The Bureau of Land Management is revoking the Trump-era approval nearly four years ago of a highway corridor through a national conservation area in Utah, instead proposing a route that would move it away from a federal Mojave Desert tortoise habitat preserve.
The plan proposes making improvements to an existing roadway overseen by the city of St. George that runs south of the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, and away from a preserve for the federally threatened Mojave Desert tortoise. It 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.
The rejection of the 500-foot-wide Northern Corridor that would have allowed construction of a four-lane highway across the Red Cliffs NCA is certain to anger state lawmakers, most notably Utah Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, both of whom have argued that the corridor is badly needed to ease traffic congestion in St. George, which is one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas.
But given the coming shift to a new Trump administration, BLM’s actions on the highway corridor could change again. The bureau’s final approval — outlined in a final supplemental environmental impact statement set to be published in Friday’s Federal Register — would not come until next month, at the earliest, increasing the chance that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration could reverse it.
