WINDOW ROCK — The Navajo Nation strongly opposes H.B. 481, a Utah invoice that might change the call of an iconic motorway in southern Utah to honor President Donald Trump.The Utah National Parks Highway, a series of roads that winds round all five of southern Utah’s country wide parks, is the focal point of a invoice that seeks to rename the scenic force after the 45th president. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, wants to change the street’s call to the Donald J. Trump Utah National Parks Highway—a gesture of appreciation for Trump’s proclamation in December that dramatically reduced the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Escalante country wide monuments.
The House Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Committee handed the bill with a 9-2 vote Monday. It now heads to the House for consideration.
“The Navajo Nation firmly opposes this bill,” President Russell Begaye stated. “President Trump and Utah lawmakers are trying to reduce the dimensions of Bears Ears, a national monument that protects land this is sacred to the Navajo people. To name a highway after Trump is like placing salt into an open wound.”
In his final months in workplace, former President Barack Obama issued a proclamation establishing Bears Ears as a 1.35-million-acre national monument in San Juan County, Utah. A year later, in December 2017, President Trump issued a proclamation slashing eighty five percent of the land from Bears Ears and developing two smaller country wide monuments.
The Navajo Nation, together with four other tribes with ancestral ties to Bears Ears, is suing the federal government, hard Trump’s authority below the Antiquities Act of 1906 to lessen or rescind country wide monuments. President Begaye twice this year has testified towards H.R. 4532, a federal bill added by way of Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, that would codify Trump’s proclamation and reduce the size of Bears Ears to approximately 2 hundred,000 acres.
“Naming a Utah toll road after Trump after he has worked in opposition to us to defend our lands would be an insult,” Vice President Jonathan Nez said. “We urge Utah lawmakers to oppose this.”
The Oljato Chapter, which friends both Grand Escalante and Bears Ears country wide monuments, also opposes the bill. In a Mar. 5 letter to Rep. Curtis, Oljato Chapter President James Adakai entreated the U.S. Consultant to assist block efforts to rename the dual carriageway after Trump.
“The highway goes through or to the five countrywide parks in Utah as well as several national monuments,” the letter states. “All of it’s far land wherein Native Americans have lived for millennia, and President Trump has no longer shown recognize for Native Nations.”
Adakai asks that lawmakers recollect naming the toll road after Native heroes, including Ernst Yazhe, a Navajo Code Talker who died in 2016 in Salt Lake City at age 92.
The Donald J. Trump Utah National Parks Highway could observe a 650-mile route that consists of numerous roads that meander around and through Zion, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, Arches and Canyonlands national parks. It also consists of elements of I-15, U.S. 191 and U.S. 89, connecting Crescent Junction (north of Moab) to the Arizona-Utah border close to Big Water.
H.B. 481 additionally could require the Utah Department of Transportation to install signage along the direction to mirror the name alternate.