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Letter: Hey Mitt: Extraction industries add up to a smidgen of Utah’s economy

In the Feb. 16 edition of The Tribune, in a Q&A with Washington bureau chief Thomas Burr, Mitt Romney said, “I think we need to revisit how we work with the Antiquities Act and how decisions are made about public lands.”

That sounds good if you say it fast, but you have to say it really fast. He goes on to refer to agricultural and local interests as though they are paramount and as though they are somehow compromised.

Travel in your mind across rural Utah. You see miles and miles of barbed wire fence, cows everywhere, farms, oil derricks, perhaps a clear-cut mountain forest, gravel pits, a pinyon and juniper forest chained down, stacks of hay.