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Video: Western lawmakers fight the Biden Administration land grab

“Your best land manager is that person who lives his entire life on that land and spends his entire life taking care of it and producing from that land. Nobody is going to take care of that land better than that person who is directly tied to the land. You cannot replace that with administrative bureaucracy.”

This week,  Karla Jones, ALEC Senior Director, Federalism and International Relations Task Force  and Catherine Mortensen, ALEC Director of Public Affairs, interviewed Western lawmakers to discuss how they are fighting back against the Biden adminstration’s massive land grab. In the 12 states from Colorado westward (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming), the federal government administers, on average, about 47 percent of the land mass within each state’s borders. Here are the highlights from the conversation. Watch the full interview here.

Karla Jones, ALEC Senior Director, Federalism and International Relations Task Force:

Weclome the show. Commissioner, can you give us an idea of what’s happening in rural communities in your state in your county because one of the thing about us Easterners is we are often ignorant when it comes to the challenges of the states in the West.

Commissioner Will Cavin, Chavez County, New Mexico:

The federal government is looking at a forest plan that would create another 400,000 acres of wilderness area in the Lincoln National Forest. Right now we are fighting a huge fire in that forest and when we create those types of areas, it just leaves the West more vulnerable to these fires. That’s because when the federal government takes control of our lands, they put the lands off limits to opportunities for harvesing trees and generally taking good care of the land.  Our ranchers and farmers and dairy guys are all being harmed by these things coming from the federal government from the East Coast. It just is really important that we get folks educated on what’s going on out West.

Karla Jones, ALEC Senior Director, Federalism and International Relations Task Force:

Representative Ivory, I know you have some stories to share with us given the fact that Utah is more than 60 percent federally owned and that you’ve been a leader and the transfer of public land space for years.

Rep. Ken Ivory, Utah:

Commissioner, I’m sure sorry about the fire issue you have. We’re experiencing that all throughout the West. Currently, the federal government is  managing our public lands like a museum, it’s “hands off don’t touch.” The trees are growing beyond the capacity of the water to carry them.  It’s like having 100 straws in your Diet Coke with everyone fighting to get little bits of drops of water and then they’re not healthy. The trees can’t fend off the diseases and we have dead stands of trees all over the West. I mean millions of acres.

What we’re seeing with these catastrophic wildfires is the federal government seems to be managing these forests for maximum combustion instead of for the environmental health and well being of the forests of the economy of the communities.

We had a study about four years ago about the water supply to 40% of the Wasatch Front, which is 2 million people in Utah. The water supply is one spark away from being gone because of this kind of federal mismanagement. So these are tremendously serious issues. So when people wonder why we get a little bit excited about this in the West, it’s because it really literally is a matter of life and death.

Catherine Mortensen, ALEC Public Affairs:

Currently,  federal regulatory redundancy creates inefficiencies and one example is in Oklahoma where it takes 700 times longer to get a drilling permit on federal lands as opposed to private lands. Commissioner, would you want to respond to that?

Commissioner Will Cavin, Chavez County, New Mexico:
Part of the problem is is that you go from one administration to another, where, just two years ago, we were energy independent in this country, and now we have a  change on administration and all of the sudden, the government is shutting down leases, shutting down the Keystone pipeline. In New Mexico, we have the Permian Basin,  one of the largest oil fields in the world. And when you start messing the the leases it really hurts the economy here. A lot of people are hurting because of how the federal govenrment is mismanaging our federal lands and resources.

Catherine Mortensen, ALEC Public Affairs:

You are both in Lincoln, Nebraska right now to attend the Thirty by Thirty Summit to deal with this encroachment of the federal govenrment into private lands. Can you tell us more about this Thirty by Thirty plan the Biden administration had adopted?

Rep. Ken Ivory, Utah:

Simply put the 30 by 30 agenda is to put the most stringent federal restrictions on 30 percent of all U.S. land and water by the year 2030 as a stepping stone to 50 by 50 which would lock up 50 percent of all land and water by the year 2050.

It also includes a complete and total decarbonization of our energy and transportation infrastructure. So when you combine those two and you control 50 percent of all land and then a complete transition of our energy, infrastructure, land and energy that’s a direct attack on  liberty and property. That’s the foundation of our system of American government.  By executive fiat, they’re taking control over these things. That’s not the way government works in in the United States of America.

We’re certainly seeing the economic consequences now and it’s clearly something that Americans need to be alerted to. We need to reclaim our liberty, our local communities and, and our lives. This is the essence of of how we protect the constitutional nature of our system.

Commissioner Will Cavin, Chavez County, New Mexico:

Europe has gone down this road. They’re five to 10 years ahead of us and we’re seeing exactly where this goes. The they’re now having to go back and rebuild coal plants and rebuild oil and natural gas to simply keep the lights on in Europe. They’ve gone down this road and it simply hasn’t worked.

Catherine Mortensen, ALEC Public Affairs:

To close this out, I would like to quote Margaret Byfield from the American Stewards of Liberty who said of our lands, “Your best land manager is that person who lives his entire life on that land and spends his entire life taking care of it and producing from that land. That person knows every acre better than anybody else and has experienced every cycle of weather on that land.”