Candidate To Lead US Land Agency: No Advocate Of Transfers

A candidate to lead an agency that oversees public lands totaling one-eighth of the U.S. says environmentalists mischaracterize her as an advocate of signing those landscapes over to state and local governments and private interests when — in fact — she has no opinion on the issue. Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen and others drew dozens of protesters when she addressed a recent land-use forum in western Montana. The protesters spoke out against the small but growing movement in the West to wrest control of public lands from federal agencies. A land-transfer advocate invited Budd-Falen to the Ravalli County event Nov. 18 but her legal work has nothing to do with the topic, Budd-Falen said. "It's not an issue that I was dealing with. But people just assumed that," Budd-Falen told The Associated Press in an interview Monday. Budd-Falen apparently is or has been among those under consideration to direct the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that oversees some 386,000 square miles of mostly arid land concentrated in a dozen Western states. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke interviewed her for the job in March, she said. Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift declined to say whether Budd-Falen was still a candidate or when somebody might be nominated for the director job, which has been vacant since January. Still, many environmentalists have been calling Budd-Falen too extreme...more