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The Bureau of Land Management will discuss the management and preservation of the Bonneville Salt Flats on Tuesday during an all-day summit, but some may have been told that the meeting was closed to those without an official invitation.

Lisa Reid, a spokeswoman with the BLM, told The Tribune that she'd been instructed to tell members of the media that the meeting, to be held at the Natural History Museum of Utah, was closed to the public. Reporters would have to wait outside the room, and meeting attendees would not be allowed to record video or audio.

The policy was changed Monday, Reid said, adding that there is nothing unusual about the meeting or the restrictions initially applied to it.

"It is not a secret meeting," she said. "We have meetings all the time that the media is not invited to."

Closing such a meeting would be unusual, said Jeff Hunt, a Salt Lake City media and First Amendment attorney. It isn't illegal, he said — the state's open meetings laws don't apply to federal agencies — but did seem like a bad policy.

"I've never heard of restrictions like these when you have a meeting of this sort, where you have matters of public interest and concern," he said. "It seems counter-productive to impose these sorts of restrictions."

The status of who could attend Tuesday's meeting all came down to a "miscommunication," said Kevin Oliver, manager of the BLM's West Desert District. The meeting was never officially closed, he said, but it was purposely never advertised — the intent was to have an open dialog between stakeholders, not hold a media event.

Reid said the BLM had decided to block media access and ban recording to make invited stakeholders more comfortable. The BLM believes, Oliver added, that people become more reticent when they know they are being recorded or when media is present.

Groups invited to participate in the meeting include Intrepid Potash, the University of Utah, the governor's office, county commissioners and the mayors of Wendover and West Wendover.

The summit is set to begin at 8:30 a.m. at the Natural History Museum of Utah, with introductions and expectation-setting for the meeting. Afternoon sessions will include scientific presentations.

The BLM's goal for the meeting is that stakeholders — environmentalists, the BLM itself, the racing community and industry that operates near the salt flats — will agree on a way to move forward to protect the salt flats.

Dennis Sullivan, chairman for the Utah Alliance to Save the Salt, said his organization wanted to film the meeting, but the request was denied.

"Utah Alliance would like to have the media there because we don't trust the BLM and would like to have their word in print or video," he said in an email.

The Bonneville Salt Flats is widely regarded as one of the few surfaces on Earth that is large enough, and flat enough, for land vehicles to reach speeds of 300, 400 or even 500 miles per hour. Concern about the evident decline of the flats reached new heights last summer, when several high-profile racing events, including Speed Week, were canceled for the second straight year due to poor salt conditions.

Motorsports enthusiasts have criticized the BLM's management of the area, saying the federal agency failed to protect the fragile salt crust despite recognizing the salt flats as an area of "critical environmental concern."

Utah lawmakers have also adopted a resolution calling on the BLM to do more to restore the Bonneville Salt Flats.

While the BLM acknowledged last summer that the salt crust was extremely thin or absent entirely from some areas of the salt flats, the agency's scientists have struggled to explain the crust's change and variability. The BLM has tapped the U. to study the salt flats, hoping to understand whether the crust's decline is the result of human activity or some complex but entirely natural cycle, as others have suggested.