Twenty years ago, fees for ranchers grazing livestock on federal public lands were a major political issue, the subject of regular national debates between conservationists and ranchers. The fee program brings in far less money for the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service than the agencies spend on maintaining rangeland. But thanks to the power of the livestock lobby, proposals to raise grazing fees have been stymied in political controversy for decades.
Now, the Obama administration is trying again — Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has proposed an additional administrative fee of $2.50 per animal unit month (the forage needed to sustain one cow and calf, one horse, or five sheep or goats for a month).
The fee would provide $16.5 million in 2016 for the BLM — a $13.5 million net gain, considering a proposed $3 million decrease in rangeland management funding. Currently the BLM spends over seven times as much money on rangeland management and improvement programs as it collects in grazing fees; that’s $89 million versus $12 million. (The rangeland programs include things like permit administration, weed management, water development and vegetation restoration.) Income from the new fee would go toward rangeland health efforts, as well as help address a massive backlog of grazing permit renewals.
Jewell’s proposal would bump the feds’ income from grazers by 148 percent, but, because it’s a separate administrative tax, it doesn’t violate the requirement that the baseline grazing fee (for the BLM, $1.69 per AUM this year) can’t increase by more than 25 percent annually. The move, which Interior has attempted in similar forms since 2012, appears to be a last resort to get around bitter political resistance to baseline fee increases. But the attempt has been repeatedly thwarted — stripped from Obama’s budget before being passed each fall.
There are many things, both pro and con, that one can say about BLM's management of rangelands and the fees charged. For instance, studies have shown that in some areas the grazing fee is above market value, while in other areas it is below market value. But that's what you get when you have a top down, one-size-fits-all approach to fees.
One thing, though, is pure bunk: that it costs BLM seven times more to manage grazing than what the fee brings in. It's all in the accounting. Let's say a rancher wants to put in a pipeline to use water to better distribute his grazing. A T&E survey must be done, an archaeological survey must be done, etc. While those surveys are there to benefit wildlife and archaeological resources, they are charged to the grazing budget. When I was at Interior we found instances where a District Manager wanted to check on a wildlife project but his budget was running low in that category so he/she would just charge his/her time and mileage to the rangeland budget. Most of those "costs" associated with the program aren't there because of the rancher or the BLM. Those "costs" are imposed by Congress and the Courts - the Congress by the laws they pass and the Courts by the way they interpret them. Think NEPA. The cost side of the ledger is far more ripe for reform than the income side.
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