Grand County

after the Lee proposal was killed and after within a few days Trump signed the one big beautiful bill into law, I was talking about this with an old friend of mine, a guy I had worked with on public lands issues for many years, a guy named Bill Hedden, wonderful guy who used to live in Utah and was an official in local government near Moab.

in Grand County, and he and I were talking about this and saying to each other, you know, the public really doesn't appreciate what really just happened.

They don't appreciate that the Lee proposal was just this sort of a sidelight to what Congress just wrote into law.

We ought to tell that story.

Ground was broken on the project last year with completion expected by mid-2027.

Officials in Grand County, Utah, are considering a new public safety complex project that would consolidate the sheriff's office and jail, while potentially adding courts, dispatch, emergency operations, and county attorney offices.

Babcock Design developed a feasibility study for a 42,500-square-foot, 120-bed jail in downtown Moab.

costing between $30.4 and $33.1 million, while adding an optional court facility and commercial shell space could push costs to between $56 and $65 million.

What we're looking at now is that same dynamic at the level of the entire federal government.

What did all that strategy and lobbying produce? When I was a county council member in Utah's Grand County, two and a half million acres with arches and part of Canyonlands and the Book Cliffs and the Manti-LaSal National Forest and the Colorado River, the entire assessed valuation of all the private land in the county was about $600 million.

There are people who could find that in their pocket lint, that could just say, "I want it all.

I'll pay you twice as much as it's worth," and they might even have to look under the couch cushion for that.