Fearing another Bunkerville or Malheur, Utah tries to mediate disputes between ranchers, feds

Stanton Gleave helped retake Cliven Bundy's cattle from the Bureau of Land Management in Bunkerville, Nev., and he was a guest in the Cane Beds, Ariz., house of Robert LaVoy Finicum. At a January "property rights" workshop in Cedar City — while Bundy's sons Ammon and Ryan joined Finicum in occupying an eastern Oregon wildlife refuge — Gleave posed for a photo with a notice in his left hand that he would "withdraw consent" to be governed by the BLM. But the lifelong Central Utah rancher never sent it in. Nor, he said, did the six ranchers to his right in the photo, each holding a notice of his own.  Gleave said they were talked into compliance by Tony Rampton, chief of the state attorney general's Public Lands Section, at a February grazing rights conference in Richfield.  Since that photo was taken, Finicum was shot dead after veering into a snowbank at a police roadblock, and more than three dozen others were indicted for their roles in armed standoffs in Nevada and Oregon.  Many of the central figures have strong ties to Utah. That includes Finicum, whose funeral was held in Kanab, and Cliven Bundy, who prayed at an LDS temple in St. George before deciding to fly to Portland, where he was arrested. And yet Utah — harder hit by grazing cuts than any other state, according to Farm Bureau CEO Randy Parker — has avoided a similar conflict, in part by mediating disputes and begging patience from some of its more aggrieved ranchers. Ranchers like Gleave...more