Should Idaho Really Take Over Federal Lands?

An Idaho legislative interim committee meeting next month could make a splash — by keeping its ripples on the small side. That might mean shifting its assigned mission. The panel is the federal lands interim committee, meeting Aug. 9, co-chaired by Senator Chuck Winder and Representative Lawerence Denney. House Concurrent Resolution 21 asked it to assemble research “before the Idaho Legislature can properly address the issue of the management and control of public lands now controlled by the federal government in the state of Idaho should title to those public lands be transferred to the State of Idaho …” Context: HCR 22, which also passed, “demand[ed] that the federal government extinguish title to Idaho’s public lands and transfer title to those lands to the state of Idaho.” Pre-meeting, attorney Michael Bogert was asked to collect background materials, and he assembled a 274-page report. As he noted, it covered many of the issues involved, but it could have been even larger: I’ve watched similar efforts flail and fail over the past 40 years. The states active on this, like Utah and Arizona, hit a brick wall: The lands are owned by the whole country and that’s unlikely to change. Still. The debate over just how well the states could do is far from conclusive. States can be useful laboratories of experimentation, and there’s talk, in some quarters, about something more modest than a fruitless demand for massive land turnover. Such as: Carve out a few small and varied parcels of federal land, require that federal standards be maintained in managing them, and then in essence pay the state to manage them in a pilot project. Could the state do better? If so, how? The exercise might open new and useful approaches to management, and either quash the state’s argument that it could do better, or strengthen it...more