Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Shrinking Federal Lands

The US federal government has seized one third of the US landmass. They US Constitution forbids the federal government to own land beyond what it needs to operate. This land grab started in 1872 with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park.  No Constitutional Amendments have ever been ratified by the States to allow this expansion of the federal government’s “enumerated powers”.

Trump to visit Utah on Monday to announce his plans to shrink Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, by Juliet Eilperin, 11/29/17, Washington Post
This post has been updated.

President Trump will travel to Utah on Monday to lay out his plans to cut the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments, according to individuals briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been formally announced.

Democratic presidents established the two national monuments in southern Utah under the 1906 Antiquities Act, and both of them have generated considerable controversy. Barack Obama last December established Bears Ears, a 1.35-million-acre expanse that is home to tens of thousands of ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites, while Bill Clinton designated the nearly 1.9-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante in 1996.
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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended scaling back both monuments, along with several others, as part of a report he delivered to the White House in August. Since that time, White House officials have been working with staff at Interior and the Justice department to draft proclamations that they think have the best chance of withstanding an inevitable court challenge from conservation and tribal groups, according to a senior administration official. White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said in an email Tuesday that she had “no announcements at this time” to make about the president’s travel plans to Utah.

While administration officials have not announced how much Trump plans to reduce either monument, they have privately indicated he intends to shave hundreds of thousands of acres off both. Trump signed an executive order in April instructing Zinke to scrutinize any national monument larger than 100,000 acres that has been established in the last 21 years, saying at the time his administration would “end these abuses and return control to the people, the people of all of the states, the people of the United States.”

The president will reduce Bears Ears by more than 1 million acres, Interior officials have informed multiple individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. And Ron Dean, an aide to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), testified before the Utah Legislature’s Commission for the Stewardship of Public Lands this month that “Grand Staircase will probably be somewhere between 700,000 acres and 1.2 million” under the revised designation.


State and local officials, nearly all of whom are Republicans, fought the designation of Bears Ears as a national monument and lobbied the Trump administration to either rescind it altogether or scale it back significantly.

“We’re extremely grateful for the president’s visit, and the [Interior] Secretary’s work that led up to this visit,” said San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman (R) in an interview Tuesday. “We feel like we’ve been listened to, and that means a lot to us.”

Trump does not intend to visit the monuments themselves, individuals briefed on the plans said, but will instead travel to Salt Lake City.

Environmentalists quickly decried the move to shrink the monuments, and vowed to block it through litigation.

“This illegal action will cement Trump’s legacy as one of the worst presidents in modern history,” said Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity. “Trump has no clue how much people love these sacred and irreplaceable landscapes, but he’s about to find out. He’s shown his blatant disregard for public lands, Native Americans and the law. We look forward to seeing him in court.”

Trump’s effort to cut Grand Staircase-Escalante may face a serious legal obstacle because Congress passed legislation in 1998 that ratified a land exchange between the federal government and Utah as part of the monument’s designation and modified its boundaries slightly. The federal land that Utah acquired has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in state revenue over the past two decades, including $1.5 million in monthly royalties from coal bed methane development for more than 10 years.

The push to scale back the monuments has sparked opposition even from those conservation groups that sought to work with Zinke at the outset of his tenure.

The Nature Conservancy is the largest private landowner within Bears Ears, and its staff took the secretary on a tour of its property when he visited the monument this summer. In a statement Tuesday, Conservancy President and Chief Executive Mark Tercek said that “we do not support modifying any national monument designations” and that Bears Ears “should remain as is.”

“Bears Ears National Monument was established after Congress failed to protect the area through legislative means,” Tercek said. “It is now time to move forward to develop and implement the management plan called for by the original Bears Ears proclamation. This path forward serves the best interests of this resource and the nation.”
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers President Land Tawney, who had supported Zinke’s confirmation, said he and Trump were defying the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican president who ushered the Antiquities Act into law.

“Public lands sportsmen and women already have made clear our position: We will not stand for this sellout to industry. An attack on one monument is an attack on them all.”

The administration is in the process of drafting other proclamations under the Antiquities Act that would alter the size of some national monuments and change the way others are managed. Those proclamations will be issued over a period of several weeks following the Utah trip, a senior administration official said.

San Juan County Commission Chairman Bruce Adams said in an interview Tuesday that changing the size of Bears Ears was only “half the race,” because he and others want Congress to limit the president’s authority to designate protections on federal land under the Antiquities Act.

Adams noted that more than half of the county’s land is federally owned and another quarter is made up of Navajo reservation land, thereby restraining local officials’ ability to raise money through private property taxes.

“We don’t want to have to go down this road every four years, in San Juan County or in the state of Utah,” Adams said. “We’re challenged with providing services for 5 million acres, whether we get revenue from those 5 million acres or not.”


Comments

American Communists, including those at the Washington Post, will view this review of federal lands as contrary to their goal to have the federal government own everything.  They will incite their American Indian cohorts to protest against this initiative in Utah.

Trump is responding to unnecessary federal overreach and expense in every part of the federal budget and this land grab scam is part of that effort to reduce the federal government footprint.

The “federal lands” scam has always been justified as “conservation” with the right emotional component to get lots of “right-brainers” to demand that we need to “preserve” the wilderness. They want the federal government to continue to add wildlife refuges and wilderness areas. But these sites are underutilized and most Americans can’t afford to visit them.

In addition, our annual forest fire festival needs to end by enlisting timber companies and farmers and ranchers to occupy the “fire breaks” next to all burnable land that borders these federal lands. At the same time, zoning residential development in many of these areas needs to be tightened.

UN Agenda 21 implementation in the US included the initiation of the “Wilding Project”, designed to remove the US population to “mega-cities” and returning 95% of the US landmass to become “wildlife preserves”. These need to be abandoned.  We already have wild animals wandering into the suburbs in developments bordering these federal lands and homeowners are not allowed to defend themselves.

This land belonged to the States and to those who held title to the land and the federal government stole it. The voters who actually live near this land in these Western States seem to support having the federal government out of the picture and prefer to be able to take care of this land themselves. Much of this land has been restricted due to lack of infrastructure and State control can change all that. The federal government doesn’t have the funds to reverse the damage done by UN Agenda 21 implementation.

When a country is in debt, it needs to go to work to produce whatever is in demand.  For the US, this includes fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.  We also have things to mine like coal and minerals. These federal lands have been “off limits”
and that needs to change.

Finally, we finally have an Interior Secretary that can see that the expense of maintaining one third of the US landmass is unsustainable.

Turning federal lands over to the States will not result in the closure of all the parks.  These States want tourism and will actually improve the parks to draw more visitors.

I trust that Trump and his team will ensure that this process will solve the problems associated with this badly needed reform. Hunters will get to hunt. Tree-huggers will get to visit. Archeologists will get to dig. Forest fires will be contained. Communists will go nuts seeing their 45 goals being reversed.


Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

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