Born of humble beginnings 13 years ago in the heart of enemy territory, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance today can boast a dual achievement unequaled by any other land-use group in the state.
Since 1984, SUWA has managed to alienate much of rural Utah even as it enjoys unrivaled support from within the state's modern, urban-based conservation movement.Squirreled away inside a maze of subterranean, ramshackle offices in Sugar House, the once-fringe group has become a political force to be reckoned with.
Membership rolls listed fewer than 8,000 paying members in 1990, but have since tripled, making SUWA the biggest environmental group in Utah. A third of the support is from within the state, the rest from elsewhere - mostly around the West but including every state in the nation and 12 foreign countries.
The organization, which started in the small southern Utah town of Springdale with a few hundred dollars, operates now on an annual budget that tops $1 million.
"What it shows is we're doing our job, we're accomplishing our goal, which is to maintain and conserve wilderness for future Utahns and future Americans," said Mike Matz, the behind-the-scenes executive director who has piloted SUWA since 1993.
Matz, a veteran administrator for national environmental causes, worked high-level stints for the Sierra Club in Alaska and Washington, D.C., before taking the SUWA helm.
He remains a mostly unknown personality, however, having left the job of giving SUWA a face to Ken Rait, who in his 61/2 years with the group has become a colorful public figure simultaneously adored and reviled as land savior and carpetbagger.
In March, Rait will leave for a job with the Portland-based Oregon Natural Resources Council, which lobbies for government protection of forests, municipal watersheds and salmon habitat. His successor is Scott Groene, a 10-year resident of Utah and an attorney who has worked on SUWA's 12-member staff for seven years.
Rait leaves behind a double-edged legacy of acrimony and accomplishment, say critics and admirers alike.
"He got things done," said Brad Barber, chief economist for Gov. Mike Leav-itt and the governor's current point man in the state's 20-year-old fight over wilderness.
But Barber - like others in the Leavitt administration - is sharply critical of SUWA's long tradition of non-compromise, and has jumped on the occasion of Rait's departure as an opportunity to bridge the chasm that separates the group from Utah's GOP machine.
"This is a time of transition they could really capitalize on by sitting down and talking with us," said Barber. "And I mean by sitting down and talking about more than just their agenda."
Similarly, Department of Natural Resources director Ted Stewart, another longtime critic, said the organization has been too single-minded in its policies.
"If all you ever have to do is present your own viewpoint, then it's a luxury they've taken good advantage of," Stewart said. "Those of us who have the responsibility of looking at more than one viewpoint don't have that luxury."
The rap on SUWA extends to criticism that the organization does not represent grass-root Utahns.
"They're not mainstream by any means," Stewart said, though others question that assertion.
"Utah is one of the most urban states in the country, not one of the most rural," said David Magelby, a Brigham Young University political science professor who cited demographic facts that note most Utahns live in cities.
"The state is much more evenly divided (on wilderness) than you would believe given the rhetoric of the Cowboy Caucus," Magelby said, adding that national sentiment is with the environmentalists.
The fundamental SUWA issue is over how much of the state's federally owned property ought to be set aside as wilderness land closed to motorized activity.
SUWA advocates 5.7 million acres, or about 10 percent of the state's surface. Most of it is in southern Utah, where many locals fear such designation will cripple the economies of the region. The Leavitt administration and the state's congressional delegation want new wilderness kept to about 2 million acres.
Recent Deseret News polls have shown a generally even split on the issue - one indication that SUWA is not the peripheral group it used to be.
Indeed, the organization's 15-member board includes people who would be considered mainstream by almost anybody.
The chairman is Wayne Owens, the former Democratic congressman from Utah's urban 2nd District. Earlier this year, former Salt Lake City mayor Ted Wilson joined the board at Owens' invitation. (Four other directors are from Utah, five are from Colorado and four are from other states - Indiana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and New Mexico).
What constitutes board worthiness, said Matz, is an empathy for the group's cause and "whether they like to raise money."
The latter requirement suggests SUWA is less an outfit outside the system than a well-oiled organization tapped into Washington politics. According to the latest tax returns provided by the group, SUWA reported $500,000 in lobbying expenditures in 1995, a figure that was probably bigger in 1996, when the organization led an all-out assault on the Utah congressional delegation's doomed bill that would've limited wilderness.
"Maybe the group has changed a little," Wilson said. "My presence on the board, and certainly the presence of Wayne Owens, has given them a couple of semi-blue suits."
"That may be," said Mark Walsh, associate director of the Utah Association of Counties, "but their underwear's still green."
Walsh, whose group is a lobbyist for local governments, said SUWA's agenda is skewed at the expense of those who live in southern Utah towns.
"Instead of worshiping the creator, they worship the creation," he said. "And there's something wrong when human life doesn't figure into that creation."
"They don't seem to care about the well-being of small-town rural Utah or small-town rural Utah citizens," said Stewart.
"They don't have a Western orientation," added Walsh. "They haven't lived in the West and made their living off the land, which they are busy trying to kick everybody off of, essentially."
SUWA's standard response to such jabs has always been the same - that wilderness will not make or break local economies and that the federal lands in question belong to all Americans. The stance served them well in 1996 when the debate was nationalized and ended in a substantial victory for SUWA and its allies.
With its blitz on Washington, the group scuttled Republican efforts to quash their cause, but the bigger win came in September when President Clinton designated 1.7 million acres of Kane and Garfield counties as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Flush with its successes, SUWA continues to grow, said Matz, who says there's been a change in public perception of the wilderness debate.
"I think the world is coming around to our version of reality . . . we've established an atmosphere in which 5.7 million acres is not viewed as radical at all."
Building on its current support, the group this month will conduct a door-to-door membership drive in Albuquerque, N.M. Later in the year, similar pushes may occur in Denver and Boulder, Colo., and Phoenix and Flagstaff, Ariz.
Such moves will probably attract more criticism that SUWA's agenda is driven by forces beyond the state line.
Rait, always the master of the sound bite, offers as response his own history, noting he comes from a small city in New York midway between the birthplace of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and the hometown of the state's best-known political figure, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch.
"In one way or another, we're all from somewhere else," Rait said.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
GRASS-ROOTS GROWTH
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
Total membership
1990 7,746
1993 10,085
Today 24,144
Top 5 member states:
Utah 11,633
California 2,457
Colorado 2,080
New Mexico 1,388
Arizona 863
Source: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
Finances: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance
Annual revenue 1995 1996
(in millions) $1.53 $1.39
Revenue sources 1995 1996
Individual donations $783,080 $438,000
Membership renewals $286,861 $318,000
Foundation grants $267,535 $348,000
New memberships $191,936 $249,000
Annual expenses 1995 1996
(in millions) $1.23 $1.12
Major expenses 1995 1996
Public education $305,124 $274,612
(newsletters, conferences, broadcasts) Wilderness affairs $559,393 503,454
(lobbying, research, "special bulletins and alerts," "arranging public attendance at meetings and hearings"
Other issues $152,575 $137,318
(analysis and research of federal policy, field trips and travel to meetings with government agencies)
Staff
1996 full-time staff 12
Average salary $28,083
Financial figures based on 1995 federal tax returns and audited financial statements and estimates for 1996.
Source: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance