Wednesday, November 9, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
21
Oregon standoff members’ beliefs also in mainstream politics
By Taylor W. Anderson
Bend Bulletin
SALEM (AP) — While
the six-week armed takeover
of a federal wildlife facil-
ity this year may have been
conducted by a fringe group,
the underlying push for states
and counties to control land
now possessed by the federal
government already exists
among local elected officials
in Oregon and elsewhere.
Attention during the stand-
off focused on the group’s
belief that the federal govern-
ment doesn’t actually have a
right to own the more than 50
percent of Oregon it controls,
and on how many of the occu-
piers who showed up at the
refuge were armed.
But advocates of state or
local ownership of public
lands already hold or are seek-
ing elected office across the
West, giving a level of main-
stream appeal to the concept
of state or local control over
public lands, says Martin Nie,
director of the Bolle Center
for People & Forests and a
professor at the University of
Montana.
“I have been much more
concerned with what’s hap-
pened at the state level and
state legislatures” than with
the occupiers, Nie said. “I’ve
always seen that as a much
more coordinated and insidi-
ous threat to federal lands.”
Nie has watched the rise
of calls for state ownership
of federal land in states such
as Utah and, more recently,
Montana. Republicans this
year voted to put a call for
transferring federal land
to local control into their
national party platform. Nie
believes that would be a step
on the way to privatizing fed-
eral land.
“There’s always been
attention on federal lands
management and always
been complaints about what’s
the right balance between
resource use and environ-
mental protection,” Nie said.
“That is just fundamentally
different than saying we’re
going to privatize the federal
estate.”
The movement in Oregon
has existed at the county level,
with commissioners oppos-
ing — and at times disputing
the validity of — federal land
ownership.
Dennis Linthicum, a for-
mer Klamath County com-
missioner running as a state
Senate Republican candidate
to represent a vast district
that stretches from Klamath
County through Deschutes
and Crook counties, expressed
sympathy for the occupiers
and is a fierce critic of federal
control of land, saying sup-
porters should “take back our
lands and manage them with
integrity, consistency and the
Constitution in mind.”
He wrote in a blog post
at the outset of the standoff
at Malheur that the federal
government’s “rough-shod
management” of hundreds of
millions of acres “is wholly
unconstitutional.” Linthicum
could not be reached for com-
ment Friday.
That belief has caught on
in states like Utah, where the
state Legislature passed the
Transfer of Public Lands Act
in 2012, which seeks to force
the federal government to
turn over most federal land to
Utah.
In Oregon, Bud Pierce
is running as a Republican
for governor who, if elected,
would go to court, “if neces-
sary,” to “fight to take back
our public lands from Federal
mismanagement and for more
state and local control.”
Pierce shares a similar goal
with Kenneth Medenbach, one
of the seven acquitted occupi-
ers of the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge.
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point where the state can gen-
erate more economic activity
on land currently owned and
managed by the Bureau of
Land Management or U.S.
Forest Service.
“We’ll get it back and we
can start making beneficial
use of it, sell some of it (con-
duct) selective logging, start
mining, farming and ranch-
ing,” Medenbach said. “Make
beneficial use of this land.”
They differ in that
Medenbach and other sup-
porters dispute the federal
government’s right to own
the land. He said in the wake
of the acquittal last week that
the group set a precedent, and
that he would focus on talking
with county commissioners
about somehow taking control
of federal land. If not, he said,
there may be more occupa-
tions in the future.
He might find support-
ers on the Wallowa County
Board of Commissioners,
which makes $1,000 annual
donations from its budget to
the American Lands Council,
a Utah-based nonprofit push-
ing for state ownership of
federal land, according to
Commissioner Paul Castilleja.
“The whole problem is
that for the last 30 years there
has been no management of
the forest,” said Castilleja,
who attended last month’s
American Lands Council
meeting in Salt Lake City. He
said he wants to see more log-
ging and thinning of federal
forests. “It’s not only unfair,
it’s not working. Simple as
that.”
Pierce, meanwhile, said
he’s not advocating for the
state to take over federal land.
He instead prefers keeping
federal land in federal own-
ership, but getting to a point
where the state is in charge of
managing it to increase eco-
nomic activity, he said.
“There are some people
that are real radical. I think
most of us believe in the rule
of law,” he said. “It’s well-
established in law that the
federal government’s current
ownership of state lands is by
law. They own it. The ques-
tion is where do we go from
here.”
He said it’s not clear how
to move forward on his idea
of state management. Despite
saying he might go to court to
fight for it, Pierce said there
are open questions about how
the state would win.
“That’s the issue. How do
we unlock it? How do we get
it so we can use the resources
in a responsible way? Do
(timber) harvesting that’s
sustainable and get some eco-
nomic value,” he said.
Char Miller, a professor
of environmental analysis at
Pomona College in California,
argues states would have a dif-
ficult time managing the huge
expanses of land managed by
the federal government.
“It’s a fool’s errand,”
Miller said.
What’s more, Miller said,
court rulings, state constitu-
tions and Western attorneys
generally uphold the federal
government’s right to own
and manage lands.
“You have to look at the
state constitutions, which indi-
cate that when they came into
the union that the lands they
did not receive would remain
federally owned,” Miller said.
“Oregon and Nevada in par-
ticular have quite explicit lan-
guage about that.”
In 1995, after a string of
attempts by state and local
governments starting in the
1970s, residents in Union
and Wallowa counties pro-
posed an initiative challeng-
ing the federal authority to
control land in those counties.
The state Attorney General’s
Office opined at the time that
Oregon agreed upon gaining
statehood to the federal gov-
ernment’s authority over 52
percent of the land in the new
state.
“The occupiers, who I
would classify as domestic
terrorists, do not understand
the Constitution of the United
States,” said U.S. Rep. Peter
DeFazio, D-Springfield.
“They say ‘Give the land back
to the states.’ I point out the
land never belonged to the
states.”
DeFazio and U.S. Rep.
Kurt Schrader, D-Canby,
joined with U.S. Rep. Greg
Walden, R-Hood River, to
propose bills in recent years
that would boost logging on
45 percent of new growth in
the Western Oregon federal
timberland previously owned
by the Oregon and California
Railroad. Management
would be overseen by a pub-
lic trust managed by state
officials appointed by the
governor.
The bill has failed to gain
traction in the Senate, and
DeFazio has had to settle for
smaller moves in Congress.
Medenbach, meanwhile,
has his own game plan.
“Next is getting to our
county commissioners and
starting to say, hey, we need
to take this land back,” said
Medenbach, one of the occu-
piers, who lives in northern
Klamath County. “We set a
precedent here.”
His next move is to talk
with county commissioners
and any state legislator who
will listen to him, including
Linthicum, he said.
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