By Tom Arrandale

 
tate and county governments in the West have gotten nowhere challenging how the federal government manages national forests and rangelands inside their boundaries. The Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s couldn’t convince Congress to turn federal lands over to the states, and the “County Movement” faltered two decades later because nobody else believed part-time commissioners who govern rural counties were really qualified to administer federally owned resources. Both causes advocated flawed solutions, yet the time now has come to start testing more reasonable mechanisms that give local citizens real power to determine what happens on the national forests and grasslands they live among.

For several decades, public land policy has swung back and forth whenever a Republican or Democrat reclaimed the White House. Rural community leaders remain convinced that environmental-group lawyers from Washington, D.C., are denying local residents high-paying jobs by stalling profit-making projects on federal lands that make up half of some western states. Legal wrangling keeps the U.S. Interior Department and U.S. Forest Service land managers from striking lasting balance between ecological and economic interests out on the ground over logging, mining, grazing and endangered species.

Both sides expected yet another top-down shift from President George W. Bush’s administration. Yet both in Washington and in state capitals, there’s a glimmer of recognition that the centralized structure that’s been constructed has gotten too cumbersome to administer public resources for the general public benefit. That is opening the way for some creative rethinking about locally based initiatives that might be better positioned to establish equilibrium between national and community interests.

Responding to his state’s disastrous forest fires two years ago, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, has channeled $5 million a year to Native American pueblos, Hispanic villages and ranching communities to thin fire-prone ponderosa pine stands surrounding their homes. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig co-sponsored a law to stabilize federal school funding for counties with large national forests that now also funds community advisory groups that are managing weed control and other improvement projects on both county and national forest lands. Idaho’s State Land Board has suggested breaking the gridlock by proposing that a federal-state cooperative, a stewardship collaborative and an ecosystem trust take over managing parts of national forests. As part of President Bush’s budget proposal, Mark Rey, the undersecretary of agriculture who oversees the Forest Service, floated the concept of designating some federal timberlands as “charter forests” supervised by some form of board or commission.

Before Congress embraces more experiments, however, advocates need to overcome environmentalists’ assumption that local control will turn public resources over to the mining, timber and ranching interests that have always dominated western county politics. The Moffat County, Colorado, Commission hasn’t offered any reassurance by proposing a Northwest Colorado Working Landscape Trust to reverse federal management policies that ranchers object to on 1.7 million acres of federal land inside the county. Two of the three commissioners come from ranching families that graze their herds on public lands, and the locally dominated trust that county officials envision wouldn’t be likely to listen to Denver-based environmentalists.

But around the rural West, almost all county commissioners come from ranching, real estate, business and other traditional roots. To make local control politically acceptable, local leaders will have to open their minds to some new ideas and take the risk of bringing conservation-minded foes to the table in setting policy for public lands. Who knows — some environmentalists might even run for county commission seats if that gives them a chance to keep their own communities economically stable and public lands ecologically sustainable.

Tom Arrandale is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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