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Since 2012, the Utah Legislature has steered $5.1 million to a nonprofit group called Big Game Forever to advocate for eliminating federal protections for the gray wolf and returning management of the predator to states.
Now, the organization has run to court in a last-ditch move to block the public from learning how these tax dollars were spent, arguing that divulging such information would give away trade secrets, akin to Colonel Sanders having to share the recipe for his famous fried chicken.
“The disclosure of the names of BGF’s employees/subcontractors would allow for competitors to recruit from BGF’s workforce and bid against BGF for other lobbying work nationwide,” the group’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit filed in Salt Lake City’s 3rd District Court.
That line of reasoning had failed to sway Utah’s State Records Committee, which in March ordered the Utah Department of Natural Resources to hand over the information to an independent Salt Lake City journalist.
For months, Eric S. Peterson, who heads The Utah Investigative Journalism Project and has written pieces for The Salt Lake Tribune, has been seeking the names of Big Game Forever’s subcontractors from the Department of Natural Resources, which has rejected Peterson’s requests made under the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act, or GRAMA.
The department has long administered anti-wolf advocacy contracts with Big Game Forever and its principal, Ryan Benson, a Utah lawyer associated with Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife.
Benson’s firm Stag Consulting has received $7 million in state contracts since 2014, according to Utah’s public funding transparency website. Those contracts were awarded to press federal wildlife managers to embrace Utah’s state conservation plan for the greater sage...