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Public commenters challenge application review and cite archaeological damage at Lost City
Summary
A public commenter who identified himself as an archaeologist disputed a commission finding that his grant application was incomplete and warned of extensive off-highway-vehicle damage to archaeological sites in the Lost City area; another commenter clarified video-content ownership and said he would propose a video policy.
Public commenters at a meeting of the Commission on Off-Highway Vehicles disputed an application-review finding and warned that off-highway-vehicle use is causing widespread damage to archaeological sites in the Lost City area.
JD Lancaster, who identified himself as an archaeologist, told the commission the application-review finding that his proposal was incomplete was incorrect and said the application asked for "standards and guidelines, not laws." He said he had cited the National Historic Preservation Act and related federal statutes in his submission and that his project did not propose new trail creation. "It asks for standards and guidelines, not laws. Right? So it says very clearly in my application that we are following the National Historic Preservation Act. That is the whole point of this thing," Lancaster said.
Lancaster also told the commission that illegal off-highway-vehicle routes are widespread in the Lost City area and are damaging "multiple historic archaeological sites at a landscape scale." "It's hundreds of miles of OHV trails. It's clear as dirt in the dirt that those are OHVs, right? Hundreds of miles of illegal trails that are damaging a historic archeological site," he said, and he urged the commission to consider liability and the legacy of promoting expanded OHV use.
A separate public commenter, Mike Henderson, thanked the commission for funding his project and clarified that a third-party YouTube channel that would host content is not owned by his organization and that the organization is paid to produce content for that channel. "We get paid to make content for them, so they would not be paying us in addition to this for that content. I believe they would make, revenue on it, but the revenue on YouTube isn't what people usually think it is. It's peanuts," Henderson said. He said he supports making videos on the commission's own channels and proposed adding a video policy to a future agenda.
There was no formal action recorded on the application during the public-comment period. Commissioners and staff were asked by public speakers to clarify how standards-and-guidelines questions are interpreted in application review, and speakers urged more outreach and clearer application instructions so applicants can supply the requested information.
