Utah Alliance

 The Salt Lake Tribune Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar was on hand for the Grand Opening of the new Dinosaur National Monument Visitors Center near Jensen on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011. Dinosaur National Monument • The bones are the attraction, but the payoff of a new visitor center and a revamped fossil quarry ismeasured not in prehistoric creatures, but in present-day humans.

A member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet came to eastern Utah on Wednesday to tout the renewed paleontology exhibit here as proof of the administration’s focus on jobs.

It adds up to a likely return in the next five years of more than a half-million tourists, the number who didn’t visit the region while Dinosaur’s most famous boneyard has been off-limits, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in dedicating the new building Wednesday.

“This visitor center and Dinosaur National Monument will once again become a huge economic generator for this part of the state,” he told a crowd of about 200 gathered under the monument’s yellow knolls for a ribbon-cutting outside the new gateway.

Many locals are grateful for the renewal, not to mention the dozens of workers for Wasatch Front contractors and their subcontractors who have been laboring here at various times since early 2010.But if Salazar was seeking points for helping the economy, he also confronted adversaries who want faster approvals for Utah oil and gas wells.

Gov. Gary Herbert, in Uintah County for an energy forum, is a frequent critic of the administration’s land policies. He met Salazar and talked briefly in private, but did not stay for the ceremony.

The visitor center is now open, and the quarry — a half-unearthed collage of fossils found in a 149 million-year-old river bend ­— reopens Tuesday. The quarry shut down for structural anchoring, because the steel-and-glass shelter had rested on unstable clay. The National Park Service took that closure as an opportunity to replace a previously connected visitor center that was collapsing.

The new center is downhill at the spot of a former quarry shuttle launch.

These reopened buildings should mean thousands of jobs for Vernal and surrounding areas, Salazar said. And they come courtesy of $9 million of Obama’s economic-stimulus plan, he noted in a pointedly political speech during the ceremony.

His message was aimed at a cross-border audience in Utah, which is solidly Republican, and Colorado, a battleground state that his Democratic boss snagged in the 2008 election. But Salazar also noted the significance of this place to Americans everywhere.

“We need to make sure that we continue to invest in the conservation of our resources,” he said, “and the celebration of our iconic places.”

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is widely “maligned,” Salazar acknowledged, but it’s still creating jobs. He urged Americans to unite behind “the 90 percent of the agenda that we agree on” and overcome a “dysfunctional” Washington.

“That’s what I’m going to do with every breath that I have,” he said.

Park visitation was just above 300,000 when the quarry closed in 2006, Superintendent Mary Risser said, and dropped to about 200,000 a year since. That number is now expected to rebound.

Vernal businesses welcome the return. At Dinosaur Inn, a motel adorned by one of many model dinosaurs on the main drag, manager Ashlee Bru has been waiting for this day. Once-plentiful European visitors have been largely absent for five years, she said, a result of the town’s biggest curiosity being inaccessible.

“Our tourists went down about 50 percent,” she said. News of the reopening will soon spring up on the motel’s franchise Web site.

But Vernal is also the center of Utah’s natural-gas drilling industry, and many criticize Obama’s handling of energy development. Some attended Salazar’s speech while wearing hard hats and shirts that said, “I [heart] drilling.”

Salazar acknowledged them but said he believes the administration is responsibly promoting domestic energy. He noted that more than 10,000 oil and gas wells are now pumping in Utah — a state record — and called the divide between energy jobs and conservation “a false choice.”

Tourism and outdoor recreation are a top-five U.S. industry, he said, that will generate millions of jobs during the next decade.

One of those wearing the drilling shirts doesn’t buy Salazar’s assertions that the administration isn’t thwarting energy development. Mickie Allred, an oil and gas leasing agent from Vernal, said she also was puzzled by Salazar’s intent Wednesday.

“I thought this was a dedication,” she said, “not a political statement. We were making the political statement.”

Asked later about drilling policies, Salazar said domestic energy is important for national security and economic development. But he said it must be done right, which explains why he withdrew for further review 77 leases in Utah after he took office. Some of those were in sensitive places, including around Arches National Park, he said, and no one should have to see a drill rig from a national park.

He said he expects a Bureau of Land Management decision on which leases to reissue by year’s end.

“I would put a different shirt on,” he said, responding to a question about the T-shirt protesters. “I would say, ‘Drill in the right places and with the right protections.’ ”

Uintah County’s commissioners skipped the dedication because they had already scheduled an energy forum in Vernal. (They do plan to attend next week’s quarry reopening.)

When Salazar learned about the energy meeting, he decided to stop by there on his way to the airport. He arrived to address a crowd of about 300 public officials and industry representatives shortly after Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, had rallied them to demand greater local control of federal lands.

Western states have difficulty funding schools because they cannot tax most of their land base, Bishop said. They need more royalties from drilling and mining.

“Somebody back in Washington has to understand that if you revoke 77 leases,” he said, “it has a specific effect back in the West.”

A few minutes later Salazar took the podium to invite industry to work with the administration to find the best solutions. He noted that this summer his department reached an agreement with Kerr-McGee to adjust well-field pollution controls in a way that will enable 3,600 new Uinta Basin gas wells that might otherwise have been stalled by unhealthful ozone levels.

“Look beyond the finger-pointing,” he urged.

Uintah County Commissioner Mark Raymond later said he welcomed the opportunity to round up and submit ideas, and that he would do so. But he maintains the Obama administration is still too slow in permitting new wells.

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© 2011 The Salt Lake Tribune
By brandon loomis
The Salt Lake Tribune