Clinton signs bill to OK sale of Western land

Benjamin Grove and Launce Rake

Friday, July 28, 2000 | 10:43 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton signed a bill this week that authorizes the Bureau of Land Management to sell roughly 3.3 million acres in Western states, including nearly 900,000 in Nevada and 100,000 acres in Southern Nevada.

The bill effectively creates incentives for the BLM to sell land holdings and for the first time ever use the sale money to buy other sensitive lands.

"The implications for the BLM and public lands are huge," BLM spokesman in Washington Rem Hawes said.

Until now the BLM rarely sold any of its 264 million acres in the 12 Western states. The bureau sold only about 4,000 to 5,000 acres a year in recent years, mostly to get rid of "problem" lands -- areas where illegal shooting or dumping occurred, for example. The BLM used to have to turn the sale money over to the U.S. Treasury and never saw it again.

"The BLM has already identified these disposal areas," Alan Pinkerton, Clark County assistant planning manager, said. "What the bill says is that the money is to be used to buy environmentally sensitive lands throughout the West."

But the bill also "puts more of an expectation on the BLM that there would be a speeded-up process" for selling the land, Pinkerton said.

Under the the newly signed law, the BLM could keep 20 percent of the sale money to recoup costs that it had to pay to prepare the land for sale. By law, the BLM is required to complete pre-sale studies of land, to determine whether the land had valuable minerals, hazardous materials or cultural significance, for example.

The other 80 percent of the land sale would go into a new federal fund that the BLM, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service or Forest Service could use to buy other sensitive lands.

"In the big picture, it benefits all the public lands," Hawes said.

Under the terms of the law, most of the money generated from sales of land in Nevada will go to the purchase of environmentally sensitive property in the state.

Through old "resource management plans" the BLM had identified 3.3 million acres, about 898,000 in Nevada, that it would like to sell.

The new law gives the BLM 10 years to sell the land. Hawes said that the BLM expects to sell roughly 300,000 of those 3.3 million acres within 10 years.

The new law closely mirrors the one-of-a-kind Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act of 1998, which also allowed land to be sold to the highest bidder with proceeds to be used to buy sensitive lands in Nevada.

"What the Southern Nevada Lands Act did for Las Vegas, this act is going to do for the entire West," BLM Las Vegas office spokesman Phil Guerrero said.

Peggy Pierce, co-chairwoman of the local Sierra Club group's conservation committee, said additional money for environmental preservation is sorely needed in Nevada and the West.

Auctioning the money is better than the BLM land sales and swaps that have provoked criticism in past years, she said.

"We shouldn't be giving away land for under-market value and not get something for the environment," Pierce said.

Pierce said her main concern is that the sale of this land could push urban sprawl into new parts of the Las Vegas Valley.

"We're always concerned about losing the desert to more development is a way that's not planned, in a way that produces sprawl without consideration of the environmental impact on air and on water," she said.

Developing the small communities in rural Clark County has to be done carefully, Pinkerton said.

"Some of these are really small, rural communities," Pinkerton said. "Our concern is that whatever happens to these communities, they are actively involved in deciding their own fate."

But because the lands have been up for sale for years, Pinkerton said he doesn't expect a sudden land rush because of the changes in the law.

"We don't see this bill as directly increasing the amount of land that will be sold," he said. "The market will dictate to a large degree the timing and how much land will be sold."

The new land auction plan was a secondary provision included in a bill introduced by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and signed by Clinton Tuesday. The primary purpose of the bill authorizes the federal government to pay a private land holder $101 million for the Baca Ranch in New Mexico.