The following occurred during the May 14th Missoula meeting. When Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Region 2 Supervisor Mack Long asked for help “developing the issues and concerns out there with bison management,” about 40 people gave an hour and a half of their time to air their thoughts. The audience included a number of ranchers and landowners wearing anti-bison buttons as well as a lot of hunters and wildlife advocates who favored adding another wild ungulate to Montana’s public land.

By fall 2013, a draft environmental impact statement should be available for official public review and comment. A final decision, which could OK bison release or shelve the idea entirely, could arrive around the end of 2014.

To read more, visit here.

Gates Watson of The Conservation Fund said the group bought the land from the Brink family that was homestead by Nellie (Brink) Whitcraft in 1925.

“It’s been for sale for some time,” said Watson. “We started talking with the BLM and Brink family last year.”

He said the family’s real estate agent started seeking other buyers after failing to interest an adjacent landowner in the property. Watson said the BLM is buying the land from the conservation group for $425,000, or about $652 an acre.

Monument manager Gary Slagel on Tuesday signed off on the agreement to buy the land in Fergus County from the conservation group. The conservation group is holding the land until the BLM can write a check.

Friends of the Missouri River Breaks supported the deal.

“The public right to access is now protected,” said Hugo Tureck, a Friends board member.

The property is along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail and the Nez Perce Historic Trail, and near the Judith Landing on the Missouri River. It’s surrounded by state and federal land between the Judith River and Arrow Creek, with some river frontage.

The 590-square-mile monument was created in 2001 by President Bill Clinton. The monument follows the only free-flowing part of the Missouri River along the route explored by Lewis and Clark in the early 1800s.

The BLM did an environmental assessment while considering the land purchase. The assessment found that “adjacent public land receives substantial recreation use, especially by outfitters, probably because it is easily accessible from the river and is secluded, shady and close to the boat launch at Judith Landing. The adjacent state of Montana land has a frequently used undeveloped camp site referred to as Flat Rock (or the Wagon Bed).”

People opposed to the BLM purchasing the land said government shouldn’t acquire land and were concerned about tax losses.

Read the full article here.

All told, land trusts control almost 40 million acres of land throughout the U.S. with at least nine million of this amount held in conservation easements, according to the Land Trust Alliance. TNC figures most prominently into this equation as it controls over three million acres in conservation easements, according to congressional testimony. They are described as “powerful, effective tools” on the TNC web site and that much is true. But the selfless, benevolent motives TNC attaches to its vigorous pursuit of easements in its public relations pitch belie its own financial incentives and its relationship with government officials, policy analysts and private property advocates have observed.

Conservation easements are legally-binding agreements between property owners and nonprofit organizations such as a land trust or government agency that restrict development in exchange for tax benefits. The property owner who sells the easement maintains partial ownership but relinquishes certain rights to use the property for development. The purchasing entity holds interest in the property and oversees the restrictions.

Although private land trusts worked effectively with property owners to preserve land in early to mid 20th Century, some of larger non-profit environmental organizations dramatically altered this altrustic approach toward easements as a consequence of the “suspect relationships” they entered into with government agencies, Dana Joel Gattuso, a scholar with the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), has argued.

“Any chance conservation easements have in being effective stewards of land is lost when land trusts cease to work as independent, private organizations obtaining easements through purely voluntary means and become agents of governing aiding in public land acquisitions,” she wrote. “Yet land trusts, particularly the larger organizations, are changing their focus from independent and private approaches to working in tandem with government agencies in an effort to assist government in obtaining private lands.”

“From Maine to California, conservation easements protect open space and enhance the quality of life in rapidly growing urban and suburban areas,” TNC claims on its site. “Conservation easements preserve agricultural lands, from family farms to ranches to timberlands. And easement lands on which use is restricted to agriculture often generate more in local revenues than they require in community services.”

Conservation easements are individually tailored to protect targeted conservation values and to meet the landowner’s needs,” TNC continues. “Many types of private land use, such as farming, ranching and timber harvesting, can continue under the terms of a conservation easement. The easement may require the landowner to take certain actions to protect land and water resources, such as fencing a stream to keep livestock out.”

To the extent easements are “individually tailored,” they are often done in a way that constrains and restricts private enterprise while empowering government-backed environmentalists, Karen Bulich Moreau, a New York attorney, warns.

Federal, state and local land use policies provide environmental groups with an unfair advantage, she explained in an interview. Green non-profit groups work very closely with government officials and lobby successfully for grant money so they can promote conservation easements in local zoning ordinances, she said. Those who wish to subdivide and sell a building lot are only permitted to do so if they surrender their rights on their remaining land to government entities or non-profits through mandatory conservation easements, Moreau continued. In New York, this is known as a “conservation subdivision,” which is hardly voluntary.

“It’s what you call a quiet exaction of rights, a malignant method of taking private land,” she said. “It’s tragic because the most financially vulnerable people in the private sector are being run over by our government policies. These landowners may be convinced that selling or donating a conservation easement is their only way to keep the family farm going, because they are already burdened with high property taxes, dire economic conditions, and the threat of losing the farm through estate taxation. If the environmental groups were truly concerned about open space preservation, they would use their enormous clout to lobby for estate and property tax relief, instead of mechanisms which result in diminished rights of private ownership. The most serious problem with conservation easements is that they typically restrict land forever, and the generation who restricts their property rights today may be inadvertently depriving their heirs, the next generation of farmers or forest owners, of the ability to do business in the future.”

Under this arrangement, the door is open to outside environmental groups to sue to enforce the terms of the easement, should they oppose a landowner’s interpretation of farming practices.

“In addition to restricting land through conservation easements, a pattern has developed in New York State where groups like the Nature Conservancy purchase large blocks of private forest land ‘in fee,’ meaning full ownership rights,” Moreau added. “They make the purchase having already made a sweetheart deal with the state of New York to purchase it from the Nature Conservancy in the short term, at a price exceeding by millions of dollars what the nature conservancy paid for the property. In effect, taxpayers are involuntarily subsidizing a wealthy private non-profit environmental group. Despite declining real estate values of the past few years, TNC has turned a handsome profit on its transactions by shrewdly exploiting its relationship with compliant government officials.”

The bottom line here is that TNC is not satisfied with just a couple hundred thousand acres, instead it wants the whole pie.

“Once millions of acres are removed from the private sector, this can change the economics of an entire region, as shown by the crippled Adirondack economy,” Moreau said. “I really believe the best stewards of property are the private owners, the people who have bought the property with their hard earned money. In most cases, there is an incentive for the farmer or private forest owner to take care of the land because the better they take care of it, the more it produces over a long period of time. Once the government gets involved there are too many different agendas that interfere with productive enterprises, and typically a lack of expertise in land management.”

To read the rest of the article, visit NetRight Daily by clicking here.

Today our needs are much different and much greater. The United States can no longer afford to keep tens of millions of acres of “public” land locked up and out of service. Some of these lands have great commercial value; others are environmental treasures. We need policies capable of distinguishing between the two.

Few Easterners realize the immense magnitude of the public lands. The federal government’s holdings include about 58 million acres in Nevada, or 83% of the state’s total land mass; 45 million acres in California (45% of the state); 34 million acres in Utah (65%); 33 million acres in Idaho (63%); and more than a fourth of all the land in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming.

Most public land decisions are made by two federal agencies, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and involve matters such as the number of cows that will be allowed to graze, the areas available to off-road recreational vehicles, the prevention and fighting of forest fires, the building of local roads, the amount of timber harvesting, the leasing of land for oil and gas drilling, mineral rights and other such details. Outside the rural West, most such decisions are made by private landowners or by state and local governments. In the West, Washington acts as if it knows best.

Like other grand designs of the “progressive” era, public land policy has failed the test of time. Public lands have not been managed efficiently to maximize national benefits but instead in response to political pressures.

Past mismanagement has turned many national forests into flammable tinderboxes where intense crown fires reaching to the top of the trees — once a rarity — consume entire forests.

Rural Westerners receive significant financial benefits when the federal government pays for many of their local roads and conservation services and provides many high-paying local federal jobs. Increasingly, however, they are questioning the trade-offs involved.

Daniel Kemmis, the former Democratic speaker and minority leader of the Montana House and onetime mayor of Missoula, the state’s second-largest city, has lamented that “our public lands … are burdened by a steadily more outdated regulatory and governing framework,” which he describes as a “frustrating, alienating bureaucratic paternalism.”

Professor Sally Fairfax of UC Berkeley observed that the creation of the national forests established “a relationship between the national government and the Western states that is usefully described as colonial.” Little has changed, even as the federal system has become more and more dysfunctional.

The fact is that probably no more than 20% of the tens of millions of acres of public lands are nationally important, requiring federal oversight and protection. This includes 45 million acres of Forest Service and BLM lands in the national wilderness system and other environmentally special areas such as BLM’s Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in southern Utah.

An additional 60%, perhaps, are ordinary lands, used principally for recreational purposes, such as hiking, hunting, fishing and off-road-vehicle use. Most of the remaining public lands are useful primarily for commercial purposes, such as the timber-rich forests in the Pacific Northwest.

A rational public lands policy more suited to current and future needs would put the nationally important lands into a newly reorganized federal environmental protection system. Ordinary recreational lands would be managed at the state and local level, perhaps by transferring them to local counties. What better steward of a local recreation area than the people who live in the area?

The commercially most valuable lands, meanwhile, would be transferred to new ownership or put under long-term federal leases. Lands that have real commercial value could produce a double benefit: revenue from leases and land sales, and additional revenue from the jobs, minerals, oil, gas, lumber and other commodities the freed-up lands would produce.

It is time to end outdated federal land policies that are draining our country’s wealth, tying up valuable resources in red tape and bureaucracy, and harming the environment. The transition to a new system would take time, but it might reasonably be completed over a 10-year period, the same time frame Washington is using for deficit-reduction planning.

Robert H. Nelson, who worked on public land issues in the office of the secretary of the Interior from 1975 to 1993, is a professor of environmental policy at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland. This essay is adapted from a longer article in the current issue of Policy Review.

The article can be read here.

“While it appears that the EPA was finally forced to make the right decision, what’s got Montana sportsmen and women concerned is that it took them this long.  Frankly, this idea should have been laughed out of the room, and we should never have wasted scare tax dollars exploring the possibility of onerous new EPA regulations on fishing tackle.  No wonder folks are worried that soon there will not be any part of our lives that the EPA doesn’t want to regulate, control or change.  We won today, but we’re going to keep fighting until the EPA also decides against regulating ammunition.”

Rehberg has also cosponsored the Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, which requires a vote on every new major rule issued by an Administration agency to ensure Congress resumes the legislative accountability granted by the Constitution and the responsibility for Congressional decisions intended by our founders.

NCBA Past President Bill Donald, a rancher in Montana, says cattlemen oppose the requirement to maintain viable populations of species of conservation concern. He said there is no scientific consensus on what level of any given population is viable or how it is to be managed.

To read the rest of the article, visit here.

WASHINGTON – U.S. Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) issued the following statement after Senator Jon Tester’s (D-MT) introduction of S.2042, legislation to track and report on tax-payer subsidies for lawsuits against the government:

“The fact that Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) payments has operated under a cloak of secrecy for the last 17 years is widely accepted to be a problem.  Users of
EAJA, including veterans, seniors and environmental organizations, collectively
agree this program should be subject to tracking and reporting requirements.  So
I find it odd that Sen. Tester would introduce a bill to track only half of EAJA
payments.

“In 2010 I introduced H.R. 4717, the Open EAJA Act of 2010, legislation that would
comprehensively track and report on EAJA payments made government wide.
Although Sen. Tester was invited to become a cosponsor in the Senate, he
refused.

“Between the initial introduction of the 2010 bill, and the recent introduction of my bill to improve and modernize the program, H.R. 1996, the Government Litigation Savings Act, a compelling body of evidence has been compiled on EAJA payments.  We now know that EAJA was written for veterans, retirees and small business and that EAJA payments are flowing to those groups as intended.  We also know that EAJA payments are flowing to large, well-funded environmental groups, which was not the intent of EAJA.

“Environmental groups have environmental laws that give them the right to sue, settle, and receive tax-payer subsidies to their heart’s content.  Conversely, EAJA provides for the nation’s veterans and seniors and small business owners.  We do not need the incomplete data that would be provided by Senator Tester’s bill to know that today, environmental groups unfairly use both avenues to pad the coffers of
their litigation shops.  What we do need is legislation to return EAJA to its
intended purpose – reimbursement for lawsuits not already provided for by other
laws.  We also need to understand specific details regarding EAJA payments so we
know if it is working for the people it was intended to serve.

“I had assumed the Senator, as I am, was interested in understanding exactly how EAJA works for seniors and veterans.  Unfortunately, Senator Tester’s bill does not require tracking or reporting for the section of EAJA chiefly responsible for the
payment of legal representation for our nation’s veterans and seniors.  Even if
he ignores the fact that EAJA is for seniors and veterans, and environmental
laws are for environmentalists, I’m still confounded as to why Sen. Tester
wouldn’t want to track the entirety of EAJA payments.

“I call on Sen. Tester to abandon his legislation, and support comprehensive tracking of EAJA payments and clarify the line between EAJA and environmental laws.”

Background:
The Equal Access to Justice Act
(EAJA) was passed by Congress in 1980, establishing two methods by which
individuals or groups could recover the costs of suing the federal
government.

• The first method is through agency proceedings, codified under Title 5, Section 504 of U.S. Code.  It provides payments for adjudicatory proceedings within the agency themselves, as opposed to courts proceedings.
• The EAJA required the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) to track these payments and report on them to Congress.
• In 1994, Congress defunded ACUS without transferring the responsibility of tracking EAJA payments to another agency.
• The second method to recover EAJA fees is through court proceedings, codified in Title 28, Section 2412(d) of U.S. Code.
• The EAJA directed the Department of Justice to track these payments and report them to Congress.
• In 1994, The Paperwork Reduction Act eliminated the DoJ’s tracking and reporting responsibility for EAJA payments.
• In March of 2010, U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis (WY-R) and then-Representative Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (SD-D) introduced H.R. 4717(Open EAJA Act of 2010).  This legislation, along with its mirror legislation in the Senate (S. 3122), would have reinstated tracking and reporting of both Title 5 and Title 28 of EAJA. It also required that the online reporting provide more detailed information on who receives EAJA payments, and to what amount, but left the remaining EAJA law intact.  Sen. Tester refused to support that legislation.
• Following a year of study on court documents and IRS filings, Rep. Lummis and U.S. Senator John Barrasso (WY-R) introduced the Government Litigation Savings Act (GLSA).  The GLSA (H.R. 1996, S. 1061) requires comprehensive tracking and reporting of both Title 5 and Title 28 of EAJA, and consolidates the tracking and reporting within the newly reconstituted ACUS.
• GLSA requires ACUS to track the payments, and provide an annual online database that allows the public to search EAJA payments.  The GLSA requires the report to indicate which groups received EAJA payments, for what amount and for what purpose.
• On January 30, 2012, Sen. Tester introduced a bill requiring only partial tracking of EAJA payments (S. 2042).
• S. 2042 requires the DoJ to track and report only Title 28 (court awarded EAJA payments).  S. 2042 does not require tracking Title 5 payments, those most likely to go to veterans and seniors.
• S. 2042 does not require the DoJ provide in its report anything other than a total of EAJA payments over which the DoJ has jurisdiction, rendering the data meaningless.

The “no-action” alternative would eliminate all snowmobile and snowcoach travel in the park after the end of the current winter season. A second alternative looks at continuing winter operations at the present temporary limits, plus analysis of limited access for
snowmobile users without guides. Under a third alternative, park roads from West Yellowstone and Mammoth Hot Springs to Old Faithful would be plowed to allow
commercially operated, wheeled vehicles into the park. Also under consideration is a proposal to phase out snowmobiles and allow motorized entry by snowcoaches alone. This alternative includes analysis of closing the park’s East Entrance over Sylvan Pass to motorized oversnow use.

Two other draft alternatives would take a new and different approach to winter use: Regulating park entry according to the sound levels created by snowcoaches or guided snowmobile groups, rather than by specific numbers of snowcoaches or snowmobiles. One of these alternatives also assesses the effects of two-week “shoulder seasons,”
where entrance to the park during the first two and last two weeks of the season would be by wheeled vehicles or rubber-tracked snowcoaches. Click here to read the rest of the article.

The Park service will be holding open houses during the scoping period to answer questions about winter use issues, draft alternatives, and the process of preparing the Supplemental EIS. The meetings schedule is listed below.

Monday, Feb. 13th in Cody WY: Holiday Inn, 1702 Sheridan Ave
Tuesday, Feb. 14th in Jackson WY: The Virginian Lodge, 750 W. Broadway
Wednesday, Feb. 15th in West Yellowstone MT: Holiday Inn, 315 Yellowstone Ave.
Thursday, Feb. 16th in Bozeman MT: Holiday Inn Baxter Lane

All four open houses will run from 6:30 P.M. to 8:30 P.M.

Visit here to comment and learn more or comment by writing to: Winter Use Supplemental EIS, P.O. Box 168, Yellowstone National Park WY 82190.