Surprised by plan from his own BLM to unload land inside Utah’s former Grand Staircase monument, Interior boss cancels sale

The Interior Department has canceled a proposal from the Bureau of Land Management that would have allowed the sale of more than 1,600 acres inside the previous boundaries of southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The department’s deputy secretary, David Bernhardt, sent a memo to BLM officials Friday, reversing part of a management plan for the 900,000 acres that President Donald Trump removed from monument status in December. Top Interior officials say they were caught off guard by the BLM proposal...MORE

Zinke and his top officials were "caught off guard" when local BLM planners decided to follow the law?

 Section 203 of FLPMA states:

Sec. 203. [43 U.S .C . 1713]

(a) A tract of the public lands (except land in units of the National Wilderness Preservation System, National Wild and Scenic Rivers Systems, and National System

of Trails) may be sold under this Act where, as a result of land use planning required under section 202 of this Act, the Secretary determines that the sale of such tract meets the following disposal cri­tteria:

(1) such tract because of its location or other characteristics is difficult and uneconomic to manage as part of the public lands, and is not suitable for management by another Federal department or agency; or

(2) such tract was acquired for a specific pur­pose and the tract is no longer required for that or any other Federal purpose; or

(3) disposal of such tract will serve important public objectives, including but not limited to, expansion of communities and economic develop­ment…

The reporters, either unaware or ignoring the law, infer the proposed sale is the result of collusion with a private party:

 ...the preferred alternative identified 16 parcels that could be sold to private developers.Among these parcels was one adjoining ranch property held by Utah lawmaker Mike Noel, a vocal leader in the campaign to reduce and block national monuments. Noel, who handled real estate transactions for the BLM during his 22-year tenure with the agency, said he never asked the BLM to make that acreage available and that he is not interested in buying more property in Johnson Canyon, east of Kanab, where he holds extensive land and water rights.

... While serving as an influential rural voice in the Utah Legislature, Noel has been the state’s leading critic of federal land management and an advocate for shrinking the 1.9 million-acre Staircase monument, designated in 1996 by then-President Bill Clinton. The lawmaker had direct access to Zinke during the secretary’s May 2017 tour of Utah.

Notice Noel is "influential" and had "direct access" to Zinke. You can see where they are trying to take the reader. 

After four paragraphs of environmentalists decrying the proposal, they do allow Noel to say:

Noel said he suspects the BLM had sound reasons for proposing a possible sale of the parcels, especially if they were isolated and difficult to manage.“Just because they identify it for sale doesn’t mean it will sell,” Noel said. “If the land is not accessible and blocked off by private property or up against a cliff, then what’s the point of BLM owning it? Isn’t the whole idea to have land that is accessible to the public?”

Let's now turn to Zinke's role in all this:

“The secretary did not see the proposal before it went out and was not happy about it,” a senior Interior Department official said Friday afternoon.

... Interior’s Bernhardt, Zinke’s second in command, says the BLM proposal to privatize these lands was “inconsistent” with department policy and would be changed. “The failure to capture this inconsistency stops with me,” Bernhardt wrote in the memo, obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune. Bernhardt's memo says no public lands will be sold. “As the secretary has made clear throughout his tenure," Bernhardt said, “the Department of the Interior is opposed to the wholesale sale or transfer of public lands to states or private interests.”

The:"wholesale" disposal?

The article says there are 16 parcels totaling just over 1,600 acres. That's an average of 100 acres per parcel. 1600 acres is 0.084 percent of the original monument, and 0.17 percent of the 900.000 acres returned to multiple use management. That is hardly the "wholesale" disposal of federal land.

Does the Secretary disagree that the parcels are small? or isolated? or difficult to manage? Or is it his ideological opposition to disposal in any form?

If we combine Zinke's opposition to disposal and transfer with his all out push to permanently fund land acquisition, what do we get? A larger federal estate. An increase in the size and influence of the feds. And this growth is to be permanently funded.

That is not what you would expect from the Trump administration, which in other areas has been attempting to limit funding and to pare back, deregulate, and decrease the size and scope of the feds.

BLM pays off portion of debt as old as Montana, giving 2,126 acres to the state

On Jan. 26, Bureau of Land Management acting state director Jon Raby signed an agreement giving the state of Montana 2,126 acres to fulfill a portion of a debt owed since 1889. That was the year Congress passed the Enabling Act, which admitted Montana, Washington, North Dakota and South Dakota to the Union and gave states sections 16 and 36 of each township. The problem was that some of those townships had already been set aside for national parks or Indian reservations, so the BLM inherited a debt to the states to compensate them for the lands. In Hill and Chouteau counties the BLM is turning over 2,120 acres of cropland known as Lonesome Lake. That land, along with another six acres in Miles City, will satisfy more than $1.82 million of the BLM’s $4.1 million debt. The property on the west side of Miles City will save the state money that it has been spending to lease the parcel for a firefighting cache. The acreage is close to other government offices as well as the fairgrounds. The State Land Board will have to accept the transfer at its next meeting on Feb. 20 in Helena for the deal to be finalized, said Shawn Thomas, administrator of the DNRC’s Trust Land Management Division. The four BLM lessees using the Lonesome Lake lands were given notice of the transfer. The lessees were offered 10-year farming leases at a rate that requires a 25 percent crop share as payment. The land was originally supposed to be a reservoir, but when that idea dried up the BLM got stuck managing crop land, which it normally does not do. The DNRC, on the other hand, oversees about 600,000 acres of cultivated land that benefits the state school trust, said Clive Rooney, area manager for DNRC’s Northeast Land Office in Lewistown...more

Trump’s Leaked Infrastructure Plan Suggests A Future Sell-Off Of Public Land

By Chris D’Angelo

President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have repeatedly said they oppose selling off federal lands. “I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do,” Trump told Field & Stream magazine in January 2016. He re-emphasized this in a subsequent interview with the Outdoor Sportsman Group: “We’re not looking to sell off land.” It was over this very issue that Zinke — a former Montana congressman — resigned as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2016. And in a speech one day after arriving at his new post, Zinke promised Interior staffers: “You can hear it from my lips. We will not sell or transfer public land.” But a leaked White House infrastructure plan has many conservation groups concerned that Trump and Zinke could soon be singing a different tune: that of the Republican Party, whose platform calls for transferring control of federal lands to states.The draft plan, which Politico and Axios obtained this week, includes this line: “Disposition of Federal Real Property: would establish through executive order the authority to allow for the disposal of Federal assets to improve the overall allocation of economic resources in infrastructure investment.” To be clear, the document is a draft plan — one Paul Teller, a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, told Politico this week does not reflect the final proposal. Nonetheless, it is easy to see how one might read “disposal” to mean that the government will look to sell off, trade or transfer federal assets, including land, to help pay for crumbling bridges and highways......more

I commented on the leaked draft yesterday

Congressman won't revive bill to unload federal land

A proposal for the federal government to unload millions of acres of land in Nevada probably won’t return to Congress. That’s according to Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., who introduced a massive lands bill last session and had considered reviving it. “Transferring millions of acres of public lands ... is not something I think the majority of people think is a good idea,” Amodei said during an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal editorial board. During the previous session of Congress, Amodei introduced a measure known as the Honor the Nevada Enabling Act. The first phase covered nearly 7.3 million acres, about half within a checkerboard pattern that traverses the state from Sparks to Wendover. Other phase one land included property the Bureau of Land Management has already “designated for disposal.” The second phase would have transferred millions more acres. A summary of the bill called for non-exempt lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and Bureau of Reclamation to be “conveyed upon request by the state or local governments.” The bill got a hearing in November but died when the congressional session ended Dec. 31. Backers of the bill hoped to revive the issue, and Amodei sought public input on the subject. Widespread public support for the idea never materialized. Also, the Nevada Wildlife Commission, which controls the Nevada Department of Wildlife, in February voted unanimously to send Amodei a letter summarizing opposition from dozens of hunters and anglers who testified on the idea. A Colorado College poll of voters in Nevada and six other Western states in January also showed majority opposition among Democrats, Republicans and independents to transferring federal land to state or other hands. In remarks Monday, Amodei said he won’t revive the bill. “Will that be being reintroduced in that form, no,” he said...more

Live by executive action, die by executive action

By Robert Romano

Whatever can be done with executive action can be undone by executive action.

That was one of the messages outgoing President Barack Obama had for his successor, President-elect Donald Trump in an interview with NPR, where Obama said, correctly, that “If he wants to reverse some of those rules, that’s part of the democratic process. That’s, you know, why I tell people to vote — because it turns out elections mean something.”

So, suddenly, upon assuming office, Trump could start immediately rescinding controversial executive actions, whether Obama’s executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children, or his decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

In total, Obama has issued 260 executive orders. Those could all be rescinded on day one, as there is no legal requirement they be retained.

There’s also a bevy of regulations, including the 2009 Carbon Endangerment Finding by the Environmental Protection Agency and its corollaries, the new and existing power plant rules, that constituted the agency’s expansive war on coal electricity.

...Those could be rescinded by the agencies that issued them, through the process under the Administrative Procedures Act, which could take a couple of years. Best to get started right away.

There is also the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which gives Congress the power to roll back with simple majorities regulations within 60 legislative days of being implemented. That goes back to June, and according to the Heritage Foundation, includes “many dozens of major rules [that] could be vulnerable to a CRA challenge. These include, among others: Rules under the Dodd–Frank financial regulation law, Sick leave for federal contractors, Offshore drilling rules, and Energy mandates for home appliances.”

...Then there is Obama’s executive action to indefinitely seal off much of the outer continental shelf in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans from oil and gas drilling. Obama officials are bragging that this is one action that cannot be undone by executive action, although there is a clear process under the law for issuing new offshore drilling leases.

But even if an attempt to undo Obama’s action to block drilling via executive action got caught up in federal court, Congress could always just defund it or pass new legislation repealing the provision he invoked.

Speaking of which, Congress could always defund, or prohibit the use of funds to implement regulations and any other executive action. So, where all else fails — if for example litigants manage to preserve certain regulations and other actions via federal court mandates — there is always the budget and the power of the purse where Congress can intervene.

With that in mind, Congress could act preemptively, and defund what it can in the April continuing resolution, particularly controversial items the left is likely to sue over, to strengthen the President’s hand.

READ ENTIRE COLUMN

Robert Romano is the senior editor of Americans for Limited Government.

Ryan Zinke, Donald Trump’s Pick for Interior Secretary, and the Rising American Land Movements

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

...Those wells are mostly on one side of a sharp political and economic divide. In this year’s election, Hillary Clinton won just under five hundred of America’s roughly three thousand counties. But those five-hundred-odd counties were populous enough that she received the most votes cast for President; even more striking, as the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley found, those few Clinton counties are responsible for more than two-thirds of national G.D.P. The news from rural America, shrouded by the opiate crisis, has been almost unstintingly bleak. Still, squint at those drilling rigs and you can imagine a future. The American economy is now mostly arranged around people, but in rural places hopes for prosperity are often vested in the land. This week, President-elect Donald Trump announced that his nominee for Interior Secretary will be Ryan Zinke, a fifty-five-year-old congressman from Montana. Zinke, who was a football player and geology major at the University of Oregon, spent nearly a quarter century as a Navy SEAL, before entering the Montana Senate, in 2009, and the U.S. House, last year. As a politician, Zinke has played up his military record, with some swagger: his official Twitter feed has referred to him as Commander Zinke, and, as Dan Brooks pointed out in the Times Magazine, he has preferred to punctuate exchanges with figures such as Wolf Blitzer with the naval salutation “bravo zulu.” Now, if confirmed by the Senate, Zinke stands to oversee the management and use of roughly a fifth of the land in the United States. Zinke’s perspective on public lands has been moderate, at least for the post-Tea Party era. He does not favor selling them off (though he would like to see more extraction). He is convinced that the climate is changing (though he has been more equivocal about the degree of human culpability). “You know, if you go up to Glacier Park and you have your lunch on one of the glaciers, you will see the glacier recede while you eat lunch,” Zinke said last year. For generations, the Interior Department has worked amid the tension between the promise of preservation and the promise of jobs, emphasizing conservation during Democratic Administrations and extraction during Republican ones. But those pressures are more poignant now, when the bleakness of rural places has deepened, when the shale towns provide examples of how a boom can grip a desolate place, and the land is the vector for hope. During the past year, two prophetic movements have swept the American West, ideologically distinct but with a common focus on the government’s use of Western land. In January, Ammon Bundy led a right-wing armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in eastern Oregon. “While we’re here,” he said, “what we’re going to be doing is freeing these lands up and getting the ranchers back to ranching, and getting the miners back to mining, getting the loggers back to logging.” LaDonna Brave Bull Allard led the left-wing resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, which began in the spring, arguing that government-approved development would poison and desecrate sacred lands. “It is the U.S. Army Corps that is allowing these sites to be destroyed,” Allard wrote in September. The two movements shared a spiritual investment in the land, and a conviction that the federal government both misunderstood its proper uses and was diverting its worth to distant people. One of the stranger details from the long saga of Standing Rock is that Cliven Bundy’s wife and children once tried to join the protest...more