BLM CONTROVERSIES THIS LAST CENTURY

TRU th MA chine Exclusive for A merican D igital N ews

As we continue in the series on Bureau of Land Management and their overreaching of sovereign lands, we will touch on several controversies that have touched the lives of so many American citizens and property owners this century.

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BLM…an unchecked out of control agency with far too much power and control of lands in the western United States.

In fact, the BLM appears to be little more than hugely successful for-profit business wing of the Department of the Interior, masquerading as a conservation agency. Even worse, they employ nearly 300 armed agents to enforce their receivables and collections.

And you thought the Internal Revenue Service was scary. At least we see the IRS coming. Enter the BLM, an agency most Americans know nothing about.

Volumes of solid data exists on the BLM’s money making enterprises. At the same time there has been one conspiracy theory after the next spreading false information far and wide.

Ironically, the truth is far more damning to the BLM than any half baked conspiracy theory could ever be.

We have all been made well aware of the massive amounts of land owned or controlled by the BLM, but little has been written about their specific business interests or just how profitable of a business the BLM is.

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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a bureau within the Department of Interior, is the largest land management agency in the United States. The BLM is one of a handful of agencies that generates more revenue than it spends. The BLM’s management of public lands contributed more than $130 billion to the national economy in FY 2011 and supported more than 600,000 American jobs.

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Over the course of the 20th century, the government’s emphasis shifted away from releasing the land to private citizens and toward managing it itself. The passage of 1976’s Federal Land Policy and Management Act made that policy concrete, keeping the land as the property of the government. After the federal government’s shift, there was a push from some in the West, including governors and members of Congress, to shift control from the federal to the state or local government. The Sagebrush Rebellion, as it was known, tapered off during the relative friendly administration of Ronald Reagan.

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LAS VEGAS (KSNV News3LV) April 26th 2016 — The Bureau of Land Management sold 818 acres of federal land in Las Vegas on Tuesday for more than $94 million. For some, it’s a sign that real estate in Southern Nevada is viable again and that it’s growing.

At the auction, the pulse of the housing market could be felt. Nearly 35 parcels of land situated in locations across the Las Vegas valley sold. The most popular parcels were bought up in the southwest.

Big residential builders from Lewis Homes and KB battled it out, working hard to outbid each other.

One parcel of 47.5 acres on the corner of Meranto Avenue and Grand Canyon Drive sold for $14.2 million, a $2.3 million profit from the appraised value of $11.9 million.

For a look at all of the parcels of land sold at Tuesday’s auction, check out the list on the BLM’s website here. [However it takes you to this:

Page Not Found

Sorry, the content you are looking for is not found or has moved.

Please return to the home page at www.blm.gov or try the search box above.

Guess that’s none of our business too?!?]

For a closer look at BLM land sales in the past, check out the Winning Bidder Reports here.

[Which also takes you to this:

Page Not Found

Sorry, the content you are looking for is not found or has moved.

Please return to the home page at www.blm.gov or try the search box above. ]

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Land owners are not the only ones who may be affected by the Bureau of Land Management’s review of almost 90,000 acres of land along the Red River in a possible land grab.

Members of the Northwest Texas Council Boy Scouts, who own Camp Perkins that sits on the Red River, say they are worried their land may be taken away from them if the BLM finds their land to be public domain.

Wayne Mansur, council president of the Boy Scouts Northwest Texas Council, says the land is used by children and adults who want to learn about scouting and what nature has to offer.

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The Bureau of Land Management will sell a 10-year mineral rights lease for a section of Lake Lewisville at a live auction in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 20.

Bidders must be qualified oil and gas operators who have the intent and ability to develop the natural gas resources that the government owns there. An environmental group may not place a bid just to keep the property from being developed.

The auction process began in June 2014 when Fort Worth-based Norwood Land Services contacted the New Mexico office of BLM. That office is responsible for mineral rights on federal lands in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Norwood nominated the tracts at the time, hoping for a sale last April. BLM spokesperson Donna Hummel told The Lewisville Texan Journal that the bureau first worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers…

BLM held a two-week public comment period in early September… Lease notice was issued Jan. 20, kicking off a 30-day protest period that ends Feb. 18. The public has until then to protest the sale by submitting written comments to BLM.

Hummel said that when the 30-day period is over, the bureau will begin reading the protests and preparing a response. That response could be to either resolve the problem by adding stipulations to the lease, to defer the sale until after the bureau can further analyze it, or to delete the parcel from the sale based on a problem that cannot be resolved satisfactorily.

That process is not always straightforward.

Wendy Park, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said a section of the sale notice provides those instructions.

“The process is arcane and obscure,” she said, “You can only file a protest by U.S. Mail or fax.”

Environmental and safety concerns

Several environmental groups are mobilizing to try to stop the sale. Rita Beving, of the Clean Water Fund, said her group looked at all Texas properties listed in the upcoming sale. She wants mitigating factors to protect the environment and critical habitat for endangered species as well.

The environmental assessment done was not acceptable, Beving said, as it was done in a more global, cursory nature.

“[Public lands] shouldn’t be for sale to the highest bidder,” Park said. “Protecting the public should be a top priority. At a minimum, they have to do a proper and full environmental review.”

The environmental assessment provided by BLM does not mention the lake’s “integrity problems”, Park said; and, she is concerned with drilling affecting the drinking water supply for the City of Dallas and other numerous North Texas cities.

The Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter echoed the concerns of the others. Cyrus Reed, the group’s conservation director, emphasized his concerns about water contamination. He thinks contamination could happen if a well’s cementing or casing were to fail or if a spill were to occur.

“Any oil and gas development near a reservoir does have the potential to lead to water contamination if not managed correctly,” Reed said.

****EDITOR NOTE: The Clean Water Fund is google search results are linked above and supported by George Soros’ OSF.

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“Do As We Say Not As We Do” should be the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) motto. For years the BLM has been violating their own federal laws and regulations, which in turn has hurt the economy, and the citizens that they are suppose to be serving. Because of this abuse several counties in Utah along with the State of Utah have taken a stand against the Bureau of Land Management and their mismanagement.

The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) was passed in 1979 to protect artifacts and archaeological sites. The BLM is one agency that is responsible enforcing this act. Despite this the BLM has destroyed animal habitats, acres of Biological Soil Crust, acres of timber, and hundreds of archaeological sites and artifacts under the guises of land management.

The Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) of 1979 protects artifacts and archaeological sites. ARPA recognizes that artifacts are at risk because of a growing commercial market. ARPA recognizes that these resources cannot be replaced once they are removed.

ARPA sets criminal penalties at a $10,000 fine and/or a 1-year imprisonment. If the value of the resources involved exceeds $500, penalties increase to $20,000 and/or 2 years in prison. For a second or repeat offense, penalties are $100,000 and/or 5 years in prison. Anyone who damages, digs up, removes, sells, or buys archaeological resources can pay these penalties.

There are other U.S. criminal laws and regulations that also include similar penalties and provisions.

Along with ARPA the BLM is suppose to follow “The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969” better known as NEPA.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) is the mandate of any federal agency or department for the protection of the environment. NEPA was created to ensure federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their actions and decisions.

There are several more examples of BLM Overreach in UTAH including:

Utah ranchers sue BLM, demand removal of wild horses

BLM Raids Blanding Utah

San Benito Supervisors Hammer BLM on Clear Creek Plan South Bay Riders

Federal lawsuit, the State of Utah says the Bureau of Land Management broke the law to please environmentalists

Carbon County Utah Asserts Jurisdictional Power

Iron County Utah Pass Resolution

San Juan County Utah Passes Resolution

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The Bureau of Land Management is in the process of stealing another ranchers land.

Tommy Henderson has already lost land to the BLM and is currently fighting their latest attempt to take his property, “How can BLM come in and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t yours’?” Henderson asked. “… Our family paid taxes for over 100 years on this place. We’ve got a deed to it. But yet they walked in and said it wasn’t ours?

BLM uses the fact that the border between Texas and Oklahoma, which is the Red River, constantly changes, to claim the land. They have already seized 140 acres of land, now they are trying to seize 90,000 acres and substantially change the border between the two states.

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TEXAS, OKLAHOMA, AND KANSAS … land grabs planned are underway by BLM … its 411,585 square miles of land … that equals 263,000,000 acres and includes Native American Lands … read it in BLM newsletter – Oklahoma Branch Office.

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Right is right and wrong is wrong … MORE FRIGGIN BLM WRONG!!!! READ THIS ATROCITY!!! BLM is going for 263,000,000 (yes millions) of acres in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas —that’s 411,585 square miles and includes Native American lands. At the bottom of this read is a Bureau of Land Management report from the Oklahoma Bureau.

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BLM BURNS LAND UNSUPERVISED: BURNS RANCHERS HOME AND CATTLE ALIVE

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is showing they have no rules to follow and no regard for either animal or human life, in the video the BLM is burning the land around Prince Glenn, Oregon, and telling ranchers and farmers to stand down and if they attempt to stop the fire they will be arrested.

Meanwhile in the video, Oregon land owners, neighbors and citizens try to scramble to save their belongings and the life of their cattle. Folks can see these cows burned alive while the BLM federal workers start more fires in the background, including one while the film is rolling. Clearly, the BLM is not putting out the fire they are starting them and you can see the government worker suited up. This unsupervised incident charred a ranchers home and burnt his cattle alive in their corral, not to mention the danger to the land owners themselves. Another rancher lost 11 cattle trapped in their corrals during the night.

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In a stunning and horrifying decision, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency of the US Dept. of the Interior, voted last Friday to slaughter over 65% of the wild horses left in the United States. There is currently an online petition to stop the slaughter. The decision was reached after a congressional hearing in June where beef industry representatives asserted that the wild horses were overpopulated and unhealthy. They maintained that the only way to solve this population crisis humanely was the slaughter of 44,000 horses currently corralled by the BLM and to surgically sterilize all remaining wild horses, effectively eliminating the entire country’s population of wild horses. The horses will not be slaughtered by the BLM but will instead be sold to middlemen who then sell them to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada where they will be sold for meat as is custom in the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro program.

Ginger Kathrens, the only person not associated with the beef industry present at the congressional hearing, said that there is no overpopulation and that current population levels are below levels necessary for genetic viability, putting wild horses of disappearing for good. The National Academy of Sciences supported Kathrens in a press release that stated there is no evidence of overpopulation and the BLM’s current practice of removing wild horses from public lands is to blame for the high population growth rate.



The press release goes on to say that the BLM’s practices are unsustainable and incongruent with public expectations. However, the BLM is apparently much more interested in how they benefit from leasing public land to private ranchers and corporations than meeting public expectations. The BLM administers federally-owned “public” lands, which account for more than 1/8th of the country’s landmass (261 million acres). However, these public lands are frequently leased to cattle ranchers. Cattle consume 82% of the forage on the lands they share with wild horses, who are outnumbered by livestock 47:1. The removal of these horses would mean that more cattle could roam the land, generating more profit for the beef industry and for the BLM who makes $14.5 million annually just by leasing to cattle ranchers. With the wild horses out of the picture, this number will presumably increase. The BLM also leases public lands to gas and energy companies who have installed an estimated 63,000 oil and gas wells, the majority of which employ the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” The BLM makes $1.27 million off of leasing public land for fracking.

The BLM says the cost of caring for a horse in a coral is nearly $50,000 over the lifetime of each animal. That equates to over a billion dollars based on the current number being held, McClintock said.

Wild horses live on only 11 percent of BLM-managed land (27 million acres in 10 states), and in most cases they share the land with privately owned cattle, she said. “Livestock outnumber horses and burros 47 to 1, and livestock are allocated 82 percent of the forage.” Who’s starving out who again?

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These are just a few of the dozens and dozens of articles associated with BLM land grabbing and overreach. And we haven’t even scratched the surface on the ones with MINERAL RIGHTS involved. Stay tuned for the next article in the BLM series….