Washington – For years, selling off some of the U.S. government’s vast land holdings has been a goal of many Western conservatives. But now it’s become the third rail of the region’s politics: touch it and you’ll get burned.
Consider the reaction to the Bush administration’s proposal this year to sell off hundreds of thousands of acres of national forests and other public lands: Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., declared the plan “dead on arrival.” It was quickly rejected by the public and disowned by Republicans in Congress.
Now, the selloff proposal – while it remains alive – has been pushed into the shadows. Even President Bush’s new interior secretary has spoken out against a key aspect of the plan.
“Among congressional Republicans, there’s a recognition that this can’t be done. But the administration seems stuck with its proposal,” said Daniel Kemmis, senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Montana.
Other recent selloff plans have met similar opposition. A Nevada congressman’s proposal to sell public land to mining companies was shelved under pressure from hunters and Western county commissioners.
And when Rep. Tom Tancredo’s bill last September to sell 15 percent of federal lands to pay for disaster relief hit daylight, his announced co-sponsors abandoned him. One said, “I was wrong,” and removed his name from the bill; another denied she had ever signed on.
“There is a political shift going on here,” Kemmis said. The old Western inclination toward turning public land over to mining and other industries in the name of jobs, he added, has given way to a respect for pristine landscapes and a tourism-based economy.
“Livability and environmental factors have become bigger economic drivers than any kind of resource extraction,” he said.
To Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., the outcry against land-selloff plans also can be chalked up to a Western hunting and fishing community that is increasingly willing to flex its political muscle.
“They want to be able to hunt the areas with their sons that they hunted in with their fathers,” Udall said. “It points to the changing political environment in the West.”
The federal government owns about 655 million acres,29 percent of the nation’s land. About 96 percent of that is controlled by the U.S. Forest Service under the Agriculture Department and by three Interior Department agencies: the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
And most of that land is in the West. Colorado is 36 percent federally owned.
The federal government doesn’t pay taxes on that land, which has long bothered many local officials.
In the Bush administration’s land-selloff proposals, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, called for unloading 150,000 to 200,000 acres to raise $800 million for rural schools hurt by lagging timber receipts.
Meanwhile, then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton proposed selling an unspecified amount of BLM acreage worth $40 million each year to fund conservation programs and reduce the deficit.
While both proposals are still on the table, Norton’s replacement, former Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, backed away from Interior’s deficit-reduction selloff idea at his confirmation hearing May 4.
Rey said he knew going in that proposing to sell forest land might spark a political fury. But he said Congress has approved land sales before, such as his plan last year to sell small unused parcels.
He noted that the Forest Service adds an average of 100,000 acres a year, but the agency still has isolated tracts that are troublesome to manage.
“We’ve been … acquiring land that meets our environmental mission,” Rey said. “That doesn’t mean every acre we have is essential to that mission.”
Despite Rey’s assurance that the Forest Service isn’t trying to sell its “crown jewels,” many Westerners looked at Rey’s list of potential sales and found some gems they want to keep.
In Colorado, the list includes lands along the scenic Mount Evans highway, near the trails to its most popular 14,000-foot peaks, around St. Mary’s Glacier, and west of Vail.
The Forest Service has received about 150,000 comments in response to the land-sale proposal, nearly all of them opposed.
Rey said the Forest Service will send Congress its final list of proposed sales in June.
Western history scholar Patricia Nelson Limerick sees the land-selloff proposals as “a vestige of the Sagebrush Rebellion,” the 1970s movement to transfer federal lands to the states. She sees the widespread opposition to the new selloff plans as a sign of change in the West.
Limerick, of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, said Republican management of public land has eased conservatives’ resentment over federal control. The Bush administration, she said, has consulted more with local officials and promoted development on public lands, such as energy drilling.
Terry Anderson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center in Montana, said backers of the land-sale proposals haven’t done enough to avert fears that “they would lead to the sale of Yellowstone National Park.”