Republican Fielder pushing for state to manage federal lands

Republican state Sen. Jennifer Fielder says she sees “a lot of hopelessness” in her northwestern Montana district – and that is why she’s leading the charge in Montana to transfer management of most federal lands to the state. Fielder represents rural, forested Sanders and Mineral counties, where logging and other work in the woods once provided a good living for many. But those days have waned, and Fielder believes it’s largely because of federal land management policies. “It was the pain that I see families experiencing as a result of bad public management,” she said in an interview last week. “Poverty, and loneliness – people who have no family, because relatives have left to find work. … “People just don’t feel like there’s anything that can be done to make it better. I can’t subscribe to that attitude, that there is nothing we can do.” Fielder, elected in 2012, has become the leading figure in Montana for a regional movement to transfer national forests and some other federal public lands to the state for management. She’s pushing several bills at the 2015 Legislature on this issue, including one to create a legislative task force to study the issue directly, with $35,000 in state funds. State management of these lands – some 25 million acres in Montana – would be free of restrictive federal policies and allow more logging and other activity that helps the local economy, Fielder and others say. “The goal is better management, that improves access, environmental health and economic activity,” she says. “The accountability (for the feds) is so far removed from the place that’s impacted by the decisions.” While Fielder says the land transfer is only one idea, and that she’s pursuing other proposals to improve federal land management, it’s the transfer proposal that has stirred a hornet’s nest of opposition...more