The Northern Corridor is a proposed four-lane highway that would cut through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area. Many local and national conservation organizations oppose the road, saying its approval would violate several conservation laws. Proponents of the road say it is a necessary traffic development to serve the growing St. George metropolitan area.
Red Cliffs was designated as a national conservation area in 2009, in part to protect the habitat of the Mojave Desert Tortoise, an endangered species native to the region.
Kya Marienfeld, wildlands attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said building a highway through Red Cliffs would violate the Endangered Species Act by failing to protect the desert tortoise.
“There's direct impacts to the tortoise, which is like … tortoise crossing the highway gets hit by a car," Marienfeld said. "But it's really the indirect effects, I think, that are pretty massive, and can really compound as well — you know, fire is a huge concern around major motorized thoroughfares."
Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke said ideally, the highway would not go through desert tortoise habitat, but building the Northern Corridor is essential infrastructure for the growing metropolitan area.
“St. George’s population has more than doubled every 20 years since 1960. And that's … just explosive growth," Clarke said. "For years, our traffic planners have said, as we grow into a more metropolitan area, you need to be able to move traffic without going through the middle of downtown."
The highway project's history
Clarke said Congress provisioned for the highway in the original legislation that designated the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area in 2009.
“So we're confident that at some point, we'll get in front of a judge and a judge will say, obviously, the road is legal. It's not illegal to put a road there when Congress specifically says, 'Go study how you can put a road in right there,'” Clarke said.
Marienfeld said the original legislation does not guarantee a highway through the area.
“All the legislation says is that the BLM in writing their management plan for the areas would analyze a northern transportation route. Didn't say where, didn’t say that they had to designate it, just that they shall analyze it, which they did,” Marienfeld said.
Marienfeld said the resource management plans for the area were finalized in 2016 — when a highway route through Red Cliffs was analyzed but ultimately rejected, due to significant adverse impacts to protected resources in the area, including the desert tortoise. The county appealed the resource management plan, but the appeal was rejected.
“And then there was the administration shift, of course, that happened. And then, I think at that time, proponents of the highway saw an opportunity to sort of restart the process and see if under a different administration they could get something through administratively. And that's kind of where we stand now,” Marienfeld said.
Zone 6: Additional habitat for the tortoise
In 2018, the Utah Department of Transportation applied for a right-of-way for the proposed Northern Corridor Highway to be built through Red Cliffs. The right-of-way was approved at the eleventh hour of the Trump administration in January 2021.
Clarke said the right-of-way included plans to mitigate the impact of the highway on desert tortoises by adding an additional area, known as Zone 6, to the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve.
“So we all work together with the BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service and went through all the studies. The conclusion is that the conservation package that we offered up was a full offset to the impacts to the tortoise,” Clarke said.
In a statement provided to UPR, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources said that the Northern Corridor project would fragment desert tortoise habitat. The statement also said the addition of Zone 6 to the reserve would represent a nearly 11% increase in habitat, to offset the 1% of habitat that would be lost due to construction of the Northern Corridor.
In June of 2021, seven Utah-based and national conservation organizations, including the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior to challenge the approval of the Northern Corridor Highway.
Clarke said he assumes that the current federal administration will rescind the state’s right-of-way for the highway.
“The day that that happens, they also are going to lift protections, on 3,500 acres of land … they're gonna they're going to take away Zone 6 when they take away the road right-of-way,” Clarke said.
Marienfeld said there is no reason Zone 6 could not remain protected habitat if the highway proposal is rejected.
“It was almost like a ransom kind of thing — saying if we don't get this highway where we want it, we're going to hold this other area hostage that we have not developed yet and don't have plans to develop, but we're basically going to make sure that this isn't protected as tortoise habitat anymore, or mountain bike trails or climbing, bouldering areas,” Marienfeld said.
The politics of development
Clarke said one of the biggest challenges in determining the fate of this project is the fluctuation with changing administrations.
“And I would love it if we could just be consistent because you can't manage lands in four-year increments. But this was just politics, right? A Trump administration was going to approve a reasonable application that met all the checkboxes, and that we felt like would hold up in litigation," Clarke said. "And a Biden or an Obama administration before that was not going to allow a new road across the National Conservation Area. Like, those are just policy positions that Democrats are going to be 'let's limit growth in these areas,' and Republicans are going to be more 'property rights.' The only thing that changed was who sat in the White House.”
Marienfeld said the Red Cliffs NCA is important desert tortoise habitat but also an important natural resource for the local community.
“This was Congress recognizing that and then proactively protecting it, setting it aside, because — I think anything that is anywhere near St. George, that doesn't have that, sort of, big red line around it will be developed, at some point,” Marienfeld said.
The BLM is currently in the process of reevaluating the environmental impact of the right-of-way for the Northern Corridor highway, as part of the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement process. The public is invited to review the SEIS and provide feedback through June 24, 2024. The BLM encourages all interested parties to participate actively in the public review process.
To learn more and submit your comments, visit blm.gov.
