The Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service have approved a new Resource Management Plan for Bears Ears National Monument, concluding a multi-year collaborative effort to manage the 1.36 million-acre landscape in San Juan County. The decision, effective immediately, follows years of intense legal and political disputes over the monument's boundaries and federal authority.
New Management Plan Implementation
The newly approved plan replaces the 2020 management plan for the monument. According to the Bureau of Land Management, the decision follows a Record of Decision signed on January 13, 2025, by the Department of the Interior’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management. The plan aims to ensure protections for the sacred, ancestral homelands within the monument while allowing for appropriate uses of the culturally significant landscape.
The monument's current boundaries were modified by a presidential proclamation issued by President Biden on October 8, 2021. This federal action expanded the protected area to its current size of approximately 1.36 million acres, which is managed jointly by the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service. The lands are used by local communities for livestock grazing and firewood gathering, and they remain vital for recreationists engaged in rock climbing, backpacking, and river rafting.
The recent management approval arrives years after Utah's top leadership launched a legal battle against the expansion of the monument. On August 24, 2022, Utah Attorney General Sean D. Reyes filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah challenging what state officials called the unlawful designation of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.
The lawsuit, supported by Governor Spencer Cox, Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson, and several members of Utah's congressional delegation, argued that the combined 3.2 million acres of these two monuments violated the Antiquities Act of 1906. The Act limits presidents to creating monuments confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management.
At the time of the filing in 2022, Governor Cox and other state leaders expressed concern that the vast size of the expanded monuments would lead to unmanageable visitation levels without providing necessary tools for conservation. The state's legal challenge argued that a congressional solution would be more effective for managing Utah lands by ensuring tribal access to sacred sites and providing local communities with the funding needed to thrive economically.
While the state previously sought a legislative overhaul, federal officials are now testifying in favor of a specific land exchange bill known as H.R. 3049, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration Exchange Act. In testimony before the House Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands, Nada Wolff Culver, the BLM Principal Deputy Director, expressed support for the legislation.
The proposed bill would ratify a land exchange agreement between the Department of the Interior and the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA). Under the terms of H.R. 3049, the BLM would acquire approximately 162,510 acres of SITLA-managed lands—many of which are located within or near the Bears Ears National Monument—in exchange for roughly 167,012 acres of BLM-managed public land located elsewhere in Utah.
