CARSON CITY, Nev. – When rancher Cliven Bundy arrived at the Nevada Capitol with hundreds of supporters recently to urge legislators to pass a bill demanding state control of federally owned lands within Nevada's borders, it renewed a fight over grazing rights that turned into an armed standoff last year. But it also represented the latest push in a decades-old tug-of-war that surfaces regularly in political debates and policy discussions.
This year, federal lands bills are being considered in 11 Western states, including Nevada. Here are some questions and answers about the debate:
•What's in dispute?
Several federal agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, administer land within state borders that isn't owned by private or other public entities. About 4 percent of land east of the State of Colorado is managed by federal agencies, while that figure is much higher in the West and is more than 80 percent in Nevada. Much of this acreage is wilderness, and agencies including the BLM lease some of it for grazing and oil and gas development.
•What's being proposed?
Public lands bills in Western states run the gamut from measures that would study the cost of the state managing federal land, to measures asking or demanding Congress turn over property.
Nevada's measure is the most far-reaching and would lay claim to almost all federally managed public lands and water rights in the state.
•Why do such bills come up so regularly?
Part of it has to do with politically conservative values that prefer local control and resist federal overreach. It's also rooted in the belief that federal authorities are standing in the way of ranchers and developers who say they can use the land to create jobs and boost the economy.
•Who wants federal control maintained?
Conservationists worry that states would sell the land to oil and gas companies and mineral exploration firms, cutting off public access and allowing iconic landscapes to be destroyed.
•Why haven't the efforts succeeded?
The bills are largely considered to be unconstitutional because they put state authority ahead of federal law. But sometimes they do succeed, even if the effect is muted. In Utah, for example, legislators passed a law in 2012 demanding that the federal government turn over about 31 million acres of public land by the start of this year. The deadline for the transfer passed with no action, however, in a move predicted by both critics and supporters.
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