Some thoughts on the Utah salt, though I really don't know exactly how much and to where all the salt from BSF goes:
Obviously, the salt and potash are there on the surface, easily accessed, transportation avenues already built..... I expect that is what made so much removal practical from this particular area. Most of the salt and related minerals are buried too deep, under much of Utah, for (currently) cost effective recovery.
It seems to me, there are farther reaching conditions that have led to this. The amount of salt needed in the mid-West, north-East, and Canada is staggering. Without many millions of tons of salt, every winter, peoples work lives, their food and goods needs, and industry....would all be in strained. Our hobby certainly doesn't count for much against the huge endeavor (supplied from many sources) of keeping two nations in transportation and commerce through the cold season.
This need for road salt (and mag-chloride in more recent times) has grown as fast as our countries and population. Perhaps this has added to the rate of BSF depletion...I don't know. During meetings with our Canadian group (when I was still in my career) we sat in on some impressive presentations about the scope of the winter need and the damage it causes to our cars. (On a side note, this entire concept of maintaining operating wintertime economies was the indirect cause of the 5yr/50,000 mile rust-through warranty now required of all vehicle manufacturers. Complicated...aint it?)
There are a lot of reasons for this mining activity, and it affects a lot more lives than just the folks around Wendover. It does seem to me that there are always more reasons for whatever happens, than can ever been known except in hindsight. I hope the plans to preserve a racing surface can be a part of the result. That sure sounds like a potential compromise.
Thinking about Utah salt (another side story, here), my wife and I were camped on some BLM land about 50 miles south of Delta, Utah, about 2 years ago. We had a visit at our campsite by a patrol working for a nearby solar generating complex. In the course of our visit, he told us about the giant salt caverns now being created under the farmlands around Delta. He said the salt is over a thousand feet thick(?), under there. The caverns are shaped out as huge, vertical, pressure vessels and linked by pipes to a formerly closed steam-turbine electrical generating plant.
He explained that the wind generating farms in Wyoming have proven too inconsistent to work well on the electrical grid. They put up a dedicated line to bring the electricity from those Wyoming wind farms to the old coal-fired plant at Delta. They use the electricity (when the wind blows) to run the generators backwards, compress air with the turbines, and stuff it into the "salt" pressure vessels under ground. This allows other portions of the plant to use the compressed air, at steady rate, to support the local electrical grids.
He said that wind farms will turn out to be a dead end except where this method can be used, and its efficiency is not good compared to solar. It seemed to him to be a "salvage what they can" effort after building the wind farms. I really don't know if the efficiency is good or bad. Meanwhile, I was thinking about where all that salt might go, but it isn't near enough to fix our race track!
(a side-side-note to this) A few months later, I found myself in a McDonalds late at night (Tehachapi, CA), visiting with a group of recently returned Afghanistan and Iraq vets. They had just been let go from their (about 4-6 month) jobs with wind-farm energy companies. It turns out that there is Fed money to support the wages (for certain time period) for hiring these fellows... OJT training so to speak. When the companies have got their several months of free work, they lay the fellows off and get a new batch of ex-soldiers, on a new batch of taxpayer money. These guys were at loose ends, down on their luck, and wondering where to go to find a job. I was pretty stunned to see we haven't learned a d##n thing..... since I came home from Nam and got turned down by every car dealer in town, except the little Toyota dealer on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.
So many things, that get so complicated.
BLM is on the hot seat for a lot of land issues, for a lot of really important (but maybe not so obvious) reasons. It is easy to forget that they were NOT chartered with only running a bunch of parks or recreation areas, but for trying to make land use be productive to national needs (perhaps, more in recent times, maintain some preservation of the ecology).
I apologize if some of this seems off-topic, here, but I would guess there is an awful lot more to this (BSF issue and how to manage public land use) than what we see and hear. I don't like to offer my opinions, these days, because I seem to have lived long enough to find out I don't know much.
I do know the folks working on this problem are the best we could ever want, and I hope they know how much we appreciate them.
Thank you.