Idaho public lands amendment is good, but don’t buy this lie | Opinion
It seems that a new amendment dealing with public lands, sponsored by Rep. Ben Adams, R-Nampa, may soon be debated in the Idaho Legislature.
The language of the amendment would prevent public lands newly acquired by Idaho from ever being sold, though they could be subject to land swaps. It excludes state endowment lands used to support public education.
The unveiling of the amendment has been seen, rightly, as a reaction to the spectacular failure of a plan by U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to force the disposal of millions of acres of federal land throughout the West. That failure demonstrated that there is near-universal opposition, regardless of political party.
And Adams’ proposal is a good amendment. But it could also have propaganda value for the federal lands transfer movement, so it’s worth addressing up front a lie that you’re probably going to hear if the amendment is adopted.
Public lands advocates have long pointed to a central truth: If federal lands are transferred to the states, the states have far too little money to manage them. The obvious outcome is that much of that land would be sold off to the highest bidder, both to generate revenue and to offload unaffordable liabilities, like fighting wildfires on nearly 33 million acres of federal land within Idaho’s borders.
And that’s why the amendment will serve as the basis for an insincere argument that supporters of land transfer are sure to make in the future.
After the amendment, those in Lee’s camp will argue once again that land transfers should proceed. But this time they’ll add: No need to worry about transferring federal lands to the state; the Idaho Constitution forbids it from being sold off after transfer. The argument will be that public lands will be better managed by the state.
The amendment will serve much the same propaganda function as the Utah Department of Land Management, a hypothetical organization created in law in 2017 with the task of managing federal lands after transfer. The idea was to neutralize the argument that public lands will be privatized, and instead argue that states will simply manage public lands better than the feds.
But the Utah Department of Land Management, like Adams’ proposal, solves none of the real problems with federal land transfer. The states are incapable of managing federal land now and in the future.
Think about how state-run firefighting would have worked in the year 2015, for example. That year, more than 800,000 acres in Idaho burned — about 8% of the total wildfire acreage burned in the U.S. that year. Federal spending on wildfire suppression topped $2.1 billion, so Idaho’s share of that spending would be around $170 million that year.
That’s just a bit less than the state spent on its entire adult prison system in 2015. It’s also just a bit less than the total of all corporate income taxes that year. So what will it be, double the corporate income tax or close all the prisons to pay for a bad year of wildfires?
You can understand this with a simple analogy.
Imagine you inherit a mansion from your rich grandmother. On moving in, you discover it desperately needs its roof replaced.
If you can’t possibly afford it, one option is to sell the house and get out from under the problem.
If the will forbids you from selling it, that keeps the mansion in the family — but it does not fix the roof. It just means it’s sure to come crashing down on your head someday.
So the only real choice is either get more income or live in a ruin. For the state, this would mean either sharply raising taxes or letting wildfires burn out of control.
Because you can’t fight a fire with states’ rights. It requires helicopters, fire engines, people willing to cut fire lines, a dispatch system, a complex forecasting system to let you know where the fires are likely to occur and a thousand other things that cost money. The federal government doesn’t have the funding to do the job as well as it could be done, but Idaho state government has no realistic chance of ever doing the job.
In short, it’s worth supporting Adams’ amendment. In the event of a federal lands transfer, it would be better to have this amendment in place than to let the state sell off land. But the really important thing, the thing that matters most, is to oppose large-scale federal land transfers in the first place.
At the end of that road lies disaster. The only question is which form the disaster would take.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.