Gunnison Sage GrouseLong after the door was shut on local officials including Garfield County Commissioners to give input into new rules turning our land over to the sage grouse, guess who was still at the table with the feds writing those regulations?

The Wilderness Society and Advocates for the West, that’s whose crazy idea it was to slip “triggers” into the conservation plan requiring even more severe land restrictions based on population numbers.

The closed-doors deal making was revealed in more than 100 documents the Garfield commissioners obtained after a one-year FOIA battle royal with the Interior Department, the Post Independent reports.

“We weren’t listened to. They don’t care about local governments and local economies. It’s like it was in 1776,” Commissioner Tom Jankovsky said.

The commissioners aren’t stopping with the first batch of emails they obtained after filing a lawsuit to force the release of the information under the Freedom of Information Act.

They are continuing the lawsuit and will be releasing the documents to the public.

We applaud the commissioner’s persistence and expect that they will find even more fingerprints by national environmental groups, who clearly drove this policy in order to put western ranchers and the energy industry out of business.