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Opinion
Make preservation initiative part of comprehensive public land reform
©Arizona Daily Sun
7/20/2005
It is, of course, welcome news that key state trust lands around Flagstaff still remain on a preservation list drafted by a coalition of conservation and business groups seeking a state ballot initiative.
But the fact that such local land use decisions will be made by voters in Phoenix or Tucson highlights the continuing need for comprehensive public land reform in not only Arizona but also the entire West. Piecemeal preservation of state holdings without accounting for future uses of federal, tribal and private lands in the region can only perpetuate the litigious and confrontational approach to land issues that have wracked the West for more than a century.
It hasn't always been so. As historians of the West are now coming to understand, the violent history of the region has been much overstated in movies and novels. Ranchers and farmers, even after the invention of barbed wire, generally worked out their differences peacefully. Gun-toting cattle rustlers and bank robbers were no more common, on a per capita basis, than modern-day criminals, and local sheriffs and judges involved themselves primarily in settling disputes over property lines and personal debts.
The real violence, as historians point out, was against American Indian tribes after the Civil War. The federal government used the Army to seize tribal lands, brutally relocate entire tribes, and enforce coerced treaties that, without land ownership rights, make most tribes today dependent on gaming revenues and government subsidies.
As for the rest of the West, federal and state governments not only retained ownership of hundreds of millions of acres -- unlike back East -- but squeezed private interests out of the land-use decisionmaking process. Absent a public seat at the table, mining, ranching and timber interests were forced to cut backroom deals that bred wasteful and ecologically harmful natural resource policies.
Today, the rulemaking has been transferred from the backroom to the courtroom, with conservationists and recreationists joining the fray. The Forest Service can hold all the open houses it wants and publish innumerable EIS reports by neutral consultants, but the fact remains that there is no representative, democratic process when it comes to allocating the single biggest resource in the West: land.
Skeptics might argue that opening federal and state lands to control by local or regional citizen councils fails to recognize that such lands are held in trust for all U.S. citizens. We say that's baloney. The vast majority of public lands in the West hold no special significance that qualify them for federal or even statewide protection. They were assigned to the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service or the Department of Defense as a matter of convenience. Most lands with outstanding natural, cultural or historic features have already been designated for protection. It's time to turn over the rest to communities that depend on maintaining a working landscape -- including recreation -- and vital, diverse economies.
In Flagstaff, for example, a major factor in high housing costs is scarce land -- federal and state holdings hem in the city on three sides. The boundaries for those lands haven't changed in nearly a century, and only through piecemeal and complex land swaps have even small adjustments been made.
The latest state lands initiative is part of a decade-long attempt to make some sense of 9 million acres that sit checkerboarded among federal and private lands. It seeks to amend the constitution to allow some lands to be preserved from development without generating any income for state schools. Others, such as Observatory Mesa or Rogers Lake in the Flagstaff region, would be offered to public agencies for purchase as open space. The rest -- more than 8 million acres -- eventually would be auctioned off for private ownership and eventual development.
That last phase, however, presents problems. Much of the trust lands, because they are in state ownership, have not been zoned or made part of regional plans, nor have the federal checkerboard parcels that sit next to them. Some public lands might make ideal housing subdivisions, others essential wildlife migration corridors. Some should house wind turbines, others should house families.
As it stands, however, there is no mechanism in place, either among government agencies or certainly not among local elected bodies, to coordinate such a massive shift in ownership and use. The result is a well-intentioned statewide initiative that nevertheless threatens to open a Pandora's Box of unaccountable and uncoordinated sales to the highest bidders. Lands controlled by the Forest Service and the tribes, meanwhile, remain completely off the table when it comes to meaningful local planning and control.
Is there a way out of the maze? We think there is, and one example, as we've noted in this space before, is the work the Diablo Trust and Coconino County planners are doing east of Flagstaff on a multi-use plan that includes ranching, wind energy, water development and wildlife protection. The plan is being coordinated by a non-profit, but it still must depend on unaccountable public land managers who administer the land leases to make it work. Ideally, those land managers would answer to an elected body that would set region-wide land uses as well as benchmarks for sustainable economic growth. But for now, the Diablo Trust effort is a good start.
As with any sea change in government, the proposals above aren't going to start with the bureaucrats or even the higher elected officials whose turf is threatened. It will be bipartisan groups like the Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership and Diablo Trust along with locally elected city councils and boards of supervisors that can effect grassroots land use reform. We applaud the groups, from builders and bird-lovers, who have come together to start down the road toward state trust land changes. But we urge them not to stop there.
Learning from the land and sharing our knowledge...
So there will always be a West.