Why there’s a federal land dispute brewing out West - video

Glance at a map showing the percentage of state land owned by the federal government and you’ll see a remarkable difference between the East and the West. East of the Rocky Mountains, the feds own no more than 13 percent of the land in any state. West of the Rockies, in the continental U.S., the federal government owns at least 29.9 percent of the land in each state. In eight states — California, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming — the feds own more than 40 percent of the land. When Alaska (69.3 percent) is included, that number grows to nine.  Carl Graham thinks that should change. He’d like to see the federal government transfer some — but not all — of those vast swaths of territory to the states themselves. “What we’d like to see is shifting that balance back to where we have more state and local governments, who are much more accountable to their people, making those decisions that affect people’s lives,” said Graham, director of the Sutherland Coalition for Self-Government in the West, based in Salt Lake City. Graham says in a domestic economic situation rife with sequesters and budget deficits, Western states in particular are too dependent on the federal government. The title of his group’s website makes no secret of that: www.EndFedAddiction.org There was a time when the federal government owned most of the land in the Eastern states. But in the early 19th century, those lands were transferred to the states through grants, sales and homesteading. But the same thing didn’t happen for states in the West. “What happened in the late 19th century was, Teddy Roosevelt and others looked out to the West and said, ‘Hey, nobody’s out there yet really using these lands. Let’s start fencing them off and preserving them and keeping people off of them,’ ” Graham told New Mexico Watchdog. As a result, there’s a marked difference between the amount of federally owned land between one border state and another, such as Montana (29.9 percent) and North Dakota (just 2.7 percent), even though both states entered the Union in the same year — 1889. “It’s a matter of fairness,” Graham said. “A promise has been broken.”...more

Here’s New Mexico Watchdog’s interview with Graham



http://youtu.be/qVmUUnEKjzY