Privatization of public land not a success

It is no secret that some state legislators in the West want to boot federal land management agencies from their states. They argue that agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service cost too much and are too detached from local values, and that states could make money by running their vast open spaces like a privately owned business. The Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank, is of that opinion and has developed models to replace federal agencies with private interests. What many people don’t know is that Congress implemented one of the Cato Institute’s ideas in 2000, on the 89,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. For some critics of the federal government, this was the experiment in land management that would signal the end of the BLM and Forest Service in the West. The Cato experiment in New Mexico, however, failed, chewed up by the friction between monetizing the “services” that landscapes provide – recreation, timber, grass, wildlife – and fulfilling citizens’ expectations for public access and protecting natural resources...more

Where did they get the idea this was "privatization"?  The lands in question remained in federal ownership, none were privatized. None of the primary interest groups wanted this model to work and they doomed it from the get-go:

Privatization supporters may say that if Congress had waived all federal natural and cultural resource protection laws for the trust – as Sen. Domenici had urged back in 2000 – the staff could have been a fraction of its size, and the trust could have made money developing lodges and putting thousands of cattle on the high-altitude meadows without public review or bureaucratic process.  Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., however, refused to excuse the trust from environmental laws. 

Domenici made two mistakes:  First was caving on the issue and supporting federal acquisition of these lands; and second was the options model.  Not the management model, but the options available after trying the experiment.  The options were succeed or return to federal management.  That gave all the leverage to the opponents of the management model.  If the options had been succeed or the lands will be privatized, you can be damn sure they would have made it work.

And if the issue was really public access, they should have left it with the Forest Service.  Everyone knows the Park Service is anti-grazing and anti-hunting and is far more likely to restrict public access or charge high entrance fees.