Signage welcomes visitors to Bears Ears National Monument near Monticello on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
Utah voters appear to support the work federal land management agencies are doing in the state and don’t believe they should have their budgets cut, while expressing opposition to the reduction of some of the state’s national monuments.
That’s according to the latest poll sponsored by Colorado College, which asked voters around the West their opinions on various issues related to public lands, natural resources, energy production and more.
And while the federal government continues to slash funding for federal programs, lay off federal workers, and considers scaling back Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, that could be at odds with Utah voters.
Colorado College has commissioned the State of the Rockies poll for the last 15 years. It was conducted by New Bridge Strategies from Jan. 3-17, surveying 3,316 voters across Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, with at least 400 voters per state. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points, maximum, per state.
Respondents in Utah want to keep national monuments, or at least Bears Ears, intact — when asked whether “existing national monument designations for some public lands protected over the last decade should be kept in place,” 82% agreed. About 50% said monuments created in the last 10 years should “definitely” be kept in place, while 32% said “probably.” Just 15% said the state’s recent monument designations should be removed.
The poll comes as the U.S. Department of Interior is reviewing the country’s national monuments, with an “action plan” due this week. The department’s new secretary, Doug Burgum, has signaled a willingness to work with Utah politicians to reduce both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
The monuments, which cover a combined 3.2 million acres in southern Utah, were cut down by Trump in 2017, then reestablished by President Joe Biden in 2021. Utah is challenging Biden’s decision in federal appeals court.
As far as the agencies that manage those monuments — and the rest of the federally-controlled land that makes up about 68% of the state — Utahns seem to approve of the job they’re doing, according to the Colorado College poll. Consider this:
- About 87% approve of the work the National Parks Service is doing in Utah.
- About 81% approve of the U.S. Forest Service.
- About 73% approve of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
- About 64% approve of the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM.
- About 62% approve of the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, the lowest approval rating of all federal agencies.
Meanwhile, just 27% said they supported cutting funding to the Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and “other agencies for repairs, firefighting, visitor services, and oversight of those public lands.”
Those sentiments are clear across party lines. In Utah, just 16% of respondents identified as liberal, while 42% claimed to be moderate and the remaining 40% said they were conservative. About 40% of Beehive State voters polled considered themselves to be supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement.
Pollsters say there was no major difference between a person’s political ideology, and whether they approve of federal land management agencies and their budgets — support appeared to be bipartisan.
“When you look at not just Republicans, but MAGA supporters, they’re pretty consistent with the rest of the electorate in terms of how they want agencies that are managing public lands and funding for those agencies to be handled,” said Dave Metz with the California-based polling firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, who worked on the survey.
“What the poll is telling us is that if there’s a mandate from those voters, it’s pretty much the same as what independents and Democrats want. So hopefully this data can inform some of the policy deliberations and shine a light on where the public stands on these issues,” Metz said during a news conference Wednesday.
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