Debate Over Future of BLM Lands

Andy Stahl debates the DeFazio forest trust proposal with Douglas County (Roseburg) Commissioner Doug Robertson. Robertson also chairs the association of counties that collect revenues from the lands in question.

Instead of dividing the lands in two, Robertson proposes to give all the lands to a single board of trustees set up something like the collaborative stewardship groups that have sprung up around the country. “Tens of thousands of acres” would be available for wilderness (instead of the roughly 1.2 million acres of land preserved under the DeFazio plan) and timber could be rationed out more slowly, providing counties with a more even flow of revenues.


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Meanwhile, the Eugene Register-Guard opines points out that “Current federal forest policy isn’t working.” So the DeFazio plan might not be too bad because it could “provide county funding” and “bring peace to Western Oregon forests.”

The Antiplanner understands that the motivation behind trying to find a new approach is the desire for county funding. But this is too bad because the counties really don’t deserve that money–no other counties in the nation get so much from federal lands. I am also not fond of the New Zealand solution (dividing up lands into some that will be logged and some that will be preserved), preferring to let the market decide how lands will be managed through user fees, with some safeguards for non-market resources (see my trust paper for details). But I am glad somebody is talking about fiduciary trusts, which are a better way to manage public lands, especially in a world of shrinking federal dollars.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

9 Responses to Debate Over Future of BLM Lands

  1. Frank says:

    Just about any system would be an improvement over the corrupt BLM.

  2. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Allow me to be the devil’s advocate here.

    I live in a small state in the East – we have no Forest Service lands and no BLM lands either.

    But we do pay federal taxes, so implicitly as federal taxpayers, we have some sort of ownership stake in federal lands across the nation. How does this benefit us as federal taxpayers?

  3. Andy Stahl says:

    C.P. asks “How does this benefit us as federal taxpayers?” Rep. DeFazio points to two benefits. First are the over $100 million in tax appropriations currently used to finance BLM’s western Oregon operations. These would cease under the two trusts proposal. Second, DeFazio proposes to allocate a portion of the timber lease payments to the federal Treasury.

    Lands in both fiduciary trusts would remain as public land, available for recreational access, e.g., hunting, fishing and camping.

  4. Frank says:

    The perpetuating myth that removing public lands from political management means locking them up. Public lands administered by trusts remain public. Just because the Met and Monticello are private, that doesn’t mean the public can’t access them. The same is true for many of the 1,700 land trusts that have conserved 37 million acres of land in America.

    Public access is not dependent on government ownership and mismanagement.

  5. LazyReader says:

    Speaking of lands, did anyone feel the Earthquake?

  6. Frank says:

    Not in Seattle. I was hoping the Pentagon would be permanently evacuated, but alas, so much for hope.

  7. metrosucks says:

    Unfortunately Frank, it would probably just give them an excuse to build a backup Pentagon in space.

  8. Frank says:

    Yes, to prevent the space alien invasion imagined by Krugman. That’ll revitalize our phony economy!

  9. irandom says:

    I was getting attached to the no cut policy. I was hoping that the built up fuel would cause most of the public lands to burn to a cinder because of all that global warming stuff.

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