The public lands debate in western States is not new. In fact, the controversy dates back to the days when the West was in the public domain. I’ll discuss this history on my Public Lands in Wyoming page in more detail as I continue building this website.
In the meantime, Wyoming legislatures are actively working on a bill to amend the State constitution “to provide for the management of and public access to lands granted by the federal government to the state after January 1, 2019“. This bill is presently a working draft (17LSO-0179) and is available at http://legisweb.state.wy.us/interimCommittee/2016/17LSO-0179-0.7.pdf.
The Select Federal Natural Resource Management Committee’s Subcommittee on Public Lands will hold a hearing in Cheyenne on December 14, 2016 at 2:00 PM to take testimony and revise this draft bill. I encourage you to either attend the hearing or write Wyoming legislatures to express your views on this bill. The agenda for the meeting can be found at http://legisweb.state.wy.us/interimCommittee/2016/SFRAGD1214.pdf.
An interesting note about this bill, and the hearing, is the Wyoming legislature funded a study on the potential of Wyoming to manage Federal lands in the State. The recently released final study report can be found at http://slf-web.state.wy.us/osli/News/FinalStudyFedLand.pdf. I encourage you to read this report. The report is lengthy so I recommend you start with the Executive Summary.
The report clearly implies Wyoming legislatures would be ill-advised to continue down the path of “State management” of public lands yet they continue to do so. Tax dollars funded this study but it appears it is being ignored. Two noteworthy paragraphs in the study are:
- “The enormous variance in acreage, personnel, and infrastructure is not the greatest challenge to a transfer of management. Ultimately, without significant changes to federal law, the greatest challenge would be that the state would be inheriting the same bureaucratic maze of overlapping, entwined, often conflicting federal mandates established in the labyrinth of laws and directives laid out by Congress. These mandates and directives are frequently underfunded, contradictory, and may regularly and suddenly change according to the political whims of a particular year. The land management trials, conundrums, and conflicts encountered would largely be the same for the state that exist under present management.”
- “The seemingly impassable mountain of problems facing public lands management today may seem impossible. However, the resources of the State of Wyoming would be better utilized being directed at fixing the problems and working to encourage the development of a system more attentive and responsive to the voice of local communities instead of directing resources towards an effort that would ultimately merely pass on the myriad of problems that exist today to the state.”
The second paragraph is particularly intriguing and I’ve asked my legislators to not ignore the report but rather take heed of the words in this paragraph.
Contact information for the legislature can be found at http://legisweb.state.wy.us/LSOWEB/Default.aspx.
This hearing is only a few weeks away so time is of the essence. Pleases write these legislators soon.