The convoluted twists of Utah stream access rights are back in the press—and potentially courts. Last Friday, the Utah Stream Access Coalition, a nonprofit with a mission to preserve public access to the state’s waterways, filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Public Waters Access Act passed by the Legislature earlier this year. According to the coalition, the act abandons fundamental principles of Utah law, prohibiting public access to hundreds of miles of rivers and streams in Utah. Many of those waterways “have benefited from publicly funded habitat restoration, stream bank restoration and other projects, and effectively gives riparian landowners exclusive rights to access and … to sell that exclusive access to the highest bidder.”
The lawsuit asks that:
• public ownership of the state’s waterways be returned to the citizens of Utah.
• stream and river access be restored to the public.
• property owners be forbidden from impeding access to waterways.
• law enforcement stop penalizing those who use rivers and streams.Source Link
Tom Bie is the founder, editor, and publisher of The Drake. He started the magazine in 1998 as an annual newsprint publication based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He then moved it to Steamboat, Colorado (1999), Boulder, Colorado (2001), and San Clemente, California (2004), as he took jobs as managing editor at Paddler, Senior Editor at Skiing, and Editor-in-Chief at Powder, respectively. Tom and The Drake are now both based in Denver, Colorado, where The Drake is finally all grows up(Swingers, 1996) to a quarterly magazine.