President Trump has said he opposes transferring federal public lands to the states. That position meets with approval from voters of all political stripes, according to the Conservation in the West Poll released Tuesday.
The survey found 63 percent of respondents supportedTrump’s stated position of keeping public lands in federal hands. The annual poll was conducted by a bipartisan research team for the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project. It involved phone interviews with 400 registered voters in each of seven Mountain West states, including all the Four Corners states. The margin of overall sampling error was 2.74 percent. In another key finding, voters overall said they want to keep existing national monument designations, by a margin of 80 percent to 13 percent. Voters in Utah were asked specifically whether the recent designation of Bears Ears National Monument was a good thing. Forty-seven percent said yes, 32 percent no. Fifty percent of voters across all seven states supported a moderate approach to drilling on public lands and the vast majority advocated keeping the Bureau of Land Management’s new rule designed to reduce methane waste. Asked whether they approve of how federal agencies are managing public lands, 82 percent gave a thumbs-up to the National Park Service, 76 percent approved of the Forest Service, and 56 percent supported the job being done by the BLM.
