By Mike Saccone, Grand Junction Sentinel
August 26, 2007 

“That’s why we live here,” Congressman Mark Udall said, stretching his hand toward Hanging Lake. “That’s what makes us Westerners: these landscapes. There’s a power in that.”

As the congressman and Senate candidate finished his thought, his voice faded behind the drone of a nearby waterfall.

For a moment, Udall and his staff gazed down from their seats overlooking the falls, staring at the aquamarine lake below where dozens of hikers and tourists milled about.

As quickly as the silence began, Udall returned his attention to one of the more controversial policy disputes this year: development on the Roan Plateau.

Udall, who sponsored an amendment to the 2007 energy bill barring the Bureau of Land Management from leasing parcels atop the Roan, said if the measure fails to make the final version of the bill, he and Congressman John Salazar, D-Colo., will continue to fight to halt development.

Because the Senate version of the bill lacked a Roan leasing ban, the Udall-Salazar measure could be discarded in a compromise.

“I think at heart of our point of view is we’re not going to stop,” Udall said. “We’re not going to quit. We’re not going to give up.

“We think this is the right thing to do, and we’ll look for other ways to keep that 50 percent of the top of the Roan that’s public lands off limits to surface occupancy.”

The plateau, located outside Rifle, was opened to development earlier this year when the BLM agreed to open roughly 50,000 acres for leasing.

The leasing process, however, halted when the Department of the Interior agreed earlier this month to give Colorado 120 days to review the government’s development plan.

In the meantime, the five-term, 57-year-old congressman said the battle over the Roan has taken on a “symbolic” nature, with himself and others defending open space and public lands in the face of rapid energy development.

“There’s so much other area in which we can drill and produce additional fuels to do our part,” Udall said of energy independence.

He said the United States needs to look outside Colorado — to developing coastal areas or renewable energy sources — to fuel domestic energy needs.

“We’ve sacrificed in greater proportion to our population and our land mass,” Udall said, “and it’s … time to say, ‘OK, enough is enough here.’ ”

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