Administration's Public Lands Sales Proposals--Dead on Arrival

Article courtesy of Wyoming Wildlife Federation Staff and the Pronghorn Newsletter

In its 2008 proposed budget, the Bush administration once again included proposals to sell large amounts of both Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and National Forest lands, despite the drubbing that these and similar proposals received from sportsmen and other public lands advocates in the previous year. The fact that these 2008 proposals were basically pronounced "dead on arrival" when they hit Congress speaks volumes to the work that we all accomplished last year.

As proposed in the President's budget, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) budget contained a plan to sell up to $800 million worth of USFS lands (over 1/4 million acres) to fund the Secure Rural Schools Act, including over 15,000 acres in Wyoming. Unlike last year's proposal, this one exclusively targeted lands in the eastern portion of Wyoming in the Black Hills and Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests as well as the Thunder Basin National Grasslands--areas of the state with already low levels of public lands access.

The BLM budget proposal sought to amend the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act of 2000 to require that 70 percent of the money raised from sales of BLM lands be deposited into the Federal Treasury. Currently, the proceeds of BLM land sales must be used primarily to acquire other lands for public use, such as the purchase of inholdings within National Parks, National Forests, and facilitating land exchanges.

Thanks to the efforts of public lands advocates in Wyoming and nationwide during last year's public land sell-off proposals, the sales contained in this year's budget were deemed non-starters from the beginning.

In a message to the Senate Budget Committee earlier this year, both the Chair (Sen. Jeff Bingaman) and Ranking Member (Sen. Pete Domenici) of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee wrote regarding the BLM land sale proposal: "The Department has again proposed giving the Bureau of Land Management authority to sell public land and use part of the proceeds for operational expenses, while using the majority of the proceeds to reduce the federal deficit. A similar proposal was rejected by both parties, in both houses of Congress, last year. A majority of the Committee remains strongly opposed to selling off the public domain for deficit reduction."

Both proposals are now effectively dead for this budget cycle.

While this success is worth celebrating, we need to pursue permanent solutions to these perennial public lands sell-off proposals, ensuring that our public lands remain in public hands.

Toward this end, the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, in partnership with the National Wildlife Federation and many other organizations, including Trout Unlimited and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, are urging Congress to pass a formal resolution expressing their opposition to large-scale public land sales proposals, and affirming the importance of maintaining access to hunting and fishing opportunities on public lands.