GOP race energizes call for historic breakup of public land

The Bureau of Land Management owns about 250 million acres of land across the nation's West, which it manages for public recreation and limited resource development. Republican presidential candidates want the land transferred to state ownership. less The Bureau of Land Management owns about 250 million acres of land across the nation's West, which it manages for public recreation and limited resource development. Republican presidential candidates want the ... more Photo: Vern Fisher, Associated Press Photo: Vern Fisher, Associated Press Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close GOP race energizes call for historic breakup of public land 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

While clever insults and genital references consume headlines in the Republican presidential primary, substantive issues lurk behind. Among them is the candidates' unassuming call

for the federal government to relinquish its claim to the gigantic public wilderness of the West, a mostly contiguous patchwork nearly four times the size of Texas.

It would be unprecedented; no substantial chunk of that land has been handed to state or private owners since the days of the Wild West, but it's been demanded on the GOP campaign trail before.

Today the fresh calls ride a wave of conservative outcry, brought to the national spotlight by horsemen in Nevada, ranchers in Texas and a militia in Oregon, part of a larger surge in anti-government fever that's swept the country in recent years.

All remaining GOP candidates have suggested support for the transfer of federal public lands to state and private control. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has authored legislation for the breakup of the federal land, has issued the strongest calls, especially on the campaign trail in Idaho and Nevada, where most of the state is public land – open wilderness.

"If you trust me with your vote," said one Cruz campaign TV ad in Nevada, which is 81 percent federal public land. "I will fight day and night to return full control of Nevada's land's to its rightful owners, its citizens."

But experts call it a mischaracterization to pledge a "return" of the land to states, because states never owned it.

A campaign spokesperson said Cruz advocates a transfer of "all public land," excluding the national parks, out of federal control. That includes most national monuments, national recreation areas, national forests and more. That is not to say they would be sold off – that would be up to the states.

Calls to break up federal public lands have in the background of the Republican platform for decades, especially since Ronald Reagan threw his weight behind the cause in 1980. Dan Holler, vice president of communication at the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, said states should be able to tax the land in their borders and local people should be free to use it.

"You have a lot of acreage there, some of which certainly could have some sort of value in terms of economic development," he said.

Various recent protests to federal land ownership have drawn attention to the cause, including the armed takeover of a federal facility in Oregon by militants upset with the arrest of local ranchers for setting controlled burns on public land.

"It shows how this has escalated over the years," said Ed Shepard, president of the Public Lands Foundation, an advocacy group mostly comprised of former BLM employees.

In Texas, a public dispute erupted when the Bureau of Land Management lay claim to land along the Red River that some families say they have owned for generations. The conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation sued the BLM on behalf of seven North Texas landowners, two county governments and a sheriff's department.

"This case adds to the great public dialogue about why does the federal government have so much land and should it continue to have that much land," said Rob Henneke, lead counsel for the TPPF.

Federal public lands are leftovers from the nation's conquest of the West. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, then the War with Mexico in 1848, added almost 900 million acres to the young United States, and the General Land Office opened in 1812 to divvy it up, and later gave it to willing settlers for free.

By the century's turn, almost 640 million acres remained unclaimed – almost four times the size of Texas – mostly in the arid lands of Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

In the West, public land was the unclaimed leftovers from the land...

By then loggers had cut the gigantic old growth forests clear to the Pacific Ocean, said Lincoln Bramwell, chief historian of the U.S. Forest Service, and the public voiced credible fears of a timber famine. National forests were declared on public land, then greatly expanded by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who founded the Forest Service, which now manages 190 million acres under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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Some remaining chunks of the West went to the National Park Service or the Fish and Wildlife Service, and 245 million acres stayed with the land office, which became the Bureau of Land Management in 1948 and operates under the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Now the land is managed wilderness for public access.

"We put a lot of dedication into that land," said Shepard, a 38-year veteran forester of the BLM and former state director of BLM for Oregon and Washington. "We'd like to continue to see them managed well for public benefit."

The Bureau of Land Management keeps the largest unfenced, unsettled expanses in the country. Ranchers' cattle graze. Bureau land hosts 58 million recreation visits each year, while the national forests draw up to 34 million annual visits, according to federal figures.

Those forests, Bramwell said, absorb about 15 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions and protect the watersheds of 66 million Americans.

James Lewis, historian at the Forest History Society in North Carolina, said dividing ownership of the massive openness likely would lead to its fragmentation.

"History by and large shows that, unless regulated to some extent, business will always put profit first and land quality second," said Lewis who has a PhD in history. "In the East, we're already seeing what can happen when forests are fragmented and parcelized."

Opponents of federal ownership note that states would be able to keep the land public if they want to. Utah in 2012 moved to assume management of federal land in its borders, but a state analysis concluded that an estimated $247 million in management costs "could put a strain on the state's funding priorities." The legislation remains stalled.

Many interests, from small ranchers to giant corporations, long have eyed the public land. The Bureau of Land Management, for example, hosts more than 100,000 oil and gas wells on land it oversees.

And the presidential candidates aren't the first to call for federal divestment of the property. In 1976 Congress repealed the homestead laws that lured settled to the empty West a century before, effectivly clamping down federal ownership of the land. Ranchers and oilmen protested in what came to be known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, named for the scrub cover on much of the western steppe. Four years later, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan declared himself a "sagebrush rebel." But nothing changed.

"This issue recurs periodically and it probably always will," said Zachary Bray, a professor at the University of Houston's Law Center.

Despite the Republican presidential hopefuls' pronouncements, the U.S. Constitution explicitly delegates power over the lands to Congress, Bray said. The president would have minimal leverage.

Even Congress would face hefty legal hurdles in breaking up the federal land, roadblocks rooted in legislation regarding a myriad of issues from ownership of mineral rights, to obligations for wildfire control to protection of endangered species, Shepard said.

"It's not as simple as just making the transfer," he said.