Houston (Platts)--12Jun2014/542 pm EDT/2142 GMT

A federal judge is expected to decide on whether the state of Utah and Uintah County can proceed with a lawsuit against the US Bureau of Land Management, which claims that the BLM has been unfairly limiting oil and gas development on federal lands since the start of the Obama administration.

The outcome of the case could determine whether the BLM has the discretion to restrict oil and gas development on millions of acres of federal lands in Utah that have wilderness characteristics but have not officially been designated as wilderness.

In their suit, filed in October 2010, the state and the county are asking the court to order the BLM to instead adhere to resource management plans issued in 2008, which called for more extensive energy development.

"More than working with the 2008 RMPs we see a sort of de facto process on the ground where they follow the unpassed and perennially introduced Red Rock Wilderness Bill in Congress," Mark Ward, senior policy analyst for the Utah Association of Counties said Thursday.

The association had joined the suit on behalf of the state and Uintah County.

In a hearing held last week in Salt Lake City before US District Judge Dee Benson, attorneys for the BLM and for several environmental groups argued that the court should dismiss the claims filed by the state and county because the BLM has the right to administer public lands in a way it sees as fit.

"Essentially, this is a political dispute. The state and the county don't like how BLM is trying to manage energy development and environmental protection. We think there's really no legal basis for their challenge," Mike Freeman, an attorney representing the Wilderness Society, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Sierra Club, said in an interview Thursday.

The dispute between the state and the county on the one side and the BLM and the environmental groups on the other dates back to controversial lease sale of BLM lands in Utah held in December 2008, in the closing days of the Bush administration.

Shortly after that sale incoming Interior Secretary Ken Salazar decided to withdraw 77 leases that had been won in that sale, citing the potential environmental value of those lands. That same lease sale became notable when a protester disrupted the sale by falsely bidding on several leases up for auction.

Three Utah counties, including Uintah, challenged Salazar's decision to withdraw the leases in court but that case was thrown out in September 2012, where the court decided the counties had failed to file the suit in timely manner.

The current suit addresses some of the same issues of environmental protections and state and local rights as that earlier litigation.

Ward said the decision to withdraw the leases from consideration "was one of several developments that occurred that brought about the need for the lawsuit."

Other complaints cited by the state and county were BLM turning down oil and gas lease applications and denying permits to drill without just cause, not pursuing leasing of shale oil resources and placing restrictions on county roads.

However, Freeman said that in filing the suit, the state and county "are trying to strip BLM of the authority of protect some of the most pristine, spectacular lands public lands in Utah. We think that theory is meritless."

He added that federal court decisions dating back to the last presidential administration upheld BLM's right to take wilderness characteristics into account in its administration of public lands.

"What claimants are doing now is bringing another round in the same long-running dispute by arguing that in fact this authority no longer exists," he said.

"Under the Obama administration, the BLM has undertaken to looking at how to better balance energy development with environment protection. It still is doing oil and gas leasing in Utah, but it's not leasing as many of these pristine lands that these particular plaintiffs would like to see. So they are suing to try to force BLM to manage it differently," Freeman said.

It is not known when a decision might be made in the defendants' motion to dismiss the case.

--Jim Magill, jim.magill@platts.com
--Edited by Katharine Fraser, katharine.fraser@platts.com

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