Angry words, rowdy applause and a walk-out marked Bureau of Land Management Director Bob Abbey’s visit Friday to the state Capitol to discuss a national policy shift on public lands management.

The new policy, announced Dec. 23 by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, directs the BLM to inventory — or in some cases re-inventory — the land it manages to determine if it should be protected under a new “wild lands” designation until Congress can decide whether it wants to permanently protect it as wilderness.

“It is consistent with our obligation to manage public lands for multiple uses,” Abbey said of the policy shift, adding that the public has a “right to protest or litigate decisions with which they disagree.”

Speaking before the usually reserved body of stakeholders on the Governor’s Council on Balanced Resources, Abbey was repeatedly blasted as he defended Salazar’s order.

“When is enough enough?” Gov. Gary Herbert asked, clearly frustrated with the shift that scraps a 2003 agreement crafted between then-Gov. Mike Leavitt and the Bush administration’s BLM that said the agency would stop trying to have public lands in Utah considered for congressional designation as wilderness.

“How many times are we going to inventory the same thing?” Herbert asked, drawing loud applause from attendees sporting “Stop the Land Grab” stickers as others wearing yellow “Wild Utah” buttons sat silent.

So many people turned out for Abbey’s meeting with Herbert and his council that two additional overflow rooms had to be opened to accommodate the session.

Herbert went on to criticize “ad nauseum litigation over public lands management that has had a negative impact on rural economies.” Specifically, he said, rural economies who rely on public lands access and face “the lack of finality” and no way to plan for the future.

Similar sentiments were voiced by council member Kathleen Clarke, who held Abbey’s job for five years during the Bush administration. She noted in the absence of certainty, “We will cause industry to flee this state.”

Council member Mike Noel went on to angrily denounce Salazar’s order as “erroneous.” The Republican state representative from Kanab said the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 guarantees Westerners responsible access to resources on public lands.

Instead, Salazar’s order is a step backward, possibly foreclosing on the state’s effort to engage different points of view to resolve challenges without legal action, council members told Abbey.

Herbert cited the “landmark agreement” between Bill Barrett Corp. and conservationists that will allow the company’s energy development program in Nine Mile Canyon to move forward as an example of the progress that was being made before Salazar’s announcement.

Locked in seemingly endless litigation, industry and conservation groups crafted a compromise to continue energy extraction and conserve public lands, the governor said.

“The agreement demonstrates the state’s appetite for collaboration” added council member Julie Mack, the Utah director for the Wilderness Society, who also pointed to the Washington County Growth and Conservation Act as further evidence of grassroots efforts to protect wilderness lands in Utah.

“We’ve tried to bring people together in a reasonable and rational approach,” said Herbert, who was clearly irked by the federal government’s lack of openness in formulating its new policy.

“Process counts and when a major policy change is announced two days before Christmas after Congress is out of session, something is wrong,” the governor said. “If we have to somehow do it in the shadows, then it probably isn’t the right thing to do.”

Still smarting from the last minute phone call on the morning Salazar announced his order, the governor said the state was “caught blind” by the policy change.

Many committee members, including Lt. Gov. Greg Bell, asked Abbey to explain how the implementation of the new policy will effect the six BLM resource management plans that were painstakingly drafted for Utah, some of them as recently as 2008.

“Each of the plans inventoried lands determined to have wilderness characteristics,” said Bell, who asked whether, under the new order, those lands will have to be managed as wild and questioned whether Salazar’s order was intended to automatically elevate lands with wild characteristics to wilderness status.

“The secretarial order gives lands with wilderness character due process,” Abbey said. “The decision protects lands with potential value.”

Of the 2 million acres of land in Utah identified as having some wilderness characteristics, only 400,000 acres were accepted in the BLM’s resource management plans for the state. Wilderness character is defined in the 1964 Wilderness Act as land of 5,000 or more acres, primarily natural in character, without man-made features and with outstanding opportunities for solitude.

“The RMP inventories all used the same criteria,” Abbey said, “but, at the end of day, if 400,000 acres are designated as natural areas, they will be managed for their wilderness characteristics.”

Re-inventory, according to Abbey, will determine whether the appropriate application of the criteria was used.

“I too, wish we had land use plans that would be static, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get there,” Abbey said.

A request to hear from former Rep. Jim Hansen, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, was met with a protest by council member Pat Shea.

Shea — director of the BLM for a brief time under President Bill Clinton and current defense attorney for Tim DeChristopher, the man charged with monkey-wrenching a 2008 BLM oil and gas lease auction in Salt Lake City — stormed out of the proceeding when Hansen, a non-member of the council, was given the floor to speak.

“The BLM is protecting fake wilderness,” Hansen said. “Only Congress can create a wilderness.”

Abbey countered Hansen’s assertion that Salazar’s order bypasses congressional authority saying, “We are not creating de facto wilderness.”

The response — interrupted by boos from the audience — focused on the BLM’s responsibility to operate as a multiple-use agency. The new policy, he explained, will not remove the energy extraction industry from public lands.

“There are 5 million acres leaseable for development in Utah with only 1 million acres in use for energy development,” Abbey said.

It is not the goal of the Obama administration, the BLM director added, to cause economic instability, but rather to protect the wild lands of the state for future generations.