Give Federal Lands to States

Federal Land Management Not a Good Deal for Americans, Posted on April 4, 2015 Written by dailysignal.com

“By nearly all accounts, our fed­eral lands are in trou­ble, both in terms of fis­cal per­for­mance and envi­ron­men­tal stew­ard­ship.” That was an asser­tion made ear­lier this month in a study released by the Prop­erty and Envi­ron­ment Research Cen­ter (PERC). The study focused on the dif­fer­ence between state-managed pub­lic lands and fed­er­ally man­aged pub­lic lands. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is ill-suited to man­age vast amounts of land in the West. Short of pri­vate own­er­ship, state and local gov­ern­ments are best suited for the task.

Fed­eral Land Own­er­ship. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is the largest land owner in the United States, own­ing roughly 640 mil­lion acres, about 28 per­cent of the coun­try. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment owns nearly half of the land west of the Rock­ies, and roughly 81 per­cent of Nevada alone. How­ever, east of the Rock­ies, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment owns an aver­age of only 5 per­cent of the land in each state. Such a high level of fed­eral own­er­ship of land in West­ern states has led to con­tro­versy over own­er­ship and man­age­ment of pub­lic lands.

West­ern states have con­sid­ered res­o­lu­tions request­ing that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment trans­fer title of much of the pub­lic land held within their bor­ders. Utah, for exam­ple has passed leg­is­la­tion that “requires the United States to extin­guish title to pub­lic lands and trans­fer title to those pub­lic lands to the state.” Sev­eral other states such as New Mex­ico, Mon­tana, and Wyoming have passed leg­is­la­tion to study the trans­fer of cer­tain pub­lic lands from fed­eral to state agen­cies. These trans­fers gen­er­ally exclude pub­lic land such as national parks, national mon­u­ments, and tribal lands.

PERC’s Find­ings. PERC con­ducted its study by com­par­ing rev­enues and expen­di­tures for the man­age­ment of fed­eral land and state trust land in New Mex­ico, Ari­zona, Idaho, and Mon­tana. State trust lands are the most com­mon form of state-owned lands in the West. State trust lands were cre­ated by land grants made to the states by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment and are used for the ben­e­fit of pub­lic insti­tu­tions, like schools. The lands gen­er­ate rev­enue through uses rang­ing from tim­ber and graz­ing to min­eral extrac­tion. The study looked at two fed­eral agen­cies that man­age pub­lic land: the Bureau of Land Man­age­ment (BLM) and the United States For­est Ser­vice (USFS). Accord­ing to the study,

• “The fed­eral gov­ern­ment loses money man­ag­ing valu­able nat­ural resources on fed­eral lands, while states gen­er­ate sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial returns from state trust lands.”
• “The states exam­ined in this study earn an aver­age of $14.51 for every dol­lar spent on state trust land man­age­ment. The U.S. For­est Ser­vice and Bureau of Land Man­age­ment gen­er­ate only 73 cents in return for every dol­lar spent on fed­eral land management.”
• “On aver­age, states gen­er­ate more rev­enue per dol­lar spent than the fed­eral gov­ern­ment on a vari­ety of land man­age­ment activ­i­ties, includ­ing tim­ber, graz­ing, min­er­als, and recre­ation.” For exam­ple, New Mex­ico receives $12.78 of rev­enue per dol­lar spent on admin­is­ter­ing graz­ing fees, whereas the USFS and BLM receive $0.10 and $0.14, respectively.
• “These out­comes are the result of the dif­fer­ent statu­tory, reg­u­la­tory, and admin­is­tra­tive frame­works that gov­ern state and fed­eral lands. States have a fidu­ciary respon­si­bil­ity to gen­er­ate rev­enues from state trust lands, while fed­eral land agen­cies face over­lap­ping and con­flict­ing reg­u­la­tions and often lack a clear mandate.”
  The PERC study calls into ques­tion the abil­ity of fed­eral gov­ern­ment agen­cies to man­age pub­lic lands in the west and sup­ports states’ abil­ity to man­age those lands. As The Her­itage Foundation’s Nick Loris and Katie Tubb note, “States are already well posi­tioned to help make a tran­si­tion to bet­ter man­age­ment of these resources.” States are best suited to man­age these pub­lic lands due to their vested inter­est in see­ing the lands pro­duce rev­enue and are also held respon­si­ble for achiev­ing that objective.
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  http://agenda21news.com/2015/04/federal-land-management-not-a-good-deal-for-americans/
  Comments
  The US Constitution prohibits the federal government from owning land, except for land needed to fulfill their enumerated powers like military bases and office buildings. Unconstitutional usurpation by the federal usually results in disaster. All “federal lands” need to be returned to the States, to be sold to US citizens and put into productive use. Closing the Interior Department would eliminate this error.
  Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader