Editorial: A smelly land-swap agreement

Wednesday, June 19, 2002 | 9:05 a.m.

Poor judgment is an understatement in describing the decision by the Bureau of Land Management in Carson City to provide two employees of a private company with office space and staff privileges while they map out land swaps sought by their company. Such an arrangement obviously invites mistrust from the public. Nevada Sen. Harry Reid is asking BLM Director Kathleen Clark to put an end to the relationship and we recommend that she do so immediately.

The two men granted status as virtual BLM staffers are employees of Nevada Land & Resource Co., which owns more than 1.3 million acres of former railroad land stretching from north of Reno to Winnemucca and east to Elko. The company earns income through selling, managing and developing the land. Its relationship with the Carson City BLM office was in respect to Vidler Water, its sister company, which is working with Lincoln County to develop a water-cooled power plant about 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The finished deal -- dependent upon land swaps -- would see a North Carolina company building the plant on land owned by Nevada Land/Vidler. The companies, along with Lincoln County, would earn millions selling about 7,000 acre feet of water a year to the plant, an arrangement opposed by Clark County officials eyeing that same water for use in Southern N evada.

John Singlaub, director of the Carson City BLM office, sees the role of the two Nevada Land employees as a good thing. Their presence saves his own staff from the labor-intensive work of mapping out the swaps. In the end, he reasons, the BLM will have a plan to gain land it needs and the developers and Lincoln County will have a project good for themselves and the local economy.

But what will members of the public get? They will get the foul odor of a supreme conflict of interest. In all land-swap deals, particularly those involving competing interests, the BLM should be the neutral arbiter. We agree that the BLM needs more bodies for the amount of work it does. But they should not be on the payroll of private companies with their own profit-making agendas. There's only two words for that type of arrangement: It stinks.