He had the guy on his show and let the old man talk. It was good to see. He seemed determined.
I don’t think the government should be in the land owning business. I’ve said that.
Now...to the EXTENT that the government directly spends money on this particular property to caretaker it, I can see a cost reimbursement plan of some sort. I would be ok with, since the idea is to sell the cattle, that the caretaker fee be taken out of the sale price of each head feeding on that property at point of sale. If each steer takes a square mile of forage to be fattened in a year’s time, then any direct cost divided by all their square miles of that region only would be fair, don’t you think?
Fair cost is best determined by the market. As I said, the feds are a pain to deal with, and that pain needs to be factored in to what a rancher is willing to pay. What I do not accept is the idea that this rancher is special and deserves to get for free what every other rancher pays for. Those payments help fund improvements and the operating costs to manage...and the dust bowl years gave birth to the management.
I have no desire to lose public lands. They were provided for in the Constitution, and the original states gave huge chunks of land to the federal government - so the concept is not foreign to our Constitution.
We spent 150 years giving land away. It often failed because people didn’t understand that in the west, it is WATER that matters, not land. There is a long tradition of ‘common land’, and it is reasonable for that common land to be managed for the common good.