Feds play waiting game at Nevada ranch

Federal officials appear to be waiting out Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters. Observers say the government would be smart to wait for the dust to settle, and then to try to resolve the situation. “It’s a very prudent strategy for the government to say ‘we’re going to let this go for now, but we’re going to revisit it,’” said James McCarthy, a professor of political geography at Clark University. “They can afford to play the long game,” said McCarthy, who suggested the government could wait six months or longer for its next action. Jonathan Emord, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney specializing in disputes over federal land, predicted that the government will move to the courts for the next battle. “They’ll press charges against him in federal court, and they’ll try to basically bleed his ability to defend himself, and beat him up on technical grounds,” Emord said. “They’ll put him in a situation where he’ll end up with a determination of liability that would be so great that he would have to sell his ranch to them to extinguish his debt.” McCarthy said the dispute can be linked to federal government decisions in the late 19th century to keep large swaths of land in public ownership while allowing private citizens to use the land for various reasons. “When our federal land system was set up, it was completely understood and accepted and part of the design that the private landowners … would have really extensive access to and use of public lands,” McCarthy said. One of BLM’s predecessors, the Grazing Service, was established to manage the land that had been set aside for livestock grazing. Though the federal government owned the land, it always had a system to allow grazing. “There’s a long history of federal allowance of trespass,” Emord said. The land management also was put in place in order to encourage settlers to move to the remote areas and use it for purposes like ranching, logging and gold exploration. “Here you have the law inviting people to settle in the West,” he said. “You create populations out there who are then dependent on the business that you invited as the federal government.” But in the latter half of the 20th century, as the country become more aware of its effects on the environment, the government’s priorities moved away from providing economic benefits through its land and more toward conservation...more