WYOMING NEWS SERVICE – The armed seizure of a federal wildlife refuge outside of Burns, Ore., has brought public attention to arguments about federal land management that have been simmering in Wyoming for many years.
Almost half of the land in the state is owned and managed by federal agencies, which spend many millions of dollars to maintain it, fight fires and provide public access. In 2013, the state Legislature formed a task force that recommended the transfer of federal land to state control.
Supporters say the state is better equipped to make decisions on when and where to allow oil and gas development. But opponents, including Travis Bruner, executive director of the advocacy group Western Watersheds Project, say the public interest, not the interests of private companies, should be paramount.
“People choose to live in states like Wyoming because of the large amounts of the land that are accessible for hiking and fishing and hunting,” he said, “and were those lands be transferred away from the federal government to state or private interests, the ability to access those lands for such things would be imperiled.”
Senate File 56 passed in March, appropriating $75,000 to study which federal lands could be transferred to the state. However, Bruner said this may all be moot since the federal government has shown no willingness to negotiate on this point.
“Federal law has supremacy over state law,” he said, “and so regardless of what a state government may or may not pass, that will not result in the transfer of federal land to the states.”
A 2013 report by University of Wyoming professor Timothy Considine found that oil production on private lands has far outstripped that on federal land in recent years, and said the state could make billions if it fully exploited the natural resources. But Bruner countered that federal environmental protections are necessary to preserve wilderness areas across the West.