Friday, February 17, 2012

Santorum supports sale of federal lands in the West, citing profits, better management

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a Boise audience Tuesday night that he would work with Congress to transfer federal lands to states and sell lands to the private sector. Santorum said the federal government "doesn't care" about its western lands and could make money and improve management by shedding ownership, an idea reminiscent of the "Sagebrush Rebellion" of the 1970s and 1980s. About one quarter of the U.S. land mass is owned by the U.S. government. An audience member asked Santorum about his view of "turning land over to the states." He replied that the one national forest in Pennsylvania, a state he represented for 12 years in the U.S. Senate, was poorly run. He said national parks like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon belong in federal hands, but that vast tracts of other lands would be appropriate for transfer or sale...more

Here are Santorum's remarks:


"We've been very blessed in Pennsylvania. We don't have a lot of federal lands in Pennsylvania. We have one federal national forest and it's about as badly managed as you can possibly imagine. I had more fights over this little plot of land up here, the Allegheny National Forest, and so I can only imagine, as I did because I experienced it, what the problems (were) with BLM, the problems with the Forest Service and a whole host of other agencies that the states that are heavily populated with federal lands have to deal with.

"My feeling is there are obviously very important critical areas of our country that should be under the purview of the federal government. No one's trying to turn Yellowstone over to the private sector or the states, or the Grand Canyon or anything else.

"But there's a lot of land out there that is land that can and should be managed by stewards who care about that land. I believe the land is there to serve man, not man there to serve the land. If we turn that, obviously, BLM, they just don't — look, we're not going to have the resources to manage this land correctly. The federal government doesn't care about it, they don't care about his land. They don't live here, they don't care about it, we don't care about it in Washington. It's just flyover country for most of the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

"We need to get it back into the hands of the states and even to the private sector. And we can make money doing it, we can make money doing it by selling it. So I believe that this is critically important.

"We do not need this huge amount amount of federal land under federal purview and I would be happy to work with your senators and congressmen out here in the West to put a plan together that's going to have a much more responsible management of land in the West than we've had in the last many years, OK?"

1 comment:

johnr said...

U.S. constitution section 8 clause 57
I will vote for this