Nation’s Hunters Help Stop Effort to Sell Western Public Lands

   The saying “Nothing good happens after midnight” reminds us to get home early to avoid rowdy jerks, drunken drivers, and other folks with the scruples of certain U.S. congressmen.

   Few would argue if we bumped that curfew to 11:30 p.m., the time May 6 when House Republicans in Washington, D.C., slipped an amendment into the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” to sell over a half-million acres of public land in Utah and Nevada to the private sector. That midnight scheme by Mark Amodei, R-Nevada, and Celeste Maloy, R-Utah,ensured none of their colleagues on the House Natural Resources Committee had time to analyze their amendment before tucking it into the bill.

   Public-land advocates had reason for worry and doubt. At first glance, the amendment seemed to target “only” about 11,000 federal acres in southern Utah. But as others studied things the next few days, the acreage increased. By May 20, analysts from the mapping app onX Hunt concluded this Bureau of Land Management acreage could total 539,526 in Utah and Nevada, with the bulk — over 500,000 — in Nevada.

   Meanwhile, hunter-based organizations like the National Wildlife Federation, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and American Hunters and Anglers urged members to call their senators and representatives in Washington and ask them to kill the Amodei-Maloy amendment. GOP House leaders pulled it May 21 after six Republicans from Western states refused to support the budget bill if it included that midnight surprise.

Pressure from hunters, anglers and other public-land advocates persuaded Congress to kill a budget amendment May 21 that would have sold over 500,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management properties in Utah and Nevada. — Patrick Durkin photo

  The Senate, of course, could reinsert the amendment, but that would risk another battle with those same GOP representatives when Congress reviews the Senate’s changes. So, yes, it looks like hunters, anglers, campers, hikers, birdwatchers and their allies defeated yet another effort by lawmakers to treat our national treasures like garage-sale leftovers when strapped for cash.

   In some ways, you must admire how stubbornly politicians cling to bad ideas and false promises. After 45 years, most of us still await the promised riches of “trickle-down economics.” And for nearly 50 years, we’ve heard Sage Brush rebels and their spawn insist we’ll all profit by selling or transferring all we can of our 640 million federally owned acres to individual states or the private sector.

   Through it all, most of us still prefer compromise, the essence of democracy. Objective, nonpartisan folks concede our nation could sell some small, urban, suburban, dirt-poor or landlocked parcels now owned by the BLM, Defense Department, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, or Fish and Wildlife Service. But such sales are already possible, provided we first study those properties and debate their sales in public forums.

   That’s why, for instance, Congress passed the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act in 2000, and presumably that’s why Donald Trump signed it into perpetuity in 2018. That law requires revenues from BLM property sales be used to buy other lands with higher conservation or recreational value. 

   But the Amodei-Maloy amendment wouldn’t have allowed us to upgrade our public-land holdings. Instead, their plan would have funneled all resulting land-sales revenues to the general U.S. treasury, presumably to pay down our nation’s $36 trillion debt one molecule at a time.

   Speaking of Celeste Maloy, here’s some intriguing trivia: Cliven Bundy is her uncle and Ammon Bundy is her cousin. In case you’ve forgotten, Ammon Bundy is the anti-government militant who in 2016 led a 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. One of his fellow occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, died when Oregon State Police shot him as he reached for his gun after refusing repeated orders to surrender. In fact, Finicum’s last words were, “You’re gonna have to shoot me.”

   Cliven Bundy, Ammon’s dad, is the deadbeat rancher who caused a standoff with federal marshals in 2014 over unpaid grazing fees on federal lands. Far-right foes of big government and entitlement spending liked to portray Cliven Bundy as a common-sense Western maverick battling Eastern bureaucrats.

   Though Cliven Bundy wears a cowboy hat, he’s no folk hero. He suggested black Americans who receive government subsidies might be better off as cotton-picking slaves, and yet Cliven himself refused to pay the grazing fees his cattle racked up on public lands for 20 years. That wasn’t a cheap date, even though the federal government heavily discounts its grazing fees. Cliven Bundy’s cattle basically ate $1 million worth of taxpayer-funded livestock feed, and he lost when the feds took him to court for nonpayment in 1998 and 2013.

   But back to Amodei and Maloy, and their efforts to address the GOP’s 2024 presidential platform, which called for selling public lands to create space for affordable housing. Yes, some lands could play that role, but we can’t assume developers will honor a sale’s intentions.

   Since 1998, the BLM has sold over 17,560 acres of land near Las Vegas under a law promoting affordable housing. So far, only 30 acres of those $3.6 billion in sales have addressed that objective. Most of the land went toward master-planned communities at market prices on Vegas’ perimeter, said Jon Raby, the BLM’s acting director and its Nevada state director, in an April 7 report by Bloomberg Law.

   Raby said the program still boosted housing availability in southern Nevada. Still others claim the sales helped reduce housing prices, whether they were termed “affordable” or “market rate,” even though some of the new homes sold for $1 million to $4 million. Either way, such sales and transfers of public land require open review and follow-up, not just good intentions.

   Sigh.

   A final thought: Even though fighting the Amodei-Maloy amendment unified hunters nationwide with other public-land advocates, those of us east of the Dakotas want to remind Western residents not to take our advocacy for granted. After all, as nonresidents we typically pay 12 times more than Western residents to hunt their states, even though we mostly hunt federal lands. In fact, we nonresidents provide over 60% of all hunting-license revenues for Idaho, Alaska, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico.

   But once again, we set those antagonisms aside for the greater good.

   Let’s hope our collective goodwill endures longer than politicians’ endless scheming to make our public lands private.