Is federal land ownership hurting county?

When the boundaries for Utah and its counties were carved out at the time of statehood, much of the land in the state was already owned by the United States — a situation that persists to the present. Today the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service own 70 percent of Utah. And no county in Utah has a greater percentage of its land owned by the federal government than Tooele County, the second largest county in the state. The federal government owns 82 percent of the county, some 3.6 million acres. The largest landowner is the Bureau of Land Management, which holds title to 43 percent of the county. The military comes in as the second largest landholder with 1.5 million acres, or 35 percent of the county. Subtracting all federal, state, and American Indian land holdings leaves only 11 percent of the county in the hands of private land owners with a small amount owned by local governments. That creates problems, according to Chris Sloan, a local real estate broker and chairman of the Tooele County Republican Party. “Not only does it create a tax burden for the county and schools, with the majority of the land tied up in public ownership and off the tax rolls,” Sloan said, “but it doesn’t leave much room for growth in the county. Especially when you realize that much of that privately owned land is lake bed or the side of mountains — it is unusable.” With the federal government owning so much land, the ability of local governments to determine the future of the state and county is limited, according to Sloan....more