RANGEfire! | Utah sues BLM to oversee management of its own public lands

Lincoln Brown

PJ Media

Utah Files Suit for Control of BLM Land

On Tuesday, Gov. Spencer Cox’s (R-Utah) office announced that the state had filed suit against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to gain control over 18.5 million acres currently under the agency’s control. According to a press release from the governor’s office, the state has asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a ruling on whether a federal agency can indefinitely control unappropriated land within a state.

In this case, the contested land is not national parks, monuments, wilderness areas, national forests, tribal lands, or military property. The case involves land that the BLM holds under the Federal Land Management Policy Act. The federal government is simply hanging on to the land but not for a specific purpose. The lands have never been designated as parks, refuges, wilderness, recreation areas, or anything. Attorney General Sean Reyes commented:

Today, we filed a historic lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to address whether the federal government can simply hold unappropriated lands within a state indefinitely. Nothing in the text of the Constitution authorizes such an inequitable practice. In fact, the Framers of the Constitution carefully limited federal power to hold land within states. Current federal land policy violates state sovereignty and offends the original and most fundamental notions of federalism.

If you live in Utah, especially in rural Utah, one of the running jokes is that “BLM” means something entirely different to you. Instead of Black Lives Matter, you are likely referring to the Bureau of Land Management, which exercises control over 18.5 million acres of land in the Beehive State. Most of the public land in Utah falls under one federal agency or another. Farmers, ranchers, and energy companies have long been at odds with the BLM and the environmental movement. The environmental movement is strong in Utah and backed by stacks of cash. One group even has a lobbying office in D.C.

When I was a reporter, I never went more than a day or two without some issue regarding the BLM cropping up. I used to live in an oil and gas country, and companies were also trying to develop oil shale and tar sands. There were places where the tar was literally seeping up through the ground, waiting to be extracted. However, many of those efforts were sidelined by lawsuits filed by the above-mentioned groups. One frustrated county commissioner explained it to me.

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