set in . . . we got up the next morning and the monument was still there."
While Judd said anger still runs high in Kanab and other locales in the area, hopes are that negotiations will occur so that tradition will weigh heavily in deciding how the monument is run.
And he offered his own olive branch.
"The time in the West where people stepped into the street to settle their difference with a gun is over," Judd said, waxing biblical as he recited a line from the prophet Isaiah.
"Come, let us reason together," he said.
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
How big is it?
The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument* is almost big enough to hold the following areas combined:
Square Miles
Washington, D.C. 68
Virgin Islands 134
Salt Lake County 737
Luxembourg 999
Rhode Island 1,044
TOTAL 2,983
*2,933 square miles