The Biden administration has formally rejected the Trump-era approval of a highway corridor through Utah’s Red Cliffs National Conservation Area.
The record of decision released Friday by the Bureau of Land Management authorizes an alternative plan that calls for making improvements to an existing roadway overseen by the city of St. George that runs south of the Red Cliffs NCA, and away from a preserve for the federally threatened Mojave Desert tortoise.
The plan also removes thousands of acres that Washington County had placed into the federal preserve as mitigation for the corridor originally approved by former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in January 2021. That land can now be developed.
This alternative “best meets the BLM’s requirement to address all practicable means to promote the general welfare and avoid or minimize environmental harm and is, therefore, considered the agency’s environmentally preferable alternative,” according to the record of decision, signed by Laura Daniel-Davis, Interior’s acting deputy secretary.
