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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.
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."
He says many Westerners are opposed to the
outright sale of public land because, the way it is,
they have it for themselves.
"There's this cultural populist
attitude," he said, "that somewhere in the
Ten Commandments it says, 'Thou shalt have access
for free."'
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