President Donald Trump will visit Salt Lake City on Monday to unveil his decision to reduce the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.
The Washington Post reports that Trump will likely drastically cut the sizes of the 1.35 million acre Bears Ears and the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase monuments.
While administration officials have not announced how much Trump plans to reduce either monument, they have privately indicated he intends to shave hundreds of thousands of acres off both.
The president will reduce Bears Ears by more than 1 million acres, Interior officials have informed multiple individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. And Ron Dean, an aide to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), testified before the Utah Legislature’s Commission for the Stewardship of Public Lands this month that “Grand Staircase will probably be somewhere between 700,000 acres and 1.2 million” under the revised designation.
A recent UtahPolicy.com survey found that 52% of Utahns support cutting down the size of both monuments. UtahPolicy.com was the first to report that Trump could shrink Bears Ears down to around 160,000 acres.
