A ruinous land rush

NEAR THE majestic canyons of Zion National Park in southern Utah is the fifth-fastest-growing county in the United States, a monument to suburban sprawl and strip development. To help Washington County grow even faster, one of Utah's senators, Republican Robert Bennett, is sponsoring a bill that would sell off a parcel of federal land almost as large as the city of Boston to developers. Some of the proceeds would go not for conservation but to such local projects as an off-road-vehicle trail and a water pipeline.

The bill has set off alarm bells all over the West for the worrisome example it sets. Because Utah was originally a territory, the federal government owns about two-thirds of it, and the Bureau of Land Management periodically sells off properties. The money from the sale is supposed to be spent on conservation projects in the affected state. Instead, this bill encourages the wasteful use of land.

It specifically earmarks money for an off-road-vehicle trail, which would destroy fragile desert habitat, and for a portion of the cost of a $500 million, 120-mile pipeline to draw water from Lake Powell in Arizona. Getting a straw into Lake Powell would spur further growth in Washington County, a center for resorts and retirement homes.

A spokesman for Bennett points to a similar federal land sale in Nevada as a precedent for this kind of allocation of land-sale funds. Conservationists say the Utah proposal is worse than the Nevada one because the proceeds would directly benefit local government, giving local officials a strong incentive to push for the sale of lands that would be better left under the protection of the federal government.

Critics also say there was too little opportunity in Washington County or elsewhere in Utah to debate the legislation. Officials held two open houses with poster boards and draft maps and comment sheets for the public to fill out, but many of those who attended complained they did not have the chance that a genuine public hearing would provide to discuss the bill's pros and cons with its government supporters.

The Bennett bill follows an attempt by the Bush administration to sell off national forest lands to raise money for rural schools and to sell Bureau of Land Management land to reduce the federal deficit. That proposal set off overwhelming bipartisan opposition and was dropped earlier this year. The public properly recoils when it sees its birthright put on the auction block to offset the government's profligate fiscal policies or to advance private development projects. If the Senate does not reject the Bennett bill, it invites a proliferation of proposals in the West to use land sales to finance not conservation but the despoliation of the public's land.