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On June 10, 2006 I shared, yet again, warnings and misgiving about a piece of legislation called the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act (SNPLMA). I wrote:
[The appended editorial .. basically suggests that we cash out all of America's public lands. It might not say that in as many words, but it says that nevertheless. It also points to SNPLMA as the model for this sell-off.
I'd just like to remind folks that while a few of us have continually spoken in opposition to that model .... many environmental/ conservation groups ACTIVELY supported it.]
This week, the New York Times published on this topic a lengthy article titled "Public Lands: Nevada Learns to Cash In on Sales of Federal Land". A much condensed version appears below along with a link to the original.
Last June 10 I asked my readers, "What is it about slippery slopes and wet paint...???"
 Today I repeat myself and make my questions clearer and more pointed. Why must the conservation community blunder onto every slippery slope presented to it? Why does it feel compelled to rub its hands into things grassroots activists have painstakingly identified and labeled as 'wet paint'?? Why has the big-green conservation community permitted itself to become so damned destructive to the environment and to become such a reliable facilitator of the commercialization and privatization of America's shared, public, commons???
Oh, one last point -- Enviros and Democrats are NOT the only ones responsible for this fiasco. The wise-use, anti-environmental, American Recreation Coalition has consistently been a strong supporter of SNPLMA and is encouraging Richard Pombo, Harry Reid and their other friends in Congress to EXPAND the SNPLMA model. From the get-go, the ARC supported SNPLMA as a mechanism for funding the expansion of their preferred forms of commercialized, privatized and motorized recreation. No one has any right to be surprised at the way things have turned out.
Scott
--MUCH CONDENSED FROM THE ORIGINAL--
The New York Times
December 3, 2007
Public Lands
Nevada Learns to Cash In on Sales of Federal Land
By JESSE McKINLEY and GRIFFIN PALMER
LAS VEGAS — When it opens in 2009, the Clark County Shooting Park will
be something to behold, through a scope or otherwise: hundreds of acres
devoted to all things gun and bow, complete with a rifle range, a skeet
center and an R.V. “host area.”
The coming Craig Ranch Regional Park, due in 2010, should be impressive
too, with plans calling for an amphitheater, an aquatics center and
sand volleyball courts, all wound around native gardens and wetlands.
Much of the financing for the projects has not come from familiar
sources, like local taxes, bond issues or private donations. Instead,
they are being paid for through the sales of public lands owned by the
federal government.
Tens of thousands of acres of federal lands in the Las Vegas area have
been sold under an unusual law pushed through Congress nearly a decade
ago by the Nevada delegation. The sales have grossed nearly $3 billion
and counting.
Because of a stipulation created by the Nevada legislators, the money
has not been deposited into the general federal Treasury, but rather
put in a special Treasury account to be spent almost exclusively in
Nevada on a something-for-everyone collection of projects.
Critics argue that the sales help pay for the infrastructure that then supports more expansion.
“Fundamentally, we’re talking about selling public lands which belong
to all Americans and giving the proceeds back to local counties for
what would ostensibly be conservation projects,” said Myke Bybee,
public lands representative for the Sierra Club in Washington. “But
those projects,” Mr. Bybee said, are not always “in keeping with
conservation.”
That said, in Nevada the law is widely seen by Republicans and
Democrats alike as paying off for most everyone at the table, a rarity
in a gambling town. Among the winners are developers — who now have
access to lands long deemed off-limits — and municipalities, which have
added dozens of new recreational amenities, thousands of new residents
to tax rolls, and improved the quality of life, all without raising
taxes.
Spreading the Wealth
In many ways the law, formally known as the Southern Nevada Public Land
Management Act of 1998, has created a new model for managing much of
the federally owned land in the West, which encompasses more than 80
percent of the state of Nevada and huge chunks of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming,
Arizona, California and Oregon. That model provides a faster way of
moving public lands into private hands, and encouraging growth into
inhospitable places, in this case, the Mojave Desert.
In each case, the central question has been what exactly do America’s
national lands represent: Are they expendable, tradeable, and now,
salable resources meant to be made private for the sake of progress and
individual gain? Or are they public treasures to be protected at all
costs, even when they are essentially arid wastelands?
In the Las Vegas area, the answer has increasingly been to sell. The
first of a wave of omnibus lands bills passed by a Republican-led
Congress, the Nevada law of 1998 was viewed as a pragmatic compromise
by environmental groups eager to guarantee the purchase and exchange of
fragile habitat.
Subsequent laws affecting other parts of Nevada — which brought
environmental groups, land owners and others into negotiations — have
coupled land sales with the designation of hundreds of thousands of
acres as wilderness. Those wilderness designations, which ban
development, were trumpeted by local lawmakers and welcomed even by
those who worried about land sales.
“We had a decision to make: Do we pursue this opportunity to protect
these special places or do we not?” said Jeremy Garncarz, the associate
director of wilderness support at the Wilderness Society. “And we made
the decision to pursue the opportunity to protect these places.”
But as the 1998 law has played out, some of its early supporters among
environmentalists have also soured on it. The Office of Management and
Budget, an arm of the White House, assessed the program in 2004 and
said that while it had been “fairly well run,” its revenues were
“increasingly being dedicated to low-priority activities.”
“The original concept was to allow private, environmentally sensitive
land to be bought more readily,” Jeff Van Ee, a longtime Nevada
environmentalist who helped lawmakers draw up the law. “But over the
years, what we’ve seen is the money going all over the place, and too
much money going to projects that should be funded through more
conventional means.”
Nevada lawmakers say it is unfair to view expenditures under the law as
a raid on the federal Treasury since the federal government is the
largest landowner in Nevada and should be expected to contribute to the
state’s economic well-being, just as big private land owners do in
other states.
Senator Reid also said that the improvements, including the money spent
on parks, trails and natural areas, were on facilities that the general
public could use. “All the money is used on public land,” he said. “It
doesn’t go onto the Las Vegas Strip.”
Before the 1998 public lands law, the government often converted land
to private hands through land exchanges. The deals were regularly
criticized by lawmakers and taxpayers, who thought the government gave
too much, and wilderness lovers, who thought they got too little.
Land sales, through acts like the 1980 Santini-Burton Act (which sold
small tracts of Las Vegas-area land to finance land purchases in the
Tahoe basin), were also laborious and the take often meager. A report
in September 2001 by the General Accounting Office found that the
Bureau of Land Management had sold 79,000 acres between 1991 and 2000
and received just $3 million.
Under the 1998 act, the sales have grossed nearly 1,000 times that
figure in the same amount of time — with less than half as much land.
One reason is timing: the auctions began just as the Las Vegas real
estate market heated up.
The proceeds took the law’s architects by surprise. The Congressional
Budget Office estimated in 1998 that the sales would gross some $350
million over seven years. But developers spent more than twice that on
a single day in November 2005, when 2,887 acres brought a record $783
million in bids. The majority of auction offerings have been parcels of
10 acres or less. But by 2002, a few large swaths of public lands, more
than 100 acres each, were starting to attract bids. At auctions in 2004
and 2005, three bidders bought a combined 10 square miles of land for
$1.7 billion for master-planned communities. These developments, often
with tens of thousands of units, effectively convert desert into
suburbia, complete with parks, artificial lakes, and preternaturally
green golf courses.
One of those master builders is John Ritter, chief executive of Focus
Property Group, who called the act “a tremendous success,” adding that
the fact that sale proceeds would be spent near the communities his
company built was an added bonus.
“It’s a well-thought-out way to release land,” said Mr. Ritter, whose
company paid $557 million for 1,940 acres at an auction in 2004.
Boat Ramps and Toilets
As quick as money flowed in to the special account, it flowed out. All
spending requires authorization by the secretary of the interior from
money held in an interest-bearing account, with recommendations from a
four-member committee representing four major agencies that receive
money from the act, the National Park Service, the United States Forest
Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land
Management.
Purchases receiving a green light have included a handsome array of
land considered environmentally sensitive, which can be recommended by
any interested group in the state, including nonprofit organizations
and private landholders.
Many projects have been focused on Lake Mead, on water pipes, boat
ramps and restrooms, as well as pleasantries like picnic tables and
campgrounds. But the land sales have also helped federal agencies
subsidize basic infrastructure needs, including phone lines, housing,
equipment shelters, road construction, fire stations, parking lots,
fencing and power supply.
Meanwhile, plans for similar land sales are moving forward elsewhere in
the West. Both of Nevada’s senators, Mr. Ensign and Mr. Reid, are
circumspect about the spoils or the concept being expanded elsewhere.
“Nevada is doing just fine,” said Mr. Reid, who posed at the
ground-breaking for the $64 million shooting range in October 2006.
“But I’m not going to be trying to be a missionary for people doing
this in other states.”
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