Sponsors (19)
Introduced March 27, 2025 by Richard Joseph Durbin · Last progress March 27, 2025
The bill permanently protects large tracts of public land—securing recreation, wildlife, and cultural values—while trading off reduced extractive development, more restricted motorized and land uses, and new management and fiscal challenges for local communities and governments.
Residents, visitors, and outdoor businesses gain permanent protection of scenic and ecological lands and long-term access to designated wilderness for recreation (hiking, camping, hunting, fishing), preserving outdoor amenities.
Indigenous Tribes and communities keep and strengthen protections for cultural, ceremonial, medicinal, and subsistence sites and can continue traditional and spiritual uses of these lands.
Wildlife and habitat benefit from long-term conservation of large, connected areas, supporting species (e.g., mule deer, bighorn sheep, raptors) and ecosystem services (refugia, riparian corridors).
Workers, businesses, and local governments that depend on mining, energy, timber, or other resource extraction may lose jobs and revenue because withdrawals and leasing prohibitions restrict development on designated lands.
Motorized access, off‑road vehicle use, and other traditional uses may be restricted and boundary setbacks can limit road improvements or emergency/operational access, reducing local land-use flexibility.
The designation creates new management responsibilities and potential co‑management conflicts (including between Indigenous and non‑Indigenous stakeholders) without specified funding and may trigger additional legal processes (e.g., water adjudications), shifting costs to federal agencies, states, and taxpayers.
Based on analysis of 10 sections of legislative text.
Designates many specific federal land parcels in western Utah as wilderness, adds them to the National Wilderness Preservation System, reserves water rights, and requires maps and land-exchange procedures.
Designates dozens of specific federal land parcels in western Utah as wilderness and makes them components of the National Wilderness Preservation System, to be administered by the Secretary of the Interior through the Bureau of Land Management. The measure reserves federal water rights for each new wilderness area with a priority date of enactment, requires the Secretary to file maps and legal descriptions with Congress and make them publicly available, and establishes procedures for land exchanges where State school trust lands fall inside new wilderness boundaries. The law aims to protect cultural, ecological, scenic, and recreational values; to preserve places important to Indigenous communities; and to strengthen landscape connectivity and climate resilience on the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin. It does not specify new funding levels or detailed management prescriptions beyond administration consistent with existing federal land laws (the Wilderness Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act).