Kane County, BLM can't agree on road-maintenance solution

There's been a long simmering dispute in Utah and in particular Kane County, over road jurisdiction and RS2477. The Salt Lake Tribune reports on the latest controversy:

The Kane County Commission met with officials of the Bureau of Land Management on Monday night to try to work out an agreement over snow removal and other maintenance on roads across public lands. The county claims a recent U.S. District Court ruling by Judge Tena Campbell wrongly took away its authority and jurisdiction to maintain the roads on BLM land in and around the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, forcing them to create a new snow-removal policy. The county has appealed that ruling. The BLM officials claim that the county can continue to maintain the roads, including snow removal, as in the past under existing maintenance agreements with the county reached in 1972 and 1977 that have never been abolished. County Commissioner Mark Habbeshaw on Monday claimed the county maintained the roads prior to Campbell's ruling because the roads belonged to the county under provisions of a congressional statute from the 1860s, S2477, which allowed for the creation of roads on most public land to facilitate settlement in the West. Though the statute was revised in 1977, it grandfathered in roads claimed by counties prior to the change. Kane County has been fighting the federal government for several years in costly legal battles to prove its rights-of-way claims...