A lobbying effort to reduce the size of the Bears Ears National Monument was churning since the spring in Colorado, the Washington Post reported last week.

Lakewood-based Energy Fuels Resources hired lobbyists and made a low-profile federal case that a federal umbrella over 1.35 million acres in southeast Utah could hurt its ability to operate the nation’s only uranium processing mill near the border at White Mesa, as well as lock away deposits of uranium inside the monument.

“It is shocking to learn that a Colorado-based corporation was lobbying Secretary Zinke behind the scenes to destroy a national monument protecting thousands of cultural sites sacred to tribes, just so they can maybe mine some more uranium and keep their polluting mill in Utah in business,” Scott Braden, the wilderness and public lands advocate for Conservation Colorado, the state’s largest environmental group, told Colorado Politics Wednesday night.

Mining allegedly played no role in President Trump’s decision to reduce the monument, designated by President Obama a year ago, by 85 percent, or 1.1 million acres.

“This is not about energy. There is no oil and gas assets. There is no mine within the Bears Ears monument before or after, so the argument that President Trump stole land is false, nefarious and a lie,” Zinke told reporters on a conference call last week.

That is true, but The Washington Post noted that Mark Chalmers, the chief operating officer of the Colorado uranium-mining company, sent a letter to the Interior Department in May to say that Obama’s original monument “could affect existing and future mill operations.”

He added, “There are also many other known uranium and vanadium deposits located within the [original boundaries] that could provide valuable energy and mineral resources in the future.”

The Washington Post report continued:

“Energy Fuels Resources did not just weigh in on national monuments through public-comment letters. It hired a team of lobbyists at Faegre Baker Daniels – led by Andrew Wheeler, who is awaiting Senate confirmation as the Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy secretary – to work on the matter and other federal policies affecting the company. It paid the firm $30,000 between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, according to federal lobbying records, for work on this and other priorities.

“The company’s vice president of operations, William Paul Goranson, joined Wheeler and two other lobbyists, including former congresswoman Mary Bono (R-Calif.), to discuss Bears Ears in a July 17 meeting with two top Zinke advisers.”

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Energy Fuels has not engaged the press on Bears Ears, but the company is well within its rights to press to protect its interest on boundaries that many industries and individuals, especially Republicans, found to be a federal overreach by Obama.

Local tribes that lobbied for the designation have voiced fears about expanded uranium mining.

In the May letter, Chalmers told Zinke’s agency his mine and mill faced “unnecessary, costly and redundant environment reviews” because it sits “adjacent to an arbitrarily drawn monument boundary.

“EFR believes this will cause further substantial financial hardship on our company and this in turn could jeopardize our positions as the largest employer in San Juan County, the poorest in all of the state of Utah, and the high-paying jobs our operations provide.”