President Bush’s proposed 2007 budget includes provisions for the sale of almost $1 Billion worth of public lands. The proposal is intended to raise funds for the federal treasury, or more specifically, to replace funding for rural roads and schools eliminated from the 2007 budget. If Congress approves, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management would have mandatory sales targets, something never seen before.
Link
The proposed numbers are truly staggering.
The administration has set its sights on selling over 300,000 acres of Forest Service land in 32 states and more than 500,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management lands in the West.
While the sale of public lands is not without precedent, looking to such sales as a source of substantial revenues breaks new ground.
The FY 2007 budget gives the BLM a $182 million revenue target over the years from 2007 through 2011. Then, in the years 2008 through 2016 the BLM’s mandatory revenue target is an additional $351 million.
Leshy said lands approaching the size of the state of Rhode Island would have to be sold off to meet the 2007-2011 targets. “It’s bad policy,” said Leshy. “Federal lands are our natural heritage and they should not be used as a cookie jar. It is clear that Americans want more land conservation not less.”
In the past, sales of public lands have been done on an as needed basis in the interest of making agency management easier. Typically it was done with cooperation at the local level. But that is not so here.
At a press conference Tuesday organized by the Wilderness Society a former solicitor with the U.S. Department of the Interior, and professor of law at University of California-Hastings said the BLM routinely makes adjustments in land holdings, buying and selling small parcels in consultation with local communities. But John Leshy said the FY 2007 budget mandates a different process, “not locally driven, but driven by money targets.” “This process is top down, and it doesn’t cut local communities in,” he said.
So, tax cuts will be made for the rich while federal agencies will be made to sell the very thing they protect, for want of adequate funding.
The list of potential sale parcels is here.
This outrageous proposal requires our input. Please call your Congress Critter at (888) 355-3588 and state your ample disgust.
Operators are standing by.
Since I live out here within an easy drive of an hour and a half of Yellowstone and the Tetons National Parks, I have long been interested in the Repugs determination to sell of our treasures. They have been focused for 12 or more years on turning Yellowstone over to Corporate America. They have already done too much of that. They further want there to be high-end condos or ranches within the parks that the wealthy can own outright. Then there is there driving force of wanting to sell off all of the oil and mineral rights to these public lands. . .”just because the lands sort of belong to the people, don’t think the oil and mineral rights do. . .no sir, we need to sell these to the corporations and get all we can from them.”
Now my imagination does not want to go to the scene of oil wells pumping away amidst the natural wonders of Yellowstone.
These people are crazy!! Blinded by greed and nothing else.
Call, write or email your congress critters.
Yes, this is terrible. I grew up near a place where land was condemned for a new national recreation area. Families were promised verbally that their former land would never be sold, used for recreation and natural habitate forever. Under Bush, that promise has been broken. Land has been sold for resorts, plans put forward for sales to private developers for condos, homes, etc.