Government Lands … how much is enough

All or Nothing

Government Lands … how much is enough

The case of the Egyptian parable

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

 

            When apples were part of my agricultural life, I crossed paths with an Egyptian Christian. We’ll call him Charles.

Charles was an interesting fellow for many reasons not the least of which he made his living collecting bad debt in Third World countries. Working on contract for the World Bank he would disappear unarmed into places like the Sudan, Somalia, and Bosnia. For these efforts, he would retain a sizeable portion of the collections. He parlayed that into various investments, and, when I got acquainted with him, his investment infatuation was apple orchards.

We were together once in the very unlikely apple universe of Arizona.  Always dapper, Charles wore his tie and camel hair blazer throughout the orchard inspection. We were late finishing and I was on course to miss my flight home to California out of Tucson. Charles insisted I rebook my flight and he would cook an Egyptian supper that night at his orchard home. I took him up on his offer.

It turned out to be an interesting evening.

The meal was good, but the conversation was better. His knowledge of the Bible was incredible. Charles’ education started in a Catholic orphanage. The nuns were demanding disciplinarians in all matters of instruction, and, of course, that included bible study.

At some point, I asked him why he never married. He responded with an Egyptian proverb. The proverb described the two kinds of men. One is the man who dedicates his life to one woman, and the other was the man whose predisposition is to pursue all women. Charles, too, concluded man can not be both. He is either fully one or the other and, without a spirituality of golden standard, the former is exceeding rare or even nonexistent. He claimed his life style prompted him to recognize he would fail as a husband.

He chose not to marry.

The federal counterpart

I live in a county where private property ownership makes up less than one in five acres. That ratio equates to the rest of the state where private ownership equates to just over half the total. That compares to all states east of New Mexico where private ownership equates to more than nine of every 10 acres.

Those who understand the West are well aware this imbalance is not changing. Private property rights are diminishing with government acquisitions and landscape fragmentation emanating from changes in federal land designations. The argument justifying the trend is sold to the nonresident pep squads on the basis of saving great natural treasures for our children.

Those of us in the West know it isn’t our children being referenced.

It doesn’t take a genius to determine targeted lands lay in counties already dominated by government ownership. They also fit into one of two categories. They are either inhabited by a growing pensioned hipster class whose closest natural responsibility might be a pet, either animate or inanimate, or natives overwhelmingly ‘too poor to pay for their sport’. In either case, the targeted lands are not being offered by the locals unless progressive governing boards are in place to bless the plans being formulated by absentee Landscape Scale architects.

Tale of two counties

You have read my words too many times regarding Dona Ana County, but this county is exceedingly important to the fate of the West. In fact, it has become a battleground in the war for private rights in our country.

Eighty seven percent of the county is owned by government. So, 13% of the land remains for ‘our children’ to live, work, conditionally recreate, and stake their future. Some 500,000 acres of the county is behind Defense Department or land agency locked gates. Of the remaining 1.3 million acres of federal lands, New Mexico’s senators are united with the absentee Landscape Scale architects to claim as much 50% or another 600,000 acres for national monument and designated wilderness.

Cultural fragmentation is being forced upon its citizenry which has demonstrated it is ‘too poor to pay for (its) sport’.

Another county of highest risk is Grant County. That county is the nation’s first county of wilderness being the administrative center of the Gila National Forest with its Gila Wilderness, the first wilderness designated in the wilderness system.

That county is a most glaring suffragette from government dominion. Based on the state’s Enabling and subsequent acts, 282,589 acres of state trust lands should have been staked out across the landscape to contribute to the harvest of revenues for the state educational fund. The county has 358,837 acres. That is 27% more trust land than the various acts authorized.

In addition, the county is dominated by federal holdings. That ownership represents 141% of the average ratio of similar federal holdings in other counties which are already burdened with relative disadvantages over counterparts in other states. Collectively, property tax yields and regulatory constraints from combined government dominion have suffocated private wealth accumulation among the natives.

Working like gravity day and night

Too often, Thomas Jefferson’s words fit like a glove.

Speaking about the judiciary, but, applicable to governing agencies, he wrote,“ … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one.”

As a consequence, such action “will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”

Grant County serves as a perfect example of Jefferson’s 1821 warning.

The state of New Mexico’s Office of Natural Resources Trustee is in Grant County co-opting with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service seeking further reductions of private property. The funds used for the acquisition of at least five properties concentrating in the Gila and Mimbres River drainages came from a settlement against the county’s largest private employer, Freeport-McMoRan. The charges emanated from dead ducks found in the company’s tailings ponds and ground water contamination. In a tiered surrender of its treasury and wealth, the company first had to sign over 715 acres of grassland to the state to expand the state’s City of Rocks State Park. A payment of $13 million was then extracted for aquifer remediation and another $5.5 million is being redistributed to habitat project restoration.

In the agreement’s definitions, habitat projects must be code for private property purchases because schedules within the documents reveal deeded land purchase plans in the Gila Valley from Cliff to Redrock to the tune of 6500 acres. The historical EE Ranch is one of the purchases.

Another purchase of 1010 acres of deeded land is planned for the Mimbres drainage.

If all the charges were assessed against the dead ducks, the settlements reflect a per duck penalty of over $90,000 not including the grassland heist. Ducks are valuable in southern New Mexico, but who knew they would serve as the strong box loot source to add scarce private property acreage to the state government’s already over-subscribed rolls of trust lands in Grant County?

“Working like gravity day and night …”

Egyptian parable applied to men and governments

Are we learning that the shortcomings of man are substantially magnified in actions of government?

I’ll say yes and offer a theorem. It has two components and both are ushered into our discussion on the basis of the presence or absence of the spirituality of a Golden Standard. The Golden Standard in the case of Man is his faith, and to all Christians, that is archived not just in our Bible but in our souls. The standard in the case of our government(s) is the (federal and state) Constitution.

Man has the choice of seeking a relationship with one woman or every woman based on his spiritual allegiance to the principles of his faith. Likewise, government has the choice of maintaining adherence to the standards of the Constitution or the spiritual avoidance of constitutional prescriptions.

The dichotomy of the two standards is reflected in the geographic demarcation of the 100^th Meridian. East of that line the Constitution and particularly the enclave and the property clauses of the document are conditionally enforced.

West of that line there exists a void of any similar constitutional consistency. Government demonstrates an insatiable desire for land accumulation. More land is preferred to less, and, once in process, there is no halting the hoarding frenzy.

Government, spelled with a capital G as in Gigolo, remains at work in the West. Dona Ana and Grant Counties are hugely important examples. That is why this debate remains so critical.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “If the citizens of Grant County were elevated to equal footing with eastern states, 1,807 square miles of government land would have to be transferred to property tax rolls.”