A map circulated by the Wilderness Society claims that vast swaths of Western public land — including nearly 15 million acres in Wyoming — could go up for sale.
That’s not the case, Wyoming Republican Congresswoman Harriet Hageman told Cowboy State Daily.
Some people are conflating the proposed sales process in a bill currently before a U.S. Senate committee with lands identified for potential sale or trade in already-existing U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) resource management plans, Hageman said.
For example, the map shows nearly all of the Bridger-Teton National Forest could potentially be sold, as well as a huge chunk of the Bighorn Mountain Range in northern Wyoming.
Even if the bill passed in its present form, only a tiny fraction of federal lands in Wyoming might go up for sale, she said. And those would mostly be parcels in or near communities that could be used for housing development.
The Wilderness Society stands by the accuracy of its map.
The map identifies lands that “are wholly separate classes of lands than those already identified in BLM RMPs and Forest Service Forest Plans for land disposal,” Julia Stuble, the Wilderness Society’s Wyoming state director, said in an email to Cowboy State Daily.
Wyoming attorney Ryan Semerad, who has handled public land access cases, said that regardless of the size and location of the parcels in question, the Senate bill could include lands that many Wyomingites enjoy.
The bill is based in the flawed premise of shifting the management of federal lands away from the public trust and toward private interests, he told Cowboy State Daily.
A Section Within A Bill Within A Bill
The source of the controversy is a measure before the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, chaired by Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee.
The measure is intended to be included in the budget reconciliation bill, the so-called One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act.
At issue is a subsection in pages 30-41 of the committee’s bill: “Mandatory Disposal of Bureau of Land Management Land and Forest system land for housing.”
The measure calls for ordering the secretary of the Interior, who oversees the BLM, and the secretary of Agriculture, who oversees the Forest Service, to identify tracts of federal land that could be put up for sale.
It would give the secretaries 60 days to do so, calling for each to identify 0.5% to 0.75% of the land in their jurisdictions in 11 Western states, including Wyoming.
They would have 30 days to post notifications calling for proposals from local governments within the affected areas, as well as the states’ governors and Native American tribes.
The lands would then be put up for sale.
Exemptions would be made for such things as national monuments or units of the national refuge system.
The measure would prioritize lands that have access to existing infrastructure, are suitable for residential housing, reduce “checkerboard” land patterns or are isolated and “inefficient to manage,” according to the bill’s text.
Not A Free-For-All, Hageman Says
Hageman said that some people might wrongly believe that the bill would lead to a free-for-all selling off of millions of acres of public land.
The intent of the measure is to focus on small parcels of BLM or Forest Service land that likely don’t have much value for outdoor recreation and could serve a better public purpose, such as affordable housing, she said.
By way of hypothetical example, if a new light-industry business set up shop in Powell, a 40-acre section of BLM land adjacent to town could be sold to a private entity, she said. Then housing could be built there to accommodate the influx of employees.
Lands that Wyomingites treasure for hunting or other outdoor recreation would go untouched, Hageman said.
She also noted that Las Vegas has parcels of undeveloped BLM land within city limits. So instead of filling those in, developers continue to push outward into land around the city.
Selling the BLM parcels inside Las Vegas city limits to private developers would mitigate sprawl, she said.
Hageman said that if Lee’s bill makes it to the U.S. House, she will consider whether to support it “without prejudice” and based upon facts, not the hype that’s blown up around it.
Bill Is A Bad Idea, Attorney Says
Semerad said the Wilderness Society map is accurate, insofar as the language of the bill possibly opens to door to any of those lands being sold.
He agreed that the focus would likely be on smaller, isolated parcels, or land adjacent to towns and cities.
However, that ignores that fact that for many average Wyomingites, those lands are vital, he said.
Those places provide the sort of right-in-our-backyard outdoor adventures enjoyed by working people with limited time and money, he said.
He also said that the bill sets a bad precedent of viewing public land as source of quick income for the federal government, rather than a public trust for all people to enjoy.
Moreover, there are already mechanisms in place for the BLM and Forest Service to sell or trade off parcels of land, which make the bill’s proposals redundant in that regard, he said.
In an article set to be published in the Wyoming Law Review, Semerad cites the Federal Land and Management Policy Act.
That allows the BLM to sell lands that meet certain conditions, such as a tract’s location or other characteristics making “difficult and uneconomic to manage as part of public lands,” according to his article.
Another problem with the bill is that it essentially orders the Interior and Agriculture secretaries to sell the lands, Semerad said.
So, for example, even if Gov. Mark Gordon and other Wyoming officials refused to endorse certain sales, the language of the bill could obligate the secretaries to go forward with the sales anyway, he said.
What Lands Are We Talking About?
Hageman said that the Wilderness Society map, as well as much of the chatter around the possible public land sales, is based upon misinformation. Namely, that all or nearly all federally owned land is up for grabs.
Much of the controversy is probably based mostly in misconceptions, not people being deliberately dishonest, she said.
A big source of the confusion is that much of the land in question — including some listed on the map — is only being considered for disposal by the BLM and Forest Service thought the existing RMP process, Hageman said.
And the RMP process is completely separate from and unrelated to the Senate committee bill, she said.
Stuble stated that from the Wilderness Society’s perspective, the bill is worded in such a manner that everything cited on the map could potentially go up for sale.
“While those lands (listed in RMPs) may be included the legislation as well, as drafted this provision makes all BLM and FS lands in these states, including Wyoming, eligible unless specifically excluded based on a list of criteria,” she stated in the email.
“Our map screens out all lands that fit those excluded criteria but leaves the rest – which is a substantially larger footprint than simply lands already considered in an existing agency plans as eligible for disposal,” Stuble added.
Mark Heinz can be reached at [email protected].
