storage and failed to evaluate how those risks increase with approved expansion. These defects independently render the April 2nd approval unlawful and require reversal or at minimum remand for proper findings. And what brings us here now is how these uses are being permitted and whether the county has complied with its legal duties under Duchenne County Code and Utah's Land Use Development and Management Act.

Since roughly 2018, the county's use of conditional use permits for oil and gas operations energy generation, and large-scale mining has drifted far away from lawful land use decision-making and more toward a pattern of negligent approvals, procedural shortcuts, and failures to protect public health, public land, and property values. This pattern did not develop in a vacuum. Over the same period, Duchenne County has experienced increasing pressure on Utah School and Institutional Trust lands. Other Utah public lands, and landscapes that historically defined the county's agricultural and environmental character. As trust lands have been sold, auctioned, or positioned for intensified industrial use, and as access to public lands has become more constrained or effectively privatized in practice, the county's role as a steward of shared resources has steadily eroded over the years.

Historically, Utah said the trust lands and surrounding public lands were managed as working landscapes. They supported grazing, hunting, recreation, watershed protection, and agriculture alongside carefully limited development. Federal public lands generated payments in lieu of taxes, grazing revenues, mineral revenue sharing, and other federal program funding that flowed directly to counties like Duchenne and just support roads, emergency services, law enforcement, and schooling. Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands likewise produced recurring revenue through grazing, service leases, and mineral development while maintaining a stable land base that supported local ranching operations and agricultural economies and generated predictable funding and revenue for Utah schools and institutions. Publicly accessible lands are also anchored in recreation, hunting, tourism, and outing outfitting economies that kept money circulating within local economies for local communities through lodging, fuel, equipment, guidance services, and small businesses.

These revenues were renewable, community-based, and tied to continued public access and long-term stewardship rather than one-time land disposition. The record reflects a departure from that balanced model toward a development-first approach in which land disposition and industrial compatibility questions are addressed incrementally, parcel by parcel, rather than through comprehensive land use planning. As publicly accessible lands have been fragmented and converted, the long- term fiscal and community benefits associated with public trust ownership have declined or shifted away from the county. One-time land transactions and