The Larger, but Quieter
Than Bundy, Push to Take Over Federal Land, by Jack Healy and Kirk Johnson
1/10/16
DENVER — Ken
Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, has been roaming the West
with an alluring pitch to cattle ranchers, farmers and conservatives upset with
how Washington controls the wide-open public spaces out here: This land is your
land, he says, and not the federal government’s.
Mr. Ivory, a
business lawyer from suburban Salt Lake City, does not fit the profile of a
sun-scoured sagebrush rebel. But he is part of a growing Republican-led
movement pushing the federal government to hand over to the states millions of
acres of Western public lands — as well as their rich stores of coal, timber
and grazing grass.
“It’s like
having your hands on the lever of a modern-day Louisiana Purchase,” said Mr.
Ivory, who founded the American Lands Council and until recently was its
president. The Utah-based group is funded mostly by donations from county
governments, but has received support from Americans for Prosperity, the group
backed by the billionaire Koch brothers.
The idea, which
would radically reshape the West, is one that resonates with the armed group of
ranchers and antigovernment activists who siezed control of a wildlife refuge
in Oregon more than a week ago. Ammon Bundy, the crew’s leader and the scion of
a Nevada ranching family steeped in disputes with the federal government, said
he and his sympathizers had gone to Oregon to give the refuge back to local
ranchers.
Many
conservatives — Mr. Ivory among them — criticized Mr. Bundy’s gun-toting
tactics, but their grievances and goals are nearly identical. And the outcry
has grown amid a dust storm of rural anger at President Obama’s efforts to
tighten regulations on fracking, air quality, small streams and other
environmental issues that put struggling Western counties at odds with
conservation advocates.
In the past few
years, lawmakers across the West have offered up dozens of bills and
resolutions seeking to take over the federal lands inside their borders or to
study how to do so. Some of the legislation has been aimed at Congress, to urge
it to radically revise the laws that have shaped 550,000 square miles of
national forests and terrain run by the federal Bureau of Land Management,
stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific.
The effort —
derided by critics as a pipe dream that would put priceless landscapes on the
auction block — has achieved little so far.
Utah is the
only state to pass a law demanding that Washington hand over federal land to
the state. That transfer never happened, so now, Republicans on a state land
commission are pressing for a $14 million lawsuit to claim 31.2 million federal
acres of canyons, scrub desert and rolling mesas. The state’s attorney general,
a Republican, has said he is studying the case and will make a decision about
whether to move forward.
Colorado’s
experience illustrates how the land-transfer discussion far exceeds any
concrete results. Last year, a Republican state senator from the agricultural
eastern plains sponsored a bill to create a Colorado Federal Land Management
Commission, to study turning over federal lands to the state. The measure never
made it out of the Republican-controlled State Senate.
In Congress,
Republicans have supported moves to set up a land-transfer fund and create a
“framework” to hand federal acres to the states.
Last week,
Representative Greg Walden, the Republican who represents the Oregon district
where the Bundy takeover is playing out, stood up in Congress to deplore the
tactics of the armed protesters, but sympathized with their frustration.
“More than half
of my district is under federal management, or lack thereof,” Mr. Walden said,
expressing anger at the Bureau of Land Management. “They have come out with
these proposals to close roads into the forests. They have ignored public
input.”
In July 2014,
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas proposed preventing the federal government from
owning more than half of any state’s land. (Five states are more than half
federal land, according to a Congressional Research Service report.) And
Representative Cresent Hardy, Republican of Nevada, whose district includes a
ranch run by Mr. Bundy’s father, introduced a measure that would block the
government from buying any new land unless it could pass a balanced budget.
But land
experts say the movement offers few details about what would happen the day
after the federal government handed over all its land. How would states afford
hundreds of rangers, officers and administrators to keep the land safe and
comply with complicated federal laws on environmental policy and protecting
endangered species? Would the land stay public, or be sold off to the highest
bidder?
“They
conveniently avoid all the difficult questions,” said Martin Nie, the director
for the Bolle Center for People and Forests at the University of Montana. In
its mission statement the American Lands Council says its strategy for securing
local control of public land in the West involves four tenets: education,
negotiation, legislation and litigation.
In practice,
local land disputes — fueled by deepening antagonism toward federal land
agencies — now unfold like social-media passion plays. Last summer, armed
groups intervened by providing security and standing guard at mines in Oregon
and Montana that had received stop-work orders from the Bureau of Land
Management. And in December, Phil Lyman, a commissioner in San Juan County,
Utah, received a 10-day jail sentence after he led a protest ride on
all-terrain vehicles through a federal area that had been closed to motorized
use.
“All I did was
drive down a canyon road,” Mr. Lyman said. “It seems to be getting worse, and
the federal agencies, they are expanding. Their restraints are being
overstepped. It’s not the way this country was set up. It’s not the founders’
design.”
Not
surprisingly, environmental activists have opposed dismantling federal lands,
but so have hunters and anglers who worry their elk-hunting grounds and trout
streams would be sold to private hands and developed. Unlike the federal
government, many states require that their land be used as profitably as
possible.
About an hour’s
drive from the wildlife refuge where Mr. Bundy’s group is facing off with the
government, Erin Maupin and her husband, Jeff, pay the government each summer
to feed their cattle on 19,000 acres of federally owned land. She said that
like many ranchers, they wanted to work with the government, but that layers of
grazing restrictions and environmental rules were getting out of hand.
“We want
somebody to make sure we’re doing it right,” Ms. Maupin said. “But it’s got to
the point where there’s no common sense in it.”
The resentments
toward federal land managers feel sharpest in economically strapped rural
counties from Arizona to Montana, where up to 90 percent of the lands are
federally managed. People love the beauty that surrounds them, but seethe at
policies that they say have whittled away logging and mining jobs, left
national forests vulnerable to wildfires and blocked access to public land.
“The land
policies now are, basically, lock it up and throw away the key,” said Leland
Pollock, a commissioner in Garfield County, Utah, a county roughly the size of
Connecticut with pine forests and stunning red-rock spires. “It’s land with no
use. The local economy’s really suffered as a result. Grazing has been reduced.
We used to have a thriving timber industry — that’s all but gone.”
Jack Healy
reported from Denver, and Kirk Johnson from Burns, Ore. Julie Turkewitz
contributed reporting from Denver.
A version of
this article appears in print on January 11, 2016, on page A1 of the New York
edition with the headline: A Quieter Push to Get Control of U.S. Lands.
Comments
This is
an important initiative aimed at rolling back federal abuse and returning the
US to compliance with the US Constitution. The purpose is to restore citizen’s
property rights necessary to restore the private sector, free market
economy. It opposes the Wilding Project
promoted by UN Agenda 21 that would destroy the US economy completely. This should be coupled with ending the
federal water grab. States need to compete with each other in restoring
citizens’ rights.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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