Utah Lawyer Tapped to Lead BLM

SEATTLE — Kathleen Burton Clarke, the head of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources, was nominated by the White House on Monday as director of the federal Bureau of Land Management. She immediately signaled her commitment to the Bush administration’s energy development goals on 264 million acres of public land.

Clarke, a 51-year-old lawyer who has worked for years as an aide to Utah Republican congressmen, would be the first woman to head the agency that oversees massive tracts of federal lands, mostly in the West.

“I hope to be a team player . . . in moving forward the agenda of the Bush administration, which I believe is very committed to resource conservation,” Clarke said in an interview.

“We certainly have many challenges. I see the most important ones where you seek to find a balance between the imperative to protect the environment, as well as the need to balance and utilize what our public land has to offer,” she said.

Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton said that Clarke brings a “holistic, integrated approach to natural resource conservation” to one of the most conflict-ridden jobs in the federal bureaucracy.

The BLM is charged with administering such complex issues as cattle grazing allotments, oil and gas development, mining and resource conservation on public lands that are in some of the fastest-growing regions of the country.

Utah environmental groups said the nomination of Clarke, which must be approved by the Senate, was a sign that Bush plans to give resource conservation a low priority in federal lands management.

“We hope she will be good. The thing we do know is she’s coming from a very anti-environmental, hostile administration at the state level. [Republican] Gov. Mike Leavitt has a very poor environmental record, and it’s not very surprising that this Bush administration would choose someone from the Leavitt administration,” said Marc Heileson, southwest regional representative for the Sierra Club.

Heileson said conservation groups have been battling Leavitt’s plans to build a freeway along the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake--an important nesting, breeding and resting site for more than 3 million migratory shorebirds and waterfowl.

And Utah environmental groups are battling the BLM over plans for oil and gas leasing on tens of thousands of acres near Canyonlands National Park. Federal legislation has been introduced to set aside as wilderness 9 million acres out of the 23 million acres administered by the BLM in Utah.

Clarke has not had a high profile on either issue, Heileson said.

But conservative land groups applauded her nomination, saying Clarke enjoys a reputation for fairness and balance and is likely to win support from ranchers and resource developers, who warred with the BLM during the Clinton administration.

“Their attitude to the rancher was: ‘You don’t think we’re right, sue us.’ We’ve never had a bigger scofflaw presidency as we did with the Clinton administration, and they turned the BLM--and to a large extent the Forest Service--into agencies that were the enemies of local communities,” said Charles Cushman of the American Land Rights Assn.

Clarke, he said, “cares about federal land and about private property, particularly the rights of ranchers. It fits right in with President Bush’s overall theme, so we feel pretty good about this nomination.”

(Most of the controversial federal monuments that President Clinton designated toward the end of his presidency were on BLM lands, including the 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante monument in Utah, a move that enraged the state’s Republican leadership.)

Shauna Johnson, a Utah rancher and member of Frontiers of Freedom/People for the USA, said she served with Clarke for several years on a multi-agency group overseeing the Virgin River watershed. She said she was impressed with Clarke’s inclusive approach.

“She was very reasonable to work with and seemed to have a lot of common sense. And you could talk to her,” Johnson said. “We had a lot of controversial issues to deal with, and she always worked to bring common sense to the table and to keep people from getting mad at each other.”

As head of the natural resources department, Clarke oversees an agency with more than 1,200 employees and a budget of $83 million. She began her government career as a receptionist for the late Republican Sen. Wallace Bennett, who represented Utah from 1951 to 1974. She worked for 12 years as a staffer for Republican Rep. James V. Hansen of Utah. She received her law degree from Brigham Young University, and also has been co-owner with her former husband of a residential construction and real estate business in Kaysville, Utah.

She has four grown children.