Judge Grants Greens Ranch Loan Info, But They Must Pay For It

SANTA FE — A federal judge says the U.S. Bureau of Land Management must release the names of banks and the consolidated amount of loans those banks have made to ranchers who are using BLM grazing permits as collateral.
The late-March ruling is a response to a lawsuit filed by the Forest Guardians, a radical environmental activist group opposed to grazing on public lands. The New Mexico Public Lands Council and New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association are interveners in the case filed last summer.
Forest Guardians earlier had tried to get the same information from the U.S. Forest Service.
Judge James O. Browning ruled this month that the information is part of the public record under the Freedom of Information Act and ordered the BLM to release redacted copies of the agency's lienholder agreement records to the Forest Guardians. The records disclose the identity of financial institutions involved in lending to BLM grazing
permittees using grazing privileges as collateral and the total amount of each individual loan.
Names, addresses and specific details of each loan are not to be released.
The judge says the BLM is to organize the agreements by field office and disclose the records to the Forest Guardians.
The BLM can compile aggregate loan totals for each field office as an alternative to releasing individual lienholder agreements.
The judge, however, denied a fee waiver allowed under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the action would not contribute to public understanding of government operations. The BLM may, the judge says, assess fees for searches and copying of the information. Such costs could effectively nullify the ruling, officials with the
Forest Guardians claim, because of the prohibitive expense involved. They say they will appeal the fee-waiver denial. (These activists can afford to pursue scores of nuisance lawsuits but can’t afford copying expenses? Or would they just prefer that
taxpayers foot the tab for their fishing expeditions? Our sympathy is reserved for the honest people at whom these extremists thumb their noses and whose livelihoods they are bent on destroying. — Ed.)
To find ranchers with grazing-permit loans, according to court records, the Forest Guardians used the federal Freedom of Information Act to get the names of participants in what's known as the escrow waiver loan program.
"We want to put the squeeze on ranchers to get off the land," says John Horning, the coordinator of the Forest Guardians' antigrazing campaign. "If some ranchers go out of business along the way, so be it."
Under the program, the U.S. government provides banks with verification of ranchers' grazing permits, so banks can accept the numbers of livestock allowed to graze under the permits as collateral for business loans. In the past 20 years, banks have issued more than $450 million in grazing-permit loans to about 300 ranching operations, according to the Forest Guardians.
Critics of the environmental extremist group say the group's tactics can be effective in putting ranchers out of business. "It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out how many head of cattle it takes for the rancher to make his bank note," says G.B. Oliver III, an executive at the Western Bank of Alamogordo, in Alamogordo, N.M.
The Forest Guardians submitted FOIA requests to each of the 10 BLM state offices in the western United States on July 31, 2000. According to court records, the Forest Guardians submitted a substantially identical FOIA request to the Arizona, California,
Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming BLM state offices.
In the requests, the activists sought copies of all documents, which are collateral assignments of all grazing permits for all grazing allotments in the state. This includes, but is not limited to, any and all notices of lienholders' interest, promissory notes, or any and all other documents that refer to the use of a federal grazing permit as a lien or collateral security for a loan.
According to court records, the Forest Guardians were interested in the names of alotments, permit holders, names of lending institutions and amount of money involved in each individual agreement.
The Taylor Grazing Act authorizes the Secretary of the Interior, through the BLM, to issue grazing permits. Permittees may use their permits, under the act, as collateral to secure loans. The act does not give the federal agency a role in the lending.
Judge Browning says the FOIA is intended to promote disclosure of information that sheds light on the activities of the government, not disclosure of information involving private citizens that happens to be stored in government files. In this case, the judge says, the lienholder agreements document legal financial relationships between
private individuals and private corporations. The extent of the government's involvement in these otherwise entirely private transactions is to receive and maintain voluntarily filed documents and notify lienholders when any action may affect the value of the collateral.
Browning's decision applies to all BLM lands in the Western United States.
The Forest Guardians claim the use of grazing permits as collateral encumbers public lands.