Latest Land Sale Proposal From Utah Senator Panned

Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee’s latest attempt to get his land disposal proposal around Congressional rules still stinks.

“It’s still a pile of dog sh*t, it’s just a different pile of dog sh*t.”

That’s the review from Randy Newberg, the Montana elk hunting and public land advocate and podcaster who got a look last night at Lee’s revision after the Senate parliamentarian earlier this week said the previous edition couldn’t be stuffed into the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, per Democrats on the committee Lee chairs.

While Lee’s proposal now excludes U.S. Forest Service lands, Newberg vows to not stop banging the drums against it. “He doesn’t get it. We’re not giving up.”

That’s because according to a draft of the updated bill posted by Outdoor Life, it still aims to dispose of up to 1.225 million-plus acres of Bureau of Land Management ground that is “within 5 miles of a population center” for “local housing needs (including housing supply and affordability) or any infrastructure and amenities to support local needs associated with housing.”

As author Andrew McKean points out, the phrase “population center” is not defined.

Does that mean Wenatchee, or would that include Carlton and Methow too? Just Redmond, or Culver and Paisley as well? Five miles as measured from city hall, the post office or the exterior edge of city limits?

The National Wildlife Federation speculates it “could include anything from a municipality to a handful of 40-acre ranchettes dozens of miles from any town.” That would fold in clusters of cabins, abodes and houses such as those up Moses Coulee and east of Oroville and outside Sunriver.

“However, these BLM lands are often the most important for people that recreate, and often provide vital mule deer, pronghorn, and other wildlife habitat – land that clearly is not suitable for housing,” states NWF’s David Willms, associate vice president for public lands.

Willms terms Lee’s latest plan a “smokescreen to sell public lands to the highest bidder under the guise of fixing the housing policy. Millions of hunters, anglers, and other public lands users have spoken up: not one acre of public land should be sold through the budget reconciliation process.”

Amenities also go undefined. Cue more photo posts of hunters glassing Western landscapes accompanied by sarcastic claims it would be a good place for a carwash.

For his part, Lee tweeted yesterday, “I’m still listening. I’m working closely with the Trump administration to ensure that any federal land sales serve the American people – not foreign governments, not the Chinese Communist Party, and not massive corporations looking to pad their portfolios. This land must go to American families. Period.”

His proposal now specifically withdraws BLM livestock grazing permits or leases from disposal, and it limits the selloff to between .25 and .50 percent of the federal agency’s holdings in 11 Western states outside Montana. The low end amounts to 612,000 acres, per NWF, which is about 956 square miles, or the equivalent of Western Washington’s Mason County or about the size of Lincoln County on the Oregon Coast.

It also now would set aside up to 10 percent of disposal proceeds to go to “hunting, fishing, and recreational amenities” on BLM land.

In its review of the proposal, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation found troubling language.

“RMEF reviewed the newest public land sales language & we encourage it be excluded from the budget bill. A new concern is language referencing ‘reducing the checkerboard’ by selling the public squares. Trading poor access for no access is not progress,” the venerable hunter conservation organization tweeted Wednesday afternoon.

There’s an existing process for selling public lands to achieve some of his purported aims, but unloading any amount or percentage of public ground to states or local governments under this end-around scheme doesn’t fly whatsoever with the Sportsmen’s Alliance.

“Let’s be clear. What sportsmen and women want is zero acres of public land sold off as a result of backroom deals done during budget reconciliation. Zero means zero. Anything more than zero will be remembered as an ‘F’ come election time. Senator Lee and others may call this ‘unreasonable’ until the cows come home, but what IS unreasonable is trying to jam through a major policy shift on public lands during budget reconciliation,” SA posted this morning.

The organization terms it poison and states, “There is no good version of poison, period.”

The fight against the proposal is also bringing different faces to the campfire.

“No matter how many times, or how many ways, Senator Lee reintroduces this legislation, it will not change the fact that the American people are dead set against selling off our public lands,” Defenders of Wildlife’s Vera Smith, director of the national forests and public lands program, said in an unsolicited emailed statement. “America’s iconic wildlife like pronghorn and sage-grouse depend on public lands and selling them off to pay for giveaways to billionaires is unconscionable.” 

Sportsmen and other public land users are being strongly encouraged by Backcountry Hunters and Anglers to “flood the lines” today to tell their Congressmen “Our public lands are not for sale.”

“All gas, no brakes,” urges a Randy Newberg video posted Monday.