Feds may not get cash from state land sales

Suzanne Struglinski

Friday, June 10, 2005 | 10:58 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The chance that the federal government will start getting more than half of the money earned from sales of public land in Nevada grew slimmer Thursday when the Senate Appropriations passed the Interior Department spending bill.

The bill made no mention of the administration's proposal to shift 70 percent of the proceeds from those sales to the national treasury while leaving only 30 percent in Nevada.

"We're going to leave it just like it is," said Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., who heads the Senate Appropriations Interior Subcommittee that wrote the bill.

Under the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, all the money from public land auctions in Nevada must be spent within the state and different percentages go to the education fund, water treatment efforts and federal land conservation projects. The auctions have generated about $1.6 billion, with $1 billion has been earmarked for spending on projects statewide, including $445 million for local parks, trails and other projects in Clark County.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., had gotten a prior commitment from Burns that Burns would not include in the bill the Bush administration's proposal that the federal government take most of the future proceeds from the land sales, Ensign spokesman Jack Finn said. Ensign also worked to keep the proposal out of the overall budget bill.

The House version of the Interior Department spending bill orders the department to detail how the government has spent money earned through Bureau of Land Management land auctions in Clark County for 2003 and 2004. Nevada's house members view this as a placeholder for the administration's proposal, which they opposed. They want the money to stay in Nevada.

The bill also did not include anything related to the Bureau of Land Management's new program to sell wild horses.

Burns created a program through an amendment passed last year that allows the BLM to sell horses that are 10 years old or older as well as those that had not been taken by anyone in three adoption rounds.

But House members voted on May 19 to ban the bureau from using any federal money for the horse sales, prompted by the discovery that some BLM horses had been bought and then resold to a slaughter house.

Burns said he will work to take the ban out. "I'll fight it to the ground," he said. "What we did last year is working. We have got to get our numbers (of wild horses) down and this is the most efficient way to do it. Let the plan work."

The Senate version of the Interior Department spending bill still needs to be approved on the Senate floor and then members of the House and Senate will iron out differences between the bills before finalizing the bill for another vote in each chamber.