Bishop, DeFazio bill would accelerate state-federal exchanges

E&E News
By Phil Taylor
June 20, 2014

A new bill by Reps. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) seeks to expedite state-federal land swaps, a move aimed at protecting federal parks and wilderness areas while also increasing state education revenues.

The bill seeks to simplify the patchwork of land ownership that arose when Western states were created more than a century ago. States including Utah, for example, were given four square-mile patches of trust lands out of every 36 square miles of federal lands.

State constitutions require those lands to generate revenues for education and other government services, but Western state land commissioners estimate more than 2 million acres of state school parcels are within federal conservation areas including refuges and wilderness.

Accessing them is difficult and developing them for oil, gas or minerals can be extremely controversial.

A wide range of stakeholders -- including conservationists, industry and land commissioners -- would like the state lands to be swapped for energy-rich federal lands elsewhere.

"Right now it is difficult, if not impossible, to utilize millions of acres intended to support public schools," Bishop said yesterday in a statement, calling the bill "a win for school kids in the West."

Bishop, chairman of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation, is pursuing a similar land exchange as part of a separate, sweeping public lands bill in eastern Utah.

The Bishop-DeFazio bill is backed by the Wilderness Society, the bipartisan Western Governors' Association and the Western States Land Commissioners Association.

Under the bill, the Interior secretary would have one year to establish a process for states to apply for land exchanges, and once those applications are submitted, the secretary would have three years to approve or deny an exchange.

As in current law, the lands would have to be of equal value. But for parcels worth less than $300 per acre, Interior could save time and money by conducting an abbreviated appraisal.

In addition, states would have to first exchange most of their parcels within federal parks or wilderness areas before seeking to exchange parcels within wilderness study areas, national landscape conservation system lands and wildlife refuges -- lands that are slightly less prized by conservationists.

Exchanges would still have to go through a National Environmental Policy Act review, but Interior would not need to evaluate more than one action alternative.

There's still a lot of controversy surrounding federal land exchanges.

A perennial challenge is deciding, for example, whether the conservation value of a pristine river canyon is equal to the fiscal windfall a state could receive by acquiring federal minerals owned by all Americans.

But advocates of the Bishop-DeFazio measure say land exchanges, when properly crafted, are in the interest of all involved.

The Interior Department already has the authority to authorize land swaps, but critics say the agency is too slow to analyze them because they can sap resources and are controversial. In the absence of statutory pressure, modest-sized land exchanges have languished, requiring Congress -- also slow to act -- to intervene.

"The burdensomeness and complexity of federal land exchange processes often prevent the completion of sensible and mutually beneficial exchanges, even on a government-to-government basis," said a letter yesterday from the WGA chairmen, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R).

This week's legislation comes several months after Bishop convened a hearing on the issue of stranded state trust lands. Land commissioners asked the panel to craft legislation that would fast-track the exchanges (E&E Daily, Sept. 11, 2013).