[huckfillary]

I have been advocating the sale of public lands for decades to pay down the federal deficit. Obviously, such legislation would have to include a freeze on federal spending. Otherwise, politicians would use the influx of new funds expand the government even more.

[Hildy]

Here in AZ we have tried to get our public lands back to local control for a very long time. Once in a while there is a success, like this year’s omnibus land bill that Trump signed into law in March. For the West to truly survive we must address this. We are not even talking about parks, military bases, tribal land...we are talking about the vast acres of land in between.

[tiki]

I really don’t know if we could afford to buy the federal land within our ranch it would double our private land but wouldn’t necessarily double the worth of our ranch as a ranch and couldn’t be recouped from ranching profits.

If you could cherry-pick the parcels and bought only the productive parcels it might work and I guess we could turn it into a hunting ranch and let our children deal with it. It would be a lot of decision making.

Our family has been there 114 years and has been paying lease, I’m assuming all those years, definitely since 1946.
.

[Svartalfiar]

There’s nothing in the Constitution allowing FedGov to own all this land; however, I believe the FedGov should be allowed to ‘own’ major national monuments like Rushmore or battlefields from the War between the States.

So, we need a Constitutional Amendment adding parks/monuments of significant cultural, historical, scientific, military, or geographic relevance to Art I Section 8, with the restriction that all land owned by FedGov (parks plus the Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, etc) can be no more than 5% of the total land area of the State.

[Svartalfiar]

On a related note, why are there so many Federal agencies owning this land? There should be two - DoD and BLM (the rest).


- National Park Service
- Bureau of Land Management
- Forest Service
- Bureau of Indian Affairs
- Fish and Wildlife
- Bureau of Reclamation
- etc etc etc

[BobL]

I would leave the National Parks under federal control, since the last thing I want is state governments like in California running those things. Most of the other underutlized lands should go private...maybe some exceptions, but the burden should be on the federal government to show why they need to keep control over them.

[Theoria]

Billionaires would just buy land and keep hunters and fishermen off of it.

Lots of land out east was striped of trees. Especially in W. NC and North Georgia. Deer had to be brought in to n. Georgia because the habitat was clear cut for lumber. Much of the land was 'worthless' and bought by .gov

[Joe Boucher]

Most Americans live in the North East corridor and have NVER been out west.
The federal gubmint owns and controls 85 percent of the west.
WHY?