Ranchers, farmers win right to Supreme Court hearing on grazing rights

Hannah Wolfson

Wednesday, Oct. 13, 1999 | 9:40 a.m.

SALT LAKE CITY - Tom Hatch's father grazed cattle in the Dixie National Forest. So did his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and another generation before that.

Hatch thinks he and some 28,000 other ranchers throughout the West should be able to follow the 65-year-old law his forbears did, rather than newer rules the Clinton administration imposed in 1995. He may have come one step closer Tuesday, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the regulations filed by ranching and farming groups.

"We're being threatened from so many different directions," said Hatch, who serves as a Utah state representative and grazes 300 head of cattle on public land just north of Bryce Canyon National Park. "I think what ranchers are really looking for is some stability."

But stability is hard to come by in the cattle business, where dropping commodity prices have put the squeeze on ranchers who fear environmental regulations could drive them off of public lands.

"For many ranchers, they would maybe have no place whatsoever to go and other ones maybe they would have no place to go for half the year," said Bill Thomas, a lawyer and rancher from Sacramento, Calif., and member of the California Cattlemen's Association.

In Garfield County, Utah, which Hatch calls home, only 4 percent of land is privately held. The rest belongs to the federal government. In fact, half of the state's 5,000 cattle and sheep ranchers - most of them small family-run operations - depend on public lands, according to Utah State University's Range Science Department.

Around the region, thousands more have permits to graze livestock on 170 million acres of federal rangeland, some of them dating back to the introduction of permitting in 1934.

Four years ago, the Department of Interior tightened up the rules, amending the permit process to conform with land-use plans, dropping the requirement that applicants be in the livestock business and giving the government title to fences, water tanks and other permanent improvements permit-holders might built on the land. Mostly, ranchers say, the new regulations have made it harder to be guaranteed permit renewals the way their parents were.

"It has made things a whole lot more complicated for us," said Barbara Marks, who with her husband has permits to graze 64,000 acres on national forest land in eastern Arizona. "It has made it difficult to survive and has forced some of our friends to cut back their herds."

Some local families have even given up, she said.

"They have changed the face of this community," she said. "It breaks our hearts to see what is going on."

So the Public Lands Council, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and other groups took their case to court in 1996 and a federal judge in Wyoming - which has issued at least 3,000 grazing permits - threw out the new provisions.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated them last fall and the ranchers appealed, saying the rules threaten their ability to get bank loans to keep their businesses going.

"It's a major change in the rules of the game," said Connie Brooks, a Denver-based lawyer who has worked on the rancher's case since it was first filed in 1993. "They can't have financing unless they can have the guaranteed right to have livestock on public lands."

But lawyers for the Justice Department called the rules a "change in terminology," and said the grazing permits granted generations ago gave only privileges, never the right to graze.

"None of these issues involve the heart of our grazing reform, which deals with resource advisory councils and standards and guidelines," said John Wright, a spokesman for the Department of Interior. "They're all working just fine."

And environmental groups say that grazing shouldn't necessarily be a guaranteed right.

"The real problem is that grazing has a major negative impact on our public lands and something needs to be done about it," said Joro Walker, an attorney with the Land and Water Fund of the Rockies. "I'm sure these people feel their livelihood is being threatened and I'm sure that's scary but we have to make these tough decisions sometimes."

But ranchers would rather take such choices out of the hands of the Clinton administration and give the court the final word. Arguments in the case will be held this winter, and a decision is expected by late June.

"We are absolutely ecstatic," said Caren Cowan, executive secretary of the Cattle Growers Association in New Mexico, where nearly 2,500 ranchers have grazing permits on more than 12 million acres of federal land. "We knew there was probably less than a 5 percent chance we would get heard on this. We feel that it's a really good sign that the Supreme Court is willing to look at this issue."