State vs. Salt Lake City on masks, Weber on guns, and Deb Haaland visits monuments on this week’s ‘Behind the Headlines’
Salt Lake Tribune journalists join this week’s KCPW news roundup.
(Rick Egan | Salt Lake Tribune file photo) Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall encourages residents to keep wearing masks after the state mask mandate ends during a news conference in March. recently extended the city s mask requirement.
| April 8, 2021, 5:16 p.m.
The end of the statewide mask mandate is nigh. But Salt Lake City says not so fast. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visits Utah as part of a review of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. And Weber County commissioners declare their county a “Second Amendment sanctuary.”
Sophia Eppolito
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox takes a selfie with Rep. Blake Moore, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson and Sen. Mitt Romney during a tour by ancient dwellings along the Butler Wash trail at the Bears Ears National Monument Thursday, April 8, 2021, near Blanding, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, Pool) April 08, 2021 - 4:51 PM
SALT LAKE CITY - For decades, a public lands tug-of-war has played out over a vast expanse of southern Utah where red rocks reveal petroglyphs and cliff dwellings and distinctive twin buttes bulge from a grassy valley.
A string of U.S. officials has heard from those who advocate for broadening national monuments to protect the area s many archaeological and cultural sites, considered sacred to surrounding tribes, and those who fiercely oppose what they see as federal overreach.
Deseret News
Share this story
The Bears Ears of the Bears Ears National Monument are pictured from the air on Monday, May 8, 2017. Navajo Nation leaders called for full restoration and expansion of the Bears Ears National Monument to 1.9 million acres in a meeting with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland on Wednesday in Bluff, Utah.
Scott G Winterton, Deseret News
Navajo Nation leaders called for full restoration and expansion of the Bears Ears National Monument to 1.9 million acres in a meeting with U.S. Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland on Wednesday in Bluff, San Juan County.
The move would reverse former President Donald Trump’s sweeping reduction of the national monument designated under former President Barack Obama.
| Updated: April 9, 2021, 3:28 p.m.
Blanding • Early Thursday morning before closed meetings with Utah leaders, before the press questions and the shouting protesters Interior Secretary Deb Haaland joined tribal leaders on the landscape near Bears Ears National Monument for a moment of reflection and prayer.
“It was a beautiful gathering of tribal leaders to start off the day right,” said Angelo Baca, a Hopi/Diné man from San Juan County who was part of the group.
“From the Indigenous perspective, how you start off the day is with gratitude,” continued Baca, cultural resources coordinator for Utah Diné Bikéyah. “[Haaland] said she felt right at home.”