The hidden stakes in this battle are huge--control of most of the land in the western US. If the land is ceded to the states, there will be huge land rush by the wealthiest 0.01% as they buy land from the states who will be eager to sell it in order to raise money without raising taxes and of course getting at the same time largess from uber rich donors.
The Larger, but Quieter Than Bundy, Push to Take Over Federal Land
By JACK HEALY and KIRK JOHNSON
JAN. 10, 2016
nytimes.com
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.
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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.
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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.
more at the link.... |
